In Harlem, Renaissance Theater Is at the Crossroads of Demolition and Preservation
Photo Credit
Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times
The Renaissance Theater and Casino
in Harlem has been vacant for more than 30 years. The doors and arched
Palladian windows are covered in warped sheets of wood. The tapestry
brick on the squat, blocklong two-story building is loose, and many of
the mosaic tiles inspired by architecture in North Africa have fallen
away. Tree branches pierce the roof.
One Sunday morning, an empty half-pint liquor bottle marked the ballroom entrance that Lindy hoppers, basketball fans and boxing enthusiasts once walked through. Down the street, the theater where Paul Robeson had performed is now a fenced-in dirt lot.
There are two competing visions about how to revitalize the Renaissance, which is along Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at West 137th Street. One calls for demolition. The other, preservation.
As
churchgoers and tourists walked by on a recent Sunday morning, the
preservation campaign was on full display. A man wearing a bowler hat
and round-framed glasses bellowed from the sidewalk a chant of three
woeful words: “Save Harlem now.”
Photo Credit
Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times
Starting
in mid-November, Michael Henry Adams, 58, has stood on the corner
outside the Renaissance on Sundays as a human bullhorn against plans to
tear it down. Led by the Abyssinian Development Corporation, the real estate arm of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a group of investors recently sold the building, once a storied social club owned, operated and frequented by blacks, to BRP Development Corporation
for $15 million. In November, BRP applied to New York City for a
demolition permit. The developer plans to turn the Renaissance into a
glassy apartment tower, with stores, a restaurant and a community center
below, next to Abyssinian Baptist Church.
“That to me is the cultural and historical catastrophe about to happen,” Mr. Adams said. “We have to save this.”
Meredith
Marshall, a managing partner at BRP and a longtime member of Abyssinian
Baptist Church, said that he respected the significance of the
Renaissance, but that unfortunately through time and neglect, “there’s
nothing to save but memories.”
The Renaissance opened in 1921. There was nothing like it.
Owned by William H. Roach, the Renaissance was a leading hot spot in Harlem and the city. Known as the Renny, it hosted Joe Louis
fights. Big bands led by Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Duke Ellington
performed on its stage. The Renaissance was also the home court, at a
time when blacks were barred from the National Basketball Association,
for the Black Fives
basketball team known as the Harlem Rens, regarded as one of the best
of its time. The adjacent 900-seat theater featured movies by Oscar Micheaux,
the first African-American to produce a feature-length film. The casino
was used for a 1923 anti-lynching meeting held by the N.A.A.C.P. In
1953, David N. Dinkins, who went on to become the city’s first black
mayor, and his bride held their wedding reception there.
The Renaissance started to taper in the 1960s as integration opened downtown clubs to blacks. It closed in 1979.
Mr. Adams, a historian, the author of the book “Harlem: Lost and Found”
and a tour guide based in Harlem, moved to the neighborhood from Akron,
Ohio, in 1985. He came for the graduate program in historic
preservation at Columbia University, but did not complete his degree.
Until recently, Mr. Adams worked as the community cultural associate for
State Senator Bill Perkins,
Democrat of Harlem. Mr. Adams seemingly cannot walk along a Harlem
street without stopping to admire the gorgeous architecture of a
building that now houses a business or a restaurant, or to share its
back story.
There are a number of historical districts in Harlem. Still, Mr. Adams has long argued that the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission
has ignored much of the neighborhood. On occasion, his protests have
gotten him arrested for disturbing the peace, mostly recently outside
the Renaissance. Bit by bit, Mr. Adams said, too many cultural and
historical sites in Harlem — sites that make Harlem, Harlem, made iconic
through black achievement — have been chiseled away. His requiem of
places erased in whole or in part includes: the Cotton Club, the Lafayette Theater, Connie’s Inn, the Ubangi Club, the Audubon Ballroom, the Savoy Ballroom, the Harlem Opera House, Madam Walker’s house and beauty salon, Smalls’ Paradise, the Rockland Palace dance hall, Lewisohn Stadium, Pabst’s Harlem, the Eisleben Building, the Church of the Master and the Lenox Lounge.
In
part, because such cultural markers have been lost, the Renaissance,
which never officially gained landmark status, takes on even more
meaning.
“There
is nothing left. This is it,” Mr. Adams said. “It defines the
community. If it’s gone — ” he paused and then said, his voice rising:
“You can name streets after dead black leaders all you want, but what’s
left for people to see? It’s cultural genocide.”
On a recent Sunday, Mr. Adams was joined by Claude Johnson, founder and executive director of the Black Fives Foundation,
devoted to the history of the black basketball league. “What hurts so
much about the demolition of this building,” Mr. Johnson said, “is that
this was the heart of black culture.”
But
what the preservationists see as an attempt to destroy history was born
out of an effort to save it. More than a decade after the Renaissance
closed, when the building was littered with trash and overrun by vermin,
the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III,
pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, organized a group of small
business owners in Harlem to buy the site. The group bought the $300,000
mortgage for the Renaissance in 1991, the same year that landmark
status of the building was proposed to the city’s landmarks commission;
in 1997, a court-appointed mediator awarded the business owners the
title to the property.
“The
idea was we don’t need downtown hotels,” said Kevin McGruder, who at
the time was the real estate director at Abyssinian Development
Corporation and who is now assisting Mr. Adams and others on possible
ways to preserve the Renaissance. “We can do events here.”
Abyssinian
Development, Mr. Butts said in 1995, planned to restore the building as
a ballroom with a restaurant and a 500-seat theater. The Renaissance,
however, continued to languish.
“Everybody
wanted to develop it,” he said in an interview this month with Mr.
Marshall of BRP Development. “But all of them had big ideas and no
money.”
In
2007, Mr. Butts successfully lobbied the landmarks commission to have
it removed from consideration, he said, to spur its redevelopment. At
the time, the development corporation said it would replace the
Renaissance with a 13-story apartment house but that it would save the
exterior of the northern part of the complex. This would be incorporated
into a larger performance, ballroom and community space. Still, the
Renaissance sat.
“It should have been landmarked,” said Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy,
adding that she gave Mr. Adams credit for raising awareness. But in
2007, the conservancy sided with Abyssinian in saying that the building
should not gain landmark status. Looking back, Ms. Breen said, “Maybe
it’s a lesson.” But at some point, she said, preservation comes down to
economics. “And is someone willing to invest to put it all together, and
to what use?” she said. “It’s a shame to see it deteriorate like
that.”
Photo Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Sometimes it is too late.
The Renaissance sits along a somewhat barren strip near the storied Strivers Row
townhouses and a French-Senegalese restaurant, Ponty Bistro. Most of
the surrounding residents are working class and black. More than a third
of the households in this section of Harlem have incomes of less than
$25,000 a year, census data show.
“The greatest need, perhaps in our community today after education, is housing,” Mr. Butts said.
The
construction project will include a 134-unit apartment building, with
affordably priced homes, Mr. Marshall said, and 17,500 square feet of
retail space. The project’s estimated cost is $70 million.
The
site will also include an education center, where Mr. Butts said
students can learn life skills, get homework help and study cultural
figures such as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Maya Angelou.
It will also have a performance space where, he imagined, students can
revive classic works like “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry.
For him, it is the same mission that he had more than two decades ago.
But none of the Renaissance building would remain.
“If I could save it, I would,” Mr. Butts said.
Some
remain unconvinced. “I can’t see why we can’t, or the developer did not
feel it necessary to, keep the facade,” Chet Whye, a community activist
in Harlem, said. “And to add insult to injury, they’re going to call
the building the Renny.”
Mr. Marshall sees it as a level of preservation.
“I
want to preserve as much of Harlem as I can,” he said. He hopes to
salvage some of the mosaic near the parapet of the old building, maybe
for an interior archway. The Renaissance has a long, deep history, he
said, but he echoed that there is little left to save. “We’re going to
remove the remnants and build anew.”
Mr. Adams contends that people save what they want to save.
Days
before his next protest, a passer-by stopped Mr. Adams by the
Renaissance and thanked him for his preservation efforts. The two then
bumped elbows. “Some cannot imagine how you can take a wreck like that
and bring it back to life,” Mr. Adams said. “But what will be lost in
the meantime is a great deal, and that’s what I’m fighting against.”
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