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A family of West Africans passed us. The little girls—claiming the sidewalk with the self-possession evident in their ram-rod posture—wore long skirts and hijabs, a walking tableau of all the Chief had just been speaking of. They did not escape his scrutiny. He did not understand, he said, why so many African immigrants were now crowded into Harlem, clamoring to live in America. He predicted that
they will curse the day they brought their children here, when their daughters are treated like prostitutes and their sons are rotting in jail.

The Chief said the condition of black people in America amounted to genocide,
but everybody’s walking around like everything’s cool.
He repeated that phrase a few times as we spoke. I looked around us, where everyone was milling around like everything was, indeed, cool.

I left him there on Lenox Avenue. I was late for another meeting.

The purpose of this meeting was to discuss strategies against
Columbia University’s plan to expand its campus
into seventeen acres of West Harlem. The meeting featured several speakers explaining different aspects of the situation. There was the historical context of Columbia’s earlier incursion into Harlem during the 1960s, when
a plan to build an athletic facility
by taking over public land from Morningside Park was scuttled by community outrage. There was
the complicity of various black politicians
who were either past or present employees of Columbia, and who were either supportive of the university’s plan or would remain silent. There were the
Columbia students organizing
in solidarity with the community, a few of whom would later go on hunger strike. There was
Columbia’s decision to ignore
the expertise of at least one scientist who issued urgent warnings about the catastrophe of building a subterranean research facility—where potentially hazardous experiments would take place—in an area known to be at risk of submersion during storm surges. And there was the awkward twist that the scientist was a member of Columbia’s own faculty. There was, above all, the doctrine of eminent domain, which allowed the seizure of private land for the construction of buildings or infrastructure to enhance the public good. The expansion of Columbia University’s private dormitories and private research facilities could be deemed, after an exhausting stretch, to enhance the public good, but it would also continue a dangerous precedent,
following a Supreme Court decision
that essentially extended the definition of “public good” to include dispossessing swathes of the public if rich and influential private entities found it good.

As part of a public relations campaign waged with the assistance of a well-connected black lobbying firm, Columbia placed advertisements in the
Amsterdam News
featuring black and brown faces promoting the university’s benevolence as an employer and institutional neighbor. At the meeting, someone suggested taking up a collection to fund a counteractive ad campaign. It would feature the black and brown faces of people who would be displaced, or whose jobs would be lost, because of the Columbia expansion. Some people at the meeting contributed money right away, but those funds were reimbursed only a few moments later. It soon became clear that no entity claimed or wanted to claim the authority to collect the cash. No actual plan had been devised or would be executed.

That meeting was the first time I’d heard of the city’s plan to rezone 125th Street. It was the next struggle coming down the pipeline. But at that moment, it all seemed distant and theoretical. Everyone was exhorted to go to a hearing on the Columbia case that was to happen in a few days. Many people did go; it was so crowded that most who wished to testify could not even get inside. I did not go to testify. I walked around among the people milling outside, asking questions and taking notes.

I spoke with one man who didn’t know why he was there. He was passing out materials from “the Coalition for the Future of Manhattanville.” That organization’s name and reading materials were oddly similar to that of the Coalition to Preserve Community, the group of neighbors and activists who led opposition to Columbia’s plan. But the Coalition for the Future of Manhattanville was in favor of the expansion, and it was not, exactly, a grassroots organization. It was launched by the same political consulting firm that placed the pro-Columbia advertisements in the
Amsterdam News
. The man passing out the pro-Columbia materials told me he didn’t know anything about the plan
.
He’d been brought in a van
of residents from a facility for recovering addicts in East Harlem. Upon arriving, they’d all been given stickers and told to pass out flyers in support of Columbia’s expansion.

Seeing my notepad, an older man approached, eager to be recorded. He wore a wrinkled suit and white socks with his black dress shoes, but he had not arrived early enough to be allowed inside the hearing. At first he spoke to me in a mix of Spanish and English, and then he leaned close and said in a low voice:
They are going to drive us into the river.

I saw fleeting images, too. Long after they had ceased to refer to any existing program or administration, I saw signs from the Koch and Dinkins mayoral regimes hanging from the fire escapes of buildings. These announced the successes of
alternative management programs, empty building projects,
or weatherization upgrades according to the latest standards of two decades past. Nearby were newer signs, offering condominiums for sale. I saw the names of James Weldon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Phillip Randolph attached to public housing projects. I remembered James Weldon Johnson’s prophetic questions:

Some have suggested that the mere presence of the projects in Harlem is the reason black people will, as James Weldon Johnson put it,
hold
Harlem. But there are condominiums going up directly across the street from the projects, and like the public housing buildings from the past, the condominiums are given names that are meant to inspire. The condominium Dafina neighbors the St. Nicholas houses; its name is Swahili for “a thing of value.” Residents with southern-facing units in the Kalahari have an intimate view of the Martin Luther King Jr. houses. The Kalahari is named for the desert into which the Herero people of southwestern Africa were driven after the murderous exploits of German imperialists who usurped the most fertile land of what is now Namibia, a genocide known as Germany’s first Holocaust, for which the Herero seek reparations. Other new buildings look to Harlem’s cultural heritage for naming inspiration, so we have the Ellison, the Langston, the Fitzgerald, the Lester, the Renaissance, and the Rhapsody.

A. Philip Randolph Square, a triangle formed by the intersection of Seventh and St. Nicholas avenues with 116th Street, is marked by a quote from Randolph:
The idea of separatism
is hearkening to the past, it is undesirable even if it could be realized, because the progress of mankind has been based upon social, intellectual, and cultural contact
.

Two blocks away, on 114th Street, a row of tenement buildings now serves as public housing. The housing development also bears the name of A. Philip Randolph, while failing to uphold his ideals about the progress of mankind. The block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was taken over by the city in the 1960s as
an innovative experiment in slum clearance
intended to preserve the original housing stock and the intricate community network by renovating houses without displacing their occupants. The block went from being slums to being a jewel of the public housing system, but now it is slums again. Many of the houses on that street are boarded up. It is not possible to tell if they are in a state of abandonment or a state of suspended renovation. The effect is the same: no one lives there.

At one meeting about the rezoning of 125th Street, a speaker shouted out,
And you know what happened to Eighth Avenue!
What happened to Eighth Avenue was that in 1998 a private developer acquired several city-owned vacant lots and buildings for “middle-income housing,” a proposal that passed the local Community Board with reservations:
Some members were concerned
that it could lead to gentrification of the neighborhood. That is one reason they are asking the developers to include community groups in planning and construction
. This included promises of
locally based general contractors, workers and handymen on the site.
What happened on Eighth Avenue was a rezoning, specifically, forty-four blocks of Frederick Douglass Boulevard were rezoned in 2003 to abolish height restrictions and
enhance development potential
. The area now boasted a strip of upscale condominium developments from just above the park to 125th Street, along with the requisite amenities: dueling wine shops, a few cafés, choice places for Sunday brunch, a boutique selling pet accessories, and new satellite offices for New York’s most exclusive real estate brokers.

On West 115th Street, near the corner of Eighth Avenue, a sign invites passersby to attend a meeting. The location of the advertised meeting, to have taken place in 2002, is the building to which the sign is affixed. But most of the windows and entrances of that building have been sealed over. In strange contrast there is no exterior door on the building. The vestibule is exposed to the street and its once fine tile mosaic is in disrepair.

Not far from there is the home of the Bilalian Center, a black Muslim outfit consisting of a barbershop and a convenience store, among other enterprises. The place gets its name from Bilal, the freed black slave who, after the prophet and his followers captured Mecca, was chosen by Muhammad to sound the first call to prayer
from atop the Kaaba, the black rock in the center of the world, with the gate of heavens directly above. The Bilalian Center is closed. One sign announces a meeting from several years ago. The theme of the meeting was
Keeping the Promise
.

I have been to Promise Land.

It is a building at the corner of 146th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.
Promise Land
is spelled out on the glass door of the building with carefully placed individual decal letters. Every time I pass it, I admire the unusual shape of that building. It sits on a corner, meeting the intersection with a gracefully rounded tower that goes up the side of the building like a turret. Just a few blocks up St. Nicholas Avenue is the brownstone where Ralph Ellison lived while writing
Invisible Man
. Its significance is not commemorated. When I last walked by, there was a sign offering it for sale through an exclusive real estate firm.

Whether or not Promise Land is occupied is a mystery. The door looks to be in regular use, but the windows are mostly boarded up—though at night, one partially obstructed window gives off a light from the lower level.