Nation: No Place Like Home

(7 of 10)

Harlem's blazing antiSemitism. The fact is that some of Harlem's most flourishing enterprises are run by black millionaires who don't live there either, but at least they are black. "If we are unable to bring about an orderly transfer of business from whites to Negroes in Harlem, it will be done one way or the other," thunders James Lawson, president of the United African Nationalist Movement, head of the Harlem Council for Economic Development and a thoroughgoing demagogue. What Lawson means is clear. Last April half a dozen Negro punks entered a husband-and-wife clothing store on 125th Street, got into an argument and stabbed the wife, Mrs. Magit Sugar, to death with a double-edged dirk. Lawson said that the store, once worth $5,000, could now be bought from disconsolate Frank Sugar, a Hungarian refugee, for $150. Similar "expropriations," he predicts, will take place if whites do not sell out to Negroes.

Relief Pets. Anger over Harlem's housing took concrete shape last fall, in rabble-rousing Jesse Gray's "rent strike." All told, Gray claimed that 4,500 tenants from 325 buildings refused to pay their rent because their landlords had failed to rout the rats, drain the swampy basements and plug the holes in the walls and ceilings. Mayor Wagner lent his support by ordering a new drive against "slumlords," but the Buildings Department, with a backlog of 250,000 complaints, is still snowed under.

While the tenements steadily decay, Harlem's housing situation is looking up in other ways. The city, hoping to reverse the middle-class exodus by offering more attractive quarters, has adopted a three-pronged program of municipal loans for rehabilitating existing houses, public projects and private developments. Under the rehabilitation program, it has handed out $1,000,000 in 20-year, 4% loans since the beginning of the year to help landlords to save whatever is worth saving, chiefly the solidly built brownstones scattered throughout the area. Another $5,000,000 will flow in the near future. "With these loans," says Herbert B. Evans, Negro vice chairman of the city's Housing and Redevelopment Board, "we can go into the lousiest damned area in the city and do something. Some of these landlords have just quit, and we've got to move in."

Not Near Enough. In the last 15 years, some 25 public and private projects have been launched in Harlem at a cost of $370 million, providing space for 84,000 people. Some are in the planning stage, such as a $30 million development for 7,440 people on the site of the Polo Grounds, which started out as a playground for Manhattan's horsy set and later became one for baseball's horsehide set. But this is still nowhere near enough. For all the gripes by Negro intellectuals about the esthetic shortcomings of the projects, applications outnumber acceptances 9 to 1, and even in costlier developments like Lenox Terrace, a $40-a-room private venture, there is a long waiting list.

Critics complain that the projects wipe out small businessmen, leave slum dwellers with nowhere to go, and perpetuate the ghetto by "packaging" people in huge, blocky buildings. While there is something to their complaint, the fact is that the projects are the best hope of luring back the professional people, whose escape to the other boroughs and to the suburbs