TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/042489/04248900.002

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 12KB | 210 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."