In Changing Harlem, Rift Between Old and New Business Owners
Leah Abraham opened her cafe on Lenox Avenue in 2001 with a track record in business and a determination to chalk up another success. It never occurred to her to court the local elected officials and business and church leaders — the Harlem establishment — and get their blessing before she opened her door.
“I never felt that I had to ask for permission or that I had to wait my turn,” said Ms. Abraham, owner of Settepani, a cafe and restaurant on Lenox Avenue near West 120th Street. “I have done whatever I wanted to do despite anyone’s blessing.”
She soon realized, though, that her approach “is very different than the way the old guard looks at doing business in Harlem.”
And so nearly 10 years later, she said, business is good, but local leaders like Representative Charles B. Rangel, whose office is nearby, have yet to hold a meeting or an event in her restaurant.
“If he has an event, he’ll have it at Sylvia’s,” she said. “That’s the power that they have.”
Before million-dollar condominiums, fancy boutiques and coffee shops began to sprout along Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Harlem was a struggling neighborhood of mom-and-pop shops, soul food restaurants and other small businesses that operated largely with a small-town exclusivity that is rarely replicated in other parts of the city.
Business deals were brokered over meals at places like Sylvia’s or in the pews of black churches, where local elected officials and other community leaders offered their blessings. It was there that new owners established relationships that often brought in business, as well as grants and financing.
Senior business owners said the meetings were as much about making intentions known as they were about showing respect — “kissing the rings,” many said.
“There were people in the community that you had to sell your ideas to: the politicians, the business organizations and churches, the nonprofit organizations,” said Londel Davis Sr., a former police officer who opened his first business, a deli, in 1983 and Londel’s, a bar and restaurant on Frederick Douglass Boulevard near 140th Street, in 1994. “They would support you with their business, and in return you supported them however you could.”
But with Harlem’s gentrification has come an unintended side effect: tensions between the neighborhood’s established business and political class and new business owners, some of whom view the old ways as patrimonial sentiment that is obsolete.
The schism seems to be as much about the old guard’s slowly losing its grip on power as it is about a perceived lack of respect shown by newcomers — a tension that many have said also exists in local politics.
Some say the rift is another indication of how much Harlem is changing.
“Today, I think instead of Harlem being viewed as a community, as a village, it is viewed as just another” business venture, said Walter J. Edwards, who opened his first business, a dry cleaner, in 1960, and later Full Spectrum, a real estate development company. “But how will those that opened the door be protected and taken care of?”
The old guard is still very active and, for the most part, still holds access to the purse strings to government loans and grants. At the top of the power heap is the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, which has had a presence in the neighborhood for 114 years.
The chamber, as well as other business associations, including the Harlem Business Alliance, where Mr. Edwards is the chairman, have long-established relationships with Harlem’s older political leaders.
Those groups have long been vehicles for “money coming in and power,” which were scarce in times when banks and other institutions did not widely lend to blacks, said Van DeWard Woods, president of Sylvia’s restaurant and the son of its matriarch, Sylvia Woods.
In contrast, many of the new business owners come in better financed and operate with a casual indifference for neighborhood rituals. They say they are more concerned with handling their business than coddling egos.
Nikoa Evans-Hendricks, an owner of N Boutique on Lenox Avenue, which opened in 2005, said that she, like many of the “young and progressive” business owners, respected those who came before them, but that the climate was right for fresh blood and ideas.
“The old guard doesn’t have as much influence on the new guard,” Ms. Evans-Hendricks said. “There isn’t that same sense of indebtedness.”
Longtime business owners argue that respect is due because it was their sacrifices that led to the gentrified Harlem the newcomers now enjoy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/nyregion/20harlem.html?pagewanted=2