Most of the time the topless double-decker tour bus chugged its way along 125th Street without incident. We passed peacefully through Harlem's main street and then it was down Fifth Avenue, crossing the great sociological divide of E. 96th Street, where luxury condo owners can look right into the public housing projects smack up against them (and vice-versa).
Then there was the black Isrealites and the mooning.
For anyone who hasn't encountered these loons (they used to be around Times Square all the time), the black Israelites are a textbook example of mass psychosis. They believe (I think) that they were the original Jews, the original chosen people. Since they are always shouting into a bullhorn, I could never tell what exactly they wanted. Israel back to its "original" owners? A land where they could get paid for shouting at people? Government money for them to shut up, for chrissakes?
Anyway, the bus stopped at the corner of 8th and 125th and they unloaded on the tourists, shouting "Crackers" and "Uncle Toms" and various other garbled epithets.
The tourists were terrified, while I tried to explain that everyone in New York knows these guys are deluded and basically harmless.
As we pulled up to out stop at the Apollo Theater, a quiet Southern black couple asked me if it was OK to get out there. "We're from Virginia, we're not used to this," they said. So it fell on me, blond-haired and blue-eyed, to assure them that the "Capital of Black America," was perfectly safe for black people. The Israelites were a few blocks back by then, and so was the guy that mooned us from his window.
In the paper today I saw that the City Council has voted yes to "upzoning" 125. This is despite the shouting from the balcony of protesters who fear the strip will become another Duane Reade-infested Condo-land. The strip is ugly but lively now, but the pressures on Manhattan real estate are just too much for nothing to change.
When Grey Line began running bus tours through Haight-Ashbury in the 60s, the residents would sometimes run alongside holding up mirrors. This is of course what you try to avoid as a guide: turning a neighborhood into a human zoo. My solution is usually to bore the tourists with architecture and planning instead of pointing at people. Most of the time.
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4 comments:
Stick a fork in Harlem, it's done.
It's not as done as The NYT thinks, though. A few years back, I went back to 125 street and expected, from the hype, that it would look like Madison Ave. in the east 60s. Designer boutiques and indoor/outdoor faux-french cafes.
Instead, I got off the train with almost exclusively blacks, and up on the street was the Magic Johnson theater and chain stores instead of mom and pop.
As for housing, much of it is rent controlled or stabilized, I'm told.
Still, look out from morningside Drive at 116 street and see Harlem spread out below you. You used to see abandoned buildings literally in the shadow of Columbia's law school dorm. Now there's not so much as a broken window anywhere.
Dude, IT'S DONE!!!! When those tenants move out, who do you think moves in? WHo do you think the landlords rent to?
Everyone under 40 who can't afford the Upper Westside heads to Harlem. They're living on Lennox, they're living on Adam Clayton Powell. Yeah, a routine walk up 125 may not show much, but just the mere fact that you can make that walk says a lot, as does the Starbucks and the Duane Reades and everything else.
update--a white friend was almost mugged on 145th and Lenox at...12:30 a.m. Now, not saying that is surprising or that the guy was "asking for it" but it is telling of two things:
Yes, parts of harlem still dangerous
Yes, white people willing to live on 145th and Lenox
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