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The changing face of Harlem in the photographs of Camilo José Vergara
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Girls, Barbies. Harlem, 1970. By Camilo José Vergara. NY Historical Society
Anyone who’s lived in New York more than a few months knows how fast the city changes. Walk down Broadway today and notice a quirky, little shop or café that looks inviting? If you pass by again two weeks from now, that business may have disappeared, leaving hardly a trace.
For thirty years--since he first arrived in New York City from Santiago, Chille--photographer Camilo José Vergara has been wandering the streets of Harlem, documenting that neighborhood’s changing face. And what he has caught with his camera amounts to modern archeology. A hundred of these photographs are now on view in “Harlem 1970 to 2009” at the New York Historical Society, where you can see a sample of Vergara’s vast and wide-ranging time-lapse photography project.
Most fascinating is a series of pictures Vergara took of 65 East 125th Street, during the period from 1977 to 2007. When he first photographed the exterior of the building, it was a club known as the Purple Manor, and its two beautiful, old wooden and glass doors exuded a homespun, jazzy kind of exuberance, with fanciful cocktail-themed designs painted on the glass in shades of gold, lavender and plum. (See the slideshow below.) Three years later, one of the wooden doors had been replaced with ugly aluminum. By 1983, both doors were gone and the property had been transformed into a discount variety store. In 1988, Vergara’s photo shows it as a grocery, candy and smoke shop. In 1996 the storefront was covered with graffiti. And by 2007, the facade had been gutted and turned into a hideous, plate-glass-fronted Sleepy’s mattress showroom.
Vergara doesn’t just document the architecture. He records the people too. A photo from 1970 shows six black girls, sitting on a stoop, playing with a row of white Barbies. (The first black Barbie had only appeared on the market two years earlier.) He photographs snazzily-dressed grandmothers on their way to church and families dressed to the nines for uptown weddings.
I was amazed to recognize one of our neighborhood regulars, who still walks the streets of Morningside Heights and Harlem today, waving a Bible over his head and shouting at the top of his lungs. Sometimes, as late as midnight, I can hear his astonishingly tenacious voice hollering in the street below, “God loves you! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
According to a plaque on the wall at the Historical Society, “The Hallelujah Man,” as everyone calls him, is named Pierre Gaspar and he’s an immigrant from Haiti. Through the photography of Vergara, Gaspar has now become part of the city’s historical record, along with the photographs of children playing in the streets, dilapidated buildings, gentrified buildings and ever-changing storefronts.
If you want to know something about where this city has come from and where it’s going, “Harlem 1970 to 2009” is a show worth seeing. But perhaps the most important lesson it teaches is about the present. Appreciate the individual, the vibrant and the quirky wherever you find it today—and do your best to preserve it, if only in your mind’s eye. Or tomorrow you may find it’s gone. “Gone,” to quote a line from the Incredible String Band, “like snow on the water!”
The New York Historical Society – 170 Central Park West – 212-873-3400
Showing now to July 12 “Harlem 1970 to 2009: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara”
Related stories:
For Rent: the recession hits Upper West Side shops
Alice Neel, painter of Spanish Harlem
Related links:
Storefront Churches, an upcoming show by Camilo José Vergara
Invincible Cities – urban photographs by Vergara
Jeremiah's Vanishing New York blog
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