He lived there for years, and New Yorkers even named a street in his honor. But these days would dapper Duke Ellington feel at ease taking the A train 2 1/2 miles north from midtown Manhattan to black Harlem? Not if he believed the vision this New York City community conjures up in the minds of apprehensive whites: a postnuclear landscape of poverty and blight, where crack dealers plan gang wars in cratered tenements. To most Manhattanites from the wealthy southern part of the island, Harlem hardly exists, except as an old, obscure head wound -- the beast in the attic,...
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