“You know what our problem is?” TaharQa Aleem remembers the man asking them. Inside are a crew of young Black men decked out in leather jackets, Argyle sweaters, and slacks surrounding a large brown-skinned man with sleepy eyes and a mischievous smile his Stetson hat is cocked at a forty-five-degree angle, and his sharkskin suit glows in the dim red light. If they don’t know you, or your rep isn’t of a certain pedigree, you can’t get in. ![]() Somewhere off 116th Street in an after-hours club that used to be a storage room in the back of a record store. ![]() Friends say he had a gift of gab-he was such a smooth talker that he could get you to “walk through hell while wearing dynamite drawers.” He told anyone that would listen, and there were plenty who did, about the hustler’s paradise he wanted to build: a “crown jewel” he had visualized called Harlem World. He was fulfilling a vision that first came to him in the late ’50s when he first set up shop in Harlem. The local businessman, who was rumored to have had ties to Detroit and North Carolina, is said to have gotten the building for pennies on the dollar. Sometime around 1977, a local businessman purchased the property on the corner of 116th Street and Lenox Avenue it had previously been a Woolworth’s department store, but the drug problem had gotten so bad that they wanted out of the area. “These niggas around here will cut your hand off.” Gonzales recalls an afternoon in the 1970s when he was walking down 116th with his parents: “Mami, turn those rings around,” his stepfather warned Gonzales’s mother. Gonzales, also a Harlem native, tells me in a phone call how his stepfather worked at a legendary lounge and barbershop on 123rd and Seventh Street called the Shalimar: “On Saturdays, all you saw was pimp cars up and down the street in front of the Shalimar.” It was the playground for the most powerful players in the powder game. It would be crowded with people selling drugs, buying drugs, whatever… From 116th to Amsterdam, you smelled dead rats, burning buildings, and drugs being smoked.” Smith tells me in a phone interview, “was like Thirty-Fourth Street in Christmastime-you know, how like you see in the movies? It was so crowded, you walked in the streets. “Eighth Avenue back then,” hip-hop historian and Harlem native Troy L. Those that couldn’t, ran like scalded dogs. Businesses that could afford to stay had to fortify their storefronts with metal gates and steel doors. Parts of Harlem turned into a no man’s land. Packages called Sudden Impact, Blue Magic, and Black Tape became hot commodities. Almost overnight, junkies prowled the streets like zombies as crews of well-dressed hustlers set up shop claiming whole blocks as territory. In the 1960s, as heroin started flooding African American neighborhoods, the quality of life took a downward spiral. It hardly resembles the neighborhood that James Baldwin wrote about so poetically. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, CVS Pharmacy, and, of all things, the Mormon Church are all on Lenox Avenue. ![]() Thirty years ago, there was no major economic investment in Harlem, nor could you have seen white women jogging at night. There have been department stores there going back to at least the 1940s when it was a Woolworth’s. ![]() Not too long ago it was a Fallas discount store.
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