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Harlem: It's A Hard-Knock Life
The New York Press ^ | August 6,2008 | Susan Crain Bakos

Posted on 01/26/2009 5:48:57 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

A thug named Mykul—all 6-foot-5-inches and 250 pounds of him—knocked me, a 5-foot-2, 120-pound “grammy” to three, down to the concrete. I was in front of St. Nick’s Pub, at 10:30 on a Monday night this past May, when he stole my handbag, a beautiful green snakeskin bag and all its contents, including more cash than I’d carried in Harlem—ever. People I knew from the pub stood and watched.

Mykul was so sure of his protected status as a thug in the ‘hood that he ambled away cradling my bag in his arm like a football. Amused that he didn’t even have to run, he grinned back at me lying on the pavement. My romance with the ghetto was over; and like every ill-conceived romance built at least partially on illusion, it was destined to end with a bang. I wasn’t expecting a head bang.

It was three summers ago that I fell simultaneously in love with Harlem and St. Nicks Pub, the legendary jazz bar on Sugar Hill—ground zero of the Harlem Renaissance. Billie Holiday sang on the tiny stage; everyone who is anyone in jazz today has played there or come by to jam after downtown gigs.

On that Saturday night when I first went with friends to hear the Africa Band, I thought the pub—Harlem!—welcomed me. And I rhapsodized about the experience to friends. Striding into St. Nicks on a balmy August night, working my embroidered denim Halle Bob skirt with the deep front slit, I felt Harlem gently kissing my thighs. Nelson, the bar manager, smiled at me and brought folding chairs up from the basement to arrange seating for us because, he said, “I want you sitting here where I can keep an eye on those pretty white legs.”

I was surrounded by the kind of crowd that I imagined assembled in small Harlem jazz bars during the Renaissance and again in the 1940s and the 1960s, time periods when the excitement in the air was inextricably linked to a sound appreciated by sophisticated people who sought out diversity. Africans and African Americans, whites, Latinos, European and Japanese tourists—a mélange of ages, races, sexual orientations and interracial couples—they were jostling against each other in this tiny crowded space without animosity. Nelson pronounced himself my “protector” and was until he became very ill a year ago. He died this past March. Two months later I discovered that Harlem is a cruel lover.

Harlem is no place for a woman without male protection.

Yes, I had noticed that the pub was deteriorating in the absence of Nelson’s management—in the year before my fall. It was always a place where cash disappears from unwatched handbags, a jacket or cashmere shawl tossed casually on the back of a bar stool may be sold to another patron and “salesmen” come through hawking everything from tube socks to portraits of the Virgin Mary. Between the casual theft and the men who asked, “Will you buy me a drink? Lend me some money? Help me buy a new car?”—Yes, a car!—I had stopped carrying more cash than I would spend on two drinks and a cab home. Drugs, of course, were available for purchase in the backyard, which usually smelled of pot smoke.

With Nelson no longer casting the watchful eye over me, the undercurrent of anger that I’d seen as an occasional flash in a black woman’s eye turned into more open hostility. The African-American girl bartenders, especially on Sunday nights, brazenly overcharged white customers and told them to leave for “being disrespectful” if they complained. Black women “regulars” made loud negative comments about white women—specifically white women who showed leg. One of the regulars, an educated, successful black man, lectured me repeatedly: “America must apologize for the original sin of slavery and offer reparations.” “The prisons are full of young black men caught with nickel and dime bags,” he declared, “Incarcerated on the three-strikes-you’re-out rule.” “Reverend Jeremiah Wright! Why is he being pilloried for saying what black ministers say every Sunday in Harlem!”

The pub didn’t feel as emotionally safe as it had. Still, I loved the music—and being able to hear it for the cost of a drink or two. Where else in New York City can you hear really good jazz any night of the week for such a small outlay of cash?

But, with Nelson gone, the violence was escalating, too. (Vincent Lempkin, the owner, is rarely on the premises.) There were stories of one musician slashing another in the backyard, of fist fights among drug buyers and sellers, of guns waved but not shot. One Friday night, I was in the pub when some thugs came in and roughed up some other thugs. Most of the African-American regulars bolted for the door; the white people stayed.

Trumpeter and bandleader Melvin Vines told me, “For you white people, it’s part of the ambience, the Harlem experience. We’re tired of it.”

In retrospect, he was right. It was part of the “experience”—and at the same time, I didn’t think the experience would ever involve me, a white woman. How did I not realize that I had become another poster person for gentrification, the evil that the ministers of Harlem were now crusading against? The concern, or so I have been told, is that Harlem will lose its “culture” as whites move in. The endangered part of the vital Harlem culture is the art, the music, the literature, the jazz at St. Nicks Pub—which is threatened by the thug culture surrounding it. The bigger part of the “culture,” thug life—celebrated in hip-hop—is intransigent like the rats and roaches and mold in gut-renovated brownstones.

I do not doubt Melvin when he says, “We’re tired of it”—but tired enough to stand up against thug culture?

Mykul, my assailant, is a thug; and I was naive to have ignored that.

I discovered during chatty conversation at the pub that Mykul—pronounced Michael—was a hairdresser who initially learned his craft while in prison. Liberal white woman that I am—was?—I believed in rehabilitation, so I made an appointment with him at Big Russ’ Barber Shop on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. And I even returned a second time.

I’m sure he stole my wallet on that second hair appointment, though he blamed a gypsy cab driver for its loss. I wasn’t going to make a third appointment. Then the shakedowns for more money began. He called asking me to pay more “because you would pay it downtown.” Apparently desperate to cover the debt with his drug dealer, he’d told me he had—or maybe just to buy more drugs—he stepped up his game.

When I hit the concrete with the back of my head and the small of my back, I knew that I was forever changed. I was mugged once before, but it wasn’t personal. No one I actually knew by name had ever raised a hand to me. Born and raised in East St. Louis, Ill., I had nevertheless lived my life—until that night—in a world where men do not hit or shove women.

Suddenly I was thrust into the Harlem people had warned me against—especially the African Americans I know downtown who wouldn’t live up there if brownstones were still going for a few thousand dollars. (“Are you just crazy, honey? Even the educated blacks in Harlem are in thrall to the thugs.”)

No one outside the pub that night would loan me a cell phone to dial 911. Crying, I went inside and borrowed a phone from Melvin. Two uniformed cops responded to the call, a man and a woman, young and as unsympathetic as the patrons at the bar—who hugged me in greeting most nights—and now wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Nobody knows you,” the cops said. “Nobody saw anything,” they said.

“It’s always like that in there. Someone gets stabbed in the backyard and nobody saw nothing, nobody knows nothing. It’s a matter of time until someone is killed here, and we can shut the place down. What’s a woman like you doing in a dive like this?”

“I love the jazz,” I said.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

The next day, a friend who has written about Harlem said: “I am sorry you lost your idealism and innocence; you held on to it far longer than most people do. It’s too bad you had to learn the hard way that the only thing African Americans hate more than crime is the police.”

Maybe living in a gentrifying neighborhood (as opposed to using it for your bedroom while you work and play downtown) eventually brings out the worst fears and prejudices hiding inside each of us.

Black people have their blame story: slavery/Jim Crow/gentrification. They revert to their blame story whenever anything goes wrong. White people come to the ‘hood as either The Oblivious—who know not, care not about the glories past of Harlem culture and stomp through neighborhoods in their giant’s shoes with all the class of Ugly Americans visiting Europe. Or they are The Idealist (and I was one) who romanticize the ghetto, know more about the culture of the Harlem Renaissance than the average African American and yet aren’t smart enough to know what African Americans do know even if they won’t express it to white people and certainly not the police: a thug is always a thug. Oblivious or Idealist, we get knocked to the pavement and our reticence against speaking out about the evils in our new ‘hood disappears.

Thug culture, not “gentrification” is the real enemy.

And “gentrification” is not a simple matter of “urban removal” either. To date, few African Americans have been displaced by Harlem development that has focused on abandoned brownstones and apartment buildings, according to African-American developer Joe Holland. Some slum landlords (such as Reverend Calvin Butts) are, in fact, African Americans. On the other hand, white developers have come in primarily from Florida and California, thrown up cheap condos and left the city slightly ahead of the floor tiles popping up, roofs leaking and other disasters. Most of the “victims,” however, are young white buyers. Rising rents are forcing out the middle- and lower-income working African Americans—teachers and doormen, nurses and office workers—while the violent homeless, drug users and dealers, remain. Holland is one of the few developers committed to keeping the middle- and lower-income working people in Harlem.

I have not been back to the pub since that night. I miss the jazz and some of the musicians, especially Melvin Vines and his lovely wife Kay Mori who sings with his group and sometimes tends bar. For all its flaws and attendant problems, St. Nicks Pub has long been a place where a diverse group of people come together to hear good jazz. The people who are campaigning hardest to shut it down are its nearest neighbors, the African-American owners of brownstones, tired of the noise in the backyard from boom boxes—not the jazz inside. Do they want to see the jazz go? No, they want to see the drugs and thugs go.

It’s a thug-life issue dressed up by the bar regulars as a gentrification issue—because they would rather blame “white people.”

When Memorial Day shootings on Lenox Avenue left eight teens wounded, some residents told the New York Times that “neighborhood development” was to blame for the violence. One longtime Harlem resident was quoted as saying, “I was praying something like this would happen to keep them out.” She was referring to the new residents. How pathetic—how morally bankrupt—is that?

Often I think that African Americans give us too much power. White people aren’t the primary force keeping them down. Thug Life is. I haven’t seen Mykul since that night in May. If I did, I’d probably find a safe building and hide. The physical sense of violation I felt when Mykul attacked me was so profound that I could not understand how my neighbors could stand by and offer no help, no sympathy.

I realized they are inured to it—or like the man who once lectured me, so committed to the defense of African Americans, right or wrong, that they actually believe the jails are filled with nice boys who smoked a little pot.


TOPICS: Music/Entertainment; Society; The Guild; Travel
KEYWORDS: bigotry; blackonwhitecrime; crime; curedofliberalism; harlem; hatecrime; liberalassclown; liberaltool; race; reparations; wealthredistribution
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To: AppyPappy

“I don’t go downtown after midnight because it isn’t safe. And this is a college town.”
***

Harlem, USA is a very different animal after sundown.


21 posted on 01/26/2009 7:29:38 PM PST by Canedawg (Lincoln freed the slaves, BO will free the terrorists.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

She’s got Jungle fever too!!! Check this out.

A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men
How many white men can treat a woman like a lady and ravish her
By Susan Crain Bakos
Black skin is thick and lush, sensuous to the touch, like satin and velvet made flesh. There’s only one patch of skin on a white man’s body that remotely compares to nearly every inch of a black man’s skin. The first time I caressed black skin, it felt like a luxury I shouldn’t be able to afford. I craved it more strongly than Carrie Bradshaw craved Manolo Blahnik shoes. That phrase, “Once you go black, you never go back” is all about the feeling of the skin.

And I had the socially acceptable explanation for my craving. I used that paucity-of-available-white-partners rationale to explain my relationships with black men for several years. A white woman past forty is often passed over by her white-male contemporaries. She goes younger or ethnic or foreign-born or down the socioeconomic scale or darker or she spends lonely nights at home with her cats. Black men are happy to get the babe they couldn’t have when she was twentysomething and fertile. The laws of the marketplace do prevail. It’s not me, it’s themthem being the white guys who weren’t after me anymore, or so I claimed.

the rest is here http://www.nypress.com/article-12509-a-white-woman-explains-why-she-prefers-black-men.html


22 posted on 01/26/2009 7:34:37 PM PST by DMZFrank
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To: Lizavetta; AppyPappy; Clemenza

that was only the beginning....looks like her jungle fever did her crazy ass in (what a nutjob.....not unusual for a women’s studies writer):

Wednesday, December 14,2005
A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men
How many white men can treat a woman like a lady and ravish her
By Susan Crain Bakos
Black skin is thick and lush, sensuous to the touch, like satin and velvet made flesh. There’s only one patch of skin on a white man’s body that remotely compares to nearly every inch of a black man’s skin. The first time I caressed black skin, it felt like a luxury I shouldn’t be able to afford. I craved it more strongly than Carrie Bradshaw craved Manolo Blahnik shoes. That phrase, “Once you go black, you never go back” is all about the feeling of the skin.

And I had the socially acceptable explanation for my craving. I used that paucity-of-available-white-partners rationale to explain my relationships with black men for several years. A white woman past forty is often passed over by her white-male contemporaries. She goes younger or ethnic or foreign-born or down the socioeconomic scale or darker or she spends lonely nights at home with her cats. Black men are happy to get the babe they couldn’t have when she was twentysomething and fertile. The laws of the marketplace do prevail. It’s not me, it’s themthem being the white guys who weren’t after me anymore, or so I claimed.

That’s a lie. The truth is, I attract about the same percentage of available white men my age (and far younger!) now as I did when I was thirtyand that’s not including the unavailable white men who want to play around anyway.

Enough white men want me that I was hardly facing enforced celibacy, but I don’t want them.

I want black men. They want me. We look at one another and exchange a visible frisson of sexual energy in the lingering glances. And our attraction is based first on race. We are not those couples who “happen to fall in love” with someone of a different race or more purposefully come together but out of some greater sense of interracial understanding and respect. Not as politically-correct men and women do we seek one another out. The Internet has made it a lot easier for us to find each other now. Men advertise: ebony seeks ivory. Women write: seeking tall, dark, and handsome. Very dark. We are not the same people who say: Race is not important. It is important to us. We have race-specific desires.

Even in a time when nearly 40 percent of single Americans have dated outside their race, that deliberate seeking of the specific other makes some people, especially black women, damned mad.

We are what they denigrate and castigate: white women and black men who choose one another because of our racial differences. They resent our taking their men. Black men are two and a half times more likely to marry a white woman than a black woman is to marry a white man. Black women can point to that statistic in justifying their wrath. But in truth, black sisters, we’re after the sex, not the ringand these guys aren’t the marrying kind anyway.

Yes, the sex!

The woman who goes after black men is a variant of sex journalist Susie Bright’s “white bitch in heat,” a woman who puts sex first even though women aren’t supposed to do that. According to one school of thought, white women turn to black men when their sex drives kick into higher gear and their social inhibitions recede into the rearview mirror. It’s a “yes, baby, now I’m ready for you” reaction.

When we get to the “yes, baby” place, they know it, and they are ready and waiting for us. Black men have more energy, style and edge than white men. They know how to flirt, a nearly lost art among the rest of us. A black man is so damned sexy because he knows how to make a woman feel sexy.

Black men have something white guys don’t have anymore: confidence in their masculinity, their sexuality. They clearly know they’re men. White men appear to be waiting for the latest sociological research study to let them know if they are men or not. Yet black men are gentlemen, something else white men no longer are. They make me feel like a woman, both respected and desired. I can let go of my inhibitions, my need to control, when I am with them. How many white men can treat a woman like a lady and ravish her too?

I often felt in my White Period that only during heated sex does that little layer of air bubbles between me and the world pop and disappear, leaving me open to intimate connection. It takes a lot of friction for two white people to get that close. These black men, so alive with erotic electricity, cut through the bubbles with a touch, a caress, a kissand they free meand I can truly touch them. I am like a pampered passenger in a Porsche with an expert driver at the wheel. I know I could suggest a route change, but I never really want to do that. On the other hand, the last time I had sex with a white man, we slogged along a bumpy road in a really old VW, the driver like the typical bumbling tv husband who would neither ask for nor accept the directions he badly needed.

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My current lover, a handsome businessman, seduced me via eye contact at a neighborhood bar while I was eating burgers with a friend. Without saying a word, he paid the compliments, asked the questions with his expressive eyes. He didn’t move over to sit beside me and ask if he could buy me a drink until he knew the time was right. Both soft-spoken and assertive, he has impeccable manners and charm. I was kissing him in a cab 30 minutes after that drink.

On another night in that same bar, a different black man, an artist, knelt and kissed my knees.

I am sure there must be some black men who aren’t good in bed. Personally, I have not experienced one who isn’t. (True, I am not dating down the socioeconomic ladder, but I didn’t do that when I dated white either, so the racial comparisons seem valid and fair.) They look better than white men, they touch and kiss and make love better than white men. Statistically, their penises are only a fraction of an inch bigger on average, but they seem bigger and harder.

White men over 40 have lost their waistlines and their zest for lifeif they ever had it. They carry resentments, grudges and extra pounds in their basketball bellies. Perhaps a good part of that bloat is unhappiness. Even the thin ones look flabby somehow and deeply aggrieved. They nurse the smallest perceived slight longer than their double shots of Scotch. Surely our culture as much as biology turns them into softer, spongier, less-interesting versions of their youthful selves just at the point where women and black men and other minorities are emerging strong. Society overvalues the white man, leaving him angry and bitter when he realizes, around age 40, that he’s not all that.

With the exception of some Italians, white men don’t turn me on anymore.

That admission puts me in the same category as the older man only interested primarily or exclusively in young women. While women my age scowl and frown at these aging, Upper West Side Boomers pushing strollers as the hand of the thin, blonde wife 20 years their junior rests lightly on their arm, I feel a kinship with the old goats. We are the same, me and that bald white guy, drawn to the exotic other, not caring that the object of our desire has no childhood memory of a Kennedy assassination or a typical WASP Sunday dinner of over-roasted beef, lumpy mashed potatoes and soggy vegetables.

Analyze the roots of attractions all you wantlike scientists have doneand you won’t come up with a perfect explanation for why we crave what we do. Desire rises from our depths and is gloriously oblivious to the good opinion of others. Yet until recently, I pretended that my lust was an equal-opportunity craving, because that seemed like the right thing to do.

Halfway through the first glass of wine in my last date with a white man, I realized that little clouds of sadness and self-pity were regularly fluffing off his psyche like the dust clouds kicked up by that dirt-smudged “Peanuts” character as he walks through Charlie Brown’s life. This guy was at least mildly depressed, and I wanted to tell him to exercise, lose weight, trim the combover and get interested in something outside yourself. I would have walked out on him immediately, but he seemed to expect that. I couldn’t deliver the blow to his ego proffered like the naked neck of a martyr to the ax. My Southern cousins would describe his general demeanor as a “hangdog air.” Into the second glass of wine and glancing longingly at the exit, I wanted to hang that dog myself when he mentioned that his face was flushedI hadn’t noticedbecause he’d taken a Viagra “just in case.”

What did he think would entice me more: That he assumed sex was probable because I’m a sex journalistor that he would need chemical help if sex did occur?

I cannot even imagine a black man bungling an attempted seduction in such a sad way.

That was my last token white guy. I recently came out of my racial-preference closet and told my friends, “I love black men. I’m not attracted to white men over 40, and I’m not dating them anymore. Really, it’s not them, it’s me.

Nobody was surprised.


23 posted on 01/26/2009 8:48:13 PM PST by wardaddy
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To: DMZFrank; The KG9 Kid

wonder what she looks like....she acts like she’s a goddess

down where I live jungle fever is more a necessity than indulgence


24 posted on 01/26/2009 8:50:25 PM PST by wardaddy
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

CRAZY! I wouldn’t have gone there in the first place, but it took her THAT long to stop going?


25 posted on 01/26/2009 9:35:51 PM PST by conservative cat ("So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause.")
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

After looking at the original article, at the tail end, I found this jewel:

“Susan Crain Bakos is a sex journalist, the author of 15 books—including The Sex Bible For Women. Her last NYPress story was “A White Woman Explains Why She Prefers Black Men.”

Where I came from, we knew “- - if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

Frequent nasty, violent ghetto bars and expect to be mugged or worse.

Poor ickle Libtard.


26 posted on 01/26/2009 10:22:10 PM PST by GladesGuru (In a society predicated upon freedom, it is essential to examine principles,)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Sounds like Mykul is getting a headstart on redistributing this woman’s wealth.


27 posted on 01/27/2009 1:39:31 AM PST by rfreedom4u (Political correctness is a form of censorship!)
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To: wardaddy

“I cannot even imagine a black man bungling an attempted seduction in such a sad way”

Obviously, she has never said “No” before.


28 posted on 01/27/2009 3:35:03 AM PST by AppyPappy (If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

This woman is a twit.


29 posted on 01/27/2009 3:39:46 AM PST by sauropod (An expression of deep worry and concern failed to cross either of Zaphod's faces - hitchhiker's guid)
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To: The KG9 Kid
“Black men have something white guys don’t have anymore: confidence in their masculinity, their sexuality. They clearly know they’re men. White men appear to be waiting for the latest sociological research study to let them know if they are men or not.

Not all, honey. Not all.

30 posted on 01/27/2009 3:42:27 AM PST by sauropod (An expression of deep worry and concern failed to cross either of Zaphod's faces - hitchhiker's guid)
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To: Clemenza; 2ndDivisionVet; durasell; rmlew
I'm pretty sure that it's safe to say that I have had more experience at many levels of Harlem than the rest of freepdom (not just as LEO, but on multiple social levels).

When the first rumblings of 'homesteading' in Injin Country started a few people asked my advice. I always said no, nope, never, don't do it...eventually you will become one of the herd of gazelles trying to make it across the Serengeti...iow, lunch.

31 posted on 01/27/2009 4:03:30 AM PST by wtc911 ("How you gonna get back down that hill?")
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To: wtc911

Harlem has always been a “block by block” deal. That’s much different than, say, Brooklyn or Da Bronx.

I know multiple middle class black families families who have moved into Harlem over the past five years. And these aren’t/weren’t cheap homes. We’ll see how it shapes up for them, but so far so good.


32 posted on 01/27/2009 4:19:33 AM PST by durasell
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To: SWAMPSNIPER

I’ve been in NYC numerous times for numerous reasons, from visiting friends who live there to checking out colleges in the area. I’m convinced that it’s not a bad place to live and go to school or get a job (there’s one college in NYC that I looked at that’s way ahead of the competition anywhere else in the country) and from that point of view it’s not substantially different form any other city in America. But, I also think that if you move there for the ‘culture’ or ‘the experience’ like this lady did, you’re a complete idiot. You can find a job and a nice place to live (probably for a quarter of the price) somewhere up on the Hudson or out on Long Island and take the train in on the weekends if you just want to be able to go and ‘experience the culture’.


33 posted on 01/27/2009 7:26:43 AM PST by Hyzenthlay (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

You can take the whore out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ...

Oh, never mind. This woman is beyond help.


34 posted on 01/27/2009 7:29:15 AM PST by Birmingham Rain ("Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow." (The Secret Garden))
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

This woman sired offspring? Ick. As for wanting to hear really good jazz, she might consider an iPod.


35 posted on 01/27/2009 9:42:16 AM PST by opus86
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To: durasell
My bet is that your friends will regret the move unless they grew up there and moved back after getting out for a while.

I could tell you stories about Harlem circa 1972-84 that'd curl your hair, make you laugh and/or cry and disbelieve all at the same time.

36 posted on 01/27/2009 4:25:26 PM PST by wtc911 ("How you gonna get back down that hill?")
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To: wtc911

The unreported fact regarding a lot of these pricey brownstone purchases in Harlem, Brooklyn, etc. is that the mortgages are only being paid with the help of one or more tenants, usually in the basement or parlor floor apartments. If rents start decreasing— as they already have in some parts of the city — it’ll have the effect of squeezing the owners.


37 posted on 01/27/2009 6:00:01 PM PST by durasell
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
I realized they are inured to it—or like the man who once lectured me, so committed to the defense of African Americans, right or wrong, that they actually believe the jails are filled with nice boys who smoked a little pot.

There's an awful lot of mugged-liberal realizations like this one in the article. But I bet she still votes Democrat.

38 posted on 01/27/2009 6:11:02 PM PST by denydenydeny (People in dictatorships long for truth while pampered, decadent people in the West long for myth.)
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