An Old Staple of Black Culture Now Adds to a New Restaurant’s Décor
It started with Miss Susie. Miss Susie owns a brownstone a few doors from Dennis Decker on West 119th Street in Harlem, where over the years she rented out rooms and tenant after tenant left scraps of their lives behind. Last summer, Mr. Decker helped his 84-year-old neighbor, known to everyone simply as Miss Susie, by organizing a cleaning, and in the sifting came across a handful of vintage Jet magazines.
“They were so small, and so beautiful,” Mr. Decker said.
For decades Jet has been a staple in the black community, each compact issue a cultural chapter found at just about every barbershop, doctor’s office and grandmother’s coffee table. The copies in Miss Susie’s building. where she also lives, featured a black-and-white photograph on the cover, headlines like “How The Sit Down Strikes Hurt Southern Business” and articles about the boxer Joe Louis’s tax problems and the first black female dentists.
Around the same time Mr. Decker, a design and branding consultant, was helping Miss Susie, he was also working on a concept for Harlem Shake, a mom-and-pop-style burger joint on the corner of 124th Street and Lenox Avenue, which opened last month. Mr. Decker and the restaurant’s principal owner, Jelena Pasic, wanted something that suggested pride, but was yet humble and undeniably authentic.
“What’s a better representation,” Mr. Decker said. “I really wanted to honor the more recent past that many of our older neighbors have been through and still can remember.” He thought that as more and more businesses sprouted up in Harlem, “it’s the recent past we’re kind of losing.”
Now, 240 Jet magazine covers, ranging from 1952 to 2013, adorn two of the restaurant’s restroom walls in a giant collage of black history and culture through their images and headlines:
“Broadway Welcomes Negro Play’’ (1959);
“Negro Judge Fights For Court Reforms” (1965);
“Should A Black Politician Run For President?” (1971);
“Eddie Murphy: Race And Wit Make Cop Movie A Box Office Hit” (1986);
“Oprah Tells Why Blacks Who Bash Blacks Tick Her Off’’ (1990);
“Venus Williams Wins Wimbledon 2000 Tennis Championship’’ (2000);
“Is Your Child Next? Jordan Russell Davis, 1995-2012’’ (2013).
The display also serves as a kaleidoscope of famous black faces, like those of Duke Ellington, Thurgood Marshall, Cicely Tyson, Adam Clayton Powell, Richard Pryor, Michael Jordan and MC Hammer.
Another wall is dedicated to the Jet “Beauty Of The Week,” with rows and rows of black-and-white, pinup photos of women in swimsuits and short biographies, from the mid-20th century.
“It makes you stay in there longer,” said Yusef McDougal, 31, a customer, sitting at a table one afternoon with a burger, fries and red-velvet milkshake. “It’s history, and a lot of Harlem is in there, too.”
Articles also touched on everyday life, through the celebration and struggles of black firefighters, postal workers and nurses.
“Jet showed our shining stars,” said Camille Z. Charles, a sociology professor and the chairwoman of the Africana Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania, “but also blacks who are still struggling, for people to understand the importance of not forgetting those who are still struggling, and the responsibility that comes with black leadership.”
Critical benefit also came from the variety of positive images, Dr. Charles said. Growing up, “I used to read about Ben Carson in Jet magazine,” she said, referring to the neurosurgeon. “You learned about black people doing great things in science, doing great things in business.”
After Miss Susie told Mr. Decker that he could keep the eight magazines he pulled out of her place, he asked other neighbors and friends if they had any old Jet magazines lying around. Some did. However, the bulk of the Harlem Shake collection came from online purchases and auctions.
Vintage copies cost around $8. The most expensive issue featured Barack Obama winning the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. It cost about $27.
“I would sometimes set my alarm at 2 a.m. to be the last bidder,” said Ms. Pasic, the shop’s founder. Her thirst for the project reminded her of a Readers Digest-style magazine that her great-aunt collected in their native Croatia. Of her display of Jet magazines, she said, “everybody relates to it because their grandmothers, their mothers used to have it. Everybody feels it’s a part of their personal past.”
At its peak in the early 1990s, Jet sold an average of one million copies of each issue, said the editor in chief, Mitzi Miller. That does not include those who read it through passed around copies. Today, she said, Jet sells about 700,000 copies. It publishes every three weeks and has a newsstand price of $1.99.
“It helps to make sure we’re still a part of current conversation,” Ms Miller said. “It’s a new generation, some of whom haven’t seen those magazines.”
The oldest cover in the collage, from 1952, asks, “Are Negro Women Getting Sexier?”
Most of the images displayed from that time are of black women with fair skin and straight hair. Black men are almost nonexistent. A 1970 cover features a woman with an Afro and the headline: “Young, gifted and black lawyer …”
Entertainment and lifestyle covers started to dominate in the 1980s, yet news that both troubles and lifts black people remains constant. Placed in the collage next to the 1971 cover about a black politician running for president is a 2011 cover with an image of President Obama.
“It just gives me chills to see it,” Mr. Decker said of the two covers, “right there in the center.”
By KIA GREGORY