and Zora Neale Hurston, at the time
a Howard University student, to New
York with promises of a budding
scene and recognition for their work.
Publications like Du Bois’s magazine,
The Crisis, highlighted voices from
the movement, while Locke’s 1925
anthology, ‘‘The New Negro,’’ tried to
codify it. Voices from farther afi eld,
like Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey
and the poet Claude McKay, both
from Jamaica, drifted in and out
of the Renaissance, but found their
perspectives amplifi ed on Harlem’s
streets and in its publications. The
foundation for a century of Black
culture was laid in New York.
Like many of New York’s cultur-
al explosions, the Harlem Renais-
sance depended on the availability
of living space not only for the art-
ists who drove the movement but
also for the masses whose culture
allowed for high art to fl ourish at
all. In most cases, the fact that New
York’s wealthy elite abandoned
entire neighborhoods left the poor
and low-caste to create new cultural
forms that invigorated the city.
In her book ‘‘The Warhol Econo-
my,’’ the writer Elizabeth Currid-
Halkett looked to the downtown New
York boom of the 1970s and found the
same logic at work: Capi tal’s aban-
donment of New York and shredding
of the social contract made the city
a dangerous place to live, but it also
created the conditions — cheap rent
and plenty of space, primarily — that
gave us punk music, hip-hop, street
art and other pillars of contempo-
rary American culture. Generations
earlier, the crowded and dangerous
conditions of the Bowery gave rise
to fi gures like the composer Irving
Berlin, who, before he was a Broad-
way luminary, got his start singing
weepy ballads to crooks in seedy
dives. In the mid-1970s, the blight
of New York’s downtown scene —
the delirious cross-pollination of
daring music, visual art and fash-
ion — birthed musicians like Patti
Smith and artists like Keith Haring.
Around the same time, hip-hop cul-
ture was taking root in the ruins of
the South Bronx. The Haitian-Puerto
Rican American artist Jean-Michelover Columbia’s ill-fated attempt to
build a segregated gym in Morn-
ingside Park, which Harlemites felt
would result in their exclusion from
crucial neighborhood public space.
When I was in school, students
conducted a hunger strike against
the plans, but the fi rst phase of the
Manhattanville project was com-
pleted earlier this year. A Whole
Foods opened on 125th Street back
in 2017, as if in anticipation of the
changes Columbia’s project would
bring: The presence of highly edu-
cated, upwardly mobile people who
would begin to colonize uptown
rather than compete in Brooklyn’s
overheated market or suffer the
absurdities downtown, and, in the
process, taking apartments that,
until recently, might have served a
more working-class group of rent-
ers. My return to Harlem speaks to
the paradox at the heart of contem-
porary New York: The city’s warm
embrace of the creative economy’s
stewards makes it what it is. Increas-
ingly, that embrace leaves too many
other residents out in the cold.Basquiat bridged the gap between
uptown and downtown, concocting
a splintered style that spoke to the
decade’s social disintegration.
Today’s housing market pro-
vides a diff erent challenge from
the recession of the 1970s, though.
Twentieth-century Manhattan was a
city in which arrivals could reliably
fi nd a place for themselves, no mat-
ter how abject or ignored that place
was. Twenty-fi rst-century Manhattan
presents an altogether diff erent set
of problems: How can new arriv-
als make a home here if there is no
aff ordable space for them? And how
can they transplant themselves with-
out exiling the working-class natives
whose culture and labor the city can-
not survive without?
Returning to Harlem means arriv-
ing again, fi nding myself looking at
the area through its history rather
than through a fantasy. When I was
a freshman at Columbia, students
railed against construction of the
university’s Manhattanville cam-
pus in West Harlem; the plan was
reminiscent of the confl ict in 1968↑Schoolboys, Harlem, 1930s.Left to right: PhotoQuest/Getty Images; Bettman/Getty Images; Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImagesP. 17