Borders (not the bookstore kind)
by Bryan
Ta-Nehisi Coates has a running dialogue today about a NYT trend story that basically says non-blacks are taking over Harlem. He disagrees, but more to the point is indifferent about what—even if true—it even means when there are like, real problems for black people. Something like: Gentrification isn’t new, and the root problem is bigger than any one instance of it happening.
But the better question is whether it’s happening or not. He asks in this post:
Still, thinking more on the geography the Times calls “Harlem” raises some questions for me:
“But the neighborhood is in the midst of a profound and accelerating shift. In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population — a shift that actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.”
By my estimate this basically places Morningside Heights (amongst other things) inside of Harlem. I imagine that might have been true at some point. But those borders sound really permissive to me. Am I off?
What I thought (and wrote a comment to this effect that is basically reproduced here) is that it’s no different than a phenomenon I was writing about earlier in Queens, where most black neighborhoods are referred to as “Jamaica” on the nightly news, et al., because it’s expedient. If the Times is including Morningside Heights in its map of “Harlem,” maybe they’re going by an old map that places it “inside” a greater Harlem, but I agree with (Run) T-NC that that seems a little off. Which gets us to the idea of how a place is defined. If Harlem did once swallow Morningside Heights whole, why doesn’t it now? And to where does it extend? Most importantly, why do we consider it to extend to wherever it extends?
A friend told me a long time ago that I was into the idea of “place,” and I’m really starting to feel that. I’m about 200 pages into William Vollman’s Imperial, which is already the most exhaustive account of the idea of “place” I’ve ever read—and I have 800 pages to go. It’s all about Imperial County, California and its sister region on the Mexican side and treats the area (wisely, I believe) as a single entity, with this crushing vivisection that makes it almost impossible to view as a unit. But for most of history it was a unit, and at some point it very well may be again. On top of all this, I was in Imperial County last week, spending 48 hours of Christmas break in Palm Springs with pops and bro. I wanted to see the Salton Sea—a reeking, festering, dead body of water around which a good portion of Vollman’s Ouija-like narrative revolves—but was talked out of it, or rather basically forbidden (as family time was short) by my stepmom, who said she had investigated it for kayaking purposes and found it “disgusting.” I didn’t have the heart to say well yeah…
But it all gets to the idea of defining a place. I’ve tried to do this before with MV and think I did a bad job [note: I just re-read it and it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I feel like I was grasping for something I didn’t quite reach] but I’m trying with Queens now and I think I’m getting some good stuff down. Definitely helps to not be from there and not be there; while there’s something to be said for writing things down as they happen*, there’s also a value in using what you remember—it’s our memories that make places what they are, to us, and it’s important to be true to that.
* Of course, I did write everything down already, but that’s not the point.
Bryan Joiner 
Thanks, CRG — you have every right to be nitpicky, and as far as corrections on the Internet go, that was about as nice as they come.
Certainly I can see the irony in my error. I figured the whole Salton Sea was in Imperial, and mentally extended it to Palm Springs simply because I wanted to be there, I think. But truthfully (don’t tell anyone), I saw a map of Cali yesterday and saw how much further the south end of the Salton Sea was from the border, and I wondered whether I had gotten that right — and immediately forgot it until right now. I appreciate it.
Haha. No worries.
If you ever get back to the Palm Springs area, definitely take a trip to the Salton Sea, and also hit the mud pots and tour through the agricultural areas south of the Sea. (But only if it’s winter.) It really is a fascinating place.
Oh, and take everything you read about the region with a grain of salt (no pun intended).
I was amused to see that, in this discussion about “place” which was precipitated by a question about where Harlem begins and ends, you miscalculated Imperial County’s “place” by about 30 miles.
Imperial County ends about halfway up the Salton Sea, so if you never made it to the Sea (or anywhere south of the Sea) you never quite made it to Imperial County. Palm Springs is in Riverside County.
“Imperial County” proper runs from the Arizona border west to the beginning of the mountains that lead to San Diego, and from the Mexican border north to include about half of the Salton Sea. “Imperial Valley” can mean the same thing as Imperial County, or it can mean Imperial County plus the Mexicali, Mexico region. Sometimes people refer to the “Imperial-Coachella Valleys,” which includes Imperial County and the agricultural areas north of the Salton Sea in Riverside County. Or sometimes “Imperial Valley” means just the narrow strip of inhabited and cultivated land that runs north to south down the center of Imperial County. It all depends on the intent of the speaker/writer.
P.S. It’s not my intent to be nitpicky – it was a very easy and common mistake to make – I simply found humor in it, and thought it might add a little to the discussion.
I feel you on the term, and I don’t generally like it and I think Coates doesn’t either: He seems to feel like “Harlem” can’t even BE gentrified, because it exists not as a geographic area but as something else. Which would be why something was “once” Harlem and is now someplace else. The place hasn’t moved, but the people have.
I find the gentrification term deplorable, and to me, I feel like the NY Times has hammered stories on this topic for years because of the fact that it is in bed with serious real estate people (I won’t get into the shameful way the Times argued against rebuilding office space at ground zero without mentioning that they were in the midst of building their own tower with space to lease).
Basically, is it not ok for people to move about within a city? is this the middle ages, where walls were built around interiors and the outlying lands were barbaric? I get it, in some cultural sense losing what Harlem is, is sad. Like how, to a much lesser extent, losing Little Italy was sad. But the Harlem people speak of romantically ceased to exist many, many a moon ago. People move all the time, calling it gentrification is a little silly and maybe a lot wrong because of its racist connotations.
Yeah, there certainly is a place vs. space dynamic that I didn’t fully acknowledge. Certainly I’m unmoored by virtue of the fact that my closest family member lives in Phoenix, and the others are in Alaska, Tucson and London, none of these places I’ve ever called home. That would be one thing, but the one place I ever really did call home is actually definable, and so it wasn’t just a function of childhood that it seemed entirely knowable, and maybe it’s why my goal to “know” other places that I’ve lived, including this one, has infinitely more facets. I think I’ve got something of a handle on New York now, but it was not without its difficulties.
Um, if you actually want to think about “place,” esp vs. “space,” let me know. There’s a giant canon about this.
Part of your difficulty may lie in the fact that, in the postmodern moment, we don’t inhabit place anymore–totally disoriented by our own lack of historicity into only fleeting through space (this is Jameson). I don’t totally agree with that, but it’s a start.
Unless you want to be a regionalist or something…