B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (30 page)

A rock formation erupts from the center of Marcus Garvey Park. This is Mount Morris, after which the park was originally named and after which the historical district, the Mount Morris Park Historical District, and the neighborhood association, the Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association, are named still. (It is, perhaps, the persistence of the original name on the historic district and the association that gives rise to recurrent rumors that wealthy residents of the area—white and black—are conspiring to have Marcus Garvey’s name stripped from the park.)

The houses on the western perimeter of the park are some of the finest in Harlem, the focus of an annual tour of homes that takes place every spring. Around its northern limit are large apartment blocks—equally grand but less glamorous abodes. One, an ornate
building called the Sans Souci, is an SRO. On one visit to the city, before I moved to New York, I was attracted to this building because it shared a name—which means carefree—with the palace built by Haitian emperor Henri Christophe. The Haitian palace, along with its nearby citadel, are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, touted as
the first monuments to be constructed
by black slaves who had gained their freedom
. But the buildings were constructed by black slaves who had gained their freedom and then worked for a monomaniacal emperor who imposed the
corvée
,
a system of unpaid labor also used in ancient Egypt to build the pyramids. When I went up the steps of Harlem’s San Souci to ask if there were any apartments available, I was shooed away from its door by the security guard on duty.
Do you know what kind of place this is?

A new building has risen
just south of the park, where Fifth Avenue runs uptown and divides itself into the abbreviated avenues known as Mount Morris Park West and East before joining again to cross 125th Street. The
vast tower
is called Fifth on the Park. A
mixed-income
development featuring units valued up to $3 million, it is advertised as being located in
New Harlem
and
South Harlem
. Also touted is its proximity to
Mount Morris Park
. It sits on land that was owned by a church, and developers purchased the “air rights” from another piece of land owned by the church in order to achieve the building’s thirty-story height, unprecedented in Harlem. The church received $12 million, a number of “affordable” housing rental units (one-bedrooms starting at $1,800), and a state-of-the-art worship facility inside the new tower. Development has also come to a former jail that occupied a purpose-built structure at 121st and Mount Morris West—now it’s a condominium. On the same side of the park, two blocks north, the old house that was for many years the headquarters and synagogue of the black Jewish sect the Commandment Keepers is also being renovated, reclaimed for residential
use. According to an article lamenting its fall, it was sold for development after a long-running internal dispute over the leadership of the community, and the temple was closed without the requisite religious ceremonies. The writer concludes:
Thus, the memory of that building
has now become a monument to self-destruction
. In the course of construction work, to effect the desecration or resecularization of the old Commandment Keepers temple, the Star of David was removed from above the threshold. A large Dumpster parked nearby received the contents from within.

The summit of Mount Morris is the province of junkies and derelicts, or so I have been warned. A male friend who I’d always assumed would escort me to the top described a recognizance mission in which he successfully gained the height of Mount Morris. The plateau there is called the Acropolis, borrowing the word—meaning city on the edge—that ancient Greeks used to designate the citadels they built at the highest point in a settlement to defend against invasion. There, my friend met a scene of oblivion. Even in the light of day the place was full of people nodding off in different stages of sleep and intoxication. My friend said he
had no business up there
. On seeing him approach, someone had cursed loudly; he’d been mistaken for an undercover cop.

Because Mount Morris was the highest point in Harlem, a watchtower was installed there in 1857 (it was then known as Snake Hill), to protect upper Manhattan from fire. Already in 1896, about a decade before black settlement in Harlem began, the tower was considered a symbol of the neighborhood, with a former watchman sharing his lamentation in the
New York Times
:

Harlem Fire Watchtower, Marcus Garvey Park, ca. after 1968. (Photo by Stephen Zane / Courtesy of Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress)

In the 1960s, concerned residents acted to preserve the watchtower as an emblem of the enclave, and it received landmark designation. In winter, the skeleton of the tower is visible from a distance, seen from below through bare tree branches.

I have not been to the top. Instead I imagine the view from there. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, absentee slumlords colluded with arsonists to set fire to their own property all around Harlem, driving tenants into the street and collecting insurance money. That scorched-earth campaign—along with the more common, more time-consuming, and less actively violent tactic of neglect, in which buildings were abandoned, boarded up, and left to rot for decades until they nearly collapsed—created the empty lots that pocked the neighborhood’s landscape. This condition later came to be known by the passive, indeterminate, and oddly agricultural term “blight,” and to reverse that blight, many of those empty lots would be developed as luxury condominiums. From the top of Mount Morris, high in the watchtower, it must have been possible to see the catastrophe blazing night after night—but no alarm could bring relief. Now, the preserved tower—an attraction for the intrepid tourist clutching a guidebook—is of little use as other dangers approach.

MS. MINNIE DIED
. It was May 23, a Thursday. On or around that day, I’d fallen asleep thinking to slip a get-well note beneath her door, something her son could take to the hospital. I’d use the blank card propped up on my desk; the front showed an English still life from the 1600s. Its long and detailed title explained the subject matter:
An urn containing flowers, including tulips, roses, daffodils, narcissus, carnations, morning-glory, love-in-a-mist, hyacinth, larkspur, anemone and medick, with a butterfly and two birds and a goldfinch
. I didn’t get around to writing the card or slipping it under the door. She had already been in the hospital for months, and I had not gone to visit.

Ms. Barbara delivered the news. I came out of the building, saying hello to everyone gathered near the stoop. Ms. Barbara pulled me aside and led me away from the group. We stood near the curb and she whispered,
Minnie is gone
. Not everyone knew, she said. The service would happen the following Thursday, at the funeral home less than half a block down Lenox Avenue.

We said to each other the things one says at such moments:
that we had not known how ill she was and that she would be missed. I thanked Ms. Barbara for letting me know and left her in front of the building. Walking up the block, I was guided by my familiarity with the path—my eyes had ceased to focus on anything in particular. What I did see was filtered through the operation that begins at the very instant one hears the news of death. The mind makes a frantic attempt to integrate the information into everything perceived, as if the most solid particles of the universe must rearrange themselves in the wake of the departed. There is the corner store,
Ms. Minnie is gone.
There is the stoplight,
Ms. Minnie is gone.
There is the subway,
Ms. Minnie is gone.
There is the hospital,
Ms. Minnie is gone
. There is the library,
Ms. Minnie is gone.

In the next days, when I walked by the funeral home where her service would take place, I could not rush quickly past, knowing I’d be there soon with all my neighbors to say good-bye to Ms. Minnie. It was a place I passed on an almost daily basis, weaving around or through crowds lingering at the end of a service. This was necessary when passing any of the funeral homes on Lenox Avenue after a service: their doors flung open, and the crowd spilled out. Sometimes they were crowds of elders, full of dark suits, dress coats, and smart hats. But often they were crowds of the young, not dressed especially for the occasion. At least once, I passed a crowd where the mourners were being led out of the parlor by a man playing an African drum.

I cannot remember, in any occasion over several years, passing a throng filled with weeping people. I am certain of this because when approaching such crowds, preparing to weave around or through, I almost always braced myself. I was anticipating some flood of sentiment, in the presence of which—not having any connection to the people or the event other than just passing by—I should try to make myself nonintrusive. The emotion I
expected among the mourners was never present. There was only a somewhat subdued calm and the sense that these people were bound together by what had just taken place. The only agitation was mine.

Once, Ms. Minnie greeted me in the street just after she’d emerged from such a crowd. Her declarations might have explained the absence of heaviness I’d seen before.
It was a beautiful funeral,
she told me. She praised the skill of the preacher and the selection of songs. She told me that the deceased wasn’t someone she knew well, but I gathered that her attendance had been a function of custom: one pays respect to the dead, even the dead who are not well known to you. And, perhaps, going to the funeral that day had been an activity, something to do. This did not diminish the event, nor the impression it had made on her. She rhapsodized on its beauty, its feeling, the size of the assembled crowd.

A few days after Ms. Barbara told me of Ms. Minnie’s passing, a flyer appeared on the door of our building. It gave details for the funeral and showed a picture of Ms. Minnie. I had seen similar flyers on others doors. Such signs alert the neighbors that one was now gone from their midst and that everyone will soon gather to pay respect to the dead. Some of the signs I’d seen on the doors of other buildings solicited funds to cover burial costs. If the dead had left behind young children, there might be a request to help provide for their care.

The news of death: I overheard it often, sitting on the bus while someone spoke on the phone, standing on a corner waiting to cross the street, watching the momentary meeting of two friends who had not seen each other in a while. Usually the angel of death swooped into an otherwise relaxed chat in the form of an assumption:
You heard about ____, right?
But the other person had not heard. They had only just seen ____; they did not know ____ was
ill; they asked how long ago it had happened; they were sorry for the family. I would exit the bus or crossed the street as the particles began to rearrange themselves and would not hear the rest of the mutual consolation.

The news of death was borne on T-shirts mass-produced by the local copy shop for the occasion. This seemed to be a ritual of young people mourning one of their own. A picture, taken during prom or a house party, showed the dead young man or woman looking full of confidence and age-appropriate immortality. The birth and death were given as
Sunrise
and
Sunset,
though the dates were too close together to have allowed the full passage of a day. I saw these T-shirts individually—when some people wore them incorporated into their normal wardrobe long after the funeral—and in groups, a uniform for those mourners stationed in clumps outside the doors of one of the funeral parlors on Lenox.