HARLEM ON THE AUCTION BLOCK

...Kwame Nkrumah and Malcolm X debated there among the stacks of books as would-be scholars and future leaders listened...

...pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, who would like to sound optimistic, admits that "the major industries of Harlem are drugs and numbers...

...She points out that new district lines were recently drawn in Manhattan to create two additional City Council seats that would be held by whites...

...The only other enterprise readily apparent here is taxi-driving...

...Harlem's city-owned buildings are being sold...

...But they are being prepared to succeed in a world that is vanishing...

...A generation later, the transition of leadership from Powell to Malcolm was smooth because both embodied Harlem's belief that its strength was in separateness, never in integration...

...Often an argument breaks out about whether it's true that whites are coming to Harlem...

...Others who had more cash to invest push little vendors' carts heaped with stuffed animals and toys mostly made in Asia...

...But Hall and others don't see them as keys to Harlem's salvation...

...They gonna change it all before they get here...

...But the victory proved deceptive...

...Now, after decades of fighting to maintain its position as the capital of black America, black Harlem looks as if it might not survive at all...

...Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Cuba's Fidel Castro felt they had to come to Harlem as ambassadors from Third World nations to what they saw as America's Third World capital...

...As if to pave the way, the monuments, reminders of Harlem as the Mecca of black America, are being razed...

...If there is any effort to house the poor in New York at all, the South Bronx Development Association would probably be it...

...We have fewer children...

...At one time this was a political, economic, cultural crossroads...

...Harlem was the home of great black writers from Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen to James Baldwin...

...So the spirit we had when Nkrumah and Malcolm and Powell, even when Minister Farrakhan [of the Nation of Islam] was here—all of that is gone...

...But they're up against so much, especially the prevalence of drugs, no group can .get anywhere on its own...

...Young men who would be the fighting edge of this community have been blunted...

...Forty per cent of Harlem's property is owned by New York City because of tax foreclosures and abandonment...

...Harlem was the birthplace of such profound black political movements as Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association and Malcolm X's branch of the Nation of Islam...

...More important, it's a cultural phenomenon, one of the few vestiges of an internal community support system...

...Harlem is in central Manhattan, easily reached from downtown if it weren't for the wall of fear around it...

...They recommend visits to landmarks left by artists and writers long since gone...

...The children are disciplined and neat, dressed in the dashiki styles popular a decade ago, called by African names...

...The renovation exemplifies a kind of "neutron bomb" approach to Harlem: save the real estate, get rid of the people—and with the people get rid of their legacy, the culture that for a century made Harlem the capital of black America...

...The streets in central Harlem have been renamed over the last decade: Frederick Douglass Boulevard, Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, Duke Ellington Avenue...

...The poor," she says, "will probably be pushed to the South Bronx...

...HARLEM ON THE AUCTION BLOCK Along with the property, the pride is up for sale BY PAMELA DOUGLAS Under an old poster of Malcolm X in a Harlem grocery store, food is locked away behind a plexiglass barrier backed by chicken wire that extends from floor to ceiling...

...It's enough to buy a one-way trip on a bus to the part of town where kids don't need to work for pennies...

...It's a position that undoubtedly would appeal to officials elected in other cities by middle-class votes and contributions from the wealthy: They could solve urban fiscal problems by getting rid of anyone who needs the services that only cities are equipped to provide...

...You can't compare this community today to the late 1960s, nor is there any comparison to when Powell was in full bloom," says Calvin Butts...

...But outside on the street, the scent of marijuana fills the evening air...

...There aren't many other "businesses" in Harlem that keep both the price and the profits inside the community, creating at least some potential for an economic infrastructure...

...New York wants them out...

...To the people of Harlem, it's not an effort to renovate buildings but to remove the legends and the energy that flourished around them...

...Some speak of the 'revitalization' of the community, but then the color changes...

...He has suggested that anyone earning less than $45,000 a year had better get out of New York because the city does not intend to supply low-cost housing or pay for social services...

...David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank recently formed a consortium with Helmsley-Spear, a midtown developer, to build townhouses on 110th Street, across from Central Park...

...Those who could afford to moved out...

...As the Eighth Avenue bus passes 100th Street on its way uptown, the nature of the conversation begins to change...

...The causes are many: weakened political power, a sense of financial hopelessness, the feeling that the dreams of the 1960s and before have been dashed...

...The drug problem has increased...

...It is a city within a city—a six-square-mile residential territory between 110th and 159th streets in Manhattan, populated by between 100,000 and 200,000 people, almost all black...

...To carry out that policy, New York has embarked on what Harlemites regard as a crackdown on the poor...

...instead, it served as one more terrible illustration of Harlem's powerlessness...

...A customer who wants to buy something must scream through the wall to a tired black woman who trudges through the motionless air, sealed in her plastic cell, to pull a single box of cereal from the shelf...

...With unemployment estimated at about 25 per cent for adults in Harlem and 50 per cent for youth between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, the half billion is apparently not reaching the people here...

...He says, "The city has cut back on sanitation and health services...

...When those who couldn't afford to pay $1.50 a day to get to and from work began ducking under turnstiles in record numbers, the mayor ordered a police siege...

...They are coming, of course...

...Lower left: James Baldwin (1963...

...When Adam Clayton Powell was elected in 1944, his Abyssinian Baptist Church, then the largest Protestant congregation in the world with 16,000 regular members, gave him so much clout that he had little need for compromise or coalitions...

...They ain't coming...

...The passengers, now all black and heading for Harlem, drop their guard and talk across the aisle, as if to members of their own families...

...They are raising the specter of "reverse discrimination" and claiming that the lottery violates the fair-housing law...

...was not initially popular here: Mixing with whites was seen as a dilution of Harlem's power...

...The uncertainty about the population figure centers on the unknown number who did not respond to the 1980 census, which showed 105,780 in central Harlem—a figure disputed by the area's politicians...

...They want Manhattan only for the rich...

...The truth is that more could be done to house the people here...

...On a quieter block of brownstone houses, an old man screams at the middle-aged numbers runner that he's got a dollar fifty coming because he did so put a quarter on a winning combination...

...Aspects of Harlem's legacy...

...That's right across the bridge, where tearing down the abandoned buildings could make room for some low-income developments...

...And the population of Harlem has decreased...

...Maybe it still is, but it's deteriorating rapidly...

...Thus, at the only drawing ever held, 60 per cent of the winners were from Harlem...

...Harlem was the setting for the work of W.E.B...

...Harlem, they argue, should belong to anyone who has enough money to buy it...

...Last June, at the Schomburg Library in Harlem, the central depository of all black cultural and historical documents and literature in the United States, a white curator was appointed over a list of qualified blacks...

...Deborah Hall, district manager of Community Board Number Ten, which represents Central Harlem's interests to the city government, explains: "The housing stock is deteriorating...

...After a while it's over and the numbers runner goes down the street to pay off dollar wins...

...But it's not Harlem...

...Though Deborah Hall is, herself, in a leadership position, she says, "I don't see any political leadership here now...

...Among those who find the colony lucrative are Harlem's many non-black retail merchants, whose stores produced more than a half billion dollars in annual gross sales in 1981...

...There was no fight from Harlem councilmen...

...People in Harlem got the message...

...Harlem might as well be "another country," in the words of James Baldwin, one of its sons...

...Unlicensed "jitney" cabs with dashboard signs saying "livery" or "car service" operate freely in Harlem, but they hide their signs downtown, where they're not permitted to operate, where the big tippers ride...

...But by now the people are powerless, and in their powerlessness they are resigned to the threatened end...

...In February 1982, the city held a lottery for thirteen brownstones...

...But the city really wants to turn the property over to private developers...

...The famous Harlem outdoor market near 125th and Lenox, for example, once a great and colorful outpost of the Caribbean gleaming with fruits and vegetable...

...We're fragmented, unfocused, not wanting to go down with the ship, so people are bailing out rather than strategizing with each other...

...The city administration is pursuing a strategy called 'planned shrinkage' With so little will to resist left in Harlem, the city administration has embarked on a strategy Butts calls "planned shrinkage...

...Young men walk the streets selling "gold" chains and rings...

...But the old man who claimed he had a winner keeps talking to himself as he retreats inside, knowing how much the dollar fifty would have meant to him...

...Exactly what they—what black Harlem—will do when the new Harlem comes, no one here seems to know...

...Nearby, their folded-down paper bag waits with three pennies at the bottom...

...Others reach back even further, identifying with the deep past—with Africa...

...Knots of kids in their early teens lean on walls, mumbling vaguely to each other, "I'm gonna get it together soon," unable to snap out of their chemically-induced walking coma...

...Hopes seem pinned not to the future but to decades and centuries gone by...

...Defenders of today's black leaders point to Representative Charles Rangel (who inherited what was left of Powell's district after gerrymandering), former Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton (now in business), and a few prominent members of the City Council as potential leaders struggling in an uphill battle...

...As outside real estate interests buy up the shells of houses for renovation, people who've spent generations here feel their days are numbered...

...Within this tradition it was no surprise that Harlem would send its own Representative to Congress, responsible to no one outside...

...If the census is accurate, Harlem's population has dropped 33 per cent since 1970...

...Walking under the names of revered leaders long gone, the residents of today's Harlem step around the stacks of bricks and lumber that are creating a new Harlem...

...Some of the old-style Harlem hustle to make it can still be found in two small boys, maybe seven years old, who stalk the checkout counters of local markets grabbing groceries and quickly loading them in bags...

...If you ask people now where the center of leadership is, they say they don't know...

...She places it in a revolving metal-plated cubicle, which is not turned to release the food until the customer pays...

...Indignant intellectuals, outraged that black culture should be so blatantly subjected to white governorship, marched with placards and passed out flyers, while a gospel choir sang nearby...

...preaching at the Abyssinian Baptist Church (1965...

...The Reverend Calvin Butts, associate Upper Park Avenue, 1947...

...The subway fare, in a town where the poor must ride the filthy trains, is seventy-five cents...

...Location is the compelling attraction...

...To qualify, a buyer had to earn at least $20*000 a year, so few of the current residents could bid for their homes...

...But the strongest determinant seems to be the land itself— because the housing is so bad and, paradoxically, because it's so badly wanted by outsiders...

...They were just glad to keep their own seats...

...Instead, it is considering outright auctions, which would inevitably result in passing the properties to outsiders and destroying Harlem's historic identity...

...If it came to defending Harlem from encroachment by outsiders who seek to tear it down and erase its history, these young men would not have the energy to fight...

...The most painful example is the loss of Lewis Micheaux's National Bookstore...

...All city bridges lead to Harlem, and such prime sites as City College are located there...

...They draw strength from the Yoruba churches and African festivals now more visible than ever as some of Harlem's Christian churches decline...

...And white real estate interests are attacking the lottery on other grounds, charging that it discriminates against residents outside Harlem...

...It could be a scene from the past, with the little slips of paper in the runner's pockets and others stashed in his hat, with old women on the front steps laughing at the arguing men...

...The streets of Harlem, James Baldwin wrote, were full of 'beautiful black people9 who had been devastated by the pressures of the white world...

...For the babies playing on the sidewalk in this fog of dope, a perpetual "contact high" has already become a way of life...

...She is a contributing editor of Pacific News Service, and has written for Black Enterprise, Essence, TV Guide, and other publications...

...The mass marches mobilized on short notice—the parades in white robes and colorful uniforms that began in the 1920s and continued through the 1960s—are but ghosts in the streets of Harlem today...

...Harlem is one of the most valuable pieces of property in the city...

...The numbers game still thrives even in the face of legal lotteries and off-track betting, partly because a hit on an illegal number is tax-free...

...Mayor Ed Koch has left no one in doubt about how he plans to shrink black Harlem's population...

...The political leadership is bankrupt...

...Lower right: Adam Clayton Powell Jr...

...Objections to the "creative" boundary lines were raised by black Council members from Brooklyn but, Hall says, "Here everyone was shortsighted...

...Harlem is prolific with self-help groups...

...Harlem's more elegant brownstones are gradually being bought by whites Harlem was the base for the development of jazz from the 1920s though the 1950s: Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Lena Home, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and countless others...

...In a gutted, abandoned storefront, some old people have set up shop, sitting on chairs brought from their apartments...

...Ironically, now that the road signs are commemorating heroes of the past, black Harlem may be without a future...

...In front of them, a table displays the few possessions for sale—pairs of old shoes, a worn coat, some placemats...

...Left: Malcolm X in conference at his headquarters (1964...

...This haze of drugs on block after block, as if the area had Pamela Douglas, a former New Yorker now living in Los Angeles, writes dramas for television and teaches screen and television writing at UCLA...

...Harlem's more elegant brownstones are gradually being bought by individual whites, but even larger changes are beginning to take place on Harlem's periphery...

...Then others jump in, "They ain't really coming...

...They can't come...

...Center: Poet Langston Hughes (1958...

...They are smart, enthusiastic, loved, the pride of Harlem...

...Though it's not difficult to walk from the southern end of Harlem to midtown Manhattan, drivers will tell you they don't know the streets below 110th...

...That's why Martin Luther King Jr...

...been fumigated with it, has sedated the population, especially the teenagers...

...Another answers, "They don't have to...

...No one imagines the current residents will be able to afford those townhouses— nor any of the others being renovated...

...The city is looking for high revenue...

...But a few did enter, and black politicians persuaded the mayor's office to give residents preferential treatment, allowing their names to be entered in the lottery three times while outsiders could enter only once...

...If each of fifty customers gives them three cents, they'll make $1.50 for the day's work, which they later divide between them...

...One old man insists, "No, they'll never be able to survive this jungle up here...

...Deborah Hall speculates that there will soon be no place for Harlem's people in Manhattan...

...Such signs of a desperate time were not so extreme even three years ago...

...So-called revital-ization is not keeping pace with the amount of housing we're losing...

...But city renovation authorities ordered Mi-cheaux to close his store because the ground it stood on was needed for a parking lot...

...So people here have no place to live...

...This special value is slightly less applicable to the area just to the east, known as "Spanish Harlem," which is experiencing less pressure from real estate developers though it, too, will ultimately be taken over...

...soon only the middle class—mostly white— will be able to afford property or pay the rents here...

...DuBois and the early NAACP...

...Those who speak of leaders at all speak of the past, recalling as if it were yesterday the time when Adam Clayton Powell called the shots...

...Meanwhile, the residents of Harlem keep on creating strategies for survival...

...Most of the resident winners are being eliminated now because they lack the means to meet repair costs that frequently top $100,000...

...The youth of Harlem have no direction...

...Occasionally one of the many private schools run by blacks for blacks, which often teach African consciousness laced with black American history, troops its young charges through the broken streets...

...Responding to residents' lack of funds for renovation and the claims of outsiders that residents should have no special rights to acquire property in their community, the city has decided to have no more lotteries...

...and homemade crafts and remedies, has been reduced to a crumbling skeleton behind broken scaffolding—an entire block transformed into a crater that is now being filled with a concrete structure...

...After Powell, the community was gerrymandered, so there is no longer the possibility of the community as a whole voting for a black...

...More accurately, it's a colony in the middle of an empire that has use for its land but not its people...

...roads are not being repaired and housing is allowed to deteriorate...

...By the time it became clear that the parking lot did not actually overlap Micheaux's site, the bookstore was gone...

...But the protest was no rallying point...

...they don't know how to get beyond Harlem to the alien, affluent world outside...