Harlem Beyond Blackness
What is lost when demographics shift in an iconic neighborhood.
When the engine of the yellow school bus started, Ronald Simmons waved at the children who came running from the Central Harlem subway station. “BOOMA CAZOOMA!,” he shouted. “Let’s go!” Agile for his 65 years and good-spirited, Coach Ron fist-bumped his tennis students and shoved them onto the three-seat benches of the vehicle, next to the ten-or-so kids already inside. None of them lived in the nearby project houses or Ron’s own co-op two blocks away, a fact that keeps bothering him.
The bus took off, taking the children and some Columbia-affiliated parents like myself to a hip-hop themed outing to the nearby Bronx. They would spend Columbus Day hunting pumpkins and playing tennis with hundreds of other children from chapters of New York Junior Tennis & Learning, a non-profit.
A Harlem native, Ron grew up in a mini-melting-pot dream of a place on Riverside Drive and 146th Street. The African-Caribbean-owned apartment building he was born in remained the center of Ron’s universe for half a century. An opera singer lived on the fourth floor, sharing a passion for classical music with Ron’s mother.
“Most people were professional or blue collar,” Ron said. “The community was the most important aspect. I knew people from a ten-to-twelve-block radius, by sight and by name.”
His father was a handsome man with a classy car who volunteered at the Church and died when Ron was ten. When this happened, Ron’s mother went to school to get a dual master’s degree and become a teacher. While she was out studying, Ron stayed with his grandmother and a grandfather who smelled like aftershave and pipe. Emmy Bloch, a neighbor who had taught French and Latin in Germany before World War II, helped take care of Ron. Her son, Herb Bloch, introduced Ron to tennis in 1976.
“Back then, education was key to everything,” Ron said. “Everyone wanted their kids to do at least equally well as themselves.”
Ron went to school in the Bronx — PS 26, Riverdale 141, Kennedy High School — all of them integrated. At junior high, one of his classmates was Neil deGrasse Tyson, who would become a famous astrophysicist. After high-school, Ron’s uncle took him on a tour of historic all-Black colleges. They settled on Hampton in Virginia, where Ron went on to study commercial art and continued to play tennis.
When he came back home in 1980, Harlem had changed. The crack epidemic was raging. People in Ron’s building were afraid of being robbed. They would find vials in Riverside Park.
Billy Johnson, a jazz-lover from the sixth floor, retired from his General Motors job and handed his apartment over to Ron. The monthly rent was $168. Ron started doing textbook illustrations, then worked at a hospital for special surgery, inspecting orthopedic parts, taking protheses down to the operating theater. When he got tired of it, Ron started teaching. His first school job was as a substitute teacher for his mother.
In 2001, a “series of catastrophic events” hit. Ron’s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. So was his aunt. 9/11 happened.
Ron took care of his mother and aunt and lost his job as a teacher. He was exhausted. White people started buying up brownstones in Harlem as “people wanted to get the fuck out of downtown” after the attacks, Ron said.
Around the time he had to transfer the two ladies to a nursing home on 106th Street, Ron started a new job teaching tennis with the NYJTL. When his mom died in 2009, he moved out of the building on Riverside Drive to a different apartment in the neighborhood. “It just got too much,” he said. “I lost the frame of reference.”
Harlem’s rise to “the most famous Black neighborhood on the planet,” as Cornell history professor Russel Rickford called it, started in 1904, when New York City’s first subway line connected upper and lower Manhattan. African-American professionals fled anti-Black riots downtown, and bought brownstones in Harlem, which now lay in commuting distance. A hundred years later, real estate speculation took off in earnest, dramatically changing demographics again.
The theme of a contested space runs through Jonathan Gill’s history of Harlem. When the predominantly Jewish and Italian neighborhood gradually transformed to majority Black after the turn of the twentieth century, there was fierce resistance from landlords. Organizations like the Harlem Property Owners Improvement Association mounted a segregationist block-by-block resistance to keep Harlem white. They eventually failed and capitalized on the Black demand for real estate instead. Migrants from the South joined African-American New Yorkers uptown.
Huge demand for labor and rising wages during World War I helped build a Black middle class. Entrepreneurs like Madam C. J. Walker, who made a fortune marketing African hair products, bought a grand townhouse on 136th Street. Lawyers, barbers and photographers prepared the ground for the cultural explosion that became known as the Harlem Renaissance.
“A critical mass of newly arrived black writers, artists, and intellectuals were now out to change themselves and their world, and the rest of the world, too,” Gill wrote.
Harlem became the spiritual home of poets like Langston Hughes, who reportedly said he was in love with the place before he even got there, and jazz masters like Duke Ellington, who centered many of his compositions around the neighborhood. An urban intelligentsia coexisted with residents coming out of the segregated schools of the South. Many struggled to afford rents, as both white and Black landlords took advantage of high demand and low vacancy rates. In the interwar period, overcrowding made Harlem the most densely populated area of Manhattan.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of the Prohibition-era bars in Harlem were owned by whites. Harlem Hospital started hiring Black doctors and nurses as late as 1920, only to lay them off again as soon as the Great Depression hit. Labor unions were still all-white. While there were “plenty of rich people” in Harlem in the 1930s, as Gill wrote, most residents were poor.
Community leaders like Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a bon-vivant-turned-pastor who later became the first African-American to be elected to the New York City Council, stepped in as conditions deteriorated. His soup kitchen fed a thousand people each day, according to Gill. Powell started confronting the racist hiring practices of most Harlem businesses with a “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign.
Things got worse with clashes against an all-white police force in March 1935, which Powell called a “protest against empty stomachs, overcrowded tenements, filthy sanitation” and a public administration that was disinterested in Harlem.
It was in this context that the first mixed professional tennis match in American history took place, at Harlem’s Cosmopolitan tennis club in 1940. Jimmie McDaniel played against Don Budge, the world champion at the time. Budge won, but the signal to the fully segregated national tennis world was more important than the outcome of the match. Althea Gibson, the “queen of Harlem” was barred from entering tournaments and country clubs until she became too good to be ignored in 1950.
As the city lost more manufacturing jobs after World War II, rents in dilapidated buildings in Harlem were still higher than elsewhere. Malcolm X came to the area when it had become a “national symbol of poverty and injustice,” as Gill called it. By the 1960s, a fifth of Harlem’s residents lived in housing projects. The neighborhood got none of the tennis courts and only a fraction of the playgrounds Robert Moses built a few miles further south.
Harlem remained central to movements for Black empowerment. Amidst the decline of the neighborhood, grassroots organizations advocated for cultural dignity and economic liberation.
By the 1970s, Harlem had lost half its population compared to the interwar period. Institutions like the Theresa Hotel and the YMCA at 135th Street shut down. Residents abandoned buildings. A good portion of Harlem’s real estate became city property.
Gill describes the election of David Dinkins in 1989 as NYC’s first African-American mayor as a turning point. Black middle-class families became interested in properties the city had put back on the market. As the economy recovered in the 1990s, funds started flowing into Harlem, as did migrants from West Africa. Brownstone prices steadily crept up by 10 percent or more each year.
In 2003, the first new bookstore in decades opened in Harlem, according to Gill. Fancy soul food restaurants and international chains moved uptown. As luxury high-rises went up, a notion of “The New Harlem” made the rounds. By 2021, less than half the residents in the district of Central Harlem identified as Black.
On a Friday in late October, Ron went out to Howard Bennet Playground to give the final training of the season. The blue tennis courts in Central Harlem matched the color of the clear autumn sky, as soul music played from a boombox on a park bench. A dozen children gathered near the net for one of the free lessons Ron and his colleagues had been teaching on four afternoons every week for the past months.
As Ron was throwing balls, Willie Green, the site’s manager, sat on the bench next to one student’s mother, a doctor from Indonesia. Willie made sure the children held their rackets close to their bodies while running around the court. “RACKET SAFETY!” he ordered a small boy in a thundering, but friendly voice. Originally from Buffalo, Willie moved to Harlem more than twenty years ago to live with his sister, who had bought a brownstone. He had been to college with Ron, and it was Willie who asked Ron to join him as a coach with NYJTL.
“Our program is a safe haven for all kids,” Willie said as he picked the right racket for a young girl with twin tails. “We don’t allow nothing around our kids. We don’t care what race or gender you are. We teach you tennis and we teach you respect.”
Ron and Willie had been striving to give opportunities to kids with fewest other options, true to the vision of tennis champion Arthur Ashe, who had co-founded NYJTL. The coaches used to take portable nets around Harlem and teach the children from the neighborhood in old swimming pools and on walkways. “Those were the good old days,” Willie said.
Then he took out his phone to order pizzas — “one ground beef and mushrooms, one double cheese, one pepperoni!”
Nadine Ntonga, the third coach on the court, went to pick them up. Now twenty-two-years old, Nadine had moved from Cameroon to Harlem as a teenager and became so good at tennis so quickly that she won a scholarship, went to college, and now planned to start an MBA. As the kids lined up to get a slice of pizza each, she told me how she and her siblings had been featured in The New York Times and how much she loved coaching children herself.
Ron joined us on the bench. “When Willie and I first started, we used to have the kids from the projects,” he said. “I live two blocks from here. I always put out flyers, but they never come.”
Most children in the Harlem community program are from middle-class families now, according to Ron. Several theories about the reasons behind this shift swirled around the court as the sun set behind the red apartment blocks on the other side of the fence.
“They see basketball more as a way out of poverty,” Ron said. “They didn’t see many African-American tennis players on TV.”
“Tennis is costing too much,” Willie said. “Tennis is like golf.”
On Morningside Avenue, where Ron and Willie used to teach dozens of children, the city redesigned the playground. “In Harlem, all the parks have basketball courts, no tennis courts,” Willie said.
Participation started to go down around 2010 or 2011, Ron said, with the “onslaught of computerization.”
The families prepared to leave Howard Bennet Playground for the season. Ron, Willie, and Nadine waved goodbye to their students.
“There’s some good and some bad,” Ron said about Harlem. “The good thing: It’s revitalized. There are very few bad buildings these days. But gentrification killed Harlem. It’s not anymore the Harlem of old. It caused the prices to shoot up way too high.”
Ife Collymore, a Harlem resident of Barbadian descent, had been bringing her children to NYJTL’s classes. One season, they continued through the winter, when community courses take place between six and eight in the morning — the only time when indoor courts are not used by commercial clubs and have space for non-profits. “To see coaches of color, it’s inspiring,” she said about Ron, Willie and Nadine.
Tennis is “way down the list” of New York City sports and not as much seen as the “meal ticket” that would let successful players take care of their families, Ife said. It is a very expensive sport, and a hot dog at this year’s family day at the US Open cost $10, she added.
Like Ron’s, Ife’s feelings about the transformation of Harlem are mixed. Neighborhoods can change and “African-Americans don’t rule Harlem,” she said. But seeing Caucasian people jogging around the neighborhood in the evening made her recall the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five, she said — the Black and Hispanic teens who spent years in prison after being falsely accused of having assaulted a white jogger.
Back at the Harlem tennis court, Willie said he would resume teaching in the spring if his health allowed. Ron ferried a cart of tennis balls out of the playground. He had been teaching tennis in the area for twenty years, and despite changes in the neighborhood, he still thought about it the way he had back when he had started.
“The only problem with this court is that it has only one gate,” he said as he reached the street. “If there’s a shootout, there’s no way to go.”
Central Harlem remains one of the poorest districts in New York City, with neighboring East Harlem and the South Bronx topping the list. The poverty rate is at almost thirty percent, compared to an eighteen percent city-average. Affordable housing, senior services and homelessness are the most pressing issues the district’s community board has identified.
At the same time, thirty percent of Central Harlem households earn more than $100,000 per year according to latest Census data — up from just fourteen percent two decades ago. The neighborhood has become a lot richer and whiter in this period.
Class and racial identities have not always overlapped in the process.
The first wave of gentrification in Harlem was Black. In the 1980s and 1990s, African-American middle-class families arrived in the wake of redevelopment policies, according to Monique Taylor, a sociologist who wrote a book on the transformation of the neighborhood. Differences between richer newcomers who moved into their own brownstones and long-term residents who rented their homes defied “a supposed chance for racial solidarity,” she wrote. Conflicts along lines of income and lifestyle “undercut any depiction of Harlem as a shared heaven.”
Taylor herself grew up as a middle-class Black person in a white suburb, she told me over Zoom. “The promise of integration was about class, but it did not do away with race,” she said. African-Americans who worked at Wall Street would still not be recognized by name by their white colleagues. Some moved to Harlem in search of a Black community, where class differences created rifts of a different kind.
In the 2000s, more white residents eventually moved to Harlem, and African-Americans started leaving in larger numbers.
“Today, Harlem is a symbol of Blackness, not a lived reality,” Taylor said. So much of its identity as a neighborhood lies in Blackness, post-slavery and the arts movement, she added. But demographics have tipped.
“Harlem has made a huge contribution to American identity and culture,” Taylor said. “Today, it is an idea that carries on. It lives on in nostalgia.”
Streets are named after leaders of the civil rights movement. Images of Harlem’s cultural icons decorate the walls of bagel and coffee shops. In a restaurant on West 114th Street, A$AP yams is served, reminding guests of the famous rapper who grew up in the area.
“I think the nostalgia is for a place where people cared about each other,” Taylor said. “Beyond nostalgia for a community, it’s nostalgia for the pride, self-sufficiency and creativity. For a place where artists and writers struggled but were defining their own identities.”
This loss explains how something Jonathan Gill called “Harlem Nightmare, 1965–1990” in his history book remains a place of longing for Ronald Simmons. The Harlem of his youth he remembers so fondly has now disappeared.
Harlem’s dilapidated buildings have been restored, but many Black residents lack the assets to own them. “Still, race is a stronger predictor of wealth than class itself,” economist Darrick Hamilton and sociologist Regine Jackson wrote in a recent book chapter entitled “An absent asset-based black American middle class.”
Despite the changed demographics, Harlem’s public schools have not become more diverse. According to a 2021 school segregation report by the UCLA civil rights project, more than two-thirds of kindergarteners in Central Harlem opted out of their zoned schools, with white students leading the trend.
After the tennis season ended, Ron invited me on a tour of Harlem. We met at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, an imposing building on 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, just a short walk from the training courts. At the book shop, next to the works of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, a volume on “The life of tennis champion Althea Gibson” was on display.
As we headed out, Ron exchanged numbers with a manager of the center. The two had shared ideas on how to promote NYJTL’s program among the kids from the neighborhood and make them more interested in tennis. “Back in the 1960s, there was community,” Ron said to her. “We played in the streets in Riverside.”
Ron led me past the townhouse Madam C.J. Walker used to own, and to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Adam Clayton Powell Jr. used to preach. In the quiet and leafy roads with brownstones, he pointed to the “WALK YOUR HORSES” signs still up next to the gates. Within minutes, we reached the project buildings around the corner.
When white New Yorkers started buying houses in Harlem in the early 2000s, it was a paradigm shift, Ron said.
We sat down in a café that served latte and chai. The room was filled with the smell of cookies, pulled from the oven at the last minute before burning. Ron joked about the T-shirts that hung on the wall and had the line “CREATIVE FUCKER” printed on them.
As he spread out pictures from his youth on the small corner table, Ron came back to the multi-ethnic neighborhood and the apartment building filled with music and warmth he grew up in. “I was never monolithic in my existence,” he said. But a touch of bitterness now appeared in his voice.
The change he sees in Harlem is not so much about having more white neighbors, but about an erosion of community structures and political ambition. James Baldwin used to frequent his building on Riverside Drive, Ron said. “Today, there is a lack of leadership,” he added.
Today, Black residents are being priced out of the historic center of Black America.
“The lack of ownership plays a tremendous role — of buildings, restaurants, stores,” Ron said. “We lack the economic clout. African-Americans, a lot of us consume but we’re not owners.” The conversation put Ron in a darker mood than I had seen him in. “When you have ownership, you have power,” he said. “If you just consume, you ain’t shit.”
We stepped out of the coffee shop and found ourselves standing on a graffiti. Someone had sprayed the words “WE TAKING HARLEM BACK! RIP MALCOM X” on the asphalt.
“I see this everywhere,” Ron said. “But you can’t take anything back if you don’t own it in the first place.”
