{"id":1929,"date":"2025-02-10T20:33:56","date_gmt":"2025-02-10T20:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/?p=1929"},"modified":"2025-02-10T21:05:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-10T21:05:06","slug":"frommers-memorable-walks-in-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/frommers-memorable-walks-in-new-york\/","title":{"rendered":"Frommer’s Memorable Walks in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Official Description<\/h3>

Follow Frommer’s for an up-close and personal look at the Big Apple. Discover the ethnic neighborhoods, literary bars, and stunningly diverse architecture that make the city unique.<\/p>

LET FROMMER’S TAKE YOU TO:<\/p>

  • The chic SoHo scene, packed with historic buildings, cutting-edge art galleries, and gourmet bistros<\/li>
  • The sights and sounds of Chinatown, with a stop for the city’s best dim sum<\/li>
  • The posh Upper East Side, lined with the old money mansions of New York’s richest families<\/li>
  • The energy and history of revitalized Harlem<\/li>
  • The literary haunts (past and present) of Greenwich Village

    <\/li><\/ul>

    With easy-to-use directions and maps-and the best places to take a break along the way<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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    Author Elevates Guide Above the Usual High Standard<\/h3>
    <\/div>

    This is a super book packed with great information! Reid Bramblett, while working within the generally great guidelines of the Frommer’s travel series, also brings out his quirky and appealing sense of humor and warmth. (I actually sought out this book because I had bought another guide he had written.) He tells these great stories about SoHo, for example, that make it more than just a listing of information.<\/p>

    Like all the Frommer’s guides, this provides great details on what to see, but encourages you to explore on your own as well. I have practically planned my trip around Reid’s advice on the neighborhood walks, and this little book is a much more convenient and authentic way to experience New York than on a bus or something.<\/p>

    Like I said, any Frommer’s book is great. The extra bonus on this book is the author’s humor and warmth.<\/p><\/div>

    Peter Rasey from Chicago, IL<\/div>
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    A compact, considerate guide and a lovely way to get to know New York<\/h3>
    <\/div>

    In all of the walking tours, Bramblett includes the same thoughtful attention to detail and the concerns of the visitor on foot, making for a compact, considerate guide and a lovely way to get to know New York.<\/p>

    A color map of the Manhattan subway system greets you as you open Memorable Walks in New York, right inside the front cover, setting the tone of convenient, accessible information. It’s a very good start. The rest of the book follows suit with 10 walking tours, taking in Chinatown, the Lower East Side, SoHo, the Village, Central Park, the Financial District, Lower Manhattan, and the Upper East and West Sides.<\/p>

    Each tour provides subway-route starting points; a time estimate (generally three to five hours, not including restaurant stops); an excellent map of each neighborhood and its notable sites; plus a word of advice on the best times to be (or not to be) walking there. Then there’s each walking-tour narrative, pointing out historic landmarks and events, and providing detailed route instructions for 20 to 50 notable sites.<\/p>

    For the Chinatown tour, for example, 27 points of interest are listed on the itinerary, including vegetable sellers on Baxter Street, the Manhattan Bridge (built in 1905), Confucius Plaza (first major public-funded housing project built for Chinese use), and Bloody Angle, where two Chinatown gangs engaged in fierce turf warfare. There’s a profile of dim sum, a selection of Chinese restaurants suitable for lunch breaks, the Ming Fay Book Store, the Chinatown History Museum, and Columbus Park. The tour ends on Rutgers Street near the East Broadway F-line subway entrance, a location you can find easily enough on that front-page subway map.<\/p><\/div>

    Stephanie Gold (Official Amazon review)<\/div>
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    Easy to use…<\/h3>
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    It’s easy to use, indexed and provides the perfect amount of historical and cultural background on what you’re seeing as you tour Manhattan by foot.<\/p><\/div>

    Eric Breeland<\/div>
    Knoxville News-Sentinel<\/div>
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    Terrific guide to Manhattan<\/h3>
    <\/div>

    We recently returned from a trip to Manhattan and used this book (among others) to take a few self-guided walking tours. This book was easy to carry and filled with useful and fun information. It’s well organized and includes info on nearby restaurants and transportation. Emphasis on the cultural, literary and political history of each area.<\/p><\/div>

    Audrey Frances<\/div>
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    Great book<\/h3>
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    Great book. It was a nice guide for a trip to NYC.<\/span><\/p><\/div>

    Lee T.<\/div>
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    Great book for NYC Fans<\/h3>
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    The book is great for anyone wishing to explore NYC neighborhoods. This edition also includes walking tours of upper midtown which I don’t believe later editions do.<\/span><\/p><\/div>

    Pat from MD<\/div>
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    New York City Guide<\/h3>
    <\/div>

    This book is full of walks around New York City, in many different neighborhoods. There are directions on where to start, places to eat along the way, and other interesting sights to see, as well as maps to follow. We look forward to using it on our next trip to the city.<\/span><\/p><\/div>

    L. Young<\/div>
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    Morningside Heights & Harlem <\/div><\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/path><\/svg><\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/path><\/svg><\/span>\n\t\t<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/summary>\n\t\t\t\t
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    Morningside Heights & Harlem<\/b><\/p>

    Start: <\/b>110th Street and Broadway.<\/p>

    Subway: <\/b>1, 9 to Cathedral Parkway (110th Street)<\/p>

    Finish: <\/b>125th Street.<\/p>

    Time: <\/b>Approximately 4 hours.<\/p>

    Best Time: <\/b>Wednesdays (for Amateur Night at the Apollo).<\/p>

    Harlem’s not just a neighborhood, it’s a whole separate city. No, seriously. The Dutch founded two cities on this isle between the East River and the Hudson Estuary (if you want to get technical, the Hudson is a fjord-like tidal estuary here in the city; it doesn’t become a proper river until way upstate where the tides cease to have an effect).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    The first of those early Dutch colonies was Nieuw Amsterdam, down in the tip of Manhattan and bounded by the wall of Wall Street, with farmland north of the city walls (“farm” in Dutch is bouwerie<\/i>, <\/i>and the Bowery district was once just that).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    In 1658, way up the East River, where the island started narrowing and an Indian village once lay, the founded a separate town called Nieuw Harlem. It took quite a while for the two communities, New York and New Harlem, to grow together and fuse into one city (it didn’t help matters that someone tossed a big old park in between the two).\u00a0<\/p>

    \u00a0<\/p>

    In 1837, the railroad brought development to this sleepy town of just over 200 residents, but also the squalor of a factory-and-warehouse neighborhood. The farms disappeared, and Irish immigrants arrived in droves looking for cheap housing (and by “cheap,” I mean “squatting for free.”)<\/p>

    East Harlem, its landscaped slashed open by still more railroad lines in the 1880s, never grew out of its bottom-of-the-economic-ladder, working-class roots as successive waves of the most downtrodden citizens called it home: Russians, Italians, Irish, Hungarians, Scandinavians, Spaniards, Jews, and eventually Puerto Ricans.<\/p>

    The core of Harlem slowly went middle class, a largely German population building all the family brownstones and rowhomes that line many of its streets to this day.\u00a0<\/p>

    When the IRT subway line extended up here in 1901, though, immigrants from the crowded Lower East Side poured into this neighborhood of lower rents and more space, and by 1917 Harlem had some 170,000 Jewish residents. This crashed the housing market, and when the Jews moved on, the city’s impoverished and oppressed black community saw a great opportunity to secure excellent housing at low cost and they, in their turn, moved in.<\/p>

    This changeover in the neighborhood’s make-up dovetailed nicely with the opening up of the country after the Civil War as more and more black sharecroppers left the south and workers sailed up from the Caribbean, all looking for a better life.\u00a0<\/p>

    As with almost every immigrant group in the first three decades of the 20th century, when you wanted to find those streets paved with gold, New York City was the place to go\u2014and the place to live in New York, if you were a black man, was Harlem.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    From 1920 to 1930, Harlem’s black population swelled from 83,000 to almost 204,000, and they began brewing up a distinctive cultural mix of their own that became known as the Harlem Renaissance.<\/b> W.E.B. Du Bois encouraged his African brothers and sisters to explore their own culture and expand their own intellects. Harlem’s creative geniuses responded in force. Langston Hughes penned his poetry and Eubie Black and Noble Sissle wrote plays (in which Florence Mills acted). William H. Johnson and Aaron Douglas painted while Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington headlined at the (whites-only) Cotton Club. Marcus Garvey\u00a0 <\/span>(see box on p TK) started telling blacks it was O.K. to be proud of their own heritage.<\/p>

    Even with that prolific output, and even given a fashion for “negro entertainments” among white society at the time, 1929 and the Great Depression snuffed out the Renaissance. And it must be remembered that the theaters, concert halls, and other venues were almost entirely white-owned.\u00a0<\/p>

    Black Harlem may have created their own renaissance, but its was the whites who profited from it. Langston Hughes, who had a way with words, put it “The ordinary negro hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”<\/p>

    The thirties were rough all over, but in Harlem there’s at least evidence that they got through it by being a community. Some of the theaters might have closed down, but they could still entertain at so-called “rent parties”\u2014bathtub gin to drink, and act or two, and the proceeds went to pay this month’s rent. Tensions in the city started running high, of course, and the race riots started in 1935.\u00a0<\/p>

    After World War II, African American culture turned its eyes once again to Harlem as Malcolm X and other Muslim ministers began preaching in the mosques that suddenly began popping up and the Nation of Islam was founded at 116th St. and Lenox Ave. Tensions increased, and race riots plagued Harlem throughout the 1960s (but where didn’t <\/i>they in this mixed-up country during the Civil Rights movement?).<\/p>

    The problem is, things didn’t really get better for Harlem with the new civil rights laws and even the slowly increasing tolerance among all Americans. The neighborhood just got poorer and poorer, the landlords more corrupt, the people more dispirited, the gangs rougher.\u00a0<\/p>

    In some parts, Harlem looked more like a Third World shanty-town that just happened to have nice shanties. So much was abandoned, boarded up, burned-out, squatted in, and half-ruined with so many landlords eventually caught as tax cheats, that by the end of the 1970s the city eventually found itself in ownership of about 65% of the neighborhood. And, shame on them, it took them almost 30 years to do something useful to turn the area around.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    By the mid 1990s, Harlem was still in a pitiful state. When compared to the rest of NYC, it had nearly twice the unemployment and had a 20% lower median income. Even more chillingly, a combination of poor sanitation, lack of health care, gang violence, and disease epidemics such as AIDS gave Harlem a death rate five times <\/i>the city’s average\u2014and those are 1997 figures!<\/p>

    But 1997 was perhaps the nadir of Harlem’s troubles. In the years since, it has started on a remarkable turn-around. Millions in investments and seed money have been poured in for smart growth to jump-start local businesses. Housing plans have rehabilitated rowhomes and created lower income co-ops and apartments (not those god-awful projects).\u00a0<\/p>

    New shopping centers are opening up every year, cultural institutions are mushrooming across the landscape, and galleries are popping up. What’s more, middle class folks from outside the neighborhood have already begun shopping for bargains on homes that would cost three to five times as much if they were just a dozen or two block further south (though not for long).<\/p>

    All that flux and change hasn’t altered Harlem’s deep, highly personal identity. Harlem is an area where community pride has renamed the major thoroughfares. Eighth Avenue in these parts is called Frederick Douglass Blvd. In 1972, when Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. died, Seventh Avenue was promptly renamed for the local preacher-cum Congressman. Sixth Avenue was long ago dubbed Lenox Avenue after James Lenox, whose private collection of some 85,000 books\u2014not to mention a half million dollar donation\u2014helped form the core of the New York Public Library, which was being established in the 1880s by John Jacob Astor’s people. In 1987 this street received yet another name, Malcolm X Boulevard, though that one really hasn’t stuck and most people still call it “Lenox.” Ditto for 125th Street, which signposts insist is now “Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard,” though rarely will you ever hear it called that.<\/p>

    This is a neighborhood of gorgeous (if often decaying) brownstones and rowhomes, of busy barbershops and nail salons where old friends pass the day in good company, of street markets and wide, slightly desolate boulevards, of tiny crowded restaurants and more churches than you could shake a crucifix at\u2014not to mention temples, mosques, and other houses of worship that make up the devout bouillabaisse of Harlem’s mixed community.<\/p>

    One of my favorite things about walking around Harlem has to be the chance to sit down and dig into a plate piled high with soul food<\/b>\u2014succulent fried chicken, sticky-fingers barbecue, slightly spiced mac and cheese, mashed potatoes with gravy, black-eyed peas, collard greens, grits, hush puppies, sweet potato pie, and spoon bread. There are also plenty of restaurants serving West African and Caribbean cuisines.<\/p>

    Many people associate Harlem with African Americans, but as we’ve seen that wasn’t always the case, and it still isn’t entirely accurate. The whole of East Harlem is better known as “the Barrio<\/b>“\u2014or, if you’re partial to song lyrics, Spanish Harlem\u2014one of the largest Latino neighborhoods in the city, and Italian Harlem still exists around 116th St. and Pleasant Avenue.\u00a0<\/p>

    Heck, there’s even a sliver of Harlem that’s traditionally Irish Catholic (I’ve never found it, but comedian-philosopher George Carlin claims to have grown up there).\u00a0<\/p>

    The recent influx of bargain-hunting downtowners and cash-strapped Columbia grads who fail to move away after graduation have brought more white faces to the urban mix in these streets (especially to those below 116th). These days, Harlem is seeing a degree of racial integration that surely would bring a smile to Dr. King’s face\u2014even if everybody still calls his boulevard “125th St.”<\/p>

    That said, for a century now, the bulk of Harlem has been black, it’s overarching identity African American, and it’s that culture, that history, and those monuments that make this walk interesting.\u00a0<\/p>

    However, recently the neighborhood’s second Renaissance has been pulling, and an increasingly insane housing market downtown been pushing, young artists and professionals of other races up here in increasing numbers. Many worry that these newcomers and all they entail will gentrify the neighborhood so quickly the poor and working-class locals will be forced out.<\/p>

    Sure, so far most redevelopment efforts have been carefully controlled and aimed entirely at helping the community: low-cost\/high-quality rental apartments and co-ops, the rehabilitation of brownstones and other row homes, and the construction of shopping centers anchored by giant supermarkets. (On several occasions, I’ve overheard long-term residents marvel to each other over the new convenience of shopping, how they no longer have to head into the Bronx for a proper supermarket.)\u00a0<\/p>

    However, there is a downside to making a community suddenly so inviting. Salivating speculative developers and would-be landlords are snapping up swathes of real estate and driving most of the free market housing prices up by double-digit percentages every year.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Fair warning: once we leave Morningside Heights<\/b> with its cathedrals and colleges and cross into Harlem proper, this will not always be the prettiest of walks. Much of the neighborhood is still struggling out of its old urban slum identity of gutted buildings and an oppressed, impoverished populace.\u00a0<\/p>

    There are plenty of “development corporations” and offices devoted to helping out new businesses, but alas they are outnumbered by the boarded-up brownstones, abandoned apartment buildings, and derelict store-fronts. The neighborhood still has a long way to go.<\/p>

    So, yes, Harlem is a neighborhood in flux, undergoing its biggest change since the civil rights era. However, to my mind this only makes it all the more exciting to wander, to explore, to dig into the soul food (mmm, soul food), and to witness firsthand this second Harlem Renaissance.<\/p>

    Our walk actually doesn’t start in Harlem, but in the neighboring district called Morningside Heights, perched atop a cliff between Harlem and the Hudson. The land was too steep and rocky and isolated to be developed and long remained largely drowsy farmland (along with the usual insane asylum and orphanage).\u00a0<\/p>

    Then 1880 brought Riverside Drive, the Eighth Avenue El, and the developers. Still, it remains a somewhat more stately and wide-open area of Manhattan, defined by institutes of learning (Columbia University, Barnard College, the Union and Jewish Theological Seminaries, Teacher’s College) and gargantuan houses of worship (St. John the Divine and Riverside Church).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Note that you could very easily make this into two shorter walks; one of Mornginside Heights, the other of Harlem (just grab the 2 or 3 subway to 116th Street and Amy Ruth’s).<\/i><\/p>

    From the 110th street subway stop, walk east on Cathedral Parkway (a.k.a. 110th Street), noting the funky gargoylish stone braces under the lower level windows of no. 527 on the left. Turn left up Amsterdam Avenue to our first stop and a nip of bracing brew.<\/p>

    Starting Out: Hungarian Caf\u00e9,<\/b> 1030 Amsterdam Ave (tel. 212\/866-4230), popular with Columbia students for its scrumptious Eastern European pastries, Vienna-style coffee, and lethal rum balls. This simple, delightfully dingy cafe also has some tables out on the sidewalk looking across the street to our first stop, the:<\/p>

    1. Peace Fountain,<\/b> built in 1985 by Greg Wyatt, a pile of swirling bronze with Michael the Archangel sticking it to Satan atop a double-helix pedestal of DNA. Weird. Much more charming is the “ring of Freedom” encircling the fountain, a series of animals dancing along the rail to meet at a large Noah’s Arc, all of them molded by middle\u2013 and high-schoolers. Surrounding the fountain are book-like plaques of educators, writers, musician, philosophers, and other cultural heroes, while beyond, in the park, a 40-foot-high Neo-gothic Outdoor Pulpit <\/b>of 1916 vintage stands forlornly with only a wandering, bedraggled, and much-photographed peacock to keep it company.<\/p>

    Next-door is the unmissable bulk of:<\/p>

    2. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine <\/b>(tel. 212\/316-7540, www.stjohndivine.org). For those of you doing the math on your fingers and wondering how NYC can have two cathedrals (St. Patrick’s and St. John’s) the answer is: Episcopalians. St. Paddy’s is Catholic. St. John’s has the better organ. Oh, and at 121,000 square feet, it’s also the largest Gothic-style church in the entire world (that THAT, Europe). At 146 feet wide, it’s twice as broad as Westminster, the roof towers 177 feet above the ground, and its record-breaking length of 601 feet led to the quip that it would fit “Two football fields, end to end, with room left for the football.”<\/p>

    It actually wasn’t supposed to be Gothic at all. The original architects drew up plans for a structure in the then-fashionable neo-Romanesque style, but between the 1887 purchase of the land, the 1892 ceremonial laying of the cornerstone, and 1911 when the choir at least was finally put in place, the old plan was chucked and Ralph Adams Cram came in with his own grandly Gothic ideas. By 1935, they had a finished nave and the cathedral had its formal debutante party on November 30, 1941. One week later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and World War II put a halt to construction, which only continued fitfully thereafter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    By 1967, the church decided to start pouring any funds into helping the community, and it wasn’t until 1978 that they started raising the cash to continue the masonry. By 1992, with just 50 feet of the first tower completed, work pretty much halted, with most of the building funds going to preserving the raw, half-finished structure (though they did continue to carve the statuary around the main door, completed in 1997). Many despair that, in this secular age, it will never be completed, but as Ed Koch pointed out way back in 1979 “I am told that some of the great cathedrals took over five hundred years to build. But I would like to remind you that we are only in our first hundred years.” Well, at this point make that a bit over 110, but still, New York’s well ahead of the scheduling curve on cathedral building.<\/p>

    Then, in December 18, 2001, a fire raged through the north transept, destroying the gift shop, charring two of the priceless tapestries hanging on the north wall, and threatening the fabric of the cathedral itself.<\/p>

    That doesn’t mean it doesn’t horde some fantastic artistic treasures inside amongst the thematic chapels (dedicated to sports, poets, patriots, lawyers, medicine, firemen, conservation, and more). The stone bones of the piers and crossing may be delightfully raw, rough, and half-finished, but the decorations went ahead full steam.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    There is not one, but two sets of Renaissance-era tapestries. The Mortlake Tapestries in the chapels were woven in 1623 on English looms, but the design\u2014the acts of the Apostles\u2014was actually a commission by Pope Leo X to Renaissance titian Raphael, who drew up the original sketches they are based upon. Hanging above the choir, the Barberini Tapestries are also from the 17th century, this time depicting scenes from the Life of Christ and woven on Cardinal Barberini’s papal tapestry factory. Two of them, the Last Supper <\/i>and the Resurrection,<\/i> were severely damaged in the 2001 fire and are off at a lab where they are attempting to salvage what they can.<\/p>

    The rose window, 50 feet across if it’s an inch, is composed of 10,000 pieces of colored glass, and that Christ figure in the center is life-sized (assuming Jesus was tall for his era, at 5′ 7″). The 61 silver trumpets ranked below it belong to the Ernest M. Skinner organ, 8,035 pipes put together in 1910 (it got an overhaul and a new stop in 1954, but otherwise is an original).<\/p>

    Head into the ambulatory (the hallway that wraps around the choir and back behind the altar) from the left aisle. The third chapel (St. Columba) and the fourth, or central chapel (St. Savior’s) are both prefaced by arched of statues carved by Gtuzon Borglum, who did a pretty good job considering this is relatively teensy compared to the scale he was used to (he’s the guy who used blasting caps to sculpt Mt. Rushmore’s giant presidential noggins). Inside that Savior’s Chapel is a 600-pound bronze altarpiece coated in white gold leaf and depicting the Life of Christ<\/i> (1990) finished by Keith Haring one month before he succumbed to AIDS. In the sixth chapel (St. Ambrose’s) is a statue of St. Anthony by the Italian Renaissance master of glazed terracottas, Luca della Robbia.<\/p>

    St. John the Divine is open Monday to Saturday 7:30am to 6pm, Sunday 7:30am to 7pm, and admission is $2 (because, you know, it costs now to enter the House of God). There are $3 tours Tuesday to Saturday at 11am, Sunday at 1pm.<\/p>

    Exit the cathedral from the front door and continue north on Amsterdam Ave. As you cross 113th St., where to your left you’ll see a small 1890 gatehouse<\/b> that was part of the stone aqueduct section of New York’s water supply network, jog right half a block to see the damage done by the fire. Then return to Amsterdam and turn right to continue north along it. On your right as you continue walking is the expansive bulk of St. Luke’s Hospital,<\/b> bits of the original (1890s) Beaux Arts architecture by Ernest Flagg still visible amid the modern accretions. At 116th St., turn left onto the campus of:<\/p>

    3. Columbia University <\/b>(tel. 212\/854-4900, www.columbia.edu), an illustrious member of the Ivy League (which, incidentally, technically has nothing to do with a quality education; it’s a football league\u2014and the league is doing fine, thank you, considering that New York Jets drafted a Columbia player in 2001. Yeah, I know: the Jets; still, it counts).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Not that its academic record as anything to sneeze about either: its profs and alumns put together have earned 64 Nobel Prizes in various disciplines, and it has matriculated the likes of Enrico Fermi, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac (O.K., so he dropped out), Art Garfunkel, Langston Hughes, Lauryn Hill (another drop-out), Martha Stewart (hey, I only specified “famous”), and Paul Robeson with a faculty ranging from John Dewey to Franz Boas. One past university president, Dwight D. Einsenhower, only left his tenure (1948-53) in order to pursue the White House (which is funny, since as Columbia President, he already lived in a White house\u2014designed by Stanford White himself).<\/p>

    Columbia’s sprawling city campus\u2014covering seven blocks, from 114th to 120th Streets, between Amsterdam and Broadway\u2014is in fact the world’s largest collection of McKim, Mead & White buildings. Charles Follen McKim designed the lot in Italianate style but on the plan of Athens’ Agora, where strolling philosophers once taught young toga’ed apprentice thinkers. This wasn’t the school’s first home, however.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    King George II granted the city a royal charter for a school in 1754 which was called, naturally, “King’s College.” It dropped the name after the American Revolution for “Columbia” in 1784. Not before, however, matriculating the likes of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, the first Supreme Court Chief Justice (they’ve since churned out six more), and in 1767 the very first medical doctors granted degrees in America.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    In 1814, the state gave the college a lot of useless, weed-ridden, rock-filled land way up north of the city, around Fifth Avenue in the unpopular zone between 47th and 51st Streets. It wasn’t until 1857 that the college moved uptown, though, to a 49th Street address before making the final move here to Morningside Heights in 1897 to occupy the former site of an insane asylum. In the meantime, Columbia held on to that worthless plot of midtown land, leasing it out in 1928 to a developer named John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In 1985, the university finally sold the land to its tenant, Rockefeller Center, for $400 million in the single biggest real estate deal in New York history.<\/p>

    So much for the university’s endowment. Let’s get back to the school itself. From the group of eight young men first taught by Samuel Johnson in July of 1754 in the schoolhouse at Trinity Church downtown, by 2001 the school had grown to an enrollment of 22,892, of which only around 7,000 were undergrads\u2014the bulk of enrollment is in their graduate and professional colleges of journalism, medicine, architecture, nursing, law, engineering, social work, and business. Of course the habit of teaching only “young men” took a while to kick\u2014try 1983, when the first women were admitted, making Columbia the last Ivy League top pull its head out of the sand on this issue by a good number of years.<\/p>

    In fact, for all its greatness and unassailable academic luster, a general pig-headedness has long governed much of Columbia’s doings. They’ve one of the worst town-gown relation problems\u2014which is saying a lot when the “town” involved is New York City! For years they’ve lorded over Morningside Heights almost as some kind of feudal land baron, building with flagrant disregard for local zoning laws and certainly for local public opinion. In 1968, they even tried to usurp a big swathe of Morningside Park and plunk a gym in the middle of it! (The concrete foundation they began to pour still scars the center of the park.) The University does seem to have made a concerted effort to turn things around in recent year, however, treading as lightly as possible on local toes rather than its previous policy of stomping them repeatedly with steel-tipped boots.<\/p>

    This pedestrianized bit of 116th St. is called College Walk. Saunter up to its center where to your left (south), across a lawn below you, stretches the fa\u00e7ade of Butler Hall, one of the largest libraries in America boasting more than 5 million volumes (there’s a rare book and manuscript section up on the sixth floor that hosts regular exhibits). To your right, dominating the campus, is the impressive rotunda of Low Memorial Library,<\/b> modeled vaguely after Rome’s Pantheon and named in memorium of the father of one of Columbia’s greatest presidents, Seth Low (the guy who moved the college here before becoming an NYC mayor). Walk up the steps, around the right side of Low, and on your right you’ll see:<\/p>

    4. St. Paul’s Chapel,<\/b> cute as a button and at least twice as majestic, a vaguely neo-Byzantine churchlet built of brick (though laid in a quirky herringbone pattern) and brick-like tiles in the dome, all the brainchild of Howells & Stokes in 1904-07. They sponsor a concert series Tuesdays at 6pm, Fridays at 8pm (tel. 212\/854-0480, www.columbia.edu\/cu\/earl\/music_schedule.htm).<\/p>

    Upon exiting the chapel from the front door, turn left then left again to walk down the chapel’s right side, past a small grove of chestnut trees on your right where a cast of Rodin’s Thinker<\/i> ponders the passing students, and up a small pedestrian bridge onto a neat little:<\/p>

    5. Sculpture Garden<\/b> on a brick terrace suspended above Amsterdam Avenue. Among the modern works poised on pedestals are Henry Moore’s globular 1967 Three Way Piece: Points,<\/i> Gertrude Schweitxer’s balancing act of anorexics called Flight <\/i>(1981), and a massive, typically lumpy Lipchitz work glowering atop the entrance to the modern Law School called Bellerophon Taming Pegasus.<\/i> It was installed in 1977, is 30 by 28 feet, and weighs 23 tons (looks it, too).<\/p>

    Double back over the pedestrian bridge and past the chapel to turn right, past Avery Hall to Shermerhorn Hall, which houses the:<\/p>

    6. Wallach Art Gallery,<\/b> founded in 1986 and presenting a rotating series of exhibitions of contemporary art throughout the academic year (check out www.columbia.edu\/cu\/wallach for information). It\u2019s only open Wednesday to Saturday 1 to 5pm.<\/p>

    Exiting Shermerhorn, go back toward Avery Hall but veer right, past the double-loop sculpture Curl<\/i> (1968 by Celment Meadmore), then left to walks down the far side of Low and back onto College Walk. Turn right onto it, then divert left to walk around to the entrance of:<\/p>

    7. The Columbia School of Journalism<\/b>, <\/b>one of the top two journalism schools in the country (the other’s also in Columbia…Missouri), founded in 1912 by publishing mogul Joseph Pulitzer. The school is in charge of awarding the annual prestigious Pulitzer Prize for journalism. A 1914 statue of Thomas Jefferson by alumnus William Ordway Partridge frowns from the top of the steps to the school.<\/p>

    Continue along College Walk to pop off campus onto Broadway and turn right. On your left, you’re passing the closed campus of:<\/p>

    8. Barnard College,<\/b> a women’s college and one of the prestigious “seven sisters” schools, was established by Columbia University rather enlightened tenth president Frederick Barnard, who spent his tenure from 1864 to 1883 convincing the trustees to set up a course for women. Of course, since women weren’t allowed on campus, and professors weren’t allowed to talk to them in any event, the course didn’t really take off, but by 1889 they’d worked out the kinks, founded a whole college just for the ladies across the street, and named it Barnard after the crusading Columbia president. Though students at both Columbia and Barnard can take classes at each other’s schools, Barnard remains a separate and proud institution.<\/p>

    Turn left on 120th St., then right on Claremont Ave., passing the Union Theological Seminary<\/b> (manufacturing liberal Protestant ministers since 1836), to the unassuming main entrance on your left into:<\/p>

    9. Riverside Church <\/b>(tel. 212\/870-6712, www.theriversidechurchny.org), just about the grandest Baptist church I’ve ever seen, built with John D. Rockefeller, Jr. money. Rockefeller was born a Baptist, but was a big believer in healing the rifts in Christianity, a philosophy called the interfaith movement, and the church to this day remains as much community center as house of worship, and it\u2019s Interfaith Center offices host Christians, Jews, and Muslims.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Though the structure bears a passing resemblance to the French cathedral at Chartres and is festooned with Gothic frippery, this puppy’s all modern, sporting a skeleton of steel girders that lets it tower soar to a ridiculous 392 feet. It’s a big one: 265 feet long and 100 feet wide, with seating for 2,500, but the overall effect is light and airy, with some stellar stained glass windows, quality stone carvings, and one whopper of a sound system.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Riverside’s famed carillon was first installed in 1925, its 53 bells making it the largest carillon in the nation. It kept that title, enlarged to 72 bells in 1931 with two more added in 1956, until 1960 when it slipped to second place (though it’s still the heaviest set in the USA). It’s played Sundays at 10:30am, 12:30pm, and 3pm (sometimes 2:30pm). The church is open daily 9am to 5pm.<\/p>

    Continue north on Claremont Ave, to 122 St., where you turn left to cross Riverside Drive and pay your respects at:<\/p>

    10. Grant’s Tomb.<\/b> You’ll never guess who’s buried here. (Actually, so’s his wife, so a lot of people get the answer that the famed non-riddle only half right.) The tomb of the only president buried in NYC is as bullet-headed as the man it honors, a giant round-peg-in-a-square-hole game with a colonnaded rotunda perched atop a square Classical temple, all topped off at 150 feet by a flattened cone for a roof. It\u2019s the largest tomb in America.<\/p>

    These 8,000 tons of marble are meant to resemble the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Inside, the associations continue with a design modeled after Nap\u00f3leon’s tomb in Paris, the white Carrara marble brightened with mosaics depicting the high points of Grant’s military career, including the Surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox (it\u2019s the one in which the two generals seem to be shaking hands amiably).<\/p>

    The hero of the Civil War and postbellum President was still a very popular guy by the time he died in 1885, and 90,000 people contributed the $600,000 (and that’s in 1890s dollars) to build this tomb. Ulysses S. and his wife Julia Dent are buried in the basement tomb. Above the entrance are Grant’s famous words\u2014all the more moving coming from a man of war\u2014”Let us have peace.”<\/p>

    The tomb is now run by the U.S. Park Service, so it\u2019s only open 9am to 5pm, with tours hourly until 4pm.<\/p>

    Cross back across Riverside Drive and down 122nd St. to Broadway. Across at the northeast corner you’ll see the:<\/p>

    11. Jewish Theological Seminary,<\/b> a neo-Georgian pile founded in the rather enlightened year of 1886 to train up passels of American rabbis. It’s also quite the research center, its library of 300,000 volumes comprising the largest collection of Judaica in the Western Hemisphere.<\/p>

    Turn right down Broadway. Between 121st and 120th Streets, you’ll pass the facade of the:<\/p>

    12. Teacher’s College.<\/b> What with all the future religious and secular leaders being churned out at Columbia and the neighboring seminaries, in 1889 Nicholas Murray Butler decided they could also do with some quality educators to do the teaching. So he took the Kitchen Garden Club based at St-Mark’s-in-the-Bowery (which was busy mucking about the public school system with a wonderfully ill-conceived program to train working-class girls on how to keep, if you’ll pardon the expression, better homes and gardens), attached it to Columbia, and slowly evolved the operation into one of the nation’s most progressive educational think-tanks, producing such luminaries as John Dewey.<\/p>

    Turn right on 120th St. to walk down the long side of the college all the way to Morningside Drive and:<\/p>

    13. Morningside Park.<\/b> This is not so much a park by design as by force of nature: it’s the schist cliff that separates lofty Morningside Heights from the lowlands of Harlem, part of the ridge of solid rock that rides along the spine of Manhattan island. Seeing as how even New Yorkers didn’t know how to make good real estate use of a cliff back in he the middle of the 19th century, master landscapists Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, of Central Park fame, were called in to beautify this strip of schist and trees.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    The two loved the views from this natural balcony, and laid out their plans to make best use of it, but a guy named Jacob Mould butted in, started building bastions of masonry against the cliff, and threatened to ruin the whole setting. Luckily, after he kicked off, the Dream Team of park planners were brought back, and Vaux started doing what he could with what was left, planting small gardens, leaving craggy rock faces bare, fitting in stands of trees, and lacing it with a zig-zag of pathways that let you gently waft your way down from the Heights into Harlem.<\/p>

    Before plunging in, turn right down Morningside Drive to skirt the park for a bit, enjoying the sweeping views across the Harlem you’re about to plunge into. At 116th St.\u2014where on the right at no. 60 you’ll see the lovely 1912 McKim, Mead, and White\u2013designed house of Columbia University’s president\u2014turn into the park itself and pick a path down the bluff to get the Harlem side of 116th St.<\/p>

    The change in neighborhoods is dramatic, from elegant academia to dingy but vibrant urban. Take a few blocks to adjust as you continue east on 116th St. At the southwest corner of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (the Seventh Avenue of Harlem) sits the quirky:<\/p>

    14. First Corinthian Baptist Church,<\/b> originally built as Regent’s Theater in 1913, a vaguely Venetian\/Moorish palazzo-like structure that almost immediately began hemorrhaging money. Samuel Lionel Rothafel, of Roxy Theaters and the Rocketttes fame, saved it from demolition before it became a church.<\/p>

    Continue along 116th St. Just before Lenox Ave. at no. 113, you’ll find one of the best purveyors of soul food in New York.<\/p>

    Take a Break: Amy Ruth’s <\/b>(tel. 212\/280-8779, www.amyruth.com). Growing up, Carl Redding and his siblings spent summers on the farm in Alabama. While his brothers did mostly farm chores, Carl stuck by the side of his grandmother Amy Ruth, learning timeless soul food recipes from the world’s leading expert: a black southern country grandma.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    In 1998, he earned at least my undying gratitude by turning his storehouse of soul food knowledge into a Harlem restaurant and naming it for his grandmother. Judging by the patient line waiting at the door for a seat, and by the gallery of celebrity photographs (Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, George Bush, Jr., Isaac Hayes, Ed Koch, Jesse Jackson, Al Jarreau, and new neighbor Bill Clinton), I’m not the only fan.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    If you try nothing else, make sure someone orders their signature dish of fried chicken and waffles. Oh, and the bourbon-glazed Virginia ham. But then you also can’t miss the smothered pork chops. And what about the fried catfish with sweet potato fries you can get on Fridays? Look, either bring a lot of friends or, better yet, make plans to come back a few times so you can work your way through the menu properly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Amy Ruth’s is open daily 7:30am to 11pm, staying open 24-hours Friday and Saturday nights, and the upstairs back room hosts a variety of events, including comedy concerts, open mike nights, and more.<\/p>

    Across the street, at the southwest corner of the intersection of 116th St. and Lenox Ave., sits the boxy yellow walls of the :<\/p>

    15. Malcolm Shabazz Mosque No. 7,<\/b> the giant green onion dome perched atop a squat shape that harks back to its origins as the Lenox Casino. Elijah Muhammad turned it into the Temple of Islam in 1965, and Malcolm X was a resident preacher until his break with the movement.<\/p>

    Cross Lenox Ave. and walk down the south side of 116th St. half a block to the:<\/p>

    16. Malcolm Shabazz Harlem Market,<\/b> a colorful outdoor bazaar of tiny shops and stalls hawking West African crafts and Harlem souvenirs.<\/p>

    Double back to Lenox Ave. and turn right (north) up it, past (at no. 130) the recently-finished (it opened in 2000) The Renaissance,<\/i> a low-income co-op of 241 apartments, with parking, ringed on the ground level by 60,000 square feet of retail space, all part of the neighborhood’s recent revival efforts. At 120th Street, where the Mount Olivet Baptist Church <\/b>(built in 1907 as a Jewish Temple) rises on the corner, turn right to enter the core of the:<\/p>

    17. Mount Morris Historic District,<\/b> a clutch of 19th century brownstones between 119th and 123rd and one of the first New York neighborhoods to be declared an Historic District (in 1971), which is slowly being rehabilitated and renovated to its former glory. The street spills into the southwest corner of:<\/p>

    18. Marcus Garvey Park.<\/b> This gnarly outcropping of Manhattan mica-schist was just too darn hard to level for development, plus it made a handy look-out point. Were you to scrape away Manhattan’s skyscrapers and other buildings, the pinnacle of this park would be one of the highest points on the island, used as a look-out point by everyone from Indian tribes to the 19th century fire department. In fact, their iron watch-tower of 1865 still perches atop the highest point, 10,000-pound bell and all, the only such tower to remain in the city (great views from the top).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    The park was dubbed Slang Berg, or “Snake Hill,” by the Dutch of Niuew Harlem in 1658, and its strategic position put it at the center of several skirmishes during the Revolutionary War. Once houses started hemming it in around 1839, it became a park under the name Mount Morris, renamed in 1973 to honor the famed local black activist Marcus Garvey (see box).<\/p>

    ***PD: BEGIN BOX\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>

    Marcus Garvey<\/b><\/p>

    One of the most colorful, flamboyant, and difficult black leaders of the 20th century, Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) emigrated here from Jamaica in 1917 as a laborer already afire with plans to improve the lot of blacks in the world. Over the next decade and a half, the Universal Negro Improvement Association he originally founded back in Jamaica ended up spreading to millions of members around the world. He encouraged black pride, founded the Back to Africa movement, and even established a short-lived Republic of Africa with himself as its President, all from a small apartment in Harlem.<\/p>

    Garvey was called a Black Moses and a charlatan, revered as a leader and reviled as a rabble rouser, considered by black and white leaders and intellectuals alike as either a visionary genius or an egotistical madman. He earned the respect of millions of blacks, the scorn of some other black leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois, the obsessive hatred of J. Edgar Hoover, and a healthy dose of genuine fear from the white establishment in the United States and Europe. His Negro World<\/i> newspaper was smuggled into Kenya and other African colonies, where some of the oppressed and often enslaved natives began viewing him as a potential Savior.<\/p>

    He wrote epic poetry (his greatest is entitled “The Tragedy of White Injustice”) and dressed in impeccable but oddball Napoleonic splendor (even while wooing his future first wife, at the age 27, he called her his “Josephine”), and provided uniforms, plumed hats, and extravagant titles for members of his organization. He almost certainly developed a messianic complex, yet he also fostered black pride long before the heights of the civil rights era. He was a legend, from Harlem workers to Alabama sharecroppers West African farmers, long before he died in a London exile 1940.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Garvey began as a sort of black self-help guru, quickly passed through a phase of\u00a0 <\/span>wanting to end social injustice through integration, and ended up an agitator for a free Nation of Africa (with himself as President). The development of his rhetoric reflected this shift. He began with “I do not speak carelessly or recklessly but with a definite object of helping the people, especially those of my race, to know, to understand, and to realize themselves.” This evolved into “Be as proud of your race today as our fathers were in the days of yore. We have a beautiful history. And we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world.” In the end, he was opening meetings of the UNIA with “If you believe that the Negro should have a place in the sun; if you believe that Africa should be one vast empire, controlled by the Negro, then arise, and sing the National Anthem of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.”<\/p>

    Eventually, Garvey’s downfall came from his general mismanagement of multiple projects, especially his poorly-run Black Star shipping line\u2014largely fueled by a penchant for appointing lieutenants who were more loyal than competent\u2014aided in no small part by the sabotage and information gathering of spies sent to infiltrate the UNIA by J. Edgar Hoover. They eventually managed to get him for mail fraud in 1922\u2014for cheating one man, Benny Dancy, out of $25 during fund-raising for a new Black Star ship. While out on bail, he made the incomprehensible move of taking a meeting with, of all people, the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In Garvey’s mind, apparently, this was a diplomatic mission: the uncrowned emperor of the black world meeting with the true (yet unacknowledged) leader of white society.<\/p>

    At this point, most of the exasperated community of black leaders gave up and sent a letter to the Attorney General disavowing Garvey. W.E.B DuBois dubbed him “the most dangerous enemy of the negro race;” A. Philip Randolph described Garvey as a “half-wit, low grade moron.”<\/p>

    At the trial, Garvey was pompous and arrogant, firing his attorney and trying to rely on his famed oratory to save him. What it did was alienate the witnesses, judge, and jury. He was quick to blame his own underlings in attempts to exonerate himself, and it didn’t help that many of the witnesses were disgruntled former members of the UNIA. He was convicted, and after two years of appeals, was sent to a prison in Alabama.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Garvey’s support was far from gone, however, and millions of signatures on petitions from around the world, rallies, and the fact that the government didn’t want his imprisonment to reflect badly on them come election time (nor did they want a martyr on their hands, as his bad health kept landing him in the prison hospital) eventually got Garvey out of jail.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    In 1927, he was quickly pardoned then immediately deported to Jamaica. For a while, as his support network slowly dwindled, he tried his hand at politics, real estate, a newspaper, and even an amusement park. But once the US Government finished seizing all his old organization’s assets, he had to declare bankruptcy, broke in name, and also beginning to be broke in spirit as well.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Save some hard-core believers, Garvey’s worldwide following had all but evaporated. His cause had become something of a joke, his vision of a unified Africa with himself at its head in Liberia a fading pipe dream. He became a broken man, jeered by children on the streets, remembered more as a megalomaniac than as the man who had done more to foster pride in their heritage and a sense of self-worth amongst the worldwide black community than anyone else in the first half of the 20th century. He abandoned Jamaica for London in 1935.<\/p>

    In January of 1940, when Garvey suffered a non-fatal stroke, the somewhat ill-informed Chicago Defender <\/i>newspaper went ahead and printed a premature obituary which stated that Garvey had died deserted by his followers and “broke, alone and unpopular.” When Garvey was handed the paper and read those words, he reportedly let out a moan, toppled forward, and died of a second stroke.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    He was 53 years old, and he had never even been to Africa.<\/p>

    ***PD: END BOX<\/b><\/p>

    Walk north along Mount Morris Park West and turn left at 122nd St. At the corner with Lenox Ave. sits:<\/p>

    19. St. Martin’s Episcopal Church,<\/b> one of the city’s greatest neo-Romanesque structures, built in 1888 and boasting a 42-bell carillon (the second largest in the city) installed in 1949.<\/p>

    Cross the Avenue and continue west on 122nd onto:<\/p>

    20. Doctor’s Row, <\/b>a lovely stretch of row-homes (though a few brownstones are still boarded up) from the late 1800s. The best are nos. 133-143, an lovely row of ornate brick homes built by Francis H. Kimball in 1885-87, the best Queen Anne\u2013style homes surviving in all of Manhattan, a brick festival of gables, dormers, decoration, and stained glass.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    At the far end of the block on the south side, at no. 152-154, is the:<\/p>

    21. Hale House,<\/b> established in 1969 by Mother Clara Hale to provide aid for drug-addicted (and now also HIV-infected) infants and their mothers. In 1996, four years after her death, Mother Hale was memorialized in a droopy sculpture by Robert Berks, surrounded by etched bronze plaques of children.<\/p>

    At Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd., pause to admire the well-maintained brick bulk on the far left (southwest) corner:<\/p>

    22. Washington Apartments, <\/b>one of the city’s very first apartment buildings, built in 1884 to tempt middle-class residents who were beginning to consider Harlem as an escape from the housing crush downtown and uptown when, in the 1870s, an elevated rail line was extended this far north. Come to think of it, luring Manhattanites with relatively low rents (though they’re already beginning to spike) is exactly what the revitalized Harlem is doing today.<\/p>

    Turn right up Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd. to head north. Between 124th and 125th Streets, on the left, rises the striking white brick and terracotta wedge of the old:<\/p>

    23. Hotel Theresa,<\/b> known as the “Waldorf of Harlem.” Built in 1913 by George and Edward Blum, at 13 stories it was for a long time the tallest structure in Harlem. A black businessman bought it in 1937 and ended it exclusionary practices, which is why Joe Louis was able to celebrate his world heavyweight title here in that year. Its oddest moment must have been in 1960, when Fidel Castro stayed here while visiting the UN and used the hotel for his meetings with Nikita Khrushchev.<\/p>

    Turn right onto:<\/p>

    24. 125th Street, <\/b>the bustling, vibrant heart of the new Harlem Renaissance, the epicenter of a development boom in the past few years. These three blocks are home to the Studio Musuem, the Apollo Theater, the National Black Theatre, the Harlem USA shopping complex, a multiplex cinema owned by Magic Johnson…is it any wonder Bill Clinton chose this hip-hop happening spot for his post-presidential offices in New York? (Though it’s my private opinion he actually moved here for the soul food.)<\/p>

    Turn right and walk down about a quarter of the block to the:<\/p>

    25. Studio Musuem, <\/b>144 W. 125th St (tel. 212\/864-4500, www.studiomuseum.org), a vast gallery space that since 1968 has been devoted to collecting, preserving, and promoting contemporary African American art, both from Harlem, across the USA, and around the world. The bulk of its display space is taken up with rotating exhibits, though they also have a fine and growing collection. The gift shop is also quite excellent. The gallery hours are Sunday and Wednesday to Friday noon to 6pm, Saturday 10am to 6pm. admission is $5, but free the first Saturday of the month (and, I’ve found, occasionally on other days as well).<\/p>

    Continue toward the end of the block at Lenox Ave. Across the street, with the Chase bank, you’ll see the fourteen-story office building of:<\/p>

    26. 55 W. 125th St., <\/b>which became famous in 2001 when a new resident moved in and the top floor became the offices of former president Bill Clinton. After flirting with pricey midtown digs, Clinton chose to put his money where his mouth was and move into the heart of Harlem into a Federal Empowerment Zone (a program that provides federal aid for economically depressed areas) that he himself created as President.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    After all, Toni Morrison once called him “our first black president,” pointing out the similarities between his upbringing (raised by a single mother, as a Baptist, on southern soul food and at the edge of poverty) and the experience of many in the black community. Not everyone buys that, but the fact is, the man does seem to be fitting in nicely enough.<\/p>

    Maybe he just wanted to feel welcome somewhere: the only group among whom his approval ratings actually went up <\/i>during the whole Monica Lewinsky fallout was amongst African American voters. This probably had less to do with his marital infidelities or accusations of perjury than with the sheer partisanship that permeated the whole debacle. As New York Representative Charles Rangel put it. “There was no one kicking Bill Clinton around who hadn’t been kicking us around before that. Sometimes you can pick your friends by who their enemies are.” Heck, the very weekend I wrote this, Clinton became the first white man inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    At 55 W. 125th, he’s got the penthouse here (natch), in digs so cool the chairs were actually designed by Madonna’s brother (no, really: Christopher Ciccone works for Bernhardt Design). Best of all, he actually seems to use the place\u2014when he’s not traveling. He shops locally (at least often enough for locals to notice), dines out locally (hey, who wouldn’t), and even threw his Superbowl party here, which must have been a trip considering the guest list: among them comedian Chris Tucker, Israeli minister Shimon Peres, composer Quincy Jones, politico Madeleine Albright, correspondent Christiane Amanpour, and a handful of CEO heavyweights.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Enough about the new Harlem. Let’s get back to the roots, turn around to double back up 125th St., cross Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd, cross to the north side of the street, and finish off this tour with perhaps the best-known stop in all of Harlem. Folks, it’s Showtime at the:<\/p>

    27. Apollo Theater,<\/b> 253 W. 125th St (212\/531-5305, www.apollotheater.com). The Apollo, like most old Harlem entertainment venues including the vanished Cotton Club, began life as a burlesque house open to whites only: Hurtig and Seamon’s Music Hall, est. 1913. But in 1934, new owners Frank Schiffman and Leo Brecher threw open the doors to the local black community and a legend was born. (These guys has a serious pedigree when it came to African American theatre; their previous venue, the Lafayette Theatre a few blocks away, once put on an all-black Macbeth <\/i>directed by Orson Welles.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Even with the fame it garnered and careers it launched, the Apollo has often had a rough time of it. From 1976 to 1983 it was reduced to a movie theater, and even with the success of the NBC syndicated “Showtime at the Apollo” weekly TV program, a take-over by the state in 1991, and recently Time Warner was called in to manage the operation into solvency.<\/p>

    How do you even begin to pare down the list of musicians and entertainers who have graced the Apollo’s stage? Bessie Smith, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Nat “King” Cole, Marvin Gaye, Bo Diddley, Galdys Knight (I assume with the Pips in tow), Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton, B.B. King, Prince\u2026 Look, just go to the R&B section of you local record store and peruse the names, it might be quicker. When the Beatles invaded America in 1964, there was only thing they wanted to see in New York City: the Apollo Theater. And I haven’t even started in on the entertainers who didn’t sing their way to fame (Redd Foxx, Whoppi Goldberg, Bill Cosby,\u2026)<\/p>

    The Apollo has been host to many a momentous event in the world of entertainment\u2014to say nothing of producing some great live albums of its concerts. Smokey Robinson even wrote the song ‘my Girl” backstage here. The famous, and famously tough, Amateur Night at the Apollo (Wednesdays at 7:30pm; tickets start at $16) has kick-started many careers, among them Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Lauryn Hill, Sarah Vaughn, and a little Motown group called the Jackson 5.<\/p>

    When a show’s not on, you often can’t enter the theater, but from the doorway you can see the stump of the Tree of Hope, which once grew outside the Lafayette Theater. Performers would kiss that tree (and, later, its replacement donated by Mr. Bojangles himself, the dancer Bill Robinson), and latter-day hopefuls always touch it for good luck before taking the stage.<\/p>

    Our walk officially ends here. Harlem of course continues all the way to 168th Street (and we haven’t even dipped our toes in the Barrio to the east), but my feet are tired, and truth be told the rest of Harlem doesn’t lend itself well to walking. It tends to have points of touristic interest only every ten blocks or so, with the interim spaces often depressingly depressed slummy areas. However, especially if you’ve got an unlimited-ride Metrocard, I highly recommend you hop on the subway here at 125th St. and ride it one stop north to 135th St. to fit in a few more must-see Harlem stops.<\/p>

    Here you can visit a branch of the New York Public Library that has become the excellent Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture <\/b>(www.nypl.org\/research\/sc\/sc.html) at 515 Lenox Ave. The Abyssinian Baptist Church <\/b>on 138th St. is so famous for its Sunday morning gospel service that tour companies have begun bussing in visitors as part of their New York trip. It’s better known around here for being the place where Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (of Boulevard fame ) got his start, preaching in the pulpit here from 1938 before moving on to organize black boycotts of exclusionary businesses, then a post on the city council, and eventually the U.S. Congress, where he led an illustrious career of sponsoring civil rights legislation, education reforms, the minimum wage bill, and military desegregation as well as becoming the first black member to chair a major committee (appropriately, the one on Education and Labor). Needless to say, he was a controversial politician, and they tried to kick him out on charges of financial hanky panky in 1967 (the Supreme Court would have none of it); he eventually lost to a fellow Democrat we met back at Clinton’s office stop, Charles Rangel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Make sure you also stroll down 139th Street between Frederick Douglass Blvd and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd., a lovely stretch of rowhouses in dark brick Italianate style on the north side (designed by McKim, Mead, & White in 1891) and in yellow brick colonial revival style on the south side (designed by Bruce Price; these extend through to the north side of 138th St. across from another lovely row, this time of neo-Georgian houses by James Brown Lord). It’s all officially part of the St. Nicholas Historic District, but is much better-known as Striver’s Row <\/b>after the upwardly-mobile blacks and others who once made these blocks their home, including Memphis-born father of the blues W.C. Handy (232 W. 139th St.) and\u2014appropriately enough, given the gorgeous surroundings\u2014Vertner Tandy, the first black architect registered in New York State (221 W. 139th St.).<\/p>

    And, OK, I have to say it, as long as you\u2019re up here you can fit in some more soul food at Miss Maude’s Spoonbread Too<\/b> (tel. 212\/690-3100) at 547 Lenox Ave. between 137th and 138th Streets. Southern fried chicken, BBQ ribs Carolina-style, golden fried shrimp, smothered pork chops, Louisiana catfish, collard greens, potato salad, candied yams, banana pudding, peach cobbler, sweet potato pie… Mmm, soul food.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/details>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

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    Walking Tour 4: SoHo<\/b><\/p>

    Start:<\/b> Broadway and Prince Street.<\/p>

    Subway:<\/b> Take the N or R train to Prince Street.<\/p>

    Finish:<\/b> West Broadway, just below Spring Street.<\/p>

    Time:<\/b> Anywhere from 3 to 5 hours, depending on how long you spend browsing galleries, museums, and shops.<\/p>

    Best Time:<\/b> Start around 10:30am, since most galleries are open 11am to 5pm (and since the breakfast stop is one of the best in the city). Return in the evening, if there are any openings, to experience the art scene at its schmooziest.<\/p>

    Worst Time:<\/b> Sunday and Monday, when almost all galleries and most museums are closed; mid July to early September, when many galleries are closed or open only by appointment.<\/p>

    Everyone has a different mental image that springs to mind when they hear the words “New York.” Seinfeld fans picture the Upper West Side, Corporate-types imagine themselves hitting it big on Wall Street, literary aficionados and ex-hippies have Greenwich Village flashbacks, and latter-day bohemians conjure up the East Village.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Growing up with a painter for a father, my frequent trips to New York with Dad focused on one neighborhood alone, the multi-hued nucleus of the international art world, so my former midtown office job and Brooklyn apartment notwithstanding, my eternal image of the Big Apple is SoHo.<\/p>

    Traditional SoHo\u2014incorporating the area SO<\/b>uth of HO<\/b>uston Street and north of Canal Street, bounded by Broadway and West Broadway\u2014is roughly only one square mile. In the early 19th century it was a run-down zone lost between lower Manhattan and the monied mansions of uptown.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    In the mid 19th century, what is now called SoHo was New York’s largest, and most genteel, red light district. mercer Street was lined with houses of illicit pleasure, and a full two-thirds of Gotham’s Ladies of the Night trolling the streets for likely clients and plying their prostrate trade in rooms on the upper floors of buildings like this one.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    By the end of the Civil War, the cream of the prostitute crop had moved uptown (arm-in-arm with high society), and SoHo’s bordellos declined into true houses of ill-repute, fit only for drunken sailors. Manhattan businesses began razing these old buildings to put up warehouses on the cheap property, and the cast iron age was born.<\/p>

    Dry-goods merchant princes and emergent manufacturing companies moved in and filled the area with warehouses that incorporated the latest in cost-cutting building technology: pre-fabricated facades of cast iron,<\/b> which represented a simple and cheap way to garnish your structure with a face that was ornate, costly-looking, and stylish (which at first meant Classically-inspired Italian Renaissance, later French).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Cast iron facades were mass produced in sections, and you could order one to fit your housing and ideal studio space. With so much art being produced, it was only natural that new art dealers, in a profession that formerly looked only to the posh neighborhoods of uptown, began to open up shop in SoHo, championing the neighborhood’s emergent stars and turning a nice profit at the same time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Established galleries from uptown soon followed suit, and SoHo became the Mecca of the contemporary art world in the late 70s and early 80s. Thrift stores and funky boutiques opened, abandoned shop fronts were filled with inexpensive diners and sandwich shops, and, inevitably, the yuppies soon caught wind of it all.<\/p>

    It\u2019s no secret that artists start most of the world’s trends; many of the wacky, publicly-derided things artists are doing today, hip young professionals will be aping within 10 years, and within 15 years junior high schoolers will be adapting a diluted version of it to the necessary teen identity arsenal that is required not to be a geek.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    In the 1980s, yuppies living in Manhattan’s cramped, expensive apartments and co-ops saw the chance to both be hip and get a huge pad at low cost by moving into converted SoHo lofts, and they swarmed the neighborhood.<\/p>

    \u00a0<\/span>Trailing along behind them pricey boutiques, transforming sandwich shops like Dean & Deluca into fine food emporia, and quickly driving the rents to the stratosphere, these trend bandwagoneers were almost universally resented by SoHo’s artist community (even if some did buy the art as an investment for their walls).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    It wasn’t long before artists\u2014even those of the non-starving persuasion\u2014couldn\u2019t afford to move in, and others long established in SoHo found their own rents escalating. Tourists quickly followed in the yuppies’ wake, and chain stores and other paeans to mass tourism started popping up everywhere.<\/p>

    West 57th Street and the Upper East Side have since regained some of their former popularity as gallery zones, and some of SoHo’s founding galleries, along with a few popular start-ups, have made an exodus a few dozen blocks to the north to the abandoned warehouses of Chelsea. (Chelsea, especially around East 22nd\/23rd Streets, is now\u2014circa 1998\u2014the hottest area in New York’s art scene.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    As for the artists themselves, they have finally found themselves priced out of nearly every neighborhood in Manhattan, and those that didn’t follow the galleries to Chelsea have gone across the river to find even cheaper run-down warehouses in Williamsburg\/Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens.<\/p>

    In the 1990s, SoHo is a neighborhood with a split personality. An artistic and pioneeringly hip air remains despite over-exposure; plenty of struggling artists’ co-op exhibition spaces, funky shops, and cheap cafes still fill the streets; and many artists continue to create in their converted apartment\/studios behind historic cast iron facades.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    But the hype has changed SoHo forever, from heavily commercial fine art galleries and chillingly expensive high fashion boutiques, to over-priced bistros and those yuppie-infested converted lofts. Still, there’s no neighborhood quite like it, and, to me at least, none that so fully evokes the vibrancy, diversity, and creative energy that characterizes New York.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Our walk through SoHo takes you past the weird industrial beauty of the cast iron age, into some of the more interesting shops and fashion outlets, and past the doors of dozens of galleries that together provide a collective museum nonpareil of the best the international contemporary art world has to offer.<\/p>

    ***PD: Begin Box<\/i><\/p>

    The Fine Art of Gallery Hopping<\/b><\/p>

    Even to the initiated, the art world and its gallery scene can seem intimidating, as if at any moment some art-snob is going to pop out from a door and challenge you to speak at length, using multi-syllabic compound words like linear subform and post-deconstructionism, to describe the psycho-political subtext symbolisms in a painting that looks for all the world like a giant blue square. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Don’t sweat it; art criticism is half hogwash to begin with, and I doubt anyone in SoHo’s galleries is going to bother you for your opinion on the art unless you volunteer it. Treat gallery hopping more like a visit to the candy store\u2014give an easy going once-over to everything on display, then choose to savor only the few that appeal to you the most.<\/p>

    Storefront galleries are the most visible, but the majority hide on the upper floors of nondescript buildings, often half a dozen or more per address. Most are open to the public\u2014unless they’re hanging a new show\u2014from 10 or 11am to 5 or 6pm Tuesday to Saturday. Many of them shut down from around mid or late July to early September.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Galleries present their works in the form of four- to six-week-long shows, either several work one or more solo artists, or a group show of several. The lifeblood of galleries is actually selling a few of the pieces, but they know that the lion’s share of people who pop by are just perusing the art, so don’t feel shy about sauntering in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Also, don’t feel the need to spend more time than you feel is necessary; galleries are accustomed to people who literally just poke their heads in, take a quick glance around, and withdraw quickly. You might walk through ten before you find one show that appeals to you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Most galleries are like agents, forming relationships with certain artists to become the artist’s sole representative, showing, promoting, and selling the artist’s works for a commission. Some galleries split this activity with that of acquiring individual works of random artists and reselling them to the public; a few galleries do this almost exclusively. So out of the impressive lists of artists’ names you’ll see in gallery guides, often only a handful are handled by that gallery exclusively (some artists use several galleries, especially if they work in different media).<\/p>

    Although you should take this walking tour during the day, the best way to catch a glimpse into the living New York art world is to attend the evening “opening” of a new show, most of which are open to the public.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    Besides hobnobbing with the artist herself, critics, and other members of the art community, you usually get to sip wine and munch on raw veggies, cheese, and other classy finger foods. The Village Voice newspaper, and the magazines New Yorker and New York all list upcoming openings, as well as current shows.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

    For even more complete information, pick up a free copy of The Gallery Guide at just about any museum or gallery.<\/p>

    ***PD: End Box<\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/details>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    “This is a super book packed with great information! Reid Bramblett, while working within the generally great guidelines of the Frommer’s travel series, also brings out his quirky and appealing sense of humor and warmth. (I actually sought out this book because I had bought another guide he had written.)” \u2014\u00a0Peter Rasey<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":958,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,51,17],"tags":[33,97,53,117,28,61],"class_list":["post-1929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book","category-reids_books","category-travel","tag-book","tag-excerpt","tag-frommers-2","tag-new-york","tag-travel","tag-usa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1929"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1942,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1929\/revisions\/1942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reidsguides.com\/rb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}