What will happen when Harlem becomes white?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/13/harlem-gentrification-new-york-race-black-white

Version 0 of 1.

Harlem is gentrifying.

Get off at 125th street’s A subway and walk south. As you go, you will spot luxury condominiums in between brownstones and walk-ups. If you want to, you can stop off at a designer flower store or a hat boutique. On your walk, you will almost certainly spot more than a few white, middle-class-looking faces – something that would have been inconceivable 20 years ago.

Couples can now be spotted in and out of bars and restaurants along Frederick Douglass Boulevard, locally renamed “restaurant row”. Outside of 67 Orange Street, a small craft cocktail speakeasy, reality television crews have been known to ask customers to sign off releases so that their faces can be used on film. The bar is a staple of Harlem’s “new” renaissance, where young, hip, black customers have adopted local venues to spend their downtime.

Gentrification means that demographics are changing, and Harlem is getting whiter. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of black residents fell notably, and white population share grew, particularly in central Harlem where white residents increased fivefold.

But when it comes to economic development, the story is much more complicated than white people moving in, black people moving out.

At the heart of Harlem’s gentrification are black residents old and new, many of whom are thankful for the new amenities and nighttime options. A very particular brand of black pride is being curated, sold and embraced – a move that is at the same time celebrating and threatening the very core of a dynamic black heritage and culture.

When 32-year-old Kwame Binea came to New York eight years ago, one visit to Harlem was enough to convince him he couldn’t live anywhere else in the city. Pushing him to make such a move were not just cheaper rents, but the heritage of what Harlem was culturally and artistically, and the sense that this was a place where he could relax as a black man. “In Harlem, I could finally breathe,” he says.

Binea, who is a part-time barman and a full-time artist and musician (he’s the lead vocalist in a rock and soul band) found that older neighborhood community members were quick to take him under their wing and offer support.

Jamal Joseph, a Columbia University professor, writer, film-maker and community activist who was a member of the Black Panther party as a teenager in the 1960s (he spent time in prison for it as a consequence) has helped Binea by shooting some of his music videos, and by being a go-to man for advice. Many other successful elders within the community have stepped up in a similar fashion.

Binea, who was born in Ghana and arrived in the US as a child by way of London, also learned to appreciate the struggle specific to African American culture while living in Harlem. “Bob Marley wrote his best music while he was here in America. That’s no coincidence,” he says.

Just over a year ago, Binea was walking home from work and was stopped and frisked by police. That night was also the night he felt he gained a better understanding of the world his American-born black brothers and sisters had been brought up in, he says.

Not a question of race, but class

To attract outsiders and economic development in recent years, a culture of political and social resistance has been toned down. Instead, Harlem has been presenting itself as a reinvigorated version of itself, specifically highlighting the period of the Harlem Renaissance when great black cultural figures came to the fore.

Karl Williams, the 39-year-old Yale-educated owner of 67 Orange Street, quotes Marcus Garvey when speaking about the heritage defining his establishment, talking about using “arts and literature to demonstrate black competence through prominence, skill and intellect”.

Williams is no Harlem native, but has settled here and embraced it wholeheartedly. “I chose Harlem not just as a business opportunity, but also because winning within this market meant more to me as a black entrepreneur.” For him, the issues around Harlem’s gentrification are not so much a question of race, but class. Many of his associates are, like him: highly educated black members of the middle class. Their stake in the neighborhood is secure.

When Harlem Park to Park was founded in 2009, eight out of its nine founding businesses were black-owned. In 2011, the organization counted over 50 businesses, 80% of which were black-owned. Today, reflecting the shift in residents more broadly, with 104 businesses, 63% are black-owned.

Of all the new settlers, few have moved in with more publicity than celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, who in 2010 opened his restaurant, Red Rooster, just a few steps away from historical soul food diner, Sylvia’s.

Samuelsson, who was brought up in Sweden but was born in Ethiopia, settled in Harlem years before opening a restaurant in the area. He jokes he had to get the equivalent of a PhD in Harlem before daring to open a business here – a form of respect and a way of paying homage, before looking to the future.

Today, his restaurant is an unequivocal success and a game changer. Business owners speak about “before Red Rooster” and “after Red Rooster”, referring not just to its power in terms of drawing outsider crowds, but also in defining a specific kind of Harlem chic.

Samuelsson and his wife are one of a handful of good-looking black couples who have given Harlem a modern sheen of gloss and glamor. While Red Rooster’s restaurant clientele is generally quite white and non-local, its bar is frequented by black locals. Beneath Red Rooster, Ginny’s Supper Club, a restaurant and club that opened shortly after Red Rooster, has been decorated to evoke the Harlem Renaissance. Here too, patrons are very often mostly of the black, cool and well-dressed sort rather than the “white tourist in trainers” variety.

For Samuelsson, who is a little touchy on the subject of gentrification, coming to Harlem has been as much about job creation as anything else. Of the 150 to 200 people his Harlem initiatives employ, he says he makes sure 65% to 70% of them at any time are Harlem residents.

“Harlem is changing. As a person living in my community, like anything that will change, I have a choice to take part in that change and to make sure that I respect the things that were built here before us. So that it’s not just completely washed out.”

Samuelsson’s approach is one shared across businesses. “Economic development needs to be strongly tied to the culture,” Nikoa Evans-Hendricks, Harlem Park to Park’s executive director, says. “That is the strategy. How do you monetize the cultural experience in a way that remains genuine and authentic?”

‘It’s never been the place – it’s been the people’

Thomas Carroll, 60, occupies a particularly interesting space between what might be seen as an old Harlem and a new one. Carroll grew up and spent most of his life on a small corridor on 118th street. “To me, 118th street was the entire world, it was our globe,” he says.

When times got tough in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, with the flooding of drugs to the area and mass abandonment and disinvestment, Carroll didn’t budge from his center of gravity. He owned a few businesses and created a block club. He returned to 118th street every day, even when he could no longer live there, and found support from his community members when his mother became ill.

Today, Carroll is a doorman just one street away in one of the large developments that came to Harlem in the early 2000s. He says most of the people he once knew on 118th street are no longer there. But he is positive about change, greeting the dozens upon dozens of residents in his building – black and white – with a signature charm and genuine warmth. Carroll gives his new building a connection to a past that’s slowly melting away.

When asked whether he remembers when white people started to move into the neighborhood, Carroll does not hesitate. “That happened in the 1990s. You started to see white women pushing their babies on the street. That’s when you knew it was changing,” he says. “That was right around the time that Giuliani introduced his quality of life campaign,” he says.

“That’s when the chasing started. We would be chased around by police vans like apes and arrested. Have you seen Planet of the Apes? Yes? Just like that.”

With newly enforced loitering and vagrancy laws and the activation of the broken windows theory of policing, Carroll found that he could no longer do something that had been a signature of his everyday life on the block: sitting on the stoop and congregating outside with neighbors.

This is where the use of cultural references for profit gets a little awkward.

A two-minute walk away from Carroll’s lifetime block is Samuelsson’s new, more democratically priced restaurant, Streetbird, which opened just a few weeks ago. Already, it has become a nighttime hotspot, attracting a young crowd – albeit a seemingly majority white one this time.

Streetbird has been decorated to celebrate 1980s and 1990s hip-hop culture. Graffiti and boomboxes adorn the walls, cassettes surround lights, sneakers hang by their shoelaces from the ceilings. Symbolically, sneakers hanging from wires might simply evoke black urban America to outsiders – but to those more familiar with inner-city life, they are a symbol of gang sites, the marking of someone’s killing, although sometimes too, of kids simply having fun.

Safe to say, they are a symbol of disenfranchisement with severe political and cultural weight. To see them hanging in a restaurant a few streets away from the housing projects where the NYPD executed their largest gang raid in department history last June is a little jarring.

“When you have shoes hanging over the wires at a restaurant at a time when black men are dying – at the hands of each other, at the hands of police … I think there should be a context where that should be memorialized, but not just as a way to sell greens and grits and black-eyed peas,” says Davarian Baldwin, a professor of American studies at Trinity College.

Baldwin, who is, among other things, a scholar of the Harlem Renaissance, says the commodification of selective aspects of black culture is something that comes with heavy questions and implications. The Harlem Renaissance included activism around labor, housing and politics, he says – subjects that tend to be brushed to one side within this current context.

The Reverend Mike Walrond, who leads a congregation of 9,000 at Harlem’s First Corinthian Baptist Church – most of whom are black and between the ages of 21 and 45 – says gentrification is on everyone’s mind. Older church members are struggling with higher rents, and some have been forced to move.

“Harlem has never been the buildings, it’s never been the place. It’s been the people, the connection, the relationships. As those things begin to fade, something of the identity of the community is going to fade as well. That is a great fear of mine,” he says. Walrond points to the elephant in the room: a fear of what happens when Harlem becomes white. With a Whole Foods opening next year on 125th street, that future might be closer than you think.

Walrond says housing – upholding and expanding affordable housing – should be at the center of concern for those seeking to keep many of Harlem’s current residents put. “Right now, we have an average rent of $2,400 a month, with average income of $21,000. That’s not sustainable,” Walrond says.

With the 1990s marking the dismantling of public gardens, crackdown on graffiti and block parties, zero-tolerance policing and the sweeping away of street vendors, community life was almost entirely formally dismantled.

Baldwin says that with such complete disregard for urban black life, real value can only be regained once it is seen as consumable by white people. “When there are limited options for survival as black people, they have nothing left to do but to sell themselves. Yes finally, we are being valued. But we are being valued within a market. We are not being valued within civil society,” Baldwin says.

On a dreary, rainy evening, a few streets north and further to the west, the headquarters of the 26th police precinct are holding a community meeting: a representative of the New York City department of parks and recreation highlights changes in Morningside Park: flowers growing, bushes being cut down to address an occasional nighttime population of homeless drug users, surveillance cameras installed, police monitoring.

“But what about the basketball courts,” one exasperated community member asks. “When are the basketball courts going to be done up? That’s what the kids want, they don’t care about flowers,” he says, referring to the vast community of children living in the nearby housing projects.

He is met with a blank stare and a muffled response. “You see what we have to deal with?” he says, turning to me, ushering his companions to the exit.