TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042489/04248900.002

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.1 KB | 229 lines

                                                                                TRAVEL, Page 68

"Welcome to New Harlem!"


The intrepid tourist can find charm, spirit and soaring music
in New York's notorious ghetto

By Richard Corliss


    He lived there for years, and New Yorkers even named a
street in his honor. But these days would dapper Duke Ellington
feel at ease taking the A train 2 1/2 miles north from midtown
Manhattan to black Harlem? Not if he believed the vision this
New York City community conjures up in the minds of
apprehensive whites: a postnuclear landscape of poverty and
blight, where crack dealers plan gang wars in cratered
tenements. To most Manhattanites from the wealthy southern part
of the island, Harlem hardly exists, except as an old, obscure
head wound -- the beast in the attic, a maximum-security prison
for the American Dream's unruly losers. Why would a white person
go to this Harlem, except to buy drugs?

    Now pose the question to a white European visiting New York
City, and brace yourself for a surprise. He will inform you that
black Harlem is one of the city's main attractions; that its 330
years echo with history, beauty and drama; that its imposing,
if often scorched, architecture tells tales of the exuberant
black metropolis that flourished in the 1920s; that in no other
New York City district can you find the vitality and
graciousness of Harlem on a good day. Maybe, too, the foreigner
wants to brag to friends back home that he saw Harlem and
survived. Sure enough, on a bus trip run by Harlem Spirituals
Inc., the black guide announces -- in German, the language of
many of the passengers -- that they are passing the spot "where
the late son of the late Senator Robert Kennedy was suspected of
buying drugs."

    So on a spring morning, dozens of Europeans and Asians line
up for excursions through Harlem, which sprawls northward from
the top of Central Park for about 50 blocks. They gasp at the
area's high and low life and attend a joyful church service.
Typically, few of the tourists are black; fewer are New
Yorkers. On a recent trip, one of these few spoke with a
librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
and was complimented on his good English. When the downtowner
asked if many New Yorkers took such tours, the librarian smiled:
"Honey, you're about the first."

    Is the white American who avoids Harlem missing something?
Yes: for starters, a poignant and profound social textbook
lying open for study in the heart of a great city. One gazes at
block after block of abandoned brownstones -- their fronts
corked by arson, their doorways cemented shut, their empty
windows gaping like a skeleton's eye sockets -- and realizes
that agonizing irony is Harlem's chief industry. Perhaps, then,
the European tourists are seeing things. Yes, they are:
spectacular things. Any tour of Harlem compresses into a few
square miles the melodramatic contradictions of urban life.
Horror dwells in the basement of propriety. Hope is just around
the corner from drugs and decay.

    A Sunday stroll down Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard
(but everybody still calls it 125th Street) between Adam
Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) and Frederick
Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue) takes the visitor past an
armory of corrugated metal doors drawn protectively over shop
facades. But on each of these doors a street genius named Franco
has painted Pop-art murals appropriate to the goods sold inside:
an underwater paradise for the fish shop, a spangled Eiffel
Tower for the travel agency, a chain-laden Mr. T for the
jewelry store. Midblock stands the legendary Apollo Theater,
which brings Harlem alive every Wednesday with its Amateur
Night display of singers, rap masters and a wonderfully gaudy
fashion show. Next door is a vacant lot bearing the sign DANGER:
KEEP OUT!

    Harlem is certainly not a harmless place for residents or
itinerants, but neither is it the city's worst crime area. In
any case, fear is no excuse for missing out on Harlem's
cultural and historical bounty. Prudent visitors, black or
white, can ride a tour bus or a subway uptown during the day,
drive or call for a cab at night, stroll with a worthy purpose
on a Sunday-go-to- meeting afternoon. They will feel as
comfortable on Amateur Night, with its superefficient security
staff, as they would at Carnegie Hall. They will be made as
welcome at a restaurant like Sylvia's as they would at an aunt's
dinner table. They can take care and have fun.

    Do this, and see the Harlem beneath the cliches, beyond its
familiar notoriety as a graveyard for Great Society programs.
True, the place is not what it was during Harlem's toniest
decades, when swells partied at the Cotton Club (now defunct)
and Joe Louis stayed at the Hotel Theresa (today an office
building). Nor is Harlem what it may become in a looming decade
of gentrification and white encroachment. But it is, at its
best, a community that radiates warmth to outsiders who dare to
embrace it. During Sunday service at the Abyssinian Baptist
Church, Pastor Samuel Proctor greets white visitors (including
chicken mogul Frank Perdue) to his congregation and asks if
there are any from foreign lands. The roll call is impressive: a
dozen countries, including the Netherlands. "The Netherlands!"
booms Dr. Proctor. "That's where old Haarlem is. Well, friends,
welcome to new Harlem!"

    Peter Stuyvesant established Nieuw Haarlem in 1658, and it
was later connected to New Amsterdam with a ten-mile road built
by black slaves. During the colonial period, Harlem became a
retreat for the Bleeckers, Delanceys, Beekmans and Rikers and in
the 19th century a chic suburb for the well-to-do. Then, around
1880, the city extended its elevated lines to the north.
Handsome neighborhoods sprang up, and by the early 1900s,
Harlem bustled with urbanity. But the speculators had built too
much too fast. So in 1904 a black real estate agent named Philip
A. Payton rented apartments to blacks who were even then being
displaced from their midtown homes by the new Pennsylvania
Station railyards. The scheme succeeded beyond the speculators'
wildest nightmares. By the 1920s, Harlem was mostly black.

    Today many of the early edifices -- the sturdy brownstones,
inspiring churches, elegant warehouses -- still stand. It is one
of the few perks of slumdom: if property values do not rise,
venerable properties are less likely to fall. Most midtown movie
palaces were razed ages ago, but New York's first, the Regent,
retains its Venetian splendor in Harlem, though it now does
business as the First Corinthian Baptist Church. Above the
marquee of another ancient Harlem theater, the Nova, is
chiseled its original name, THE BUNNY (in honor of movie idol
John Bunny), flanked by two grinning stone rabbit heads.

    Residents have meticulously preserved some of the area's
most gorgeous homes, like those on Strivers' Row -- two blocks
of houses (some designed by Stanford White) where ragtimers
Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake lived. The homes of two earlier,
more antagonistic Harlemites are open to the public: the
Morris-Jumel mansion, once the home of Aaron Burr, and Hamilton
Grange, the last abode of Alexander Hamilton. Near the Grange on
still posh Sugar Hill is a quiet riot of Tudor and Romanesque
residences that shelter the faculty of City University. Around
the corner is Harlem's favorite archival trove, Aunt Len's Doll
and Toy Museum, where Lenon Holder Hoyte, 83, will show off her
collection of more than 5,000 dolls. She's one too.

    For these and other sights of Harlem, the anxious white
visitor can hop a Harlem Spirituals bus at 9 some Wednesday
morning. As the bus heads uptown, a guide sketches a history of
the district. A walk through Hamilton Grange and Sugar Hill
precedes a stop at the Schomburg Center. And then . . .
nirvana. At the Manhattan Christian Reformed Church, a
storefront mission run by and for recovering addicts, the Rev.
Reggie Williams spins a stirring homily: "You have the power to
pray when you wanna party! The power to close your veins to dope
and open your brains to hope!" An old hymn like Amazing Grace
percolates with urgent rhythms. Secular songs like Higher and
Higher gain turbo power as spirituals. At the end, everyone
joins hands in a big chain of redemption.

    The tour is over, but the visitor should stay for the day in
Harlem, beginning with a saunter down Seventh Avenue to the
Mount Morris Park historical district. Girding the rocky park,
today named for Marcus Garvey, are rows of beguiling Victorian
houses. Head north on Fifth Avenue for an unpretentious lunch of
pork chops and collard greens at La Famille.

    Then flag down an astonished cabbie ("White people!" his
face says) and go back through Sugar Hill to 145th Street and
Broadway. The character of this area, with its many Dominican
immigrants, is raffish and polyglot. One store, the House of
Talisman, is downright polytheistic. In the window of this
religious-goods mart, wooden Indians rub elbows with statues of
the Madonna and an ebony St. Martin of Tours; inside, Holy
Seven Spiritual Good Luck Bath Oil and the ever reliable
Gamblers Drops are for sale. Next door is a nice place for early
dinner: Copeland's, which speaks in tasteful tones (carnations
on each table, a harpist on weekends) and cooks in Southern and
Cajun accents. "Chitterlings and champagne, m'sieur?"

    Another quick cab ride deposits the visitor at New York's
most ecstatic secular event: Amateur Night at the Apollo. A
great seat for this slice of Harlem history costs just $12.
Almost all major black entertainers played the Apollo, and many
got their start at the Amateur Nights that have been held for 50
years. From the beginning, the host has been Ralph Cooper, who
can still boogaloo and scooby-doo like a septuagenarian Michael
Jackson.

    At Amateur Night, a blend of revival meeting and The Gong
Show, the Apollo audience is the true star. A favored artist --
say, the 300-lb. gent whose falsetto carries him through an
all-stops-out aria from Dreamgirls -- wins whooping applause
from this Colosseum of 1,500 self-appointed Caesars. Less
appreciated acts -- the Whitney Houston clones and clumsy break
dancers -- are pelted with catcalls until a figure known as the
Executioner darts across the stage in clown garb and chases
them into the wings. Usually the performers soldier on to the
end, broken but unbowing. Surely, as starmaker or heartbreaker,
every audience member has a fabulous time.

    Two Harlem events are sacred to born-again visitors: Amateur
Nights on Wednesdays and church on Sundays. Book a table for
Sunday brunch at Sylvia's, Harlem's friendliest eatery. But
first, for God's sake, go to the Abyssinian Baptist Church. The
pioneer architect Charles W. Bolton designed the church as an
amphitheater, and for good reason: its pastor was the
spell-weaving Adam Clayton Powell Sr. His son won even more
fame, first as a preacher there, then as Harlem's first black
Congressman. The bold spirits of both men inform the place.

    On Easter Sunday the church was packed. A cadre of
deaconettes -- stately matrons attired in white -- ushered
hundreds to their seats, while dozens more stood. The Rev. Dr.
Proctor, who will retire in June after 17 years as pastor,
raised spirits and rafters with a 45-minute sermon, titled
"Believing the Unbelievable," that addressed issues ranging
from Jesus' Resurrection to Joel Steinberg's fall. As 17 souls
were baptized in the pool behind the pulpit, the Jewel Thompson
choir tore into Take Me to the Water. That joyful noise is the
church's heartbeat.

    The Abyssinian congregation makes every timid white
sojourner feel serenely at home. At the service's end, one
parishioner approached a visitor, extended his hand and said,
"Thank you for joining us. Won't you come again?" It is an
invitation no "foreigner" could refuse, after a trip uptown
that he began in fear and skepticism and ended by believing the
unbelievable. "Harlem," he says, invoking Duke Ellington, "I
love you madly."