Tourists who include Harlem in their New York City itineraries are only following a path well-worn by a long list of trend-setters who have recently made their way north of 110th Street between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers.
Most famously, former U.S. president Bill Clinton opened an office on 125th Street, Harlem's main street. His pre-diet attendance at local soul-food restaurants such as Sylvia's and Miss Mamie's Spoonbread Too is like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.
Martha Stewart regularly includes Harlem stories in her various media, including a profile of the Famous Fish Market -- a storefront take-out restaurant with the motto "everything is fresh, everything is fried" -- that, even pre-Martha, drew lineups for its fish sandwiches.
In the arts, not to mention real estate, avant-garde Manhattanites are turning Harlem into their corner of the city.
Sheila Bridges, named "America's Best Interior Designer" by CNN and Time magazine, has an office in Harlem and decorated Bill Clinton's. "There's nowhere else in the world that's really recognized the contributions that African-Americans have made, you know, socially, artistically," she says. "So I wanted to be in that neighbourhood."
Actor Marcia Gay Harden (co-starring in Mystic River) is thrilled to live on the same street as poet Maya Angelou, and Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections in a cramped 125th Street studio.
Many celebrities are getting involved in the cultural life of the neighbourhood. Clinton and Stewart, along with singers Jessye Norman and Bette Midler, are honorary committee members of Harlem Lost and Found, an exhibition of pictures and architectural objects at the Museum of the City of New York until Jan. 4.
Other personalities drawing tourists to Harlem are of the late, legendary kind: literary figures of the early 20th-century Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes; jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington; and political leaders such as Malcolm X.
One of the most influential catalysts in the growing interest in Harlem is architectural preservationist and Harlem resident Michael Henry Adams, whose book, Harlem Lost and Found, inspired the museum exhibition of the same name. Adams is sometimes involved with the specialized tours of Harlem listed in weekend editions of The New York Times or the Village Voice in Manhattan's tourist season. From time to time, for instance, he conducts Homo Harlem, a visit to locales associated with the gay and lesbian intelligentsia of the 1920s and 1930s.
Taking advantage of the museum exhibition, or Adams's book, will enrich a visitor's experience on a bus tour or a self-guided walk, not just by filling in architectural gaps but also by explaining the importance of the district's history as a capital of African America.
Symbolic of both its pride and its distinction from the rest of Manhattan, Harlem's major streets were renamed after members of the 1960s civil-rights movement. Eighth Avenue became Frederick Douglass Boulevard; Seventh Avenue became Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.; Lenox Avenue became Malcolm X Boulevard, and 125th St. became Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
On the street, people use the old names like old habits, but the new names appear as grace notes of justice on signs everywhere.
Not all of Harlem's historic sites have been properly preserved. Key landmark buildings such as the Cotton Club have been torn down, while others, such as the Hotel Theresa, where jazz greats and even Fidel Castro stayed, are no longer serving their original purposes. The façade of the Audubon Theatre and Ballroom, where Malcolm X was slain, is grafted onto a medical research centre.
That's more than exists of the demolished early 20th-century house built by black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy on West 136th Street for the daughter of C.J. Walker. Walker was America's first black, female millionaire, and made her fortune selling cosmetics and hair-care products to women of colour. Adams's book and the museum exhibit provide fascinating snapshots of this Lost Harlem.
Another source for visitors interested in Harlem is a chapter on the district in The Big Onion Guide to New York City, produced by Big Onion Walking Tours. Big Onion is also offering its "Historic Harlem" tours on Nov. 8 and 30, and Dec. 20. The tour includes stops at important residential areas: Striver's Row, named for the ambition of those who managed to reside in these lovely brownstones with alleys between and behind them; and Sugar Hill, named for those who had gone beyond striving and made it ("sugar" being slang for money).
Former residents of Sugar Hill include the late Thurgood Marshall, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and W.E.B. DuBois, sociologist, author and activist who, in 1896, became the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard.
Big Onion also visits sites associated with Harlem Renaissance leaders Zora Neal Hurston, Marcus Garvey and Langston Hughes -- even if the site of their boarding house is now a parking lot.
And then there are the gospel and jazz tours, the vanguard of modern Harlem tourism. Harlem Spirituals offers jazz tours Thursday and Saturday evenings and morning gospel tours on Sunday and Wednesday. Harlem Spirituals' gospel tour takes a quick bus ride past major Harlem sites, then to a Harlem church service, often at Abyssinian Baptist, followed by a soul-food lunch, likely at Sylvia's.
The jazz tour is basically the gospel tour with a visit to a nightclub instead of a church. Unfortunately, on the night I attended, the club, St. Nick's, turned out to be a hole in the wall with a lacklustre jazz trio performing mostly John Coltrane numbers.
Our Harlem Spirituals guide, however, was excellent. As he pointed out landmarks, he wove in some of the darker aspects of Harlem's history. Here, at the centre of black culture in the early 20th century, most of its jazz clubs and stores were white-owned and, in one way or another, discriminated against blacks. He told us about the protest led by Abyssinian Baptist pastor Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in 1934 against Blumstein's, then a major department store on 125th Street, under the banner, "Don't buy where you can't work."
Eventually, things changed at Blumstein's, and it became the first American department store to hire a black Santa Claus. Harlem Spiritual's tours may be a bit pricier than some of the others, such as Grayline's, which offers the district as an add-on to its tour of Uptown New York, but it's a much better value.
On a recent Grayline excursion, the best part was an unexpected detour caused by a local parade that forced the double-decker bus into areas of Harlem rarely shown on tourist maps of New York.
These streets do not, like 125th Street, host stores such as GAP, MAC Cosmetics, Disney or Starbucks. Instead, they include several abandoned buildings cheek-by-jowl with brownstones etched with beautiful architectural details, housing projects, lively looking bodegas, dumpsters in the middle of the street, a public school named for Mahalia Jackson, and local residents hanging out on street corners on a Sunday afternoon.
And, unlike those swells down in the rest of Manhattan, these locals waved at the runaway double-decker tour bus
If you go
TOURS
Big Onion Walking Tours: (212) 439-1090; http://www.bigonion.com.
Harlem Spirituals: (212) 391-0900; http://www.harlemspirituals.com.
WHERE TO EAT
Sylvia's: 328 Lenox Ave. (Malcolm X Blvd.); (212) 996-0660. Reservations only for parties of 10 or more.
Emily's: 1325 5th Ave.; (212) 996-1212.
Miss Mamie's Spoonbread: 366 W. 110th St.; (212) 865-6744.
Famous Fish Market: 684 Saint Nicholas Ave.; (212) 491-8323.
EXHIBITIONS
Harlem Lost and Found: The Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Ave. at 103rd Street; (212) 534-1672; http://www.mcny.org.
RECOMMENDED READING
Harlem Lost and Found, by Michael Henry Adams, Monacelli Press; The Big Onion Guide to New York City: Ten Historic Tours, by Seth Kamil, Eric Wakin and Kenneth T. Jackson, New York University Press.