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Percy Griffin's design for the M. L. Wilson Boys and Girls Club (above)
is stylistically contextual with the neighborhood.
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Bond's Schomburg Center reading room (above) is octagonal, like early
African-American churches, and features Sapele wood from West Africa.
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Many of the neighborhood's cultural landmarks are losing out to
development projects: a high school (above), is going up on the former
site of Small's Paradise, Harlem's first integrated nightclub.
Top courtesy Percy Griffin; middle, courtesy Max Bond.
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Thanks to special government-funded programs like the Upper Manhattan Empowerment
Zone, Harlem is finally obtaining amenities that other communities
have long taken for granted. In the last five years Harlem has seen
its first major grocery store and its first mall with national
chain stores. But many feel that after years of neglect Harlem is settling
for less than it deserves. In a sense the discrimination and inequities
that persist in American culture are becoming built-in features in Harlem.
Several of the biggest new development projects--such as the Harlem USA
mall by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill--clearly do not integrate well with Harlem's
existing architecture. "I have nothing against box stores, but that
building doesn't respect 125th Street," Davis says. "It doesn't
respect it in terms of the character and texture of the strip itself."
"We waited too long, but I would eat crow before I accepted some of
these things," says architect Percy Griffin, whose firm's
lineage descends from Vertner Tandy, the first licensed black architect
in New York. "If I have a suit that has holes in it, I would wait until
I have money to buy the suit that I really want. I'd keep patching the holes
and wear the suit in pride." Some are skeptical about the new development's
overall economic benefit to blacks. "A lot of it is being done
at a pretty low level; it's pretty bad in terms of design," Bond says.
"It's also not very good in terms of hiring African-American professionals
or contractors and laborers."
A catch-22 of complex social and economic forces has kept black architects
from playing more of a role in shaping Harlem's future, says Karen A. Phillips,
former head of Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC), a major player
in bringing development dollars to Harlem. To get a large government-funded
project such as a school or mixed-use development, architecture firms
need a track record of sizable projects. Virtually all of the black-run
firms in the city are small and find it difficult to compete
with larger, more experienced white-run firms, says Phillips, who is
now a member of the New York City Planning Commission. Black architect Roberta
Washington says several years ago she was disqualified from the $5
million Studio Museum in Harlem competition by city officials who told
her that her firm was too small. In fact, no black firms took
part in the competition.
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Saint Thomas the Apostle Church (above) and Strivers' Row (below right)
are well-preserved examples of Harlem architecture built by whites.
Meanwhile the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom (below left), built by
followers of Marcus Garvey, is now endangered.
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When small minority-owned architecture firms do get the opportunity
to work in Harlem, Phillips says, the way the government funding is structured
makes it difficult for them to survive. "A lot of the time we
would put people out of business because the money came in so slowly,"
she says of her work at ADC. Further, according to Phillips, it's difficult
to partner larger white firms with minority-owned ones. "People
call up a minority firm the day before and say 'I need your name,'
but they are not open to a real partnership," she says. Considering
the racially charged nature of architecture and development in Harlem it
is clear that nobody, black or white, can build a race-neutral statement
there.
Jack Travis is disappointed that few of the area's new developments directly
address the African-American experience. "This outbursting of color,
texture, and pattern is an essential part of black culture in almost everything
we do that is considered artistic," the architect says. "If you
ask a black child in Harlem to give you an example of black music, they
can. If you ask them what black art is or black speech is, they have an
idea, a concept. But if you ask them about architecture and design, and
you ask them for a concept of blackness in those disciplines, they cannot
do it." Travis, who has remodeled homes for Wesley Snipes and Spike
Lee, sees African Americans relating to their physical environment in a
distinctive manner. "We tend to double- and triple-park in our neighborhoods,"
he says. "We tend to be front-space people, because historically the
villagers in sub-Saharan Africa lived in open enclaves. The closed spaces
were for specific functions; you went into the hut to sleep."
One of the few buildings in Harlem that Travis feels is "black-culture
specific" is the National Black Theater, on Martin Luther King
Boulevard and Fifth Avenue. The interior was designed by a group of Nigerian
architects, and its decorative rounded auditorium is characteristic of buildings
from West Africa.
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Harlem's most famous places have been significant more for cultural than
architectural reasons: the Lenox Lounge still exists, but the Cotton
Club--with its legendary roster of black performers--is gone.
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Bottom: Corbis Images
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For Percy Griffin, building in Harlem doesn't involve making an overt
statement about African heritage. "The residents in Harlem are ethnically
black," he says, "but they are American." Still Griffin's
views on race inform his approach to redevelopment. He maintains that after
decades of underinvestment, Harlem's built environment deserves an affirmative-action
program to put it on an equal footing with wealthier downtown neighborhoods.
"We fought in this country's wars," he says, asking why an effort
cannot be put together to rescue Harlem's endangered theaters as was done
with the theaters on 42nd Street. "Until I have the same cup of tea,
the same china," he says, "I am not satisfied."
A building that Griffin is designing for the M. L. Wilson Boys and
Girls Club, at 521 West 145th Street, would be at home in any middle-class
white neighborhood. The design for the mixed-use building is careful to
respect the neighboring tenement buildings through both its use of materials
and the design of its facade. Griffin also references architecture
from the European Renaissance: the exterior detailing on different levels
varies according to the activities that will take place on those floors.
The seven-story structure will have a banquet hall, senior center, gym,
and two floors of commercial space. Over the gym is a barrel-vaulted
roof with a skylight.
While Griffin's approach takes its aesthetic cues from the existing
architectural context, other black architects are referencing a more distant
heritage. Some, like Roberta Washington, are experimenting with symbolic
associations to Africa. A mixed-use condominium development she is designing,
1400 on Fifth, will feature African masks on the outside columns. Railings
around the top and bottom of the building will be in a Dinka motif.
One of the few black-run development companies in the city, Full Spectrum
Development, is building 1400 on Fifth. It was partly out of frustration
at being discriminated against as a black architect, says the firm's
principal, Carlton Brown, that he became a developer. "1400 on Fifth
is meant to be a statement about the African-American presence in Harlem,"
Brown says. "Architecture should say something about the people who
designed it, about the people who financed it, and about the people
who used it," he says. "If archaeologists come through here three
thousand years from now and dig through the ruins in Harlem, they should
be able to find out something about the people who lived here."
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The altar of Saint Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, which the AIA
Guide to New York City describes as "berserk eclecticism
reminiscent of the filigrees of Milan's Cathedral or of many Flemish or
Venetian fantasies. It is unnameable but wonderful."
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One of Harlem's few existing examples of modern architecture by an African-American
architect is the main building and addition for the Schomburg Center, designed
by Bond. The building has an octagonal reading room, which reflects
the shape of some of the first churches African Americans built in
this country. The room's paneling and furniture are made from Sapele wood
imported from West Africa. Bond says the panels create a symbolic and an
economic tie to the African diaspora.
A primary consideration for Bond was to provide minority workers with jobs.
One reason the Schomburg addition was built from brick and mortar was that
minority craftspeople tend to be skilled with those materials. "Too
often with this issue of links to African-American heritage, people talk
about them in purely symbolic ways," Bond says. "But it is also
important to look at who works on the buildings and how the project is contracted,
so that you get the opportunity for minority contractors to work on it."
Meanwhile others see the effort to make associations with Africa as superficial
gestures. "Do they have a dashiki? Do they ride a donkey? Can they
even speak an African language?" Adams asks derisively of the efforts
to express a distinctive Afrocentric aesthetic.
Despite their strong opinions, ultimately African Americans in Harlem have
limited opportunities to shape their built environment. There is no local
preservation group such as Landmarks West, which succeeded in turning much
of Manhattan's Upper West Side into landmark districts. There are no powerful
business associations to rescue the decaying theaters dating from the Harlem
renaissance. And black architecture firms do not have the size to compete
for many of the large jobs that will define the physical landscape.
Many hope that the system will change before it's too late for African-American
Harlem. "Architecture is clearly art, but it has a lot more to do with
finance, with power," Brown says. "The thing about the Harlem
renaissance is that most of the people were artists who had patrons. One
of the great contradictions is that it was not about the sharing or transfer
of power; it was about patriarchy. One of the things I would hope about
this second renaissance is that it be about sharing power." But some
of New York's black architects are skeptical. "When we look back on
this time," Washington says, "we are going to think that this
was an opportunity that was missed in terms of having an impact on the built
environment."
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