Novelist Ralph Ellison wrote in the mid-1960s that New York

City’s Harlem was “a slum” and “a ruin,” composed not only of

the “spires and crosses of churches” but, as well, of “garbage
and decay” (Clapp, 1984Clapp, J. A. (1984). The city: A
dictionary of quotable thoughts on cities and urban life. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey
Press. [Google Scholar], p. 77). Doubtless, the eminent African
American author could not have imagined then the
transformation that would eventually spread over the nation’s
center of African American culture. Ironically, the “spires and
crosses of churches” would eventually emblemize the
ecclesiastically centered nature of a movement to reverse the
neighborhood’s economic and physical decline. Historian Brian D.
Goldstein, immersing readers in the tortuous details of Harlem’s
resurgence, ably traces its evolution from the alt-adversarial
1960s to its gradual revitalization, largely at the hands of church-
affiliated community development corporations (CDCs), in the
1980s and thereafter.

In its early stages, the campaign to rebuild Harlem was heavily

influenced by Black radicals who sought community control over
planning and development decisions. A more or less constant
theme during this period was the primacy of confrontational
politics in advancing agendas. Rejecting the heavy hand of
centralized bureaucratic project planning with its allegedly token
input from residents, some citizen activists demanded outright
administrative dominion over decision making. Many opposed
government redevelopment programs and their emphasis on
comprehensive neighborhood clearance, household relocation,
and the building of large-scale modernist projects such as public
housing towers. Instead, some leaders called for a mixture of
housing and retail development consistent in scale with Harlem’s
historical streetscapes. Some activists desired rehabilitation of
older housing, whereas others decried “hand-me-down” housing
and wanted new residential construction. Not surprising,
property owners did not always see eye to eye with renters, and
merchants sometimes favored more commercial development
than residents wanted. As Goldstein reveals, Harlem’s power
structure was distributed across many fault lines.
Government officials placed greater emphasis on attracting
middle-class people than did low- and moderate-income
inhabitants. Institutions such as Columbia University desired
expansion of campus facilities and increased student and faculty
housing. Other interests lobbied for enlarging Harlem’s dwindling
industrial sector. Throughout, a racially charged undercurrent
advanced competing visions of a community owned and operated
by people of color vs. one balanced on the yin and yang of a
racially and socioeconomically heterogeneous population. In
short, determining who constituted the legitimate community and
reconciling their differences (much less successfully
implementing their plans) posed a Sisyphean challenge.

But the unrealistic dreams of 1960s radicals faded into the mists
of yesteryear with the dwindling of government largesse in
subsequent decades. As The Roots notes, however, a
communitarian vision had been implanted, hinting at the
possibilities of a new social order in Harlem. With the fading of
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society ambitions, the increasingly
powerful grip of neoliberalism would thus deconstruct those lofty
goals and deliver a quid pro quo demanding that, in return for a
scintilla of citizen influence, a plethora of capital accumulation
would be due.

Several subthemes appear in The Roots. For example, the book

recounts the role of New York State’s powerful Urban
Development Corporation (UDC) in choreographing the rebuilding
of Harlem, especially along 125th Street, its main commercial
corridor. A one-of-a-kind public entity, the UDC raised millions of
dollars through a combination of public subventions and private
investment capital. Moreover, it had the power to override some
local development regulations. But the UDC’s priorities leaned
strongly toward commercial and office development, whereas
some indigenous community-based organizations sought
affordable housing and convenient retail shopping. In the end, the
UDC’s financial dilemmas plunged it into default and it was
terminated in 1975. Though it produced a number of
redevelopment success stories across New York State, its
effectiveness in Harlem was problematic virtually from the start.
Readers are left to compare UDC’s top-down approach to
community revitalization versus the bottom-up CDC model that
succeeded it.

Another theme explores the roles played by several African

American activists in Harlem’s post-1960s renaissance. J. Max
Bond, Jr., for example, receives considerable attention. A
Harvard-trained architect who endured considerable racial
cruelty in the 1950s and early 1960s, Bond went on to play a
major leadership role in the seminal years of Harlem’s
revitalization. His struggles to reconcile a search for a truly
indigenous expression of African American cultural values in
architecture and design with the prevailing institutional and
professional norms of those times is ably narrated by Goldstein.
Another leader, James Dowdy, was the third director of the
Harlem Commonwealth Council. He was a plumber and high
school dropout who, despite his background—rose to
considerable power and influence over the 1970s. His talents
drew several millions of dollars to the Harlem Commonwealth
Council, thanks in considerable measure to the commitment of
U.S. Senator Jacob Javits, a strong Dowdy supporter. All the
while, Dowdy maintained a deep commitment to his version of
community control over Harlem’s development. The Rootsshines
a light on many of the personalities whose leadership
achievements risk being forgotten in the Harlem of the 21st
century.

Despite its subtitle, readers will not find much in this book that
probes or challenges the scholarly issues animating
contemporary gentrification discourse. Goldstein acknowledges
that his use of that term suffers from the same imprecision that
other studies have displayed. He indicates that he wishes to
avoid “simplistic frameworks of good and evil” (p. 14) in his
account of Harlem’s resurgence. Instead, he chooses to
document in remarkable detail the people, organizations,
programs, and goals powering Harlem’s most recent renaissance.

Nonetheless, the author makes clear that Harlem’s gentrification

arose at least in part as an unintended consequence of struggles
over community control and Black power in the 1960s and 1970s.
The very inclusiveness of early community-based organizations,
plus their often ambiguous means and ends, left the door open
for later groups to pursue goals such as economic integration
and commercial development. And when these goals were
pursued by Black home seekers and developers as well as by
Whites, the issue of race, though not neutralized, was
problematized to some degree by one of social class.

Goldstein’s book invites comparison with Derek Hyra’s

(2008Hyra, D. (2008). The new urban renewal: The economic
transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]) The New
Urban Renewal, which appeared nearly a decade earlier and
contrasts the revitalization of Harlem with that of Chicago’s
Bronzeville. In both communities, Hyra found that “middle income
blacks are replacing low-income African-American residents” (p.
4). Moreover, for-profit Black-owned businesses involving real
estate were “generating huge profits from Harlem’s
revitalization” (p. 106). Thus, Hyra’s account suggests a
community resurgence propelled as much by individual self-
interest as by African American unity.

Goldstein’s somewhat finer-grained analysis points out that the

decline of public funding for community development from the
1970s onward occasioned the abandonment of a race-based
vision for Harlem’s future. Instead, the need for private capital
necessitated a strategy of socioeconomic (as well as racial)
integration, as newer actors entered the real estate market.
Harlem would have to retain its identity as the capital of Black
America but, as well, it would have to accept a mixed-income,
mixed-race community of long-term residents and newcomers. To
some Harlemites, this shift symbolized an intractable rhetorical
contradiction. In describing such events, Goldstein deftly
delaminates the complex economic and racial layers underlying
Harlem’s revitalization.

The Hyra and Goldstein books differ, too, in their assessment of

the relative influence of church-affiliated entities. Goldstein
portrays organizations such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church’s
CDC as a leader in Harlem’s renaissance from the 1980s onward,
whereas Hyra refers to the neighborhood’s church-based CDCs as
“smaller players” in this movement (p. 106). Despite these
variations, the two studies appear to agree on many matters. But
Goldstein, a historian, and Hyra, a public affairs specialist, filter
their findings through somewhat divergent disciplinary lenses. In
my opinion, these two volumes offer plenty of grist for the mill to
stimulate constructive classroom discussions in courses on
housing, urban development and planning, urban politics, and
African American studies.

At 383 pages, The Roots probes in microscopic detail the last

half-century of Harlem’s transformation. Surprising, though, aside
from a few references to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant
revitalization process, the book treats Harlem largely in isolation
from the rest of New York. In doing so, the author relinquishes
the opportunity to compare and contrast the gentrification
process in different neighborhoods. One suspects that despite
the community’s much-vaunted reputation as the hub of African
American culture, at least some of the issues addressed in the
book are endemic to many neighborhoods undergoing
reinvestment in New York.

Another concern is the text itself, which is driven by narrative

but lacks tables or graphs to document population changes,
racial shifts, or other relevant metrics. For example, we learn
that Harlem’s Black population has declined with gentrification.
But it is not clear to what extent this may be due to normal
household mobility variables such as retirement, a job change,
outmigration to suburbia, or other life cycle matters, rather than
to involuntary displacement from evictions, lease terminations,
sharp rental increases, or steep property tax hikes. However,
though sidestepping the quantitative dimension, the book is
liberally illustrated. It includes an informative Harlem map, a
generous sprinkling of photographs depicting neighborhood
scenes, illustrative site plans of various proposed projects, and a
reproduction of a 1969 protest flyer. Moreover, Goldstein offers a
richly documented set of notes on his sources and methods that I
found to be almost as interesting as the text itself. The Roots of
Urban Renaissance stands as one of the most exhaustive
studies of Harlem’s physical and economic resurgence published
thus far in the 21st century.
 References
1. Clapp, J. A. (1984). The city: A dictionary of quotable
thoughts on cities and urban life. New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey Press.

[Google Scholar]

2. Hyra, D. (2008). The new urban renewal: The economic

transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.

[Google Scholar]

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