In the postwar years, a slow stream of black middle-class families started migrating to the suburbs, gaining momentum over time. Meanwhile, the manufacturing economy, which had employed most of Harlem’s working class, began to disappear. By the 1960s, Harlem was imploding. “Harlem is a ruin,” Ralph Ellison wrote in Harper’s in 1964. “Many of its ordinary aspects (its crimes, its casual violence, its crumbling buildings with littered areaways, ill-smelling halls, and vermin-invaded rooms) are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams.”
Love B. Woods, the black businessman who had bought the Theresa, was forced to sell it in 1966. When news broke that the hotel was being sold to white owners and converted to office space, several prominent members of the Harlem community rallied to raise the capital to buy the Theresa, but they were ultimately unsuccessful. A few tenants remained in the building under the new ownership, Jimi Hendrix among them. The building was now called the Theresa Towers, and its first six floors were rented by the Haryou-Act Anti-Poverty Program, which addressed joblessness in the black community.
Over the following decades, a parade of nonprofits and social services agencies moved through the Theresa. In Push, the novel by Sapphire (on which the movie Precious is based), the 16-year-old Precious attends an alternative school housed in the Theresa. Kicked out of public school for being pregnant, she arrives at the front desk and asks, “This the alternative?”
With office buildings few and far between, Harlem rents—even for rundown space—often exceeded the market rates for downtown districts. The nonprofits attracted to the Theresa were typically those with a vested interest in the neighborhood, but they were often unable to afford it. A fluctuation in funding, damaging for any nonprofit, could prove especially debilitating. During the Giuliani administration, for instance, the Theresa’s manager told Newsday that an adult literacy program-likely similar to the fictional one attended by Precious-lost its government funding and had to close.
Bill Clinton’s 2001 move to 125th Street, a block from the Theresa, established Harlem as something of a nonprofit hot spot-at least for those that could afford to stay. The Theresa’s tenants have tended toward the spectrum of endowed, educational institutions reflected in today’s roster: Touro College; Arbour Education and Training; a branch of the Columbia’s Teachers College; the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
In 2007, Mayor Bloomberg proposed a drastic shift in Harlem zoning regulations to pave the way for new construction. As hyperbolic midtown rents pushed development farther and farther uptown, city officials and developers promised a “renaissance” of new office towers, hotels and residential buildings, a dazzling Harlem rebound. Over the objections of community members, small businesses were uprooted to make way for a bevy of new building projects. Most, however, were slated to begin just as the real estate market was proving a speculative illusion, and the downturn put a halt, at least temporarily, to much of the new development.
Harlem has always been particularly vulnerable to the nation’s economic mood swings. In 1931, a report to President Hoover noted that 50 percent of families in Harlem were out of work, and only 9 percent received government relief jobs. When a bright, hopeful administration took office in 1932, evidence that the New Deal was not a new deal for black America was blunt and swift. The National Industrial Recovery Act discriminated broadly against black workers, and President Roosevelt jettisoned legislation directed at the black community, fearing the loss of Congressional support for his economic agenda. In later decades, elected officials held press conferences heralding an endless succession of new development initiatives for Harlem, but the results were often as empty.
Mayor Bloomberg was not the first to conjure up grand towers of deliverance, nor were these the first developers’ dreams deferred. But now instead of buildings, there’s a crane frozen above a mess of uncongealed scaffolding and a skeletal hotel carcass. Down the street, a chain-fenced lot is littered with plastic bags.
But 125th Street itself is anything but stalled. The days when Malcolm X charged crowds to action outside the Theresa are long gone, but the 125th Street intersection is an endless gush of people: hawking, preaching, hustling, converting, pushing their way through. Dead buildings or no, the street is alive, the kind of place where the whole scene can upturn and change in an instant, where, depending on the day, the Apollo’s sidewalk can fill with revelers or mourners or both at once, the street vendors with their incense and jewel-toned oils and Farrakhan tomes right there, too, Barack Obama or Michael Jackson T-shirts at the ready.
It’s a street, like Harlem itself, that has a way of subverting the best-laid plans, of becoming exactly what nobody expected. Harlem was always about people stepping into the unknown, whether the word itself stirred the exodus of thousands from rural towns across the country, or whether it meant crowds assembling outside the Theresa, come to embark on the brazen enterprise of social change. Which is maybe why the easy promises handed down by developers—the markups of gleaming towers, always absolute in their salvation—haven’t stuck very well in Harlem: The energy of 125th Street, when it’s been there, has always come from the street up. Trickier to legislate—though what truly democratic endeavor isn’t?—and more bebop than big band, it’s what blows the long hard note of breath into buildings and the streets they make up.
egeminder@observer.com
