The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  Recently, the Harlem Renaissance has come under fire. Some say the writers weren’t militant enough. That they were writing for white people. Wallace Thurman was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, editor, and publisher of a magazine called Fire, but some contemporary critics seem only interested in the quantity of gin he drank. There was that extraordinary statement printed in Black World, a literary magazine that recently ceased publication, the organ of Black Aesthetic criticism, which said that the Harlem Renaissance was part of a conspiracy to divert attention from the more militant figures of the time.

  In other words, every time Cullen, McKay and Hughes wrote a poem they thought, “How can I make this poem divert attention from the more militant spokesman of these times?”

  Hughes, Cullen, McKay, Thurman and the others aren’t here to defend themselves, but I’m sure that they would agree: That just as with airline pilots, teachers, students, advertising men, actors, carpenters, editors, publishers and cat burglars, you judge workers by the quality of their work, not by how much gin they drink, or how many men or women they kiss, or who their friends are, or which parties they attend, or whether they’ve successfully created a plan to end the world’s evils, or have prevented the universe from collapsing.

  Mixed Feelings on 125th Street

  By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS | June 13, 2008

  IT ISN’T NEWS THAT UNTIL A COUPLE OF YEARS ago, Harlem had a paucity of bank branches and grocery stores, or that now that more affluent people have started to move there, upscale shops and restaurants have followed.

  But change can have surprising results. Longtime residents have found themselves juggling conflicting emotions. And those who enjoyed a measure of stability in the old Harlem now long for the past—not necessarily because it was better but because it was what they knew.

  “The majority of the stores, the 99-cent stores, they’re gone,” said Gwen Walker, 55, a longtime resident of West Harlem. “The bodegas are gone. There’s large delis now. What had been two for $1 is now one for $3. My neighbor is a beer drinker, and he drinks inexpensive beer, Old English or Colt 45 or Coors—you can’t even buy that in the stores. The stores have imported beers from Germany. The foods being sold—feta cheese instead of sharp Cheddar cheese. That’s a whole other world.”

  Gentrification, it turns out, can have an odd psychological effect on those it occurs around. Almost no one is wishing for a return of row upon row of boarded-up buildings, the mornings when lifeless bodies turned up in vestibules or the evenings when every block seemed to have its own band of drug dealers and subordinate crackheads.

  The neighborhood’s devolution was so complete that between about 1960 and 1990, Harlem had lost a third of its population and half of its housing stock. In 1990, during the height of the crack epidemic, 261 people were murdered in the police precincts that cover Harlem. Last year, there were about 500 murders in the entire city.

  Last month, the City Council approved another significant change: the rezoning of 125th Street to allow for high-rise office towers and 2,100 new market-rate condominiums. Earlier this year, the average price for new condos in Harlem hit $900,000, although average household income remains less than $25,000.

  The Rev. Dr. Charles A. Curtis, senior pastor of Mount Olivet Baptist Church, one of Harlem’s oldest black churches, said that people feel powerless when they see change that they believe is not intended to benefit them.

  “There are great developments going on,” said Pastor Curtis. “You can see things in your sight, but they’re just out of reach.”

  Puerto Ricans Remember When El Barrio Was Theirs Alone

  By ED MORALES | February 23, 2003

  EL BARRIO. IN MY CHILDHOOD ITS MERE mention conjured all kinds of feelings, from a kind of reverence for proud beginnings to my parents’ wariness of its slow descent into hard times. It was a reference to a place that curiously seemed to belong to us. As more of us moved to various corners of the Bronx, El Barrio increasingly became the source of authenticity, like the bacalaltos (codfish fritters) on 116th Street that were the closest thing to what you could get on the island.

  Today, although Puerto Ricans are still the city’s most populous Spanish-speaking group—of the 2.2 million Latinos, 830,000 are Puerto Ricans—we can sometimes feel like an afterthought in the Latin New York we all but created.

  And the Spanish Harlem of the mind, dotted with the world’s greatest cuchifrito stands (fried Caribbean snacks) and old-school piragueros (men who sell flavored ices from pushcarts) is threatened with extinction. The changing face of East Harlem is due not only to the real estate charge from south of 96th Street, but also to a surge of Latino immigrants. That new presence is personified by Valente Leal, a 14-year-old immigrant from Mexico who has lived in East Harlem for the past eight years.

  Valente has a bushy spiked punk haircut, likes hard rock bands like Korn and Slipknot, is an occasional painter and wants to be a doctor. And Valente’s got a theory about why so many people from south of 96th Street are moving in. “Ever since 9/11 there’s all these people from downtown around here,” he said, wide-eyed. “I think they got scared or something.”

  So, as the strip on Lexington between 104th Street and 96th morphs from Barrio to boho periphery, a loose confederation of mostly Puerto Rican politicians, activists and residents is trying to make a stand to preserve the area’s Latino identity. Rafael Merino, a graphic designer who grew up on the Lower East Side and recently moved from Williamsburg, thinks what’s happening uptown is bigger than mere nostalgia.

  “It’s not about Latinos losing El Barrio, it’s about New York City losing El Barrio,” said Mr. Merino, who lives on 116th Street. “This is one of those diverse gems that makes the city what it is.”

  Harlem Altered By Public Housing

  By THOMAS W. ENNIS | June 23, 1957

  IN A MASS ATTACK ON ONE OF THE WORST slum areas in the metropolitan area, the New York City Housing Authority is leveling 137 acres of slums in East Harlem. Blocks of old, dark buildings have been ripped out. Structures worth saving have been left standing, as an invitation to rehabilitation by private enterprise.

  Twelve projects, providing new homes for 13,500 families—some 53,000 people—are taking the place of decayed and overcrowded buildings. Most of them take in and consolidate two to six or seven adjacent city blocks, forming a superblock.

  The housing authority finds that superblock projects make planning, construction and management more economical and efficient. In addition, the buildings can be widely spaced, exposing them to sunshine and air on all sides; and much of the open space between can be landscaped and part of it used for playgrounds and off-street parking.

  Four of the 12 housing projects are forming a strip of superblocks between 112th and 115th Streets, extending from Lenox Avenue to Thomas Jefferson Park on the East River.

  As East Harlem Develops, Its Accent Starts to Change

  By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and TANZINA VEGA | January 21, 2007

  One the big new developments going up above 96th Street in East Harlem.

  INSIDE A WOODEN SHACK IN A GARDEN ON East 117th Street, a group of Puerto Rican men, many of them in their 70s and 80s, is playing a spirited game of dominoes on a rainy afternoon.

  Outside their little retreat, a thick dust, the pounding of hammers and the shouts of construction workers inundate the block, signaling the transformation of East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio (the neighborhood). Many see it changing from the Puerto Rican enclave it has been for decades to a more heterogeneous neighborhood with a significant middle-class presence, luxury condominiums and a Home Depot.

  It is a familiar story of gentrification in New York City, but this one comes with a twist: the many newcomers who are middle-class professionals from other parts of the city are joining a growing number of working-class Mexicans and Dominicans.

  The result is a high degree of angst among many Puerto Ricans, who worry they will be unable to prevent their displacement from a n
eighborhood that is far more than a place to live and work. “You have a choice, try to pay that rent, or move out,” said Tony Ramirez, a plumber who has lived in East Harlem for 43 of his 47 years. “Puerto Ricans in El Barrio is like being extinct. None of the people I grew up with are around. People feel like strangers in their own town.”

  An illustration of his lament can be seen on several blocks of 116th Street, long Puerto Rican East Harlem’s main shopping strip, which are now filled with shops selling Mexican food, flags and pastries.

  In 1980, there were 856,440 people of Puerto Rican descent living in New York City, compared with 787,046 in 2005, according to census data. In East Harlem, the number of Puerto Ricans has also been declining, to 37,878 in 2005, from 40,542 in 1990, according to the census. They now make up about 35.3 percent of the neighborhood’s population, down from 39.4 percent in 1990.

  The changes are unmistakable.

  For decades, there had been no doubt about where the Upper East Side ended and East Harlem began: 96th Street, the last major east-west street before the start of East Harlem’s clusters of high-rise public housing projects.

  That demarcation line is softer now. Peter Lorusso, 25, who works for a shipping company, has lived for about a year in a 234-unit luxury apartment complex at 101st Street and First Avenue, where half of the units rent at market rates. He said the building is “an extension of the Upper East Side,” where he and his friends go to “do the pub crawl.”

  “People are bringing more money north, which is a good thing,” he said. “You just got to be street smart.”

  BROOKLYN

  There’ll Always Be a Brooklyn

  By ANNA QUINDLEN | May 25, 1983

  IN FRONT OF A HOUSE ON LAFAYETTE AVEnue in Bedford-Stuyvesant stands a magnolia tree as big as a brownstone. It is a magnolia grandiflora, and it usually grows nowhere north of the Mason-Dixon line.

  Somehow, improbably, this tree has grown in Brooklyn for 100 years. It is no more likely that it will wither and die than that Cohen’s Pharmacy, on a corner in the shadow of the Franklin Avenue Shuttle, will close down, or that Irwin Lefkowitz, whose grandfather drove a livery horse and carriage, will move his taxicab company from Bergen Street and Fourth Avenue, or that the red brick house in which the Patterson family now lives in Brooklyn Heights, built in 1832, will crumble to red dust on the quiet corner of Sidney Place and State Street.

  There are a good many things like this in Brooklyn, things that last. Not all of them are bridges.

  This is not to say that Brooklyn is just what it was. Mr. Lefkowitz works in Brooklyn, but like so many others he moved to what he calls “greener pastures” on Long Island. The Dodgers play in Los Angeles, despite the proprietary way people in Brooklyn still talk about them.

  Changes have come to this borough of 80 square miles, which has either 2.25 million people if you believe the census, or 2.5 million if you believe the borough president, who in typical Brooklyn fashion says Brooklyn was robbed. But life in Brooklyn is the same song with new lyrics. The city of churches now has many mosques. There are immigrants living in three rooms with four children and two jobs—they are just different immigrants, from Poland in Greenpoint, from Russia in Brighton Beach, from the Caribbean countries in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

  Bergen Street west of Mr. Lefkowitz’s garage is a pastiche, part faded row houses, part handsome restorations, part sheets hung at windows, part lace curtains and antique brass doorknobs and knockers.

  “It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.’’

  “They want us to leave,” said a grimy man drinking from a paper bag with some friends on the steps of one of the down-at-the-heels houses, “but we ain’t leaving.” It’s the same old song, but with new lyrics. Thomas Wolfe once wrote: “It’d take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo. An’ even den, yuh wouldn’t know it all.”

  The Great Awakening

  By SUKETU MEHTA | June 19, 2005

  AT A PARTY ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE IN 2000, a distinguished American author, a longtime Manhattanite, asked where I lived.

  “Brooklyn,” I told him.

  He snorted. “Poor people live in Brooklyn.” Then he turned away to get some meat.

  Shortly after the party, to see if I could move from my rented apartment in Boerum Hill, I went looking to see what I could buy in a part of Fort Greene where cars parked on the street were still regularly stolen. I told the broker that it would be nice for my kids to have a house by a park. “We just sold a house by the park: $510,000,” the broker said. But there was a catch. “It had no walls or ceilings.”

  What happened, I wondered, to the distinguished author’s “poor people”?

  It has become a cliché to say that Brooklyn is booming. Brooklyn now buzzes with a momentum that would have stunned residents of its sleepy streets not long ago. With 2.5 million people, it is bigger than San Francisco, Boston, Atlanta and St. Louis combined. The population is approaching the historic high of 1950, when Brooklyn was home to 2.74 million. Turn around, and you will see the renaissance.

  The two boroughs with the most housing starts of late are Queens and Brooklyn. Why so many homes? Brooklyn’s prime appeal is relatively low cost.

  For me, Brooklyn became a neighborhood one steamy August night in 2003. It was the night of the great Northeastern Blackout. The streetlamps were out, and people strolled about with flashlights and lanterns. There was a bright white moon high above the city competing with the red glory of Mars, the warrior planet, which hadn’t been so close to Earth in 60,000 years.

  At midnight, the bars were still dispensing ice for our whiskeys. We took our drinks out on the sidewalk; we’d make our own laws tonight. Everyone’s face was illuminated in flickering, flattering light, and everybody looked beautiful, desirable. In the glow Brooklyn was revealed to be what we had forgotten it really is: an impossibly romantic, a 19th-century city.

  Borough of Fear

  By EMANUEL PERLMUTTER | December 7, 1966

  AT A FIVE-HOUR CONFERENCE ON LOCAL crime, Brooklyn was depicted as a crime-ridden borough where women were afraid to visit their doctors at night, church services were not held after dark and merchants closed their stores early.

  “To put it simply, our people no longer feel safe in the streets, at their places of business or even in their homes,” said Borough President Abe Stark. “Our people feel they are going through a nightmare of violence and terror.”

  Mr. Stark and most of the 55 speakers urged the assignment of more foot patrolmen to Brooklyn as a way of curbing crime.

  Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary said that the police were trying to do their best to cope with the problem. He said he hoped to release more policemen for foot patrol and that the scooter patrols would be increased from the present total of 150 to 500 vehicles.

  “There are many things that the police can’t help,” he said. “These are the problems of poverty, lack of opportunity and poor education that lead to crime.” Mr. Leary also asserted that recent judicial decisions that limit interrogations and confessions “make it difficult for the Police Department to be as effective as in the past.”

  Guarding the Charm of Long Ago

  By JOHN P. CALLAHAN | December 2, 1956

  “OUTSIDERS” OFTEN SPEAK WITH DISPARAGEment of Brooklyn as a hinterland—the home of raucous Dodger rooters, the place where comedians find inspiration for their characterizations of grammatical offenders. The 25,000 residents of the Heights are happy about this, and hope that nobody will try to change that opinion.

  Much of the credit for not trying goes to a quiet but determined group of 1,200 citizens who are members of the Brooklyn Heights Association. It has been able to resist the commercial building and public housing pressures that threaten to break through the 100-square-block borders of the Heights.

  A few of the former have succeeded, but only after they met architectural demands. An example was a chain g
rocery store that had to redesign its coldly utilitarian plans and construct a two-story colonial building.

  That pride of ownership should be reflected not only in one’s own home, but in one’s neighborhood.

  The atmosphere of yesteryear lingers in the luxurious Georgian drawing rooms seen through windows with long lace curtains. It appears in the trim front-yard lawns behind low iron fences and gates that swing open to basement entrances. It is found, too, in the spacious red-block approaches to former stables where haylofts have been made over into rooms with a suggestion of French Provincial design.

  When a Georgian Colonial on Columbia Heights was put up for sale a few years ago its owner found a buyer down the street who held it until recently, when the right kind of bid came in. Price was secondary, she said.

  The important point was to find a buyer who felt as she and her neighbors feel about the Heights—that pride of ownership should be reflected not only in one’s own home, but in one’s neighborhood.

  Co-ops Lead the Latest Renaissance In Brooklyn

  By LAURIE JOHNSTON | October 16, 1979

  TWO YOUNG LAWYERS, ONE FROM A PARK Avenue firm and the other from Wall Street, talked jauntily as they headed home up Henry Street from the steamy subway station under the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. They had both bought floor-through, two-bedroom apartments in the same brownstone a year ago for $60,000 each, and had also paid part of the cost of conversion and renovation, but their maintenance was under $400 a month. “And already I could make a profit,” one said.