By Sonja Sharp
Special to DNAinfo
HARLEM — Manhattan’s streets ooze history, particularly in Harlem where marquee names top virtually every corner, from Malcolm X to Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
So it’s no surprise that Open House New York’s walking tour of Historic Harlem, put on in conjunction with Culture Now, drew more than two dozen people to the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street late Sunday afternoon.
“I’m a New Yorker, so I’m interested in New York City history,” said Barbara Thau of the East Village. “We never come up here, so it’s different.”
Throughout the two hour tour, longtime guide James Kaplan lingered over Harlem’s storied real estate, from the “Million Dollar Houses” that helped usher out racist renting practices along135th Street to the humble apartment building on 138th Street that once housed Marcus Garvey’s Liberty Hall.
At the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, participants were urged to look for membership cards to Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which archivist Miranda Mims assured them would be on display.
“We’re one of the best guides you could come to on black culture,” Mims said.
After a weekend full of Open House events, Maria Camargo, 24, said it was cultural curiosity that had brought her uptown.
She and pal Maria Cunha, 26, had explored Open Houses throughout Midtown and the Upper East Side, hopping from Central Park to the Park East Synagogue and the Chrysler Building before hitting up Harlem, snapping pictures in front of the 135th Street YMCA.
“I know nothing about the history of black culture in America, so I thought this was a good start,” said Camargo, who lives in the East Village but hails from the historically black city of Sao Paulo in Brazil.
“I’m very interested in black culture in Brazil. It’s part of our history, which is shared, so I take it as part of my own culture.”
