Harlem: Lost and Found Review

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Harlem: Lost and Found ReviewPaul Rocheleau urged me not to worry about what I wrote stressing, "Most people only look at the pictures anyhow." Taking over ten years to research and write something, how tiresome it is to then be compelled to defend it. One is reluctant to do much beyond urging those who might disagree with what you've said to take a decade or two themselves and write their own work. After all no matter what one does or doesn't do the inadvertent error is sure to emerge. This was so for Galsworthy and for Langston Hughes. It will be for you as well. The Riviera Apartments, for instance, were designed by Rouse & Goldstone, not Schwartz & Gross. Mr. Charles Lovejoy is in fact Mr. Charles Loveday, and so it goes. It appears that Harlem Lost and Found will warrant a second printing at least, so thank goodness these mistakes and similar ones can be addressed.
What cannot be altered, however, is my understanding of Harlem's boundaries. Quite justifiably, I believe they can be identified as extending as far north as 168th St. "Not For Tourists Guide to New York City 2003", sponsored by JPMorgan Chase Community Development Group, at least agrees to this hallowed region extending north as far as 160th St. Well, actually, they call the region south to 134th St. between Bradhurst Ave. and the Hudson River 'Manhattanville/Hamilton Heights'. However, surely these neighborhoods are agreed to be in Harlem, are they not?
Unashamedly, I concede that my book was driven by handsome buildings. But, throughout its publication from circa 1910 through 1934, Harlem Magazine, an all white journal, included the very same structures that I have located north of 155th St. in its pages. Things do change, of course. Attempting to dissect Harlem into a series of hierarchically class-based districts, many, by the 1890s, designated all Manhattan west of St. Nicholas Ave. and north of 135th St. as 'Washington Heights'. Already by the 1860s the appellation was used from 155th St. north. But this initial usage much like that of 'Carmansville' was meant, I believe, to identify a subsection of greater Harlem. Certainly, the Audubon, Knapp, and Hooper families continued to identify their address as Harlem much as today many residents of the officially named 'Clinton' continue to give their address as 'Hell's Kitchen'.
In any case, perhaps the old-fashioned but unfashionable race card trumps other considerations? Asked in the 1950s by Joe McCarthy where he lived, Ralph Ellison said 150th St. and Riverside Drive. He qualified his answer, though, noting that the area had once been regarded as 'Washington Heights'. But stated that from his experience, "Wherever Negroes live uptown is considered Harlem." Surely this is the logic whereby the Audubon Ballroom and Theater, where Malcolm X was slain in 1965, was and continues to be identified as a Harlem landmark. No doubt, as more whites displace more blacks and Latinos throughout Upper Manhattan, Brian Keith Jackson's satirical references to name changes in the novel "The Queen of Harlem" will, in fact, occur more and more. It's this likelihood that makes me even more adamantly compelled to document the old understanding amongst blacks and many whites of what is Harlem.
How easy it is to regret what one has not done. If only I had a computer I might have addressed these issues earlier. If only I were more prosperous, I might have also included footnotes in Harlem Lost and Found and saved myself some grief. But as an author under contract to a small press it was difficult enough to pay for an index, I can assure you. As it was so dear, I especially wish the mystery reviewer at 800 RSD had consulted it. I reference Vaux & Withers twice. Once in relation to their Trinity Cemetery suspension bridge. Another time based on Francis R. Kowsky's 1980 monograph of Withers (Wesleyan University Press), on page 196, in the appended work list, I cite the George B. Grinnell house and stable on West 156th and 157th Sts. entered for 1869 and 1870. At no time, regarding this firm, do I ever mention either Mrs. John James Audubon or her dwelling.
As for my attribution of Audubon Park's ownership by George Bird Grinnell, on page 21 of the pamphlet "Audubon Park" published by the Hispanic Society in America in 1927 and reissued in 1987, a later George B. Grinnell relates of his relative, "Long before this, the greater portion of what had been Audubon Park, that is to say, all of it except the track where the old Audubon houses stand had become the property of a single owner, George B. Grinnell, from whose estate, in 1909, a large part of it passed into the hands of builders who covered much of it with tall apartment houses."
Similarly, so far as Jesse W. Benedict's earlier ownership of the park after 1864 goes, no less an historian than Audubon Park's own Reginald Pelham Bolton in his great book "Washington Heights, Manhattan, Its Eventful Past" asserts the same on page 111.
Regarding record sale prices at the Grinnell, the New York Times, it's true, might inflate values, but can I really be faulted for believing all the news that's fit to print?
Yes, indeed, whatever else it is, thanks mostly to Paul Rocheleau and designer Abigail Sturges, Harlem Lost and Found is a visual feast. Whatever its shortcomings, I hope that it is better written and researched than one critic suggests. Better than ever, I now appreciate the aphorism 'Some do, and others complain'. And anonymously, no less. Well, what can one say except God Bless America.Harlem: Lost and Found OverviewLong identified with African-American style and culture, Harlem is also a pillar of New York's social and architectural history. In this beautifully illustrated study, historian Michael Henry Adams presents an evocative portrait of the various and divergent Harlems of yesteryear, from the Native American settlements discovered by the Dutch in the seventeenth century to the vibrant community of present-day preservationists.In addition to the legacy of residential architecture—Dutch farmhouses, Native American longhouses, mansions and country villas, thoughtfully planned row houses, and handsome apartment buildings, the author examines schools, industrial facilities, stores, churches, and more. Harlem's spectrum of designers ranges from the well known—McKim, Mead & White, responsible for part of Strivers' Row; George B. Post & Sons, architects of the monumental Shepard Hall at the City College of the City University of New York—to practitioners who, though today mostly forgotten, designed much of the urban fabric of Harlem and New York City. All have contributed to an extraordinarily rich streetscape that today preserves the best of Harlem's past.

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