HARLEM is rising above its chequered past and claiming its position in a list of America's Great Places. And it has a few ideas we can try here, too.

Neil Fraser

AFTER the International Downtown Association's 53rd conference and world congress held in New York City from 14 to 18 September, our group visited a number of business improvement districts (BIDs) operating in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

We were five South Africans from Joburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth plus a Canadian from Toronto and had visited Washington DC and Philadelphia prior to the conference.

One of the improvement districts we visited was the 125th Street BID. The area in which it operates, mid-town Manhattan, has a history with which South Africans can resonate and a current programme from which we can learn.

Ever ebullient Barbara Askins, the president of the 125th Street BID - she was in Joburg for our Cities in Change conference in 2003 - gave our group a wonderful overview of the dedicated work of her organisation over the past 18 years.

125th Street is, of course, in Harlem, which stretches across Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson River and from the north boundary of Central Park, 110th Street, right up to 159th Street. 125th Street serves as this region's business corridor but also functions as a local retail street, providing a multitude of cultural, commercial and institutional offerings.

Turbulent history
Like Johannesburg, the area has a turbulent history of colonialism, apartheid (but not legislated), slavery, oppression, ghettoisation, crime and poverty but in the past couple of decades it has experienced the beginnings of an economic and social turnaround which it will build on through a new "vision" for the area.

Originally settled by the Dutch in 1637, the area was initially named Nieuw Haarlem after the Dutch city of Haarlem; it was later anglicised to Harlem by the British when they took over in 1664. The Dutch and British settlements were at the expense of local Native Americans. The settlement area remained a farming community until land values declined when the farmland was worked out somewhere between 1850 and 1870.

The land was then occupied by Irish squatters - Irish or not, not good for land prices! Recovery began with the extension of the elevated railways in 1880 and the decision to extend the underground railway to the area. Anticipation of these transport connections to the buoyant downtown area sparked off a building boom but, as with many such booms, it ended in a glut of space.

Much of this space was taken up by Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s and Jewish Harlem peaked in 1917 but thereafter declined. By 1930 part of it was known as Italian Harlem, now known as Spanish Harlem. So it has had its fair share of occupants of international origin.

The decline of living conditions for African-American New Yorkers in other parts of the city led to their moving to the area from as early as 1880 but more en masse from 1904. By 1920, Central Harlem was predominantly African-American but land holding seemed to have remained predominantly in white hands until the 1960s.

Dramatic decline
The population density had skyrocketed. Whereas Manhattan in 2000 had a density of 27 000 per square kilometre, Harlem in the 1920s was over 83 000. There was, however, no investment in private homes or businesses for nearly eight decades up to the 1990s. The area declined dramatically, buildings were abandoned, drug dealing, anti-social behaviour and crime moved in - huge parallels to Hillbrow - there were also riots in 1935 and 1943.

Harlem has, however, always been known as one of the centres of African American culture. The 1920s/30s had spawned great jazz and many resultant clubs and theatres, such as the Cotton Club, where the legendary Duke Ellington played - attendance was restricted to whites - and the famous Apollo Theatre, opened in 1934, which is still in use today. As an aside, one of the conference's social functions was held in the Hip Hop Cultural Centre at the Magic Johnson Theatre, which houses some unique artefacts and is a performance venue. Hip-hop is used to attract young people, who are then exposed to career development, civil rights, diet, nutrition, financial literacy and political awareness.

In 1994 an Empowerment Zone was established and money was funnelled into investment in the area. We had a small window when a similar programme was run by the Department of Local Government in the Gauteng provincial administration in the 1990s, on an obviously much smaller budget, and the city scored with money for the Gandhi Square revitalisation.

The Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) programme was established in 1993 by the Clinton administration as part of its community revitalisation strategy. The programme was designed to empower people and communities across the United States by inspiring Americans to work together to develop strategic plans to create jobs and opportunities in the country's most impoverished urban and rural areas.

Vision for better future
A nationwide competition for the designation of six urban EZs and 65 urban ECs began in January 1994 and each was awarded federal grant funds along with various tax benefits for EZ-based businesses. A community-based strategic plan for revitalisation was the fundamental requirement; communities had to assess their assets and problems, create a vision of a better future, and structure a plan for achieving that vision.

In the first round of the competition, 72 urban areas and 33 rural communities were designated. Each urban EZ received $100-million (about R682-million) and each rural EZ got $40-million, in performance grants for job creation and job-related activities. Upper Manhattan, which includes Harlem, was one of the designated areas.

In 1999, 20 additional economically distressed communities were designated as Round II Empowerment Zones, making them eligible for a share of $3,8-billion in federal grants and tax-exempt bonding authority. Becoming one of the designated EZs was clearly a big fillip for the Harlem community and area.

The 125th Street BID was established in 1989 with an extremely restricted budget that initially only allowed for two issues to be tackled - the design and production of a banner and sorting out a major street vendor problem; 125th Street was jammed with hawkers.

This was addressed by establishing a designated "African" market area to which all hawkers were moved (it is still going strong); it was followed by a street cleaning and maintenance programme. The BID then obtained a planning grant that enabled it to undertake some good, basic research into various aspects of the area. As Askins notes, "The detailed pedestrian counts (part of the research) empowered the BID in its further research, as no-one else had that level of information."

Partnership
A relatively short while back, the New York City council advised that it had developed a vision for 125th Street, which came as something of a surprise to the locals. The vision included designating a small area of the street for cultural purposes. Pulling as many political levers as possible, the community blocked the implementation of the vision and the BID set about creating a "community vision" in partnership with the Urban Design Lab and The Earth Institute, both at neighbouring Columbia University.

Columbia was a strategic partner particularly as it has been keen to obtain a 17-acre site in Harlem; and the BID and the community were able to influence the design of their project to ensure its community integration.

Here in Joburg, no influence appears to have affected the University of the Witwatersrand campus; only recently has the university relaxed its introverted focus and softened the barrier between itself and Braamfontein.

However, I wander. Two issues that became central to their research findings were the inherent value of their cultural base and the need for applied ecology - the BID wants to pilot a programme to convert food waste from the area's many restaurants and take-aways into energy.

An excellent report, Creating a Cultural Destination was the partners' response to the City's proposals and was generated "through a series of studios and studies" which "led to the creation of a performance model that integrates academia with actual business stakeholders to solve problems".

History and culture
The document presents "arguments that describe the risk of losing one of Harlem's most precious gems, its history and culture", and it incorporates practical and deliverable recommendations. It highlights some of the challenges that face cultural non-profit organisations on 125th Street, and this really sounds like home.

• Rapidly rising rents and property prices forcing closure or relocation;
• Inadequate economic support; and
• Inability to sustain necessary patronage and foot traffic figures.

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