Saturday, May 07, 2005
Goodbye, Harlem
Last week I left my apartment in Hamilton Heights, Harlem and moved my things to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I will miss the cafe con leche and the cubanitos from "El Rey De Sandwich"; I will miss the view of New Jersey across the Hudson; I will miss the olive bar at Fairway Market. I will not miss the filth all over the sidewalks, the junkies living on the stairs down to the river, or the neighborhood tradition of walking two abreast up the subway stairs at a slow crawl. In Greenpoint, I can pass for a native even though I don't speak Polish; in Hamilton Heights, I had to assert my membership in the community by initiating conversations in Spanish. Little changes.
This last was my fourth apartment in Harlem, and the most disappointing. I had lived on 122nd near Amsterdam, at 116th and Manhattan, and at 125th and Broadway, and each location had taught me something interesting about the interplay among Harlem's geography, culture, and demographics. 125th Street, a.k.a. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, traces a valley through northern Manhattan, with Morningside Heights rising to the south and Hamilton Heights to the north. The 1-9 tracks run aboveground over this valley, bursting from the side of one hill to meet the 125th Street stop, suspended in air above the intersection of 125th and Broadway, and then launching straight into the side of the next hill to continue its subterranean course. (My third apartment was under the 125th stop, and I could hear the faint reassuring rumble of the train overhead going to sleep at night.) Parallel to this railroad bridge is an overpass, one block closer to the river: Riverside Drive passes Riverside Church, Sakura Park, and Grant's Tomb before spanning the valley, and on the other side it hits my old (fourth) apartment building, number 587. I used to take this route to and from campus, and the world of the overpass was a constant surprise to me. Late at night, it was lined with cars with their front seats tilted back, lewd scenes playing themselves out through the windshields. In the morning, many of the cars were gone, while the ones unfortunate enough to remain overnight often sported broken windows and missing stereos; the day before I left, I passed a car whose interior had been burned out completely, all scorched upholstery foam and melted plastic. The sidewalk was a hopscotch grid of broken safety glass, used condoms, and the ubiquitous piles of shit, presumably canine but always suspect. This landscape was overlooked by giant billboards aimed at motorists on Riverside -- for Beyonce's new perfume, for Manhattan Mini Storage, for Judge Judy -- and by the Fairway marquee, a scrolling red LED sign ten feet high that spewed out sales pitches and tired jokes, tirelessly, all day and night. I would look at that LED while working out in Riverbank State Park, which juts out over the river and only sometimes smells like the sewage treatment plant it's built on top of, and the occasional offensive political message on the marquee would irritate me while I was trying to catch my breath and relax into my training. It was an interesting meditation on anger. That LED is another thing I will not miss about Harlem.
In addition to Martin Luther King Valley, Morningside Park is the other salient geographical feature of the neighborhoods where I lived: when Harlem was slated for incorporation into the street grid, the surveyors advised against leveling the steep cliff, suggesting a park be built there. The cliff now separates Morningside Heights -- the hill on on which the dome of Columbia University rests -- from a neighborhood that lives literally in the shadow of the university, a spot I called Morningside Depths when I lived there. There's a nice Senegalese restaurant there, and 116th along that stretch is a cool little mix of cheap stores and north African mosques, but groceries were hard to come by after the C-Town burned down. I never managed to confirm the park's reputation for danger walking home through it every night, but I did get held up at gunpoint once at 114th and Morningside Ave. It was not Columbia.
So we see West Harlem now as a valley running east to west along 125th, with the hill of Morningside Heights to the south rising in sharp contrast to the level area under the cliff. North of 125th, the same cliff persists, more gradually, as the eastward slope of St Nicholas Park coming down from Hamilton Heights to the west. The two hills are joined by the aforementioned overpass and railroad bridge, and they play host to very different populations. Soon, however, Columbia plans to expand all the way up the hill from 125th into Hamilton Heights, buying up the land to 135th and renaming it "Manhattanville". Biotech labs. No more fried chicken joints, no more manicurist on the corner, no more cuban diners. I think it's a scummy plan, but I don't know how much I will miss the old neighborhood.
This last was my fourth apartment in Harlem, and the most disappointing. I had lived on 122nd near Amsterdam, at 116th and Manhattan, and at 125th and Broadway, and each location had taught me something interesting about the interplay among Harlem's geography, culture, and demographics. 125th Street, a.k.a. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, traces a valley through northern Manhattan, with Morningside Heights rising to the south and Hamilton Heights to the north. The 1-9 tracks run aboveground over this valley, bursting from the side of one hill to meet the 125th Street stop, suspended in air above the intersection of 125th and Broadway, and then launching straight into the side of the next hill to continue its subterranean course. (My third apartment was under the 125th stop, and I could hear the faint reassuring rumble of the train overhead going to sleep at night.) Parallel to this railroad bridge is an overpass, one block closer to the river: Riverside Drive passes Riverside Church, Sakura Park, and Grant's Tomb before spanning the valley, and on the other side it hits my old (fourth) apartment building, number 587. I used to take this route to and from campus, and the world of the overpass was a constant surprise to me. Late at night, it was lined with cars with their front seats tilted back, lewd scenes playing themselves out through the windshields. In the morning, many of the cars were gone, while the ones unfortunate enough to remain overnight often sported broken windows and missing stereos; the day before I left, I passed a car whose interior had been burned out completely, all scorched upholstery foam and melted plastic. The sidewalk was a hopscotch grid of broken safety glass, used condoms, and the ubiquitous piles of shit, presumably canine but always suspect. This landscape was overlooked by giant billboards aimed at motorists on Riverside -- for Beyonce's new perfume, for Manhattan Mini Storage, for Judge Judy -- and by the Fairway marquee, a scrolling red LED sign ten feet high that spewed out sales pitches and tired jokes, tirelessly, all day and night. I would look at that LED while working out in Riverbank State Park, which juts out over the river and only sometimes smells like the sewage treatment plant it's built on top of, and the occasional offensive political message on the marquee would irritate me while I was trying to catch my breath and relax into my training. It was an interesting meditation on anger. That LED is another thing I will not miss about Harlem.
In addition to Martin Luther King Valley, Morningside Park is the other salient geographical feature of the neighborhoods where I lived: when Harlem was slated for incorporation into the street grid, the surveyors advised against leveling the steep cliff, suggesting a park be built there. The cliff now separates Morningside Heights -- the hill on on which the dome of Columbia University rests -- from a neighborhood that lives literally in the shadow of the university, a spot I called Morningside Depths when I lived there. There's a nice Senegalese restaurant there, and 116th along that stretch is a cool little mix of cheap stores and north African mosques, but groceries were hard to come by after the C-Town burned down. I never managed to confirm the park's reputation for danger walking home through it every night, but I did get held up at gunpoint once at 114th and Morningside Ave. It was not Columbia.
So we see West Harlem now as a valley running east to west along 125th, with the hill of Morningside Heights to the south rising in sharp contrast to the level area under the cliff. North of 125th, the same cliff persists, more gradually, as the eastward slope of St Nicholas Park coming down from Hamilton Heights to the west. The two hills are joined by the aforementioned overpass and railroad bridge, and they play host to very different populations. Soon, however, Columbia plans to expand all the way up the hill from 125th into Hamilton Heights, buying up the land to 135th and renaming it "Manhattanville". Biotech labs. No more fried chicken joints, no more manicurist on the corner, no more cuban diners. I think it's a scummy plan, but I don't know how much I will miss the old neighborhood.
