Word: harlemization
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When told of the Harlem move, comedian Chris Rock exulted: "He's black, he's blue, he's just the best of all time." Clinton is the national bad boy, yet he is also the best. He has always seemed most comfortable in black churches, where one senses that his soul--the decent-if-boiling entity so frequently disguised by bad-boy behavior--was truly connected...
...Harlem-office decision in some ways certifies that connection. Ever since it became a prominent black area, around 1910, Harlem has been two contradictory neighborhoods-- both the Zebra Room and the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Rudolf Fisher, another Renaissance author, described the place in his novel The Walls of Jericho: It "remains for six nights a carnival, bright with the lights of theaters and night clubs...Then comes Sunday, and for a few hours Seventh Avenue...reflects that air of quiet, satisfied self-righteousness peculiar to chronic churchgoers...
Transfer those opposites to a man, and there's old Bill-- good as gold, one day a week. Like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, like Harlem's former Congressman, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., like Gabriel Grimes, the preacher father in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, he sins and repents, and then comes Monday...
Baldwin hated the Harlem of the 1950s, when drugs, the numbers game and prostitution poisoned a place graced by George Gershwin and Billie Holiday during the decades before the end of the Second World War. In the 1960s, when Clinton walked 125th Street, things got worse. But from the teens to the mid-1940s, the joint jumped. Claude McKay celebrated the idea of coming Home to Harlem, where life was sensuous and exotic; Zora Neale Hurston moved up there after writing Their Eyes Were Watching God; Countee Cullen wrote his poems; W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey delivered their polemics...
...these days, Harlem is on the rise again, with Disney moving in, and Rite Aid and Magic Johnson's movie theater. And Starbucks and the Gap. And a revitalized Apollo Theater, and the fashionable houses of Striver's Row made fashionable again. And now, who should appear, ready to do business, but the Comeback Kid himself...