Before all the hate NYC bashing begins, Harlem has been gentrified for years. Inwood is in the process. For some reason, Inwood attracts people from the opera world. I have friends who live there. It’s coming along.
There are dozens of parks there. I’m not at all surprised that they have problems with animals. After all, parts of London are overrun by fox.
True. I remember some of the parks in and around London that were overrun by deer in the 60’s. Don’t know about today but I remember the foxes as well.
The simple reason is that it’s a short subway ride from Lincoln Center. Cheap, but still Manhattan.
I worked nothern Manhattan through-out the 90s. I worked in the streets, backyards, rooftops and basements. Inwood was nice, often spent lunch hours bird watching from Seaman Ave...Washington Heights was pretty clean, but dangerous...Harlem was filthy, but not as dangerous as WH.
As a Harlem resident I can assert that Harlem is not even close to being gentrified - that’s a canard created by The New York Times in cahoots with real estate developers to increase rents on slums. Gentrification is what occurred in the meatpacking district, that was transformed from a sparsely inhabited quasi-industrial wasteland of transvestite prostitution to an ultra-trendy upscale neighborhood of expensive restaurants, hipster bars, outdoor cafés and cutting-edge clothing boutiques. Nothing like that has happened in Harlem. Harlem is enormous - its north/south axis starting at 110th St and Morningside Dr. and extending up to 150th St. Its east/west axis goes from Fifth Ave to Riverside Dr. A couple of new restaurants five Starbucks and a few new laundromats do not constitute gentrification. I lived in the East Village as an adolescent, before it was even called the East Village - I know what gentrification is.
For those who don’t live here: Washington Heights is the neighborhood north of Harlem, and Inwood is the neighborhood north of that, at the tippy-top of Manhattan.