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A Sunday stroll down Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (but everybody still calls it 125th Street) between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue) takes the visitor past an armory of corrugated metal doors drawn protectively over shop facades. But on each of these doors a street genius named Franco has painted Pop-art murals appropriate to the goods sold inside: an underwater paradise for the fish shop, a spangled Eiffel Tower for the travel agency, a chain- laden Mr. T for the jewelry store. Midblock stands the legendary Apollo Theater, which brings Harlem alive every Wednesday with its Amateur Night display of singers, rap masters and a wonderfully gaudy fashion show. Next door is a vacant lot bearing the sign DANGER: KEEP OUT!
Harlem is certainly not a harmless place for residents or itinerants, but neither is it the city's worst crime area. In any case, fear is no excuse for missing out on Harlem's cultural and historical bounty. Prudent visitors, black or white, can ride a tour bus or a subway uptown during the day, drive or call for a cab at night, stroll with a worthy purpose on a Sunday-go-to- meeting afternoon. They will feel as comfortable on Amateur Night, with its superefficient security staff, as they would at Carnegie Hall. They will be made as welcome at a restaurant like Sylvia's as they would at an aunt's dinner table. They can take care and have fun.
Do this, and see the Harlem beneath the cliches, beyond its familiar notoriety as a graveyard for Great Society programs. True, the place is not what it was during Harlem's toniest decades, when swells partied at the Cotton Club (now defunct) and Joe Louis stayed at the Hotel Theresa (today an office building). Nor is Harlem what it may become in a looming decade of gentrification and white encroachment. But it is, at its best, a community that radiates warmth to outsiders who dare to embrace it. During Sunday service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Pastor Samuel Proctor greets white visitors (including chicken mogul Frank Perdue) to his congregation and asks if there are any from foreign lands. The roll call is impressive: a dozen countries, including the Netherlands. "The Netherlands!" booms Dr. Proctor. "That's where old Haarlem is. Well, friends, welcome to new Harlem!"
Peter Stuyvesant established Nieuw Haarlem in 1658, and it was later connected to New Amsterdam with a ten-mile road built by black slaves. During the colonial period, Harlem became a retreat for the Bleeckers, Delanceys, Beekmans and Rikers and in the 19th century a chic suburb for the well-to-do. Then, around 1880, the city extended its elevated lines to the north. Handsome neighborhoods sprang up, and by the early 1900s, Harlem bustled with urbanity. But the speculators had built too much too fast. So in 1904 a black real estate agent named Philip A. Payton rented apartments to blacks who were even then being displaced from their midtown homes by the new Pennsylvania Station railyards. The scheme succeeded beyond the speculators' wildest nightmares. By the 1920s, Harlem was mostly black.