ABSTRACT
So, the Department of City Planning has a planning problem. It needs to come up with a zoning change which will allow the real estate industry to score big on 125 th Street, Harlem USA and, at the same time, to appear as benign, arts-inspired, dialoguers. Creating openings for the boys who control the city is that agency’s motivating impulse when defining successful development—no matter what kind of happy drivel they throw at us when they compose their treatises on urban removal. Of course it’s obvious to anyone who walks historic 125 that the heart and soul of the neighborhood is at stake. Even tourists and other non-natives get a glimpse of that as they amble through; and they don’t have the collective memory—the familiarity with landmarks of resistance, the soapbox tradition of true democracy, loud notes boasting Aretha’s gospel and JB on the good foot every half block (real quality of life), the University on the Corner of Lenox Ave., the bent rims, even the blue tape (7th) and the red tape (8th) and all that inventive, desperate, exploitive, creative street hustling that an Ivy League education can’t suss out even as it teaches its own to do the same with a fountain pen.
