Strolling in Harlem, NYC
Harlem Stroll
In 2020, I made a resolution as many of you may have. My resolution is to write vignettes about the two cities I love and live in: Paris & New York. I plan to do it at least once a month. Here is my first vignette. If you would like to make a comment, feel free. Any encouragement would be highly appreciated.
Last week, I went to Harlem to celebrate the birthday of a friend. We went to an African restaurant on 116th called La Savane. I hadn’t been in Harlem for years, except for last year. I went to The Wallach Art Gallery located on 129th and 9Ave. It is owned by Columbia University. I saw an exhibition called Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today.
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From downtown (West 4th) we took the A train to 125th Street. Because it gave us a chance to walk around the neighborhood as we went down to West 116th Street.
Harlem For Ever
What a great discovery.
Harlem has changed so much and is still in the midst of a revival. Many Columbia University students live here as the rents are lower than the ones closer to Central Park. In addition, a new large African community has moved there in the last 10 years. They are both bringing to the neighborhood a new look and a new feeling. Coffee shops, café concerts and restaurants are booming. One thing that struck me was the quietness of the neighborhood compared to downtown. In South Manhattan, the traffic is horrendous and construction sites are growing like mushrooms in a forest.
Jazz & Toni Morrison
As the weather was unusually warm for January and the day sunny, I noticed people sitting and chatting on stoops. It reminded me some of the vivid depictions in Jazz, a novel by Toni Morrison that I’m currently reading again.
We could not believe the feeling of space, peacefulness… The absence of car traffic and delivery trucks that downtown Manhattan is suffering from.
While strolling, we dreamed of moving there, thinking out loud how we could do it & what we will do there. We imagined how we would convince our friends to follow us to this new adventure…
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We ate a very simple homemade food, listening a mix of Afro-French musics. Then, we walked farther West and North to the Wallach Art Gallery. At every step, we were still enjoying and mesmerized by the unclogged avenues and streets.
Harlem inspires
There, we saw an exhibition called Waiting for Omar Gatlato: Contemporary Art from Algeria and its Diaspora. The exhibition conveys how contemporary Algerian visual artists and filmmakers approach and engage art as the decolonization process evolves.
My favorite piece was a pressure cooker. A symbol of France’s housewives feature of the 60’s, on which the artist glued a set of keyboard letters. It was sitting humorously on a stool in the middle of the room.
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Leaving the exhibition, my friends noticed through a large window facing the Hudson river a gigantic building under construction. Puzzled and out of curiosity, one of them asked a clerk what was this building.
The young clerk looked at us and said rather proudly, This is going to be the new Colombia MBA school.
My friend, the birthday girl, answered in disbelief:
A business school? What for? Don’t they know, we are in the middle of a climate crisis!
The clerk did not react to her comment. Think about it.
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