Still Life in Harlem (11 page)

These are the conditions and climate that created the despair that created the hope that created Harlem, the city of refuge, the city that became the black mecca.

In March 1925, the
Survey Graphic
ran a special issue called
Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,
where, in an essay simply titled “Harlem,” Alain Locke wrote,
“Harlem had the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.”

Adam Clayton Powell Sr. called Harlem
“the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere.”

Eslanda Robeson said that only blacks belonged in Harlem. “It is,” she said, “a place they can call home.”

And home was what they needed.

So they moved to the suburbs.

Harlem, as a matter of fact, used to be the suburbs.

That is probably hard to believe, standing where we now stand and seeing the urban decay all around.

Standing where my father stood, I would have found it hard to imagine, had I tried, that Harlem had ever been anything but what it was that day, and certainly not a pastoral community of prosperous farmers, colonial families, peace and tranquillity. Marshes and meadows covered the district of Harlem then, clean streams, goats and geese and cows. Eventually, though, the land played out. The farms were abandoned, many of the great estates were sold at public auction, property values plunged.

As longtime residents moved out, Irish immigrants moved in. They built shanties and shacks and squatted on abandoned lands that had formerly been prosperous estates. Those who could buy property did so cheaply. They built small houses. Harlem was fast becoming a residential community. And new prosperity was on its way.

Harlem was still the country, a rural outing for city dwellers, a weekend in the countryside where downtowners could get away from New York and take afternoon strolls along the quiet lanes. The aristocratic horsey set would ride their sulkies through Central Park to exercise their trotters on Harlem Lane—long before it became St. Nicholas Avenue—and people wanting to avoid the frenzy of New York City began moving to Harlem to escape the noise and the crowds of the city and to get away from the next wave of immigrants who had newly arrived.

They couldn't escape for long.

Once the population of New York City had passed the one-million mark, pastoral Harlem's days were numbered. There was nowhere else for a city built on an island to grow, nowhere to put all those people except for them to move north.

Finally in 1873 Harlem was annexed to New York City. Three elevated train lines were extended into Harlem, and Harlem quickly became the scene of wild speculation and development. Nearly all the houses that exist still today in Harlem were built in the frenzy that followed.

Land changed hands often and quickly. Speculators made fortunes buying up Harlem real estate and selling it at tremendous profit to developers who built houses on the land and sold them quickly to reinvest the profit in still more buildings.

Prices soared. Rents in the new buildings were so high that only the wealthy could afford them. Harlem was poised to become an upper-class community.

Blacks of course still lived in the area. They had always lived in the area. They had been of course among the earliest settlers—if indeed slaves can be called settlers. They had tended the farms, worked the estates, and built the roads. The original wagon road connecting Harlem with the community farther down the island had in fact been built by black slaves. They even had their own burial ground.

With the end of slavery, blacks stayed in Harlem and began to spread across the area. They were squatters on abandoned lands long before the Irish immigrants were, or they farmed their own land, or they worked as servants in the mansions of the wealthy who were moving to Harlem. There was never a time when blacks did not live here.

But early in the twentieth century, when the second wave of real estate development collapsed, so many blacks suddenly began to appear in Harlem that white residents seemed to forget that substantial numbers of blacks had always lived here. These old white residents were shocked and dismayed and none too happy at the changes happening to their neighborhood.

Nowadays when we think of Harlem, we never think of it as
their
neighborhood. It is hard to remember that white folks once lived here too. It is hard to imagine a time when Harlem wasn't predominantly black—or even entirely black. It is so easy to look and see the world and think that everything is as everything always has been, possibly even that things will be forever as they are now.

When you stand on a street corner in Harlem you can easily get the feeling too that Harlem has always been this way and will always be this way, that Harlem has always been poor and desperate and dangerous, and that these things have always been equated somehow with being black.

It is easy to forget how disadvantage and atrophy happen, easy to forget how much we help them along.

The land speculation in Harlem continued unabated. Property values were inflated beyond the barriers of reality, yet new houses continued to be built. A new subway line had been proposed. It was supposed to make Harlem even more attractive, even more popular, justifying all the construction and the crazy high prices of rents and properties.

Then all at once the bubble burst. The subway that was proposed and then promised didn't arrive on time; and in anticipation of its arrival, too many buildings had been built. Harlem was awash in vacant apartments.

Now suddenly rents were too high, and landlords were forced into the dramatic action of lowering rents and allowing blacks to fill the vacancies. The boom was over. Blacks in large numbers began moving to Harlem.

Before Harlem turned into the fringe area it became, blacks in New York City had lived primarily in another fringe neighborhood, the Tenderloin—midtown Manhattan, along the West Side. Now with the construction of the new Pennsylvania Station came the destruction of many all-black tenement blocks. Displaced and now at last offered decent housing for the very first time, blacks moved in droves uptown to Harlem.

Landlords and speculators had been facing financial ruin, many of them. Some offered their apartments to blacks. Others used the threat of black tenants moving in to force whites in the neighborhood to buy the vacant properties. Still others allowed black tenants in order to further lower property values so they could buy buildings cheaply, often at half price, and then put in more black tenants once they discovered that blacks were willing to pay a premium to rent in Harlem.

Philip Payton found an opportunity here. New York's black population had been steadily growing and needed housing. And Payton knew how willing they would be to sacrifice and pinch pennies in order to live in such an exclusive area as Harlem. Payton, a black man, assured white landlords an income by leasing their apartment buildings. He then turned around and rented apartments to black tenants—at a 10 percent premium, of course.

Payton got control of his first building when two landlords were locked in a dispute. To get even with the other, one of the angry landlords turned his building over to Payton. Payton filled it with black families.

This was the beginning. Harlem was becoming a black community. Harlem would soon be the mecca it became. Harlem was turning first into a ghetto; then it turned into a slum. The slum is what we know of Harlem today.

We think we know this place because it is so much in our consciousness. We think we know Harlem because of the rumors we've heard, the movies we've seen, the stories we've read. We think we know this place because it is so deeply embedded in our cultural idiom that the very mention of Harlem conjures an image—perhaps not always the same image, but an image and a connotation. We think we are so familiar with this place that we know its history, its beginnings and endings, and the failings it has come to symbolize. We think of Harlem now, many of us, if we think of it at all, as we think perhaps of a dying fruit tree, or of a well gone dry. And we think we know—not that we care—but we think we know what happened.

There was a time—not so very long ago but still a long time ago, and perhaps we've forgotten—but there was a time after Harlem became the ghetto and while it was still the mecca when Harlem was a celebration.

It was a time so much like today and yet so unlike today. It was an era when white was white and black was black and Harlem meant nothing but blackness and the whites of this world did not want to live anywhere near the blacks of this world. It was this separate world of blackness that Harlem came to represent. It became a magnet for blacks the world over—certainly for blacks, but it became for a time a magnet for whites as well. It was dark—yes! forever dark, this place—but the darkness was of mystery, not so much of danger. Harlem was on the move, on the rise, full of life and hope. Harlem was fun.

It was, as Duke Ellington exclaimed when he first got here, like something out of the Arabian Nights, a time of amazing excitement, incredible frolic and carousing.

In
Parties,
Carl Van Vechten's novel of this early era, one character tells another: “And we'll get drunker and drunker and drift about night clubs so drunk that we won't know where we are, and then we'll go to Harlem and stay up all night and go to bed late tomorrow morning and wake up and begin it all over again.”

Harlem was where you went to cap festive evenings—and that was only if you hadn't started the partying there. 'Round about midnight the Harlem bands started swinging, the joints started jumping, and Harlem exploded with merriment.

You didn't want to live there if you were white, but you wanted to go there: to the Cotton Club, to Pod's and Jerry's Catagonia Club, to Tillie's Inn; to hear Duke Ellington's band, Fletcher Henderson's, Cab Calloway.

Harlem was a wondrous destination on a magical tour of nightclubs, music, and liquor, exotic living and excess. Harlem was full of life. Harlem was the place to be.

If uptown was, as Harlem on the surface might have seemed and as Van Vechten titled it in another novel, a kind of “Nigger Heaven” to blacks, it was for whites a different kind of paradise. When the Broadway shows let out and the dining was done, the white folks went uptown for a taste of the exotic, stayed until the wee hours, and then glided back downtown.

This is the Harlem of legend, the place we think we know. If we think of Harlem, this mythic Harlem is very often the Harlem we call to mind, that era of hot nights and swinging jazz and what is now called the renaissance of black art and literature, but was in fact the first birth of a black voice, the finding of a new black identity.

Nowadays another image of Harlem has taken the place of the previous one. Nowadays we look at Harlem and see nothing glamorous here. Exciting, perhaps—in a way. Dangerous, yes. Even exotic. But glamorous? There is nothing in the reports of Harlem, nothing in the modern definitions of Harlem, that suggests allure or appeal. The Arabian Nights have given way to the bitter reality of morning's harsh light, morning in America.

When the white folks had had enough of Harlem, they slid back downtown, out of sight, gone from here. They abandoned Harlem as if they were refugees fleeing a battle zone.

They stayed as long as they could. When the black invasion began, white owners organized into neighborhood associations to repulse the enemy. They advertised for white tenants, they pleaded with other whites to join the antiblack crusade, to protect themselves, protect their property, and keep their property values up by keeping blacks out. They devised covenants among themselves, promising not to rent and not to sell to blacks. It was even suggested (by John Taylor, founder of the Harlem Property Owners' Improvement Corporation) to white people living on the borders of black blocks that they build twenty-foot fences to separate themselves from their black neighbors.

They resisted the black hordes for as long as they could, but it was a lost cause. Too many white landlords were losing money. Real estate values spiraled downward. Buildings sold at bargain rates. Owners who had honored agreements not to sell or rent to blacks found no whites willing to rent. To keep the tenants they already had, they had to reduce rents still further. Many simply sold out. Many lost out to foreclosure. Many others stared at the dilemma: to stick to a policy trying to keep Harlem white and risk losing everything, or to rent to blacks—at higher prices, of course.

In the end the white folks gave up on Harlem. They surrendered. They abandoned Harlem, abandoned their homes, abandoned property as if they were fleeing and seeking refuge elsewhere.

Harlem became black.

Then Harlem became mecca.

Said one black man: “If my race can make Harlem, good lord, what can't it do?”

It didn't happen overnight, but it happened. Harlem went from being a neighborhood where blacks could finally get decent housing to becoming the black part of town to becoming, as James Weldon Johnson put it, “the greatest Negro city in the world,” a source of black pride, a place of enterprise for black people, a place of hope for black people.

Then Harlem became a slum.

*   *   *

I don't know what my father was thinking as he stood there and watched the street that day. I don't know how much of Harlem's history he knows. But whether we're talking about Harlem or about East St. Louis or about East Palo Alto or about the black parts of every town and every city in this country, the process of segregating blacks from whites has always been the same—the process and the end result—and he would have seen it all.

As a young man traveling, my father would have seen these Niggertowns and Black Bottoms, as they were called, the Smoketowns and the Bronzevilles. As a younger man growing up, he would have lived in them. As a young black man knowing nothing else, it might all have seemed so normal. I couldn't help but wonder, however, if he didn't feel a little bit cheated, a little bit angry. I certainly would have been. In fact I certainly was.