I graduated from college in 2020, which means that a global pandemic upended what was already going to be a deeply transitional time of my life. In that haze of existential crises, I decided that I wanted to be an actor. And I knew that if I wanted to be an actor, I might want to live in New York, even if I had only ever spent eighteen hours there, half of them asleep. I’m a Black girl from the South, so after four years in Boston, I wanted to live where the Black folks stayed at. When I made the move to the city, I landed in Harlem.
In my naivete, I assumed that every time I stepped above 110th Street, I would be rejuvenated and inspired, knowing that people like Zora Neale Hurston and Marian Anderson and Lena Horne had roamed these streets before me. There were certainly days when that felt true, like when I walked down streets lined with brown faces on brownstone stoops. There were other days when that felt very untrue, like when I saw a Black Lives Matter sign posted up in the window of a condominium most Black folks couldn’t afford to live in.
The untrue days won out, so I moved.
Which is to say, 306 West 142nd Street—a condo building two blocks from St. Nicholas Park and six blocks from the train station featured in the music video for “Tomorrow 2” by GloRilla, featuring Cardi B—is no longer a part of my personal stomping grounds. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have beef.
The easily Google-able story of this address begins in 2015, when construction of a new luxury (!) condominium began on a previously empty lot. Two years later, construction was complete; the mixed-use building boasted seven stories, thirty-six residential units, and one commercial space. According to our guiding light StreetEasy, the units are “premium, sunlit residences” with a “clean” aesthetic. A white oasis with “revered” Central Harlem serving as a colorful “backdrop” (“white” as in the color, not as in “yt people”—metal appliances notwithstanding, every surface in any given apartment is either hex color code #FFFFFF or aspires to be so).
My true angst, though, is spurred by the building’s facades—both of them.
New constructions often legitimize their existence by claiming to serve the wider community. If there is anything about 306 West 142 to indicate that it intended to be for-the-community rather than simply in-the-community-it-seeks-to-displace, it is the commercial space on the first floor. If the advertisement plastered outside the building is to be believed, this unit was intended for a “community use/day care/medi-cal/nonprofit” type beat.
Though there is ample evidence of tenants shelling out the coin to live here—StreetEasy lists a two-bed rented on October 2 for $3,195 a month—the commercial space has apparently sat empty for every single day of the past five years. Between that and rents consistently landing to the right of Central Harlem’s median, 306 West 142nd is not doing a good job of being for-the-community. What’s more, it’s only nominally in-the-community. I think it could better be described as a pocket dimension, the front door a portal from Harlem to someplace (scare quotes) “decontaminated” of the (Huge Scare Quotes) “inconveniences” of living in a historically Black neighborhood. But maybe we should have known it was a wrap when the building’s designer dropped a model rendering of the building that featured exclusively pale-skinned Harlemites. Create the future you want to see, I guess.
As for the actual front of the building, it has bravely committed to being totally out of step with its surroundings. A facade that in its grayness cannot help but identify itself as a deeply boring harbinger of gentrification. A face whose inexplicable trapezoidal appendage adds superficial height, making it a comrade in arms with every man who claims that his height in Timbs is true reality.
I concede that what the building looks like ought to be materially insignificant. I should accept that aesthetic moralism plays an outsized role in my layperson’s understanding of architecture. I could internalize the reality that governmental regulations and economic imperatives push architects to design buildings in certain ways across eras. I might even be led to the conclusion that my preference for any number of the brownstones in a five-minute radius does not nullify the reality that the machinations of capitalism influenced their appearance.
To me, “old” is survival. Old is a badge of honor. Old is blessed. Old is the proof that we the young can also survive. And in the context of Harlem, the same Harlem that I’ve always romanticized, “old” invokes creative abundance and Black endurance in the face of physical and spiritual annihilation.
Even knowing all this, I choose to be a hater. The antiseptic interior walls of 306 West 142 are the perfect surface on which to cast my own visceral feelings about age and survival.
For me, the physical signifiers of age are sacrosanct. To me, “old” is survival. Old is a badge of honor. Old is blessed. Old is the proof that we the young can also survive. And in the context of Harlem, the same Harlem that I’ve always romanticized, “old” invokes creative abundance and Black endurance in the face of physical and spiritual annihilation. So when I see a new, trapezoidal facade rise where an old one once stood, I feel threatened. It feels like the destruction of the proof that we existed and the promise that we will exist in the future.
Right around here, I had hoped to write something poignant about the history of 306 West 142nd Street before it was an empty lot. In my romanticism, I thought I would dig up some inspirational story about how a famed jazz musician wrote their magnum opus in that building or a tearjerker anecdote about how a seemingly preordained couple lived in the building for most of their lives. And then I would have this sanctimonious little gotcha moment about how decades of continuous history have been washed away and replaced by apartments that change hands every few years.
I can’t write that version of this piece, because despite my best efforts, I couldn’t figure out what even stood at that address over the course of the 20th century, not to mention anything about the people who lived there. All I know is that whatever existed before was demolished in 1999.
So let me instead turn my attention back to the current 306 West 142nd Street. I already got anticommunity vibes from the fact that the community space is as functional as the McDonald’s soft-serve machine, but the rental patterns of residential units also paint a bleak picture. There’s luxury, there’s “premium” living, but there’s (probably) no community, given that—again, according to our guardian angel StreetEasy—the units change hands every couple of years. On a more concrete note (in the most literal way), new constructions like this one have gotten some bad press lately for shoddy construction and a presumed lack of longevity.
The hypothetical “community use/daycare/medical/nonprofit” serves as a superficial salve to the violent reality that this building strives to extract and retain as much money as humanly possible, even if it means displacing and replacing the tenant population in order to do so. With mixed-use enterprises popping up all over the city, this appears to be a common MO. I just wish that the developers behind these buildings were forthright in their intentions instead of hiding behind empty promises—and storefronts.