by Charles Miles, NOMA

“Where do you live?”

“I live in Harlem . . . well, like West Harlem . . . or Hamilton Heights . . . actually, I don’t know what they are calling it now . . . actually, scratch that, I live Uptown . . . I guess.”

Similar conversations are often heard at get-togethers in New York City these days. “Where do you live?” is becoming a more difficult question to answer definitively. In fact it may even prompt the internal dialogue:

“What neighborhood do I live in exactly? And what are they calling it now?”

Take, for example, Harlem. While Harlem has experienced a real estate boom along with the rest of Manhattan during the past 10 years, possibly no other neighborhood has had its geographical boundaries and names stretched and morphed by those seeking to capitalize on its rediscovery. Many longtime residents have lamented various changes to the neighborhood’s character, and along with this has come a strange sense that the neighborhood’s very name is changing as well. This can reduce you to just giving your physical address when asked where you live—it’s all you can be sure of.

Harlem is as much a concept as a physical neighborhood, which makes it amenable to stretching and renaming. Harlem covers the largest area of any neighborhood in Manhattan, traditionally extending from 110th Street (Central Park South) north to 155th Street and across Manhattan between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers. This dry physical description of Harlem is superseded by the sense of place that defines the neighborhood so strongly.

This sense cuts both ways. Some see the neighborhood positively as an incubator of black culture, while others have historically feared the neighborhood as a hotbed of crime, a place to be avoided entirely. Both views have basis in truth, but as the crime rate in New York has declined and housing prices all over the city have skyrocketed, developers see Harlem as the final frontier. However, to attract potential buyers to Harlem, builders and realtors are faced with dilemmas. How do you get affluent customers to overlook Harlem’s reputation in a city with some of the highest racial and socioeconomic segregation in the entire country?

One option: convince buyers that they are not really in Harlem. People from outside of Harlem may view it as one undifferentiated mass, but the neighborhood is so physically large and diverse that it is actually broken down into multiple districts, which are not so demographically different from each other. Hamilton Heights, Sugar Hill, and Vinegar Hill are only three of the districts on the west side of the neighborhood. While these enclaves received their names and historic identities from topographical features or small historic landmarks within their vague boundaries, increasingly the names are used or created as marketing tools by realtors eager to promote the property for sale, but not overly eager to locate the property within Harlem itself. For example, Hamilton Heights is a name that does not have positive or negative connotations to people who are considering relocation into a new neighborhood. It’s a blank slate. When walking around Harlem, as you go past the increasing number of large real estate offices, you are bombarded with alluring advertisements for condo conversions in Sugar Hill, apartments in Hamilton Heights, brownstones in Striver’s Row area, but the word “Harlem” is increasingly hard to find when property is for sale.

The contortions and evasions of the developers and realtors are increasingly inventive. If no name exists for the place you are trying to sell, or the name that exists lacks the requisite pop, brainstorm until you think of an acronym that suggests youth and vitality. Just whatever you do, do not mention Harlem.

The section of West Harlem between 125th and 135th streets has historically been known as Manhattanville (not including those occasions when it is called Vinegar Hill or lumped in with Hamilton Heights). As you walk through, you may only see parking lots and storage facilities, yet you are walking through one of the most contested neighborhoods in Manhattan. The most notable physical feature of Manhattanville is a series of viaducts that carry noisy train and automobile traffic over 125th Street and are also used by film crews seeking a seedy look for crime dramas. The upper reaches of the viaduct are popular as camping sites for the homeless and have a reputation among residents as no-go zones. However, realtors have to market the area and have latched on the viaduct, renaming the neighborhood Viaduct Valley, or ViVa for short.

But at least promoters used a salient physical attribute to create the term ViVa. Other developers in central Harlem simply created a district that seems to be confined to one building. Prudential Douglas Elliman has marketed a new building at Frederick Douglass and 118th Street called SoHa 118-SoHa being an acronym for South Harlem or South of Harlem. The problem is that the only place in Harlem where South Harlem exists and is acknowledged as a district is on the nameplate and in the marketing materials for the building itself. And South of Harlem is commonly referred to as Central Park.

And SoHa 118 is not even the most fascinating condo name you find while walking around Harlem. Condo names are increasingly the primary way that famous artists in Harlem are remembered. A stroll can take you past the Ellington on the Park, the Ellison, and the Langston. Best of all, one finds the Kalahari condo development on 116th Street, whose name has no real relation to Harlem. And when you walk up towards Central Harlem, you see large banners promoting the SoHo North Condominiums, which are located on 124th Street—well north of SoHo indeed.

Evasion with intent to sell
A visit to the Web site for the development explains: “ . . . SoHo North combines the exclusive luxury of loft living with the rich cultural heritage of West Harlem.” Sounds nice. Except that 124th Street at Frederick Douglass is commonly viewed as being in the middle of Harlem, not in West Harlem, which is linked with higher income and education levels than Central Harlem. Combined with the use of “SoHo” in the condo’s name, the project comes across as an exercise in evasion with intent to sell. A look at some of the other development names on the Halstead Web site reinforces this notion, with buildings in other, perhaps less problematic neighborhoods adhering to the truth in advertising rule and simply using their physical address for a name. Names and boundaries matter in Harlem, and in New York City as a whole, which is why they have always been disputed. As you travel north along the avenues in Manhattan, Harlem announces itself with the change of street name: Seventh Avenue becomes Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, Eighth Avenue becomes Frederick Douglass Boulevard, and so on.

In the past, streets and developments were named via community and consensus as an assertion of identity and sense of place. The increasing fragmentation and renaming of Harlem today is driven by marketing and political strategies designed to ignore the realities of a neighborhood that has a per capita income one-third the average of its county—New York County, which has the largest income gap in the nation. In effect, the definitions of Harlem are becoming an economically driven, top-down calculation instead of a cultural and political affair. More than ever, neighborhoods are now brands and have to be marketed as such—but some brands need a little enhancement to sell. And gentrifying neighborhoods, often poor and minority, need more enhancement than others. A mixture of class, race, and real estate has always driven neighborhood change in New York City.

The situation in Harlem today is different because of the use of language in an attempt to obscure and negate the facts of the neighborhood for sales purposes. Minority groups and poorer residents have always seen Harlem as a place where they could define and control their own space. The current renaming craze is a transparent example of the ability of those with money (regardless of race) to come into a neighborhood with a defined identity and use language as a tool to reshape and redefine the neighborhood, in many cases without regard to historical precedent or reality. People of different economic levels can now live in Harlem and have wildly diverging names and definitions for it, which threatens the historic cohesion of the neighborhood.

So . . . what is in a name? In Harlem, names, the ability to name, and the use of names symbolize power and control. And the new names emerging are a sign that power and control in Harlem is starting to shift into new hands.

Copyright 2008 National Organization of Minority Architects. Reprinted with permission from the fall 2008 NOMA Magazine.