In East Harlem, N.Y., development is encroaching on historic property that is unprotected by landmark status.

Story by Lisa Selin Davis / Nov. 21, 2003

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Pleasant Village townhouses in East Harlem (Lisa Selin Davis)

In East Harlem, N.Y., children play stickball alongside lines of row houses, tourists mill along Fifth Avenue on the way to nearby museums, and stray cats patrol the cobblestone streets. That's right: cobblestone streets, museums, and row houses in East Harlem.

This northeastern corner of Manhattan may be known for its urban ills, but it's a neighborhood full of history and historic buildings. The area called Pleasant Village, a modest grid of townhouses that runs from 114th Street to 120th Street and from First Avenue to the East River, is one of the last vestiges of historic property in East Harlem. Without landmark status, however, Pleasant Village has become vulnerable to demolition and development.

"East Harlem is not just an area with a history of poverty, crime, and drug addiction," says Raymond Plumey, architect and East Harlem resident for more than 20 years. "The neighborhood should be aware of their history, whether they choose to ignore it or not," Plumey says.

In some ways, East Harlem is more historic than its western neighbors. Developed a full century before West and Central Harlem, by 1800 the Dutch village of Nieuw Haarlem served as a bucolic getaway for lower Manhattan's wealthy elite, and then in the later in the century as a vibrant working-class neighborhood. By the 1930s, East Harlem was home to the largest Little Italy in America, housing such venerable residents as former New York City mayor Fiorella LaGuardia.

East Harlem church

Yet East Harlem has been unable to secure landmark status from New York City's Landmarks Commission or the National Register of Historic Places. Harlem preservation activist Michael Henry Adams, author of Harlem Lost and Found, points to what he calls the "rampant elitism" of the commission and its tendency to overlook important sites in poor neighborhoods. The commission has landmarked Chelsea, Greenwich Village, and the Upper West Side as historic neighborhoods, he says, so why isn't East Harlem a landmark?

"Because these other neighborhoods are prosperous white neighborhoods," Adams says. "If that is not the answer, pure and simple, you should tell me what it is, because I'd like to know what is the big discrepancy."

The Landmarks Commission says that the public's perception of an area has no impact on its potential for historic designation. "Designations that happen under my leadership are without regard to whether it's a poor area, a rich area, or any sociological factor," says Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the New York City Landmarks Commission. "We base our decisions solely on architectural and historical merit."

Tierney points to historic designations of such neighborhoods as Mott Haven in the South Bronx, or Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn as proof that the Landmarks Commission does not use class as part of the criteria. "I don't want the impression that we're elitist," he says. "We have rafts of historic districts all through New York City. We don't traffic in stigmas."

Though East Harlem borders the wealthiest part of Manhattan—the Upper East Side—cross the fault line of 96th Street and you enter a neighborhood still seen by many as a pocket of drugs, crime, and poverty. "People don't see East Harlem as [a historic] place," says Philip Reed, New York City Councilman from East Harlem.

But Adams says East Harlem is not the blighted neighborhood the rest of New York thinks it is. He points to the infusion of new restaurants, renovated loft-style housing renting for near market value, and bodegas that sell flowers and gourmet foods like Manhattan's more southerly neighborhoods. "It may be less publicized and ballyhooed, but I don't think that it's lagging in terms of public investment or economic development."

Housing projects loom over historic storefronts in East Harlem.

Still, East Harlem has more public housing projects than any other in New York City­15 in all­and many historic buildings were lost during urban renewal projects of the 1960s. With the highest poverty rate in New York and a slew of environmental problems (East Harlem has the largest pocket of asthma sufferers in New York), it's hard to galvanize residents to care about historic preservation when they have more immediate problems to surmount. "It's landmarking versus trying to improve wretched public schools," says Adams.

Adams says preservationists often overlook the history of working class America. "All of upper Manhattan is neglected in terms of landmarking," he says, noting that only eight percent of landmarked buildings stand above 96th Street. (Tierney says 16 percent of all buildings in Harlem are landmarked, though he admits he doesn't know how many­if any­of those are in East Harlem.)

While West and Central Harlem have seen vast improvements and multi-million dollar investments since the 1994 designation of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone (UMEZ), a Clinton initiative that offered tax breaks as incentives for private development, East Harlem still lags behind, both in terms of development and preservation.

But that's not for lack of trying. When Plumey nominated Pleasant Village to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, his application was denied. "I contacted all the preservation groups in New York City and asked them for help, and I ran up against at brick wall," he says.

East Harlem's 118th Street

At that time, the UMEZ had already started planning to tear down the six 1903 buildings of the Washburn Wire Factory in Pleasant Village, once the largest employer in Manhattan. The redevelopment plan calls for the construction of a million-square-foot commercial space for big-box stores like Home Depot and Costco, desired amenities in Manhattan, but stores that no neighborhood wants to accommodate due to the influx of traffic and pollution. Despite resistance from neighborhood groups like the Business and Resident Alliance of East Harlem and the East Harlem Historical Association, the factory was demolished in February of this year.

"Had that building been landmarked—and there are several factories and other buildings throughout the metropolitan area that have been landmarked—they would have built that store inside of that factory," Adams says.

Many residents, lured by the pledge of jobs, favored the plan. The problem, says Plumey, is that East Harlem is starved for redevelopment, and it must surmount the perception that neighborhoods rife with troubles like poverty and unemployment need economic input at all costs. "In order to build a preservation movement," Plumey says, you "need a diverse economic group. You have to have some moderate income folks so there are other issues besides survival."

With only five percent of the population owning their homes, and the rest stuffed into Corbu-style housing projects, local preservations face and uphill battle and an uncertain future.

"The only thing we know is that we lost the factory. It's gone," Plumey says. "What is built there will have an impact on whether or not we get this historic district. We're losing a lot of our history."

Lisa Selin Davis is a freelance writer living in New York City.

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