Up in Harlem

The future looks golden for New York City’s famous quarter, but what role will the past play?

BY ROB GURWITT

The lunchtime crowd has ebbed by the time Michael Henry Adams and Michael Eberstadt settle down to their argument. Outside the second-story windows of Bayou, Eberstadt’s stylish Creole restaurant on Malcolm X Boulevard, the stir of 125th Street is but a few storefronts away: A Nation of Islam member hawks The Final Call; people stream from the subway, squinting in the bright winter sun; curbside vendors peddle incense, knock-off watches, and vivid paintings of Malcolm and of a black Jesus; old women stump past, pushing metal carts with groceries; a young woman ambles by, clutching a brown paper bag pressed into the shape of the bottle inside. Adams and Eberstadt ignore it all.

“What I’m saying … ” Adams insists.

“What are you saying?” Eberstadt interrupts, with a short laugh.

Just this: Adams hates what Eberstadt has done downstairs in Slice of Harlem, a pizzeria and Bayou’s sister restaurant. Michael Adams is a freelance preservationist, a passionate and knowledgeable advocate for Harlem’s buildings and for respecting their place in the history of African-American culture; his book, Harlem Lost and Found, will be published this fall. Until a few years ago, the space downstairs was the Casablanca, the oldest bar in Harlem. It had an enameled copper hood over the lunch counter, stained-glass windows, cut-glass paneled cabinets, and a grand mahogany bar. A photograph of the Casablanca’s interior from 1920, Otis Butler’s A Last Drink, appears in Harlem on My Mind, the book and catalog from the pathfinding 1968 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition. Over the next 78 years, Adams says, “it survived intact enough that Langston Hughes could have come back and recognized it in every detail.” Then Eberstadt took over the space, replaced the fittings with pizza ovens, a kitchen for Bayou, and tables along one wall. To Adams, this was as profane an act as loosing a pig in church.

Yet even he would admit that Eberstadt is hardly a force for evil. Formerly a graduate student in public affairs and a caseworker for people with aids, Eberstadt, who somehow is fast-talking and thoughtful at the same time, opened his restaurants “to create a business that would make money and create jobs in the inner city,” as he puts it, “to see if it was possible to do good and do well at the same time.” He hires locally, buys from local suppliers, and is dedicated to serving a Harlem clientele. The plain truth is, he says, making his business work meant changing the space. “The bar was beautiful,” he tells Adams, “and there were a couple of pieces of nice stained glass, but honestly, Michael, the rest was a dump. The only business we could have had if we had left it more or less as it was, with that big bar, would have been a bar.”

It is hard to argue with plain business sense in a neighborhood where jobs have been scarce, but you can understand why Adams might be upset. While many of Harlem’s residential streets would be recognizable to someone who knew them 60 years ago, many of the places that once supplied its cultural scaffolding are disappearing. The original Cotton Club, the legendary nightclub, is gone. So are the Savoy and the Golden Gate, clubs that thrived during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, and all but the facade of the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was shot. The Renaissance Ballroom, Small’s Paradise nightclub, the Victoria Theater—all were crowded in Harlem’s heyday but are now abandoned and decrepit. The renowned Apollo Theater is again a going concern but only after much ballyhoo and many infusions of public funding; even so, most nights you can walk past it along 125th Street and encounter barely a soul. Only a handful of places remain where you can go at night for a taste of Harlem’s cultural birthright. One of them, the recently restored Lenox Lounge, where Billie Holiday once sang, is just down the street from Bayou.

But this is old news. It’s not hard times that lend urgency to Michael Adams’ voice; it’s their end. Harlem is reviving.

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