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A street scene close to the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, 1920. (Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

An apartment building occupies the background on the far side of the intersection. Just visible in a few of the upper-story windows are figures looking out from their apartments—people surveying the happenings on the street, keeping watch from within. No one looks at the camera. I can tell from the clothing of the walkers that the picture dates to the 1910s. The shadows should tell me the time of day, but I can’t decipher the angle at which they fall.

It is a Harlem street scene. It is another Harlem street scene. It is not an especially crowded scene, so it does not tell the story of Harlem’s legendary crowdedness. The people are elegantly dressed, so it does not tell the story of Harlem’s legendary destitution.
The comedy advertised
on the billboard is the movie adaptation of a 1919 stage play of no great distinction—the story of a minister’s daughter who comes to New York, lives in a boarding house, winds up a chorus girl, and then falls in love—so it does not tell the story of Harlem’s legendary artistic outpouring of racial consciousness.

In fact, the story that captured my attention was not told by the photograph itself but by its caption.
The picture is titled
Within Thirty Seconds Walk of the 135th Street Branch.
Nothing indicates whether these words were fixed to this image by its maker or by its cataloguer. It gives information not contained within the frame: there is no street sign in view alerting us that this corner is the intersection of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. For the caption’s author, the crucial thing was not the exact location—we do not learn whether you could reach this scene by walking north, south, east, or west. Essentially, the caption does not describe what the photo shows. Instead, it offers a lesson about perspective that has nothing to do with the position of the photographer’s camera. According to the caption, the people we are looking at, and their various activities, are not of primary importance. The scene is
important only in relation to what is nearby. For the author of the caption, defining this image for the official record, the crucial thing was time: thirty seconds was all it took to go out and meet this scene. Its significance is in its distance from the library; all things in the street refer back to the library, just as the hour of the day around the world is determined by one’s distance from Greenwich. I scan the image looking for some other sign and wonder how many times I have hurried over that very spot.

It has the character of a clue from a treasure hunt:
Within thirty seconds’ walk of the 135th Street Branch you will find
…. But there is a tear in the parchment. It is not possible to hunt treasure with such incomplete instructions. Within thirty seconds’ walk of the library you find a Halal grill cart manned by Egyptians, and West African women standing at the subway entrance selling the
Daily News
and
New York Post
. Walk in another direction and you find the Yemeni bodega where I go for tea and junk food while working at the library. At the intersection of 135th and Lenox, within thirty seconds’ walk of the library, I once found a man toting a portable xylophone who offered to play me a song. He walked with me in the direction of my building, chiming his keys, but he would not tell me, when I asked, the name of the tune he played. He acted as though it were an insult to ask and a blasphemy to answer.

Within thirty seconds’ walk of the library, just near the corner of 136th Street, a handsome and serious-looking African man sells incense, perfume oils, and shea butter. Watching him during my breaks from the library, I notice that usually he is not minding his wares, but sits planted beneath a sidewalk tree reading the Koran, making notes, and manipulating a length of prayer beads. I imagine him to be a diligent scholar of Islamic law and wonder how he came to be a street merchant outside the library. One day, taking my break under a nearby tree, I saw that he’d been joined
at his station and in his activity by two attentive students. I could not hear his voice, but the tender incantations of his young charges, timidly repeating their lessons for review, carried over the sound of traffic from that makeshift classroom beneath a shade tree. First they answered in concert, then each child spoke alone. The smaller of the two boys struggled to stay focused. He scribbled hurriedly in his composition book when his eyes were not darting up and into the crowd, as if searching for clues in the faces of the people streaming by.

Before moving to Harlem, I often visited the library as a college student, during trips to New York. At the time I didn’t think of this as “going to Harlem,” because I was “going to the library.” Technically, when setting out on such journeys I was already in Harlem, because I always stayed with a boyfriend who lived just north of Columbia University. If I’d been more enterprising, I could have walked to the library or taken a series of buses, but instead I’d take the local 1 or 9 line from its elevated tracks at 125th Street and Broadway downtown to 96th Street. From there, I would then take the express train back uptown to 135th Street and Lenox, via the 2 or 3 line, which deposited me directly at the library door.

When I came up from the station, it was necessary to get my bearings. This was not difficult—on one side of the intersection at 135th and Lenox was the hospital, on the other side was the library. I could invent for you the street scene of a decade past, some loud summer noise or curious encounter, but they would be just that, inventions, because I don’t remember a thing. I don’t remember a thrill that was specific to being in Harlem. The thrill was in the library. Harlem was the place I rushed past to meet it. The library was my true destination.

Once inside, I settled into my work. My research at the time was scattered but intense. I went to the library armed with a list of topics, usually for some writing project that was never accomplished. The library was where I read the history of the Scottsboro trial. I read about the cult of the Black Madonna shrines scattered throughout Europe, deciphering the controversy about whether the faces of the Madonna statues had been black intentionally, perhaps hearkening back to dark-goddess worship beginning with Isis, or whether the images had become blackened through the operation of time and the residue of smoke from candles burned by her devotees. I studied minstrel shows. I read about the Great Migration and about the public execution of a twelve-year-old slave girl in 1786. All of these subjects consumed me at the time, the answers to a series of questions whose urgency I have since forgotten. Even though the hours spent at the library in those years did not produce any tangible achievement, my pilgrimages were carried out with a great sense of purpose: I was in the place I needed to be in order to know all things. But my visits to the city were brief. I would leave the library and dash out past Harlem, back to New York.

Looking through my own old photographs I found a strange souvenir of those days, a picture I do not remember making of a vista I don’t recall having admired. It is a street scene, a Harlem street scene. It shows the intersection of 135th and Lenox Avenue—looking south down Lenox and taken from a slightly elevated view. When I first discovered the picture, it took some moments to understand how I could have achieved such an angle. Looking closer, a slight glare revealed that it was taken through a window. I soon realized only one place could have offered this particular vantage point: the library. Perhaps I’d abandoned my research that day and had been staring out the window. But I was looking out at nothing in particular, it seems. I did not train my
lens on an event taking place in the distance or on any specific person. The clothes of the people in the street reveal that it was winter. There are no shadows by which to tell the time of day.

Another picture in the library shows the point of departure for that thirty-second journey. It is the reading room of the 135th Street Branch, in 1935. A group of fashionable aesthetes are gathered for a portrait. They sit in a formal semicircle, with some in chairs and others standing behind in a second row.

The static composure of these figures suggests none of the clamor that could be found in the intersection just a few yards away. The
Staff and friends of the Negro Division
of the 135th Street Library
occupy a distant realm. The gentlemen sit with legs placidly crossed and arms folded in their laps, the women tuck their ankles in quiet propriety. One man wears white spats over his shoes; some of the women hold pocketbooks. The ladies are coiffed with hairstyles plastered into finely marcelled curls. One woman’s dress fastens with a multitude of buttons, another woman wears a corsage. In the center of the room is an Italian marble sculpture of the great nineteenth-century actor Ira Aldridge as Othello at the moment when he mournfully clutches Desdemona’s handkerchief. Around the room, framed pictures hang salon-style, and bronze busts decorate the tops of bookshelves. In the background, African masks jut out from the wall. Standing in the back row, unassuming, is Arthur Schomburg, the man whose collection was housed in that library, the man whose search for origins made the place a destination.

What became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture began as the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Indeed, the now world-renowned special collection was, at first, just a few files of newspaper clippings on black history,
curated by a white librarian, Ernestine Rose, and her black assistant, Catherine Latimer. Upon arriving at that post in 1920, at the moment when the slowly accumulating mass of blacks was beginning to assert its permanence and purpose in Harlem, Ernestine Rose devoted herself to creating a facility that might answer the question posed by the crowd in the streets outside. As she saw it,
Instead of considering the Negro problem
shall we not treat the Negroes as individuals, with the opportunities and restrictions only which surround all individuals?

If the street was the place where black Harlem constituted “the Negro problem,” where people were only of sociological interest, then the library would be a temple of the individual, worshipping the personal aspirations and collective triumphs of black people and their culture. The purpose of the 135th Street Branch, articulated early on by Rose, was
to preserve the historical records
of the race; to arouse the race consciousness and race pride; to inspire art students [and] to give information to everyone about the Negro
.

Rose and Latimer set up a program of poetry readings and book discussions, and, most important, they began to build a small collection of books, periodicals, and clippings related to the history of black people in Africa and America. The novelist Nella Larsen worked there as a librarian. The young poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were regular patrons. Of course, a great many other seekers whose purposes and accomplishments will never be known also came to the library. The black history collection soon became so popular that the librarians, after consulting with a committee of local intellectuals, removed the items from general circulation in the lending library, keeping them on the upper floor of the branch, where they could only be retrieved for reference on the premises. The few books available on black history were so frequently used and so much in demand that many hard-to-find and irreplaceable books were read until they fell apart.