Correction Appended
If we take this history into a single breath, then Harlem not only serves as a beaming black beacon to all the world but also pulses with an Algonquin heartbeat, a great Jewish heartbeat, and beats with the blood of the battles of Henry Hudson and George Washington. It’s hard to say if Harlem has ever fallen off the broader American radar, or if it’s ever really been on it, but the creative spotlight of that neighborhood has always been pointed inward, and has always mattered. That light has now brought us, along with Gill’s history Coach Handbags, a handful of books to cast a dreamy and retrospective gaze onto a sometimes insular corner of Manhattan.
Correction: February 4, 2011
Anyone who ever said Harlem is dead forgot that dead doesn’t mean a thing in Harlem. After all, the neighborhood is more alive in itself and its history than any other in New York, a city that has rebuilt itself so repeatedly and so relentlessly that it’s a wonder the Hudson still knows where to go. But Harlem is the brain of New York; it is the deep memory of the city, where past and present are fused into something that looks like the future. Harlem has always been Harlem, and can’t help it.
The opposition of past and present becomes the book’s refrain: a certain bluff is now Columbia University; a certain meadow is 125th Street; from an erstwhile farm now sprouts the Apollo Theater. Gill makes us wonder how different our lives would be if every building, every corner and alley, and every piece of paved land in New York City could be conspicuously inscribed with exactly what it once was. A walk through New York would become a walk through a new imagination of the city, where every step forward would in fact be a step back and back and back, where every New York minute would last through the ages.
We see the Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee, who animates the Depression with portraits of Harlem living rooms and kitchens. One mother peels onions into a basin while a naked gaslight guides her young son reading at the table. Another family, in matching robes, poses around their tree on Christmas Day, their bicycles and toy streetcars assembled on the rug, a baby stroller in the corner, a clock on the mantle reading 12:15. These images, like Gill’s history, draw us into Harlem at a proud moment, and leave it at a hopeful one.
Due to a misprint in the book in reference, an earlier version of this slideshow misstated Gordon Parks' photo "Emerging Man," 1952, as "Man Peeking from Manhole, " 1949.
From Harlem’s own Studio Museum comes “Harlem: A Century in Images” (Rizzoli, $55) which travels in photographs from 1911 to 2009 to map out what Langston Hughes called “the sheer dark size of Harlem.” That journey takes us to a 1925 parade where Marcus Garvey, riding as High Commissioner General for the Universal Negro Improvement Association, stares sternly from the page in his medals and epaulets. We are given the old Polo Grounds — when the Giants were a Harlem team — on the final game of the ’23 Subway Series; we see Malcolm X and Diana Ross and Nelson Mandela, Kennedy and Castro alike, but we also see barber shops and bus rides and a girls’ game of hopscotch. We see gay couples in the streets and party girls at concerts. We see the fire escapes and the garbage and the neon churches of a newer moment. In this most expressive of neighborhoods, the marquees and sandwich boards captured in these photos write their own biography: Buy Black; Jim Crow Must Go; Michael Jackson Is Dead.
To work through these books is impossibly, and surprisingly, personal. Harlem, once walled off by geography, then closed again by the dark will of the country, opens like a light to take its proper place at the center of the American spirit. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, a new author with a just-published book, “Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America” (Little, Brown, $25), has given us a guidebook for this kind of remembrance. Her book is not so much a history of Harlem as a kind of memoir of history. In its account of one person’s ascent up the imposing hill of centuries of Harlem’s stories, we have an example of how to read ourselves into the neighborhood, of how to think and how to believe when we rise out of the 125th Street station and into the bright heart of Black America.
Rhodes-Pitts takes us back to James Van Der Zee Coach Handbags, but reminds us that photographing the living was only his day job. By night, he posed and crafted elegant portraits of Harlem’s dead in their coffins. Death in Harlem, Rhodes-Pitts tells us, “is recorded as yet another milestone of life — along with baptism, graduation or marriage.” Like a spectral postcard sent from some far-off realm, “the photographs of the dead are also for the left behind.” And so, Harlem’s dead become Harlem’s living, and the fusion of time and place, of past and present, is complete.
This is not to say that the mighty neighborhood hasn’t untold its share of stories. Fortunately, a new history by Jonathan Gill, “Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America” (Grove Atlantic, $30), thumps from the floorboards with the necessity of what has, and hasn’t, been forgotten. The ancient bones of Harlem are bared, and its old Dutch farmhouses are uncovered Coach Handbags, and the forgotten cattle in the pastures shake away a long-settled dust. In this retrospection, something remarkable happens. Page after page of Gill’s book removes brick after brick of the hulking substance of Harlem, paring it back through the jazz and the riots and the poetry to its ancient hours, until a quiet nothingness is left, and the place at last makes sense.
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