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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Michael Henry Adams is a preservationist with an unusual attachment to the history and houses of Harlem, an African-American neighborhood of vast reach, complicated history, and uncertain hopes at the northern end of Manhattan. Adams is an unusual figure in Harlem. He would be an unusual figure anywhere, except perhaps Edwardian London, or Harlem as it was seventy-five years ago. His daily costume in winter includes a bowler hat, a wasp-waisted camel-hair overcoat, a half-cut mustache of the kind one sees in portraits of early-twentieth-century art dealers, and a silver-handled cane. In summer, he exchanges the bowler for a straw boater. Like all passionate, self-shaped New Yorkers, he comes from Akron. He arrived in 1985 in the Harlem he had dreamed about as a boy, and, in the years since, he has been a chef for the family of the unlucky real-estate magnate Larry A. Silverstein, an occasional journalist, a graduate student, and now makes a frugal living by writing and giving guided tours. He lives on West 122nd Street, in a ground-floor apartment filled with pieces of woodwork and ironwork and furniture salvaged from demolition sites around the neighborhood. For years, he has labored there on his masterpiece, "Harlem Lost and Found," a history, which is to be published by Monacelli this fall.
He is a gentleman and a scholar, but he is also an activist of unusual audacity. He likes to picket, even if he is the only man on the picket line, and although his speaking voice is gentle and Anglophile, he has, for picketing occasions, a startling basso profundo that can penetrate across streets and into church basements and through the heads of dense and uncaring developers of every hue. In the pursuit of equal justice for Harlem's landmarks, he often forms one-man parades on behalf of old buildings threatened by commercial greed or government indifference.
"Only ten per cent of the eleven thousand designated landmarks in Manhattan are north of Ninety-sixth Street, and that doesn't seem like a just number," he says. His dream is to turn all of Harlem into a National Historic Landmark District, and for this cause he has, among other things, chained himself to the door of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. His knowledge of Harlem is encyclopedic, block by block and brownstone by brownstone, and he speaks excitedly of aubergine Art Nouveau grilles and Palladian exteriors as he walks along blocks where the conventional reports are of crack dens and flying bullets. "And this," he will announce on, say, 129th Street near Lenox, a beautiful streetscape filled with turn-of-the-century town houses, "is what the Times has called the most dangerous block in New York City."
Adams not only sees the glass as half full where others see it as half empty; he sees a glass where others see merely a puddle of stagnant water, spilled long ago. It would be fair to say that he exists, at times, in a Harlem of his own imagining only if one adds that nearly all Harlems are of their makers' imaginings, for Harlem is distinctive among New York neighborhoods in being a set of thwarted possibilities rather than a series of successful accommodations. "Somewhere I recall reading Lincoln Kirstein saying to someone that in the twenties Harlem was treated as just another arrondissement of Paris," Adams says. "That's my Harlem, and I believe it can return."
In the past few years, his vision has emerged from his studio to do battle with other people's visions of what Harlem can and should be -- a redoubt of racial resistance, or a poor people's refuge, or the real-estate brokers' Upper Upper West Side. Adams knows that his battle is quixotic, but he also likes tilting at windmills. He has even, in the past few months, led a charge against the plans of Calvin O. Butts III, the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, who is generally considered to be the most powerful man in Harlem, and who, if he thought of himself as a windmill at all, would probably think of himself as the kind of windmill that takes recalcitrant grain and grinds it very, very small.
On a cold, sunny February morning, Michael Henry Adams paid a call on his friend Mrs. Josephine E. Jones, at her terra-cotta-brick-and-brownstone Queen Anne-style town house on West 122nd Street. Mrs. Jones gives meaning to the cliche "pillar of the community" -- one can imagine entire buildings falling down without her support -- and pretty much embodies the past fifty years of Harlem history, from the great migration and the encroaching shadows to the new hope.
"I always promised myself that someday I would own a house," she said, sitting formally in the back parlor of the house that she reclaimed from an S.R.O. in the nineteen-seventies. The sun was streaming in from the street. "You see, I grew up in Gray Court, South Carolina, and we played around a house that was owned by the Shell family. This was a white family, you see, with a beautiful Victorian house, and we were crowded in our little place down there, and I promised myself that someday I would live in my own mansion, you see, own my own house. On June 24, 1946, I left the South and saw New York for the first time. I worked domestically, and then I became the manager at the cafeteria of the Standard Brands company. When my daughter Wendy was six months old, I realized...
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