Condos, Renovations Mean Building Boom for New York’s Black Harlem

Harlem, for generations the Promised Land for blacks seeking a better life, is facing a new wave of immigrants: whites moving uptown for scarce housing.

The cost of buying or renting in Manhattan has risen steadily for years, and neighborhoods once ignored by the upwardly mobile have been swept up in wave after wave of gentrification.

Now that trend has swept so far north along the Upper West Side that at Central Park’s northern boundary a brand new condominium, Towers on the Park, is set to accept residents.

“Harlem is on the move,” said Eugene Webb, chairman of one of Harlem’s largest real estate companies, Webb & Brooker.

‘Only Land Left’

“Why? Land. You’re going to run out of land. Everybody wants a little land. The only land left is in Harlem. That’s why it’s going to be rebuilt.”

At Harlem’s main western intersection, 110th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, 2,200 units will be available in June, 1988, when Towers on the Park is completed. Prices will range from $60,000, under income guidelines, to $200,000 or more, depending upon the marketplace.

On the other side of the park, at Fifth Avenue between 107th and 108th streets, the Daughters of Israel building is being turned into a condominium with a penthouse selling for $500,000.

“That’s how real estate values are changing in Harlem. They’re sold out,” said Donald Cogsville, president and chief operating officer of the Harlem Urban Development Corp.

Barriers Have Tumbled

Apartment vacancy rates in Manhattan are under 2%. In 15 years, real estate barriers have tumbled; posh addresses used to stop at 72nd Street, then 86th, then 96th. New buildings and expensive renovations were completed on Broadway, on Amsterdam Avenue, on side streets.

On and on it goes.

“It’s paradise over there now,” Webb said of once-declining West Side neighborhoods. “The same thing’s going to happen in Harlem.”

Foremost among those moving into Harlem, he thinks, will be young professionals.

“The yuppie comes to where the action is. He will creep further and further north,” Webb said, energetically pushing up from his desk at his central Harlem office. “These people are going to move into Harlem.”

Ten years ago, when New York was shaking off its fiscal crisis, Webb might have sounded like the wildest of speculators. But anyone who has watched as Upper West Side shot-and-draught bars and mom-and-pop groceries have been transformed into fashionable nightspots and boutiques knows that he is probably right.

Plenty of Clout

Harlem, however, poses unique circumstances. The gentrification process in such Manhattan neighborhoods as Soho, Tribeca and Yorkville pushed out the poor to make room for wealthier people. Harlem boasts longtime community and political clout that will be used to try to regulate redevelopment.

“Whatever development we have in Harlem should be part of a comprehensive program that looks at many issues besides building, such as jobs, housing, education and recreational facilities,” said Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins. “I also maintain that the development, housing, jobs, profitable opportunities that result should be for the people who already live in Harlem.”

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) echoed Dinkins’ view, adding that he was not about to allow outsiders to pluck the community in which he grew up.

And Noreen Clark-Smith, chairwoman of Community Board 10, which oversees central Harlem, said she had been instrumental in seeing there was affordable housing in Towers on the Park--and will continue to do so in other projects.

Developers Are White

Harlem’s 1980 population of 466,000 was about 49% black, 34% Latino, 14% white and the rest Asian and other.

Development is sure to mean a larger white population, and it appears that whites will be most likely to benefit financially from any building boom.

“Right now, Harlem is going to be developed by white people,” Webb said. “I don’t think we have the resources to go into big development.”

Blacks live in Harlem but have never owned it, and redevelopment is forcing even the best-backed black entrepreneurs to the side streets.

A walking tour of Harlem winds past boarded-up buildings, tree-lined residences, expensive new co-ops and graffiti-scarred tenements. But buildings that sold for just a few thousand dollars five to 10 years ago are selling in the hundreds of thousands today. In 1980, the average property sales price was $140,000; in mid-1985, it was $450,000.

Latest Metamorphoses

And while big building might seem to signal big changes, there’s a lot more going on. “It’s the smaller stuff, the renovation of brownstones beyond the headlines, that’s helping in the rejuvenation of Harlem,” said Ron Norwood, director of development at Webb & Brooker.

The current development is just the latest of Harlem’s many metamorphoses.

Haarlem, the Dutch village, took over an Indian village in 1658. Gen. George Washington had his headquarters north of there. In 1873 the village was annexed by New York City and became its first residential and quite fashionable suburb.

Starting in 1904, real estate agents engineered the migration of blacks into the area to take over rentals that had gone begging. Many homes were divided into apartments or rooms, rents were raised and a legacy of over-crowding and poor maintenance began.

In the 1920s, Harlem became known as the Capital of Black America. Downtown society came uptown to hear jazz and see shows at places like the Cotton Club, which excluded blacks.

Poor Will Relocate

But the Depression brought construction to a halt and building maintenance to an end. Ever since, Harlem’s expanding population has pushed its traditional boundaries south of 110th Street and north of 155th Street.

These days, Webb wants to make sure that blacks carve out some piece of the latest action “so people here will get the benefit of it, so the money won’t flow right out of here.”

And the the poor?

“It’s like any other thing. They’ll relocate themselves,” Webb said. “People have a way of dispersing themselves.”

The migrations of old were led by people looking for jobs and escape from the South’s discriminatory laws. The new Harlem migration will be led by people looking for space and park views.

“We already had one of the best locations in the city of New York,” Cogsville said of the site opposite Central Park. “It’s a residential section, it’s 25 minutes from Wall Street, 15 minutes to Yankee Stadium, 20 minutes across the George Washington Bridge. Midtown is around 20 minutes, LaGuardia Airport is 20 minutes.

“The view from Central Park North is a much better view than Central Park South uptown.”