Harlem: Lost and Found

by Michael Henry Adams
Paul Rocheleau (Photographer),
 

Harlem is known throughout the world as the center of African-American history and culture in the United States. At the end of the 19th century, Harlem was an enclave of the upper bourgeois, and in the beginning of the 20th century, it absorbed a great number of new inhabitants displaced from midtown. This era saw the Harlem Renaissance, in which a group of artists, writers, and jazz musicians had an important role in influencing world popular culture. The same period saw a flourishing of architecture and design in beautiful houses, churches, apartment buildings, theaters, and commercial buildings. After a period of decline, largely due to state and federal neglect, Harlem is once again experiencing a revival.

Author, preservationist, and Harlem resident Michael Henry Adams presents in this volume an architectural and social history of Harlem. Starting in its early days - the establishment of the first European farms in the mid-1660s, Thomas Jefferson’s dinner at the Morris-Jumel mansion - the story encompasses great periods of social upheaval and change. Numerous architectural styles were employed by the builders of Harlem, notably neo-Palladianism, and specially commissioned color photographs capture the area as its architecture and interiors are being lovingly restored. Harlem: Lost and Found tells of the history and also of the present of this once ignored and now vibrant metropolitan center.

Hunting in Harlem

by Mat Johnson

Gentrification-by any means necessary.

With the help of new employees Cedric, Bobby, and Horus-three ex-cons trying to forge a new life-Lester Baines's Horizon Realty is bringing Harlem back to its renaissance. Fate seems to be working in Lester's favor when Harlem's undesirable tenants begin to get clumsy and meet early deaths by accident. A deadbeat dad electrocutes himself in the bathtub. A drug dealer takes flight from his fire escape. A pimp is shot dead by police when they mistake his wallet for a handgun. That's where Horizon steps in. Block by block, Lester and his crew clear out the rubble and the rabble, filling once dilapidated brownstones with black professionals handpicked for their shared vision of Harlem as a shining icon for the race.

Rumors of the Chupacabra, a mythical monster claiming the lives of Harlem's unfortunate, run rampant with Harlem's youth. But it isn't until an ambitious reporter begins to investigate the extraordinarily high accident rate in Harlem that Lester starts to get a little nervous about Horizon's future. For Lester, no cost is too high in protecting Horizon and his vision for restoration. The battle for gentrification and for the souls and very lives of the ex-cons plays out on the streets of Harlem and against a backdrop of beautiful Manhattan brownstones.