Professor Prabal De, CCNY 2014
Neighborhood Visits
What Once Was
010 years
It has been absolutely thrilling for me to see Harlem from a new perspective; one that I had been oblivious to for quite some time. I have been seemingly unaware of my Harlem surroundings due to my preoccupation with school. I was then given the opportunity to remove myself from the stresses of school and just walk around in the surrounding area, and given the ability to observe the beauty and history of Harlem. I feel somewhat blessed to attend school in an area bound by such a rich culture. One of the most disturbing observations that I made was the fact that the city is not preserving the historic monuments of Harlem. As the city paves the way for the future, they are not hesitant in tearing down the structures representing the past, which is ironic because it is the richness of Harlem’s past which has made the future of the area possible. A very interesting fact that I learned during the walking tour was that there was initially an immense amounts of discrimination exercised in the foundation of Harlem. When Harlem was first established it would not allow minorities, specifically African-Americans, from moving into the neighborhood. Eventually, the landlords allowed minorities to move in, but they had to be affluent in order to do so, which for many was a very steep requirement. This is so ironical now, due to the fact that Harlem is now predominately inhabited by minorities. With the current gentrification of Harlem, the ethnic diversity is changing, and the story of Harlem is once again coming full circle. It may occur again that Harlem is an area in which only the very affluent can live. Harlem should be gentrified in a way in which there exists a balance between preserving the past while making room for the future, as well as affording an equality in who could afford to live in the area.
Here we see the Harlem 5 Basketball Stadium in ruins, and soon to be demolished, despite the fact that it was an integral part of the community and the foundation of Harlem.
Here we see remnants of the original buildings of Harlem, still beautifully preserved.
Here we see what once was immense, beautiful and the embodiment of Harlem is now being demolished for the future. However, is this the future that we want, one that is ignorant and not respectful to the past?
Hidden Artifacts
010 years
by Allen Kim
in Neighborhood Visits
First of all, I thought the tour guide was incredible and knowledgeable. My only complaint, if this counts, is the sheer amount of information being thrown at us. She was just throwing out so much information that I didn’t have time to process much of it. However, I do remember some things. The most striking part of the whole tour was the incredible lengths the tour guide would talk on a particular site. Even though I lived in New York City my whole life, I never really took the time to appreciate its extensive history. I was taught some U.S. history in school so, I wasn’t oblivious to the importance of NYC.
When we first stopped at beauty salons, I was confused. It turns out that it was a major historical landmark. The most surprising part of the tour was when we stopped at a random abandoned warehouse, or so it seemed. Of course, it turns out to be something historically noteworthy also… Almost everywhere we turned, there was some deep history to be found. Just appreciating the various locations we went to was the part that stuck with me the most. It really made me think about how much we can uncover in just our neighborhoods.
Historic Harlem
110 years
The most notable aspect to note about Harlem is its history. Not just what is still left today, but how it’s remembered. In general, it’s safe to say that the history of Harlem can’t be determined by a stroll through the neighborhood — it can only be remembered by people that choose to remember certain aspects of the history.
To illustrate the point I’m trying to make, I will give a few examples. Take the Tree of Hope. This symbol is not present in the location it was several decades ago. Without the stories and the recollections of someone that remembers the Tree of Hope, as well as its significance, no one would really be able to tell the importance of what this tree used to symbolize. No one would really comprehend the meaning of the replacement tree at the Apollo Theater or the little plaque that stands where the tree used to stand. Clearly, the rich practices of Harlem are only remembered by people that choose to help retain history.
Next, we can look at present day nail salons. Back in the day, there were hotspots where people used to come to drink, dance, spend time together, and all in all have a good time. People used to come together at night to make these places just part of the vibrant community. Nevertheless, today, those hot spots that were a vital part of the night life have all disintegrated into nail salons and restaurants. I am not offering the statement that nail salons and fast food joints are not a community hotspot, but I am stating that night clubs are more vibrant than their current replacements are. Take the famous Big Apple Night Club. In the midst of a tenement building, this was one of the more popular places to spend the night in Harlem. Today, it is a Popeye’s. Even though this restaurant got an A, it’s still not the same thing as what used to stand in its place. Unless they are educated by people that choose to remember the Big Apple Night Club, the customers of that Popeye’s Restaurant probably have no idea of the importance of where they are eating.
A final example I want to make concerns the building where the Harlem Globtrotters used to play. That building, before it was a part time basketball stadium, was also know for being a ballroom hall where musicians used to fill the building with jazz and with life. People all the way from Chicago would perform for entertainment and for comedy. The basketball team garnered so much support and had fun playing for decades at this location. And today this edifice is scheduled to be demolished. Most people that walk by that building today have no idea of the rich history that it represents. But those who choose to remember and study the history realize that the scheduled demolition is actually a travesty.
To hammer the nail through the coffin, take what the founder of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture did. Someone once told him that African Americans do NOT have any [memorable] history. He made it his life mission to prove that person wrong, by collecting hundreds of pieces of African American literature and memories. He understood the maxim of life: history is only remembered by people that choose to remember certain aspects of the past. He chose to remember. Will people of our generation do the same?
Tour of Harlem
010 years
I found this tour to be very interesting and informative. There was a lot of material that I learned about Harlem from this tour. Honestly, I didn’t know much about the history of Harlem coming into the tour. I knew that it was mainly a black community in the past, but I never knew of the whole predicament of the landowners. I thought it started with African Americans and more came to join them. I didn’t think that there were white landowners who refused to give apartments to blacks. This really gave me a lot of insight on how Harlem has grown as a city through the years. Today it seems to be filled with many different types of nationalities, rather than the white or black majority that was expected in the past. I felt that overall this tour could have been much better. Most of the information we learned about was about structures that no longer exist. The tour would have been more exciting if we looked at more buildings like the Apollo Theatre and the residential area. It is still standing and serving its purpose. This way when I walk by those attractions I will be able to have a better knowledge about what happens within those buildings. This would be especially beneficial because I am dorming along with a number of students in our class. Having a better understanding of the current Harlem would be great to help navigate through the area. The information that we got out of this tour could have been done in a classroom setting, and would have the same effect.
Harlem Walking Tour
010 years
I thought the Harlem tour was pretty enlightening, because I didn’t realize how close we live (all of us in the towers, at least) to such important historical sites. Since coming to New York, it’s always been a shock for me to see things I’ve only seen in movies or read about. For example, Times Square, Central Park, and Washington Square all initially felt like I was walking into a frame of some movie I had just seen. I had a similar feeling when on the tour, especially recalling a book I read in high school for Lit, “Invisible Man.” This book tells the story of a nameless narrator living through the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement, becoming an influential orator, but eventually fading into obscurity. Not even just the people mentioned, but some of the areas we walked through were mentioned in the narrative and were even main plot points. The most interesting thing about the tour was the fact that Langston Hughes’s ashes are in the library, the first building we saw. That particular fact stuck with me through the rest of the tour, because he was such an influential poet and is so ingrained in US literary history. I also found it incredible that he was laid to rest in the same building that initially stunned him as he walked out of the 135th street subway station. I’m grateful to be able to live in such a historically important place, especially so important in recent US history.
Touring Harlem
010 years
It’s pretty amazing how little I knew about the rich history of Harlem, especially since I’ve spent months living here. I enjoyed the entire tour, but two moments stood out most to me.
The first was when our group stood before a seemingly uninteresting Popeye’s. This Popeye’s used to be the Big Apple Nightclub — the place to party roughly fifty years ago. I could just imagine the fabulously dressed people walking in and out of an old-timey club. It’s pretty crazy how quickly neighborhoods change and evolve. Plus, I’m sure a tour group standing in front of a Popeye’s was a bizarre sight for any pedestrians walking past.
The second moment was when we visited Strivers’ Row, or two blocks of gorgeous Brownstones. I thought it was unbelievable that when they were first put on the market, in the early 20th century, out of 140 homes that were built less than twenty sold. However, even then these homes were for the wealthier New Yorkers, hence the name Strivers’ Row. It seemed out of place in the relatively lower-middle class neighborhood. And as my fellow classmate said, quite dreamily, “Imagine if these were CCNY’s frat houses.”
Our Connection to History
010 years
After living on campus for so long, I feel like many of us do overlook the historical significance of living in Harlem. Sure, now we often hear rumors about certain neighborhoods to avoid, but it wasn’t always like this. We first started at the Schomberg Center, which we learned was one of the first research libraries dedicated to African descent culture and contained one of the largest archives of African American works. However, one of the more overwhelming facts was hearing that when Langston Hughes first came to NYC, his prime destination visits were to this library and the YMCA down the street. It’s astounding to think that we are visiting the places that so many significant historical figures contributed to. As we stood outside and marveled over the rustic architecture, perhaps Langston Hughes and countless others were feeling the same?
Another memorable location we visited was the construction site of the former Lafayette Theater, which was the first theater to desegregate. I just couldn’t believe how all these areas with such historical and cultural significance could be torn down. That eliminates the connection we have to the great figures who contributed and fought so hard to establish that significance. So many of the former popular nightclubs and ballrooms and social centers have all been closed and all that remains are the skeletal remnants that people pass by without realizing all the stories that have happened right there in front of them. I appreciate our opportunity to walk and get a glimpse of some of these stories even though there wasn’t much to see at first glance.
It feels rather sad to see how, as Rick put it, Harlem has passed its heyday. It’s very hard to find that same spirit of a flourishing, cultural community. It’s such a shame that Harlem now brings up a negative connotation rather than the memories of a thriving birthplace for African American culture.
Holy Schist
010 years
by yejoonseo
in Neighborhood Visits
This tour of Harlem truly opened my eyes to the culture and past of the area. It is actually surprising that, although I live in the dorms and attend CCNY, I have never really bothered to walk around the area. Something about the area always felt ominous or simply not welcoming. However, here comes the tour guide in all her joy and passion about the area. Her pictures and most definitely her attitude brought some life into my slept-for-4-hours brain very early in the morning. Although it seemed like we were walking around in circles stopping at places in an ineffective manner, I truly enjoyed the experience of being able to see what Harlem was.
Two things I liked the most were the apartments that were grouped together with an alleyway to connect them all instead of a backyard and the tree of hope. The neighborhood of houses is honestly a very good way to organize buildings and it make me wonder why there aren’t more with the same layout. The alleyway is not only good for the cleanliness of the streets but also to bring a group of people together in the neighborhood. The tree of hope has a nice story behind it which I never heard of before. It is kind of sad to know that the tree is gone and is now only a plate of steel in the middle of a busy street.
And… I never knew that Shepard Hall (?) was made of schist. Seems irrelevant but fun fact?
Bird Poop and Harlem
010 years
Sometime yesterday. Probably around 9 am.
Who is this extremely happy tour guide? Is she actually… passionate about this? Oh my goodness, she actually loves what she’s doing. This is weird. I was expecting a malnourished Dominican man with a patchy beard in an over-worn, stained sweatshirt to lead me around for two hours telling me about the significance of the buildings I would never have noticed and the road signs that I would never have read and the change in the landscape I would never have thought of. But instead we have been thrown into a page of a Wes Anderson movie script. What are those shoes and coat doing on the same body anyway? I was digressing. I tried to pay attention to her but the bustling Friday morning crowd on 135th and Lenox held too many distractions.
Suddenly I felt something on my shoulder. Did something just? HOLY. The audacity of pigeons these days.
An unimaginably brainless, probably blank faced, insolent, unmannered, uncivilized, uneducated pigeon had hit its target dead OFF. My shoulder was decorated with a line of green and white poop, lying there in all its glory, boasting its feats of accuracy. I saw wings flapping away and I wished for a bow and arrow and accuracy that beat the one the bird’s butt had just practiced. But I didn’t have a bow, or a quiver of arrows. I had my drawstring bag and a lonely dollar that was now going to be spent on a self-consolatory doughnut and the extra wet napkins that the street vendor was kind enough to give me. But the stain disgraced my shoulder until I saw a desolate Popeye’s (an unusual sight for the place) and as I rushed in and encountered an Indian accent behind the counter, I ushered myself into the bathroom to change while the class stared at my supposed insolence in abandoning the tour in order to get fried chicken. As if I would have betrayed the doughnut I had eaten earlier and introduce it to the company of fried chicken, what a preposterous notion.
The tour was fascinating in some ways, especially when I realized there were million dollar properties right behind the hellhole I thought I resided in. That this place used to be the Czech republic of the early and mid twentieth century, just my luck to develop the ability to even think by the time it had ended. The thought of visiting the Harlem YMCA as I came to New York for the first time in my wool trousers and blazer with a crisp cotton shirt, lugging baggage out of the subway on 135th and Lenox was a page out of a novel written in the back of my mind. The two-story penthouse at the top of the Theresa hotel left a myriad of stories to be concocted and the dinners to be had with world dignitaries left me in a delirium as we crossed the street to the Apollo theatre where the crowd was giving standing ovations to the Jackson five as I bustled my way through the crowd.
But all of this was only a figment of my imagination. Harlem had passed its heyday and it was now a cog in the capitalist machine of advertisements and cheap stores that yelled and screeched their sales pitches through the avenues and streets of Harlem. The ongoing and obvious gentrification of the place was a sign of ‘better’ things to come but better for who, we would only know in the aftermath. It was a chapter in the life of this ever breathing, living city that millions commuted to and resided in. But only a handful had any idea of what was happening as their walked in their bubbles to their office buildings and walked right back to their homes and television shows to keep their minds entertained in short bursts and spurts like a car in disrepair.
Suddenly I turned around to see the tour guide had vanished. Who was she, did anyone catch her name? And on that note of suspicion, my tour of Harlem had come to an abrupt end.
harlem tour- rachel weintraub
010 years
Today’s Harlem tour was extremely eye opening to the rich culture that we are living amongst. We focused on Harlem during the 1920’s and 30’s, the prime of the Harlem Renaissance. After the mechanization of the south around seventy percent of the South’s African American population migrated to the north settling in major cities, namely Harlem. We walked around viewing the different landmarks such as the research library focusing on African American culture, the YMCA, churches, tenements which housed the lower class, the first ever desegregated upscale hotel, the remains of former night clubs and theaters, the first desegregated townhouses for the wealthy, the Apollo theatre, and of course City College, “poor man’s Harvard.” Jazz, folk art, dancing, and acting really defined Harlem during this time. It was very cool to see the home of the Harlem Globe Trotters, where every game began and ended with a dance. We walked the walk of Langston Hughes when he first came to this great city. We stood in front of the theatre were world class acts such as the Jackson Five and Stevie Wonder first performed, rubbing that bark from the tree of hope for good luck. The rich culture of Harlem’s past and present was inescapable.
