New York – On Saturday nights in summer, hundreds of fingers pound out mesmerizing rhythms on African drums – a ritual repeated for decades in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park.
This year, the drums have a counterpoint: the complaints of “new Harlemites.”
“African drumming is wonderful for the first four hours, but after that, it’s pure, unadulterated noise. We couldn’t see straight anymore,” says Beth Ross, who lives in a luxury apartment building near the park. “It was like a huge boom box in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen. You had no way to escape except to leave the apartment.”
Ross’ complaint is just the latest sign of conflict in Harlem, where upscale apartments and hotels are rapidly changing the face of a neighborhood long considered the heart of black culture in America.
Central Harlem around Marcus Garvey Park is especially attractive, with its opulent brownstones and churches from the Gilded Age of the 19th century.
The park was formerly known as Mount Morris Park, the name given to it by developers in the 1800s, when the area was mostly white; that name is now often used by real estate agencies. The park was renamed in 1973 for the Harlem-based black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who had advocated black ownership of Harlem.
The influx of outsiders intensified after the arrival six years ago of Harlem’s most famous commercial tenant, former President Clinton, whose 125th Street office is a short walk from Marcus Garvey Park. He said then that he hoped his presence would encourage others to move to the neighborhood.
Longtime Harlem residents say that while Clinton’s intentions were good, the “new Harlemites” are making changes that are destroying some of what’s dearest to the black community.
A community garden was bulldozed to make way for elegant new apartments – right next to the future Museum for African Art on Fifth Avenue. After 50 years in business, the soul-food restaurant Copeland’s closed in July, a victim of what the owner called the neighborhood’s changing demographics and food tastes.
“They call this the new Harlem Renaissance – bringing in people who are able to pay for these properties, who push out people who can’t, like schoolteachers and municipal workers,” said James David Manning, the 60-year-old Baptist pastor of the Atlah World Missionary Church, a block from the park.
The original “Harlem Renaissance” was a flowering of literature, art, theater and music during the 1920s and 1930s.
In recent years, Manning said, “the community has been taken over by big business and banks, and deep-pocketed entrepreneurs. If we lose Harlem, we lose the flagship of African-American people worldwide.”
