Harlem on Hold: The Fading of an Ecosystem
The Randolph Houses in Harlem are disappearing. For half a dozen years now, I have walked past them on my way to Frederick Douglass Academy II, where I work as a Spanish teacher. Neighbors sitting on the stoops of their brownstones across 114th Street used to cheer my daily commute. I would walk into my workplace showered by greetings from students, school personnel, and neighbors. Now the street is quiet.
A few months ago, after the Randolph Houses on the south side of the street were closed down, I started noticing fewer and fewer neighbors. Now, when I look outside my classroom window, I see the row of buildings across the street with padlocks and feel the emptiness of what I once called my favorite ecosystem. The human landscape around the school, Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, has been slowly transformed from a vibrant neighborhood into a lifeless stretch of padlocked buildings and empty streets.
I hadn’t really understood the mechanisms of public housing renovation until I began to investigate the closing of the Randolph Houses in recent months. In 2001, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) contemplated a $60-million urban plan for 114th Street’s Randolph Houses. Thirty-six dilapidated walk-up buildings would be repaired, and their dwellers temporarily relocated. Since 2002, 159 families have vacated their homes; Sixty-four of them were moved across the street and the remainder to distant developments. But the plans for upgrade turned into plans for demolition in 2008, when NYCHA announced a new 154-unit building would be constructed.
The relocation has involved a four-year delay for neighbors who were displaced in 2002 with the promise that their new building would be ready in 2009. The organic nature of the barrio, whose elders on the tree-shaded benches would greet me as I entered the Wadleigh School building, has slowly declined. The block of row houses across the street has emptied. The South side of the 1890 tenement, which contained a rich human landscape, now looks like an empty vacant lot.
The true magnitude of the situation didn’t fully hit me, however, until I sat with the neighbors during a meeting between Randolph Housing residents and civic leaders at the Wadleigh High school auditorium on February 25. You could feel the frustration in the air. The tenants, who defied the impending blizzard to attend it, took repeated apologies from the recently appointed NYCHA General Manager John Rhea and Deputy General Manager for Operations Gloria Finkelman. According to the New York Times, Rhea had been appointed after a stint as managing director of the Lehman Brothers global consumer retail group. NYCHA’s General Manager Michael Kelly, who also spoke at the meeting, assured the residents that they would oversee completion of the project. He mentioned several successful renovations and relocations in Staten Island and Far Rockaway. He mentioned the Landmark Commission. However, no clear rationale for the plans was given, and no target date for completion was forthcoming, only apologies.
For several months, neighborhood residents have been complaining to the media about the lack of progress. An article published in The Columbia Spectator last month attributes the delay to problems involving building codes, zoning issues, and historic district status. On Thursday, Kelly said area residents would be informed and included in the plans. He didn’t say how many more years of displacement they would endure, nor did he attempt to count its human and economic costs.
NYCHA did not respond in a timely manner to The Advocate’s request for an official, detailed update. But Rose Washington, one of the relocated tenants, points out that some families had to move to apartments that were too small or were not fit for their needs. Sarah Gregory, a long-time resident and mother of six who was relocated to the north side of the building confirms Washington’s claims. Gregory attributes the delays to neglect, and believes NYCHA President Robertus Coleman is part of the problem. “We tried getting us a lawyer from legal aid to find out what is going on,” she said. “When they write up documents, it’s in lawyers’ terminology, and we don’t know if something is missing,” she added. The petition was denied because it had not come from President Coleman who, according to Gregory “has let it slide for years.” Gregory feels that the delays are unethical. “If they had problems with the Landmark Society why didn’t they find that out first?” She is in close contact with neighbors who have moved away, and a reliable source of information about community affairs. Gregory argues that they have not received notices since they were relocated. ”There was Fabra Hardy had to move away. Dorothy moved to Grand building 121st and Saint Nick, Liola Brown moved to the projects on 91st and Colombus. Now I have to talk to them to try to keep their spirits. They dumped them there and they were all forgotten about,” she says, noting that they have not received updates since being relocated.
Oblivious to the residents’ agony over their future dwelling, the commercial and other planned development transforming Fred Douglass Boulevard is unfolding at a meteoric pace. The Department of City Planning rezoned the area to foster opportunities for residential development promoting building forms that are supposedly consistent with the urban line. Expansion of new ground for commercial use and other changes, approved by the City Council in 2003, contemplated the rezoning of forty-four blocks. Frederick Douglass Boulevard is labeled under contextual zoning,” which regulates the height and bulk of structures as well as consistency with the neighborhood character. But you be the judge about whether the character stays the same or whether there exists a big gap between what ends on 114th Street and begins right at the corner of Frederick Douglass. Real estate and businesses have mushroomed along the boulevard. The Randolph Houses relocation increases the rift between public and private housing, and the eclectic, vibrant neighborhood that this steady gentrification was supposed to engender has yet to be witnessed
In 2004, The Gateway, a new condo which had been converted from an old building, took root next to the Randolph Houses on the east side of Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Shortly after came “Society,” a trendy coffee shop which served lunchtime meals I simply could not afford. I was happy to buy lunch at a joint located one block away on 113th Street and Frederick Douglass. But it soon closed down leaving behind a trail of former customers, colleagues of mine, who, like me, opted to buy lunch at a bodega. Soon after, another building mushroomed across the street on 116th Street and Douglass Boulevard: The Livmore, which features condominiums that range from $460,000 to $980,000. Last year, a handful of stores opened and it was difficult to keep up with the pace: “The 2115 Senegalese Café,” to “Mod Squad Cycle Shop,” the “Posh Paws Pet Store,” and “Questan’s,” an upscale seafood joint, where the cheapest meals start at $8. Dunkin Donuts and Subway franchises soon came along as well but as we add the Soha, a nearby trendy condo to the seemingly never-ending list of gentrifying forces in the neighborhood, the magnitude of the situation becomes apparent. And we haven’t even discussed he Parc Standard, a tall gray apartment building across from The Gateway which looks like a futuristic spacecraft. Although the urban landscape is changing and the trendy spots have arrived, the community from the Randolph Houses is still left hanging. There is little left of the barrio where “Little Senegal” and the Randolph House residents converge. Vacant buildings from the public housing units that make the street look like a ghost town.
The Revitalization plan at Randolph, which has been making news for almost a decade, goes beyond the housing ordeal. The 2001 pact between the Harlem Local Development Corporation and Columbia University, pledged affordable housing, education and job training in the area. But the Village Voice, quoting Columbia geophysics professor Klaus Jacob, claimed that the eighty-foot-deep basement plan could make the area susceptible to storm surges. There is also Nick Sprayregen, owner of the “Tuck it Away” storage warehouses and once a member of the Harlem Development Corporation, who recently won a lawsuit against Columbia University in which the court overturned the state’s use of eminent domain. The business owner became the David every Goliath hates when his lawyers showed that Columbia’s attempt to claim the land as “blighted” was unconstitutional. The difference in Sprayregen’s case was that he could afford to pay lawyers’ fees, unlike the low-income victims of NYCHA’s delay, who depend on the Legal Aid Society.
During the meeting at Wadleigh, many residents and tenant leaders wondered why their homes still sat vacant, patched with padlocks, when the new buildings they were promised were supposed to be completed in 2009. In the January 21 issue of the Columbia Spectator, Robertus Coleman contrasted the Randolph families’ ten-year ordeal with the fast-track condominiums next door, which are already being advertised, shown and sold. As a friend of mine noted, the police “moved in like an army” and set up road blocks on 114th Street in January when an open house was held in “The Douglass,” an apartment complex where apartments range from $529, 000 to $799,000. The luxurious building is now ready for occupation. Whatever else one may think of Michael Bloomberg’s Harlem Revitalization Program and urban renewal agenda, it has not worked yet for the Randolph Houses families. The Dominican bodega owner from whom I frequently purchase lunch, who asked not to be identified, agrees. If revitalization brings progress it won’t be for everybody. “You see, rich people have cars. They buy elsewhere or they get their stuff through the net. Poorer people buy in cash, it flows. We are seeing less and less of our old customers every day.”
To be sure, life in the Randolph Houses was never glamorous. The dilapidated buildings needed a long deserved facelift. The Columbia Spectator featured complaints from residents who for years have begged the city for repairs in the decayed tenement. But the renovation of twenty-two of the thirty-six buildings, along with all of the relocation, dispersion, delays and diffusion has destroyed the everyday shared intimacy of the block. I have worked at the Frederick Douglas academy for years, slowly developing “intimacy by proximity” with the people of 114th Street. It used to be that on Friday afternoons when I left work, residents would stop whatever it was that they were doing—from cleaning their cars to braiding their children’s hair, from cooking barbecues to sitting on the stairs. I acknowledged them and they acknowledged me in an unconscious ritual, touching souls without ever saying hi. My business was not their business. I was the Spanish Teacher. They were neighborhood residents. We left it as that. Today, I wonder if the families will ever return to the padlocked homes that sit indefinitely vacant, if the buildings and the brownstones will indeed ever be renovated, if area residents will ever restore their urban rituals. The children who were soon to be my students playing in the streets, the people resting, playing, eating, sitting on the shaded benches embedded in the art of being—all this has been suspended indefinitely in a transition that seems to have left Randolph Houses in limbo.
“During the 4th of July everyone would bring their tables out,” said Sarah Gregory of the old Randolph Houses. “We had coconut cake and pie. We did not have to lock our doors. Our kids were coming up and down. We were very happy over there. Now we are not happy, because they did not do what they said they were going to do for us,” she says, waiting in vain for a public commitment as four more years of her life slip away.
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