Urbanities Volume 4 | No 2 - November 2014 - page 54

Urbanities, Vol. 4 · No 2 · November 2014
© 2014 Urbanities
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motion since the late 1990s, it gained enormous momentum during the years of Bloomberg’s
mayoralty.
A Brief History of Harlem’s Main Street
Laid out in the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan for Manhattan (the ‘grid plan’), 125th Street runs
from the Hudson to the East River, crossing West, Central and East Harlem. After the
completion of a subway stop at the corner with Broadway in 1904, 125th Street established
itself as Harlem’s central commercial corridor. In the 1920s and 1930s, it became the bustling
focal point of the famous ‘Harlem Renaissance’, a moment of remarkable artistic and literary
accomplishments for Black Americans. The Great Depression ended this moment of
extraordinary cultural ferment and circumstances worsened after WWII, when 125th Street
and the surrounding areas entered a phase of steep decline as middle-class Blacks started
moving to outer boroughs, leaving only the poor and the unemployed in the neighbourhood.
Meanwhile, discriminatory policies of most banks resulted in the rejection of mortgages for
new constructions in Harlem as well as other African American communities in the city.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the flight of middle-class residents to the suburbs was paralleled
by the concentration of pockets of poverty in Harlem. The lack of habitable housing, soaring
crime rates, racial tensions and a falling population contributed to make the neighbourhood
more uninviting to investment; 125th street’s fortune as a premiere commercial street declined
dramatically. The famous Apollo Theatre shut down in 1976. Few bars and clubs remained
open along the thoroughfare, while most storefronts were boarded-up or left vacant. In the
early 1980s, the street saw modest signs of revival as Mayor Koch commissioned a
‘Redevelopment Strategy for Central Harlem’, which called for public-private investments in
selected anchor areas around Harlem, especially along the 125th Street corridor. In the same
years, the city began auctioning the City’s in-rem properties back to private investors and
non-profit organizations, in an attempt to foster private investment and opportunities for
homeownership in the area. The auctions attracted mostly middle-income residents from other
neighbourhoods who had the opportunity to purchase homes in the area for a relative bargain.
Around the mid-1980s, Schaffer and Smith (1986) noted that certain activities in the housing
markets of specific areas of Harlem, notably its western corridor, were enough pronounced to
signal the onset of initial mild forms of gentrification. During the Giuliani years, the
establishment in 1993 of a 125th Street Business Improvement District (BID) to promote local
shopping along the strip paved the way for a gradual revitalization of Harlem’s Main Street.
However, the main catalyst for a new wave of commercial development at 125th street was the
Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ) legislation introduced in 1994 in Congress by
Harlem Representative Charles Rangel, and backed by US President Clinton. Most of the
UMEZ funds were used to encourage large corporate retailers to open activities along the strip
(Maurrasse 2006). Among these, huge retail and entertainment complexes like Harlem USA,
opened in 2000, and mixed-use office and retail developments like Harlem Centre and
Gotham Plaza, both opened in 2002. Private investment followed suit. By the late 1990s,
tenement-style dwellings and row houses around 125th Street and in Central and West Harlem
started catalysing increasing numbers of affluent in-movers, mostly black and white