Harlem Hustle
Chasing Real Estate
Minton’s Playhouse re-opened in Harlem last week and it seems my neighborhood is becoming the place that initially led me here. The “Harlem Re-Renaissance,” threatened a couple times since my move uptown fifteen years ago, is finally upon us.
My love affair with Harlem actually began long ago and is probably why I resisted settling in Brooklyn like so many in my circle. A New York native, I was born and raised in East Elmhurst, nestled between the better known Indian foodie destination, Jackson Heights, Corona (of the Ice King fame), and LaGuardia Airport in Queens. A hop, skip, and a jump away from Manhattan, I could see the Empire State building from my bedroom — on the same street that Malcolm X once lived.
But even then I dreamed of Harlem. While my interaction with the neighborhood was limited quantitatively speaking, I treasured dearly weekend visits to my aunt’s townhouse on Hamilton Terrace, one of the neighborhood’s most famous blocks. I would also go up to Harlem to feed the hungry on Christmas alongside my Aunt Reesey and Rev. Al Sharpton, who eloquently eulogized her when she passed away in 2011.
I’m not sure if it was the beauty of the brownstones or the energy at my aunt’s sparkling parties, but Harlem had me hooked from early on.
I would move to Bermuda at eleven but when I began Barnard at sixteen, I commuted from Queens by way of the M60 bus’ LaGuardia Airport/125th Street run. I wasn’t mad that in those early years the route ended and began at Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. The abbreviated path forced me to walk down the hill from Columbia and across town after classes. The late afternoon stroll gave me a chance to decompress and breathe in the sites, sounds and energy of New York’s “Martin Luther” (Boulevard). The vendors, the families, the people that set up shop and socialized along 1-2-5 reinvigorated me daily as I hightailed it past the Apollo and picked up bootleg cassette tapes of Onyx and Sade, and cowrie shell necklaces, on the way to my bus stop.
Soon after graduation my Aunt Reesey decided to sell her townhouse and offered it to my dad at a discount who, while he worked in Harlem, had no interest in living there. I, on the other hand, who would have done anything to take up residence at 35 Hamilton Terrace (the block would also serve as the backdrop for Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums) was fresh out of college, still interning in the music biz, and in no position to take her up on the offer.
In 1999, I landed my first, very own one-bedroom fifth-floor walk-up on 114th and St. Nicholas Ave. I now lived where we were warned never to go during first year orientation and where, as an undergrad, my intrepid friends and I would venture for nickel bags—of the funky stuff of course. I was also now around the corner from the Malcolm Shabazz Masjid, the building where Malcolm X gave his fiery sermons, where my parents met, and where I had prayed on many Eid Al Fitrs at the end of the month of Ramadan as a youngin’. If I was up early enough — usually during Ramadan when I actually woke at dawn for morning prayer — I could hear the Adhan (call to prayer) before the trucks and sirens hit the block.
That apartment, that building, that block became Harlem anew for me. It was from that stoop that my neighbors and I would watch Jim Jones drive by regularly in his newest car as we debated the headlines of the day and who was better, Nas or Jay-Z (they for Nas, me for Jay). My neighbors would soon become family and travel with me off the stoop to downtown parties and on business trips to L.A., helping out when I started my own business. Bullets would eventually penetrate the stoop and my neighbor’s second-floor window when kids started slinging drugs out front.
That was seven years into my stay on 114th Street and that summer also marked the beginning of my Harlem real estate drama. In a nutshell:
2006: Unbeknownst to me, while I am in grad school in Europe, my subleaser moves an entire family into my one bedroom apartment, including two additional adults and two tweens. I am able to reclaim my apartment, but the premium on space in upper Manhattan all of a sudden becomes very real.
2010: Soon after my husband and I get married (he is part of the early 21st century migration of West Africans to the community — his brother opened the first of a new wave of Harlem nightspots, The Shrine), we give up my 114th Street apartment and move to a garden-level-two-bedroom apartment in a brownstone on 128th Street. I’m about to have a baby and the fifth-floor-walk-up is not going to work.
After twenty-one months of domestic bliss there, the entire brownstone is sold for two million dollars.
2012: We pack up and move to a two-bedroom-two-bathroom-doorman- elevator-laundry-garden-and-playroom-having co-op building on 120th Street. The rent is at the top of the market, but we are doing aiight and all the amenities for our growing family seem worth it.
2013: About six months into our residency the landlords say they’d love for us to renew the lease. While we consider renewing and wonder if we need more space as I am pregnant again, the one person that comes by to see the apartment makes an offer to buy it and our landlord accepts. Another apartment is sold out from under us and we are on the hunt again. This gentrification thing is real. Folks are not only temporary residents, students, or artists, checking out the scene and looking for cheap rents in Harlem; they are buying. An exhaustive search reveals very small apartments for very large rents and my old neighborhood in South Harlem is being listed as simply, “the Upper West Side.” Luckily, shortly after we begin looking, another two bedroom/two bath becomes available in our building and we are able to stay without too much disruption in our busy lives.
Now: So here we are, across the street from Marcus Garvey Park with Minton’s opening up the block with a $98 prix fixe menu, and my husband’s brother’s third Harlem establishment, Silvana, within walking distance. It’s really quite lovely; however, during this last apartment search I wondered if perhaps the African-American street names — Frederick Douglas Blvd., Adam Clayton Powell Blvd., Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., etc. — that none of the Harlemers I know ever use, will outlast actual black people in Harlem, including me. Will they perhaps be the last remnant of that Harlem I dreamt of and never found? Real talk. I came to Harlem chasing one dream and found another. I’m not mad. This holy hood’s been good to me. #NewYork
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