Harlem’s Council Member – Adriano Espaillat – endorsed Inez Dickens – the latest Harlem establishment figure to support Dickens in her bid for City Council on June 27th.
Espaillat stated that: “Inez is who we need… City Council needs her leadership, experience and passion.”
Inez Dickens is seeking to reclaim her seat on City Council (District 9). Dickens noted that:
“We have very serious issues in the district that require more than aspirational speeches.”
“With the support of my colleagues, the esteemed former Congressman Charles Rangel and Congressman Adriano Espaillat, as well as my neighborhood and constituents, I feel confident that better days are ahead for us.”
Remember, election day is June 27th!
Eater is Back With “Where To Eat In Harlem”
Take a look at Eater’s list of great places to eat in Harlem:
Our neighbors, Eva Chan and Lilian Chow were recently celebrated and highlighted by Columbia University for their work and activism to support Harlem’s growing Asian community.
In the summer of 2021, we started distributing meals to Asian seniors with the help of Heart of Dinner. We’re looking for ways to expand that service because there’s a lot of interest. There is a real lack of groceries for these Asian seniors. They are forced to travel long distances to Chinatown to do their grocery shopping because they don’t know how to use the vegetables and produce that are in the markets near them. We’ve been in conversation with grocery store owners in the area–some of which are actually Korean–and they cannot justify selling Asian groceries because there’s not enough demand to cover the cost. So it’s not an easy thing to solve. That’s why we continue our work with Heart of Dinner which gives out Asian vegetables—and the seniors love it.
Eva and Lilian have worked to empower the many elderly Asians and Asian Americans who call Harlem home through political activism, cultural events, and more.
Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics
As seen, upsidedown, reflected in the Harlem River.
The 2041/5th HDFC Co-Op (on the corner of 126th Street and 5th Avenue) will be hosting their 2nd Annual Block Party: A Great Day In Harlem Kids Party on August 12, 2023.
The Community Board (CB11) will review this Block Party using Event ID: 698307. If you have any comments on this proposed date/event, please reach out to Community Board 11.
We are looking forward to a welcoming, child-focused block party for neighborhood families and youth this summer.
Stoop Sale Postponed to May 7
DUE TO WEATHER MMPCIA STOOP SALE POSTPONED SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2023
April 28, 2023 Subject: MMPCIA Stoop Sale 2023
Dear Neighbor, Due to the weather, the MMPCIA Stoop Sale Day event scheduled for Sunday, April 30, 2023, from 10 am – 3 pm has been postponed. THE NEW DATE is Sunday, May 7, 2023, from 10 am – 3 pm. If you are unable to participate because of the date change, we are sorry, and we look forward to your participation next year and in other MMPCIA community-wide events. Please Email [email protected] today, and we will remove your address from our MMPCIA Stoop Sale location listing.
The flyer has details of the participating houses and buildings; please feel free to share this with your bargain-loving friends and relatives.
As previously stated, all registrants are responsible for disposing of any items you do not sell or give away and ensuring that the area in front of your house or building is clean and tidy after the sale. The Goodwill NYNJ Store & Donation Center at 2221 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10035 may be interested in your unsold items, and you can reach them at (212) 410-0973.
Please take lots of pictures and share your stoop sale photos on: Facebook: Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association (MMPCIA Group)
Instagram: @mmpcia Twitter: @MountMorrisPark and be sure to use the hashtag: #MMPCIA
If you are not already a member of MMPCIA, please consider joining us, or you can donate via our website or via Zelle to [email protected]. Looking forward to the stoop sale on May 7th!
Sylvia’s Restaurant, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in August 2022, is a testament to the values instilled by the founder and matriarch, Sylvia Woods. She cultivated a strong community around her soul food restaurant in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood that has continued to thrive, even after her passing a decade ago. Amid business expansions and succession planning, the legacy of Sylvia Woods continues to live on. But as Sylvia’s grandson takes over the business, a new challenge faces him and his family: what should the next 60 years of Sylvia’s look like?
Harvard Business School senior lecturer Christina Wing and Kenneth De’Sean Woods, chief executive officer of Sylvia Woods Inc., discuss the case, “Sixty Years of Sylvia’s.”
When looking in an early 20th century street car, bus, and subway index to New York City streets, this popped up:
indicating that there was a market at Third Avenue and 129th Streets – where the large sports fields are and where the traffic from the 3rd Avenue Bridge gets routed to East 129th Street or 2nd Avenue.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any images or information on this market. If you have any information about this market, please put it in the comments section.
“The overhead lights in the back of a public plaza in East Harlem, mounted on a rusty viaduct that supports the Metro-North Railroad, were not working. And Carey King was panicking.
Ms. King, who runs the plaza as the director of Uptown Grand Central, a nonprofit group formed by local merchants, was getting ready to reopen that section in the spring of 2021 after two years of construction to make it nicer. It was so dark that neighbors stayed away. Drug addicts shot up in the shadows and others found hidden corners to urinate and defecate.
When Ms. King tried to get the lights turned on, the Metro-North Railroad, which is operated by the state, said they were not its lights. She went to the city’s Department of Transportation, only to be told to check with Metro-North. After months of going back and forth with different agencies, she finally got city transportation officials to take ownership of the lights.
‘It’s a bad joke: How long does it take to change a light bulb?’ Ms. King said.”
There’s just a little while longer to enjoy the Winter Lights that are glowing here along East 125th Street.
Our trees are lighting even more blocks than ever before, from Fifth to Second avenues. We’re grateful as always to local small business Urban Garden Center for the many weeks they spend to bring you the holiday magic.
The lights will be up through the end of February — adding not only festive cheer, but extra shine and safety on the sidewalks on these dark winter nights.
Since 2005, Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab has been exploring the geography of incarceration. In their project The Pattern, the Columbia University team looks at the relationship between impoverished communities and their physical infrastructure, racial make-up, community investment, and incarceration. The Design Lab’s resulting maps are fascinating explorations of how we have not only spatially concentrated poverty, but how this oversaturation then contributes to scores of spill-over effects that cost society billions of dollars.
The project begins with a map of poverty in New York City:
A detail of the (above) map of poverty is below:
Below is a map of New York City’s communities with concentrated incarceration rates:
A detail of the (above) map of incarceration is below:
Below, the Spatial Information Design Project shows expenditures on incarceration – how much money is spent to incarcerate people from various New York Neighborhoods:
A detail of the (above) map of prison expenditures is below:
To read the report and note how similar the patterns are in city, after city, after city in America, see:
If you like ginger beer, Karl Franz Williams is ready to serve up his ginger beer that is currently celebrating it’s first anniversary.
Williams is a veteran in the beverage industry (having worked at Pepsi) but he’s now focused on his bar and ginger beer that was inspired by his grandfather’s love for fresh juices. This reimagined ginger beer is named after his grandfather — known to the family as Uncle Waithley.
“It makes me really proud just to see that legacy that my grandfather left and he gave me,” Williams said. “Developing this idea of taking care of yourself and living well that was important to him and that passed down from my father to me.”
He says “Uncle Waithleys” is now available in supermarkets like Whole Foods — but fast forward to a busy night at his bar he says watching people enjoy his ginger beer gives him the most pleasure.
I came across a photo of the street scene in front of the Apollo from 1963 – almost 60 years ago:
It was great to see Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and other amazing acts featured, but I was intrigued by the steak house next-door (east) called Harlem Embers.
In the 1940’s the NYC tax photos show this location as housing a very different business:
A Men’s Wear store.
Seawall
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is proposing a seawall along the FDR to protect East Harlem from coastal flooding.
The image below shows a section of the FDR, with one of the towers on the 103rd Street bridge in the distance on the right:
And below, a view looking northward from atop the proposed seawall, with the northbound FDR on the left, and the 145th Street Bridge in the distance:
Two of our Harlem neighbors – Eva and Lilian – formed the Upper Manhattan Asian American Alliance to support this growing community and to celebrate its contribution to the beautiful diversity of Harlem.
The Adams administration announced the placement of 250 new “smart” composting bins. The sealed bins will be on publicly accessible streets and opened via a smartphone app.
The city has completed a small-scale pilot of these bins that began in late 2021, proving them to be a popular and effective way to keep compostable material out of landfills. The new bins will be placed in communities in all five boroughs, with a special emphasis on areas in Manhattan above 125th Street, the South Bronx, the North Shore of Staten Island, and Central Brooklyn.
At the moment of writing this post, the NYC Sanitation site had not been updated to show Harlem locations:
but check it out to see if they’ve updated the outdated information that the Smart Compost Bins are only in Astoria and Lower Manhattan. The bin below and at the top of this item, is at the corner of East 130th and 5th Avenue:
The report found that 16 people under the age of 18 were killed in 2022 by drivers, which is double the number of kids killed by drivers in 2018 or 2020.
Last year’s total pedestrian death toll also marked a 24% increase from 2018, when 202 people were killed by drivers. That was the lowest number of deaths since Vision Zero launched with the goal of reducing traffic deaths to zero.
“As we near the 10-year mark of Vision Zero, it’s clear we haven’t moved fast enough to address this crisis,” said Danny Harris, Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives.
The report noted that East Harlem and the Bronx saw the most crashes, with 6.2 crashes per 100,000 residents. Next was the City Council district covering the East Bronx, as well as the district covering Fort Greene, Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant.
Advocates urged the city to recommit to goals signed into law in the 2019 Streets Plan, which requires the construction of 250 miles of protected bike and lanes and 150 miles of dedicated bus lanes over a five-year period. The Adams administration is not on pace to meet those goals.
