Eat the City(18)

Over the years, Willie has moved from plot to plot at the whim of city administrators who decide to develop land he has cultivated but who always seem to consent to finding him a replacement. When the city founders, he gets more space for vegetables; when the city booms, he gives it up. His current garden, on 122nd Street near Eighth Avenue, is a verdant wonder in a neighborhood that has been urban-renewed, burned out, abandoned, rebuilt, and halfway redeveloped. Over decades, brownstones have been renovated; new condominiums have risen. Still, for years, the only nearby places to get provisions at night are a Popeye’s Chicken, a Dunkin’ Donuts, a few delis that reek of cat pee, a liquor store. And Willie’s.


YOU might say that Willie’s bit of Harlem has returned to its roots. For hundreds of years, Harlem was a farming village. Lenape Native Americans cultivated the fertile terrain spreading from an inlet off what is now 125th Street, near Willie Morgan’s garden. Their specialty crops were squash, beans, and corn, which they sowed together so the tall corn stalks would support the growing bean vines and the low, prickly squash roots would deter predators and moisten the soil. They also ate from wild orchards of sweet apples and pears, picked strawberries, blueberries, mulberries, huckleberries, raspberries, blackberries, and cranberries, and gathered barley, chestnuts, hickory nuts, and acorns, as well as herbs such as purslane, white borage, agrimony, pennyroyal, elecampane, and sarsaparilla.

The first Dutch farmers found the land they called Nieuw Haarlem easy to farm, as it had already been cleared, but they worked with their muskets at the ready, in case of attacks from the people whose fields they had usurped. The rich, dark earth yielded more than the soil of lower Manhattan, and canoes and wagons filled with uptown vegetables, meat, butter, and tobacco helped make New Netherland self-sufficient.

As time passed, the great families of the settlement planted vegetable fields, fruit orchards, and greenhouses full of delicate crops at their uptown estates. Their names are familiar to us now mostly through street names: the Delanceys, Beekmans, Bleeckers, and Hamiltons. On the edges of their manors, squatters erected shacks from wood, twigs, and barrel staves, and raised livestock and produce to sell downtown at market. A goat grazing on a rocky outcrop became the emblematic image of Harlem. Finally, by the mid-eighteenth century, after years of hard use, farms simply refused to yield. Wealthy owners deserted their estates. In the first round of a cycle that would later repeat many times over, the city acquired many abandoned properties for resale.

By the early nineteenth century, Harlem, like all of Manhattan, was transforming. In 1808, John Randel Jr. had begun to survey the land, mapping out a grid of streets. The construction of this grid would eventually flatten the island’s topographical irregularities—hills and valleys, streams and swamps, and bursts of marble and schist—turning wild and cultivated lands into even blocks suitable for dense, high development. Not everyone considered this progress. Unhappy landowners pelted Randel and his colleagues with artichokes and cabbages, sicced their dogs on him, had him arrested by the sheriff for trespassing, and sued him for damages after he pruned their trees. But as waves of immigrants from Europe continued to arrive, housing grew short, and many people saw the solution in the dense promise of the grid.

In Harlem in the mid-1800s, political bosses out to enrich themselves purchased choice lots and then arranged for the city to build macadamized streets and install hollow-log pipes to bring in clean water from upstate reservoirs. Elm trees were planted, gaslights and sewer lines installed, and the value of the real estate increased instantly and exponentially. Land became far more valuable for its potential than for its current use; it only had to be drained, filled, divided, parceled, and auctioned. Its fecundity was forgotten as investors focused on its remarkable ability to support an undreamed density of high-end housing. By the time they were done, around the turn of the nineteenth century, block after block of modern, overpriced row houses went unrented. Speculators were foreclosed. It seemed Harlem had overdeveloped.

Soon black Realtors stepped in to fill vacant apartments with black tenants. From the earliest days of European settlement on Manhattan, people of color had kept one step ahead of trouble with whites by settling on the city’s periphery, which as the city grew, moved northward: from the notorious Five Points slum, which spilled over the edges of today’s Chinatown, to Little Africa, around the current Sullivan, Thompson, and MacDougal streets, to the coldwater flats of the Tenderloin in Midtown West. Racial violence flared in the hot summer of 1900, when thousands of whites rioted in the Tenderloin, using lead pipes and their fists to beat blacks, who soon after, fled for the safety of half-empty Harlem.

Black dentists and doctors, nurses and pharmacists, lawyers and hotel owners moved into grand, speculator-built brownstones made of Harlem’s own underground schist, ornamented with dragons and lions and suns with tongues. Black photographers and printers, undertakers and barbers, cooks and barkeeps and dancers followed to narrow brick row houses. Rents were high—landlords charged blacks about 50 percent more than whites for the privilege of decent housing. Those who couldn’t afford whole apartments rented floor space, bathtubs, coal bins, and basements. Some even “hot bedded,” sharing a single mattress with a stranger who worked opposite hours and left the sheets still warm. The institutions followed the people to Harlem—the churches, the Odd Fellows, Masons, Pythians, Elks, the Music School Settlement, the New York Age newspaper, the White Rose Working Girls’ Home, Banks’s Club, a raunchy honky-tonk place, Barron’s Little Savoy, where Jelly Roll Morton performed, the Douglass Club, with its one-legged pianist—as though the fabric of a whole neighborhood could simply be dropped down like a mantle to dress brand-new buildings.