White people are a scarce commodity in Harlem. Getting off at 123rd St subway station in Harlem, and walking towards Central Park, you feel like the emperor with no clothes. There's hen fighting, street trading and garish looking preachers all around. "Yeah brother, you too, come follow the Lord. You can be saved." Every second neon shop light reads "Nails". Harlem ladies have an obsession with nails. Long, curled, purple-pink nails. You don't need to read the shop's sign in Harlem to figure out its business. Harlem has Franco, graffiti artist par excellence, who paints murals on the door, for free.
In the 1800s, Harlem was the most fashionable area of New York. Well-to-do bankers and financiers like the Delanceys, Beekmans and Rikers lived there. Plantation owners and oil men from the southern states had their town houses there. Wide streets and handsome Edwardian-style houses rivalled the best in European urban planning. But greed caught up with the speculators, and black families from downtown Manhattan were crammed in to one-family houses to make up for the well-off families who couldn't be found. Rents had to be paid. Come the 1920s and the Depression, and Harlem became a mostly black neighbourhood. Black families swamped into Harlem, moving into the elegant homes of the rich. Harlem became America's most famous black neighbourhood. Gangster woman Madam Queen ran the numbers racket from here, in competition with other gangsters like Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. Later on, in the 1960s, Harlem became a war-zone: its territory split and fought over by rival drug gangs. In July 1964 riots began there which would spread to black ghettos right across America. Prostitution was a problem, drugs were a problem, murder was a problem, school violence was a problem. Name any modern social ill, and Harlem had it. It was a wasteland.
Today, Harlem is going through a renaissance. Its notoriety has become its greatest asset, as hundreds of European tourists visit every week. They come to see the gospel singers, the jazz clubs, and the houses which Duke Ellington, Malcom X and Martin Luther King once called home. They come to see the Cotton Club, where Joe Louis hung out and where Ray Charles and BB King launched their careers. The patrons of Harlem's latest renaissance are, however, some of its lesser known citizens. One of those citizens in particular deserves mention. Muriel Samana is president of Harlem Spirituals, a tour company which takes tourists on bus and walking trips around neighbourhoods like the Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem.
Samana, a French native, started off in 1987 with her now deceased friend Lucien Carcos. They drove one tour van, bringing a handful of curious foreigners around Harlem, pointing out areas like that in which a son of Bobby Kennedy was arrested for buying drugs. They hassled downtown hotels to advertise their tours and to provide pick-up points for Harlem Spirituals. They travelled to trade conventions around America, promoting their venture, and Harlem. People started to listen. I spent four hours with one of the Harlem tours, moving in an executive-style coach between the main neighbourhoods.
Harlem certainly has its assets. Elegant street facades, a huge diversity of church architecture and a saxophonist busking on every second street corner. It's also got the Cotton Club, the Apollo Club and the Maurice Jumel Mansion, where George Washington once garrisoned his troops. Harlem's greatest value is in its very soul. Beauty shines through the scorched facades and graffiti-marked doorways of houses, churches and theatres whose like have long since been replaced by glass and plastic in other parts of New York city. If nothing else, Harlem is a architect's wonderland. Similarly, the people. The old man selling James Brown tapes on the kerb is as fascinating a sight as any museum exhibit. His clothing encompasses just about every musical trend from reggae to glam rock. The crafts people in the Betty Shabaaz Market, opposite Malcolm X's former mosque and headquarters are shy, brooding types in the main, concentrating as much on their craft work as on the customer.
Leaving the very old but recently trendy Sugar Hill enclave, our tour paid a short visit to a Gospel church service, where black-cloaked singers wearing ethnic African hats swayed and clapped to the music. A Dutch member of our group almost fell off the balcony in his eagerness to capture the crimson-suited preacher's every move on camcorder.
The final stop of the tour took us to Sylvia's Soul Food Restaurant, for lunch. Soul food is a mixture of chicken, greens, potatoes and fish. The foods are ordinary, but the cooking involves a good deal of boiling and dressing. Unpretentious, but wholesome. "The soul, not the stomach is more important. God will provide," explains the maitre d'.
Back in downtown Manhattan, I met with Marko Nobles, director of Harlem Visitors and Convention Bureau. Nobles' organisation is associated with Harlem Spirituals Tours and shares its goal of promoting Harlem.
Eight million tourists are now visiting Harlem every year, he tells me. Most are from abroad, but more and more Americans are beginning to visit. "People are drawn here by the Harlem mystique," he says. "They want to experience the music, the restaurants, jazz venues and gospel choirs they've always heard about." Admitting that Harlem has an image problem which some find off-putting, Nobles argues that media coverage of the area has not been helpful to this problem. "When a crime happens in Harlem, the whole neighbourhood is tarnished, but if that crime happened in Greenwich Village, it's only associated with the particular street it happened on." On the other hand, Nobles' explanation for the huge European interest in Harlem is that "the further you are from a situation, the more objective you become".
Whatever the reason, Harlem now ranks alongside the Empire State building and Liberty Island in a lot of tourist itineraries. It's got soul man, it's got soul. . .