Harlem Nights, or There Was Life Before Bill

Who’d a thunk it?

I have loved Harlem for a long time before former President Clinton moved in. My wife and I loved it so much that we named our second son Marcus Dakar Harlem Shockley.

When we lived there in the mid-1980s, we loved the good food one finds almost at random on every other block.

We loved the vibrant worship life that brought tourists from across Europe--but we only had to catch the cross-town bus.

We loved the 15-minute subway ride to Yankee Stadium. We loved the pulse and excitement of 125th Street before and after the Apollo crowd filed out into the warm Harlem night.

We loved the ease of access to Central Park. We loved that we heard the music first, saw the fashions first, learned the slang first and saw the reality first.

Yes, inner cities often have been the canary in the economic coal mines of the nation. But it gave us a jump on the rest of the city and indeed the country. What you now call “downsizing” and “retraining” always were known to us as a layoff and finding a new “J-O-B.” But that’s life in the big city.

The questions raised by Clinton’s move uptown could be raised in inner cities from Washington to Chicago to Los Angeles.

It’s not that diversity is not welcomed by the residents of these neighborhoods; it was intolerance to diversity that created them. But we want some credit for the quality of life that endured before the Clintons of this world discovered Harlem.

It is amazing what happens to a neighborhood when white people decide they like it. Clinton’s sudden affection for Harlem has brought into focus a phenomenon that usually takes place over years, if not decades.

Gentrification has brought mixed emotions to neighborhoods across the country. Even now, as gas prices hover at almost $2 a gallon, old inner cities with large old houses are appearing more and more attractive to the 90-minute commuters who still work downtown but escape to their sterile suburbs and cookie-cutter houses when the sun goes down.

Many blacks in inner-city neighborhoods who have enough money to own their homes and a comfort level to enjoy these communities will welcome the inflation that gentrification often brings.

But there is that nagging resentment: “Why wasn’t it good enough when it was just us here?”

The streets are still the same, the housing stock hasn’t changed that much.

It’s as close to the life and pulse of the city as it ever was.

We recognized the value and beauty of these communities long ago. Why is it that it only counts when somebody white likes it?