Changes are coming to 125th Street. Plans to rezone Harlem’s main artery look headed for approval in the city council, after a compromise to limit the height of new buildings to 19 stories. The amount of affordable housing in the plan has also been increased. While the look of 125th Street will change, it’s less clear what will happen to its identity.
The ninth edition of the Harlem Book Fair takes place today. Up to 70,000 visitors are expected on 135th Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, along with 300 exhibitors from the spectrum of African-American publishing. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter checked in on the uptown book scene.
The poet Langston Hughes died of cancer 40 years ago this month. His work spanned the time from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Power movement, and he is recognized as one of the great figures of American literature. But Hughes’s longtime home in Harlem hasn’t fared as well as his legacy – until recently. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter visited some of the young artists who are bringing the house back to life.
Boston Globe, March 2, 2007
NEW YORK—On the middle floor of a Harlem brownstone that once was home to Langston Hughes, the pianist Marc Cary holes up in a studio crowded with computers, keyboards, partly depleted bottles of red wine, and other flotsam of the creative process.
In the next room, his collaborator in business and music, Shon “Chance” Miller, a hip-hop artist and producer, lurks in similar fashion. Motema Music, the indie label on which Cary records, has its office in a space upstairs. And on the parlor floor, in the one fully renovated room, a concert piano stands proudly beneath a bank of stage lights.
Folks trundle up and down the narrow staircase and maneuver past drywall and over ripped-up carpet. Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, may have lived here, but the house is no elegant Harlem dowager. When the artists leased the building last year, they found it in a state unbecoming to the memory of its illustrious resident.
“It was in such disrepair and disrespect,” Cary says. Now, he says, they’re bringing the energy back, and he is starting to feel the presence of the luminaries who once met here. “Sometimes when you sit here – quietly – you can see something out of the corner of your eye. There’s a certain joy in here that’s come back to life.”
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