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Rebuilding the Barrio

Now, from her second-floor office on 116th Street next to the Banco Popular, she works the phones relentlessly on behalf of her clients and her neighborhood. She watched East Harlem deteriorate ("I remember when people used to get dressed to come to El Barrio, and then I remember when the elevators stopped working in our building and I had to step over junkies on the way to school"), and she is determined to do what she can to help turn things around, even if it means alienating some people or starting an intramural battle in the community by complaining about "our leaders here who do absolutely nothing."

But as I walked the streets of East Harlem with her over several days, it was clear that this is a neighborhood in transition. Though there is plenty of work that still needs to be done, the physical environment is no longer an aesthetic or economic emergency. Nearly all of the abandoned buildings are gone, either renovated through public and private initiatives or torn down -- an arduous undertaking accomplished through the work of people like Mark Alexander, the executive director of Hope Community, a nonprofit development group that has built more than 1,000 units of housing in East Harlem. Flores introduces me to Alexander one afternoon at his office on 104th Street. Alexander knows East Harlem in a way that only someone who has spent the past twenty years struggling to provide decent housing for the residents can know it.

By renovating decrepit, abandoned, and burned-out buildings as well as putting up new ones, Alexander has been responsible for recapturing whole blocks that had been surrendered to addicts, dealers, hookers, and the ravages of urban decay. Blocks like 105th Street between First and Second Avenues. Once one of the worst streets in the entire neighborhood, it's now home to a bright five-year-old 102-unit apartment building for seniors and half a dozen smaller rehabbed residential buildings. "This was an empty lot used as an open-air heroin market for years," says Alexander.

Alexander's efforts had a similarly dramatic impact on Lexington Avenue and 105th Street, where Hope put in a garden, complete with charming foot bridges that rise over a man-made stream stocked with fish. And you can also see the impact on 104th Street, where Hope not only renovated three residential buildings and some retail space but also planned and funded the restoration of a four-story mural known as The Spirit of East Harlem. Painted in 1973 by Hank Prussing, the mural, which features characters from the neighborhood, had become a local landmark. Badly weathered, it was painstakingly restored by Puerto Rican artist Manny Vega, who, 25 years ago, was Prussing's apprentice.

Even private development dollars in search of new venues with potential have begun to find their way to El Barrio. The Blumenfeld Development Group, a Long Island company, is only months away from breaking ground on a $150 million project known as East River Plaza, a six-acre shopping center that will include Home Depot, Costco, and perhaps Staples and Old Navy. The site, purchased at a foreclosure for $3.1 million, is the old Washburn wire factory, which runs from 116th Street to 119th Street between Pleasant Avenue and the river. It's been empty for more than fifteen years.

Blumenfeld has also gone to contract on a city-owned piece of property on 125th near Lexington, right across from the one-year-old Pathmark. David Blumenfeld told me the company wants to build an eight-screen, 50,000-square-foot movie-theater complex with stadium seating. Plans for the site also include 25,000 feet of retail space to be occupied by a bank, a clothing store, and a fast-food outlet.

A critical factor in the changes happening uptown is that crime is down dramatically. "Crime used to be so bad," says Alexander, "that on 103rd Street, people would have to pay somebody to walk them to the subway. I could be in my car with my family, stopped at a red light, and be physically accosted by someone trying to sell me drugs. You could see people lined up on 119th Street to buy crack. I mean, they were literally queued up waiting to make their buys. It's clearly not as intense as it was."

Overall, says Alexander, who grew up in the Woodrow Wilson Houses, a project on 106th Street and First Avenue, the changes have allowed the community to breathe again. "For a long time, people had their doors and windows shuttered tight. They were frightened. Now the people here are opening their doors and windows, they're coming back outside, and they're getting to know their neighbors."

As the process of revitalization moves forward, small victory by small victory, the focal point of much of the frustration and disappointment felt in El Barrio is the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone; the government vehicle designed to stimulate private investment in Harlem by providing $300 million in seed money and a variety of tax breaks and other incentives. "I don't see where East Harlem is benefiting from the Empowerment Zone," says Raul Rodriguez, executive director of the East Harlem Council for Community Improvement, the largest one-stop social-service provider in the neighborhood.

"When I look at the Empowerment Zone, it seems to me that the whole deal is 125th Street. They're giving money to people who already have money and tax breaks to big businesses that don't need them. And then we have to fight to get some of the jobs. So you tell me, who's empowering who?" asks Rodriguez, who co-founded EHCCI two decades ago.

"When we complain, they ask, 'Where are your plans?' Well, what money do we have to plan with? Where did they get the money to plan and create Harlem USA? You know, it just looks to me like the same old story. The Old Guard that's run Harlem for all these years -- Paterson, Sutton, Rangel, Dinkins, and now Virginia Fields is part of that same group -- they're used to controlling things, and they have made significant gains for their community. But I don't see it here."

Actually, what's happened in East Harlem is not all that different from what's happened in central Harlem. For years, the economy uptown was driven by public expenditures. And the people who got this money to dole out -- in amounts based essentially on how much juice they had -- were the politicians. Now the rules have changed. The Old Guard no longer controls development, and this has posed problems for both communities. "They've had to step up to the plate to compete," says someone on the zone's board. "And it's like they're playing a team with seven-footers, and central Harlem's players are only six feet tall and East Harlem's players are only five feet tall. They're both disadvantaged, but one's clearly more disadvantaged than the other."

On one level, the competition for Empowerment Zone funds is simply a microcosm of the tension that exists between blacks and Puerto Ricans in Harlem. Though nobody likes to talk about it openly, everyone discusses it privately. Because the majority of Harlem's black and Puerto Rican residents occupy the same rung on the economic ladder, they end up competing for the same jobs, educational opportunities, and benefits.

"The perception in the Latino community has long been that blacks have greater access to power," says Mark Alexander. "And as far as the Empowerment Zone is concerned, it was an African-American congressman Charlie Rangel who brought it to Harlem, it's focused on central Harlem, and its board is filled with people connected to central Harlem. And significantly more money has actually been dispensed in central Harlem. The Empowerment Zone will say East Harlem hasn't given us enough applications. But the belief in the Latino community is, in order to put in an application, you need to know someone in power to put it together."

In its eagerness to get some projects going in El Barrio, and to fight the perception that it was unfairly favoring central Harlem, the Empowerment Zone board has been burned. Eddie Baca, for example, who runs an organization called the Local Development Corporation, was given a significant six-figure grant to start a micro-loan program to help small businesses. A well-known figure in East Harlem, he had to be defunded for not fulfilling his obligations.

"Look, the truth is, there's simply no there there," says a former executive of the zone. "You know how they say in Hollywood every other person is walking around with a screenplay? Well, in Harlem now, every other person is walking around with a plan to get Empowerment Zone money. But they're not fully thought-out and developed proposals; they're concepts."

Mark Alexander believes he knows what El Barrio needs, and it's the same thing he thought it needed when he first went to work at Hope Community in the late seventies: leadership. "There is in East Harlem even the absence of the perception of leadership," he says. "Communities need leaders, and this community in particular needs more young people to stay here after college."

Raul Rodriguez, who, like Alexander, plays a quasi-leadership role by virtue of the services he provides, is more specific. "We need some leaders who've made it in life and see politics as a way to give back, as a way to use the resources of their success. What we have now is people who take these positions to help themselves."

Rodriguez is particularly hard on East Harlem's state senator, Olga Mendez, who, after 21 years in office, is the grande dame of Latino politics. Mendez, a Democrat who is very close to both Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki, is credited with helping to get the East River Plaza project going. "I've adopted a nonaggression pact toward Olga," says Councilman Philip Reed, who's had a particularly difficult time with her. "I don't win beating up on a 70-year-old Puerto Rican woman. All I will say is, she tells you she has influence. Good. Tell her to use it."

Rodriguez goes even further: "Olga simply doesn't have the energy anymore. Every time I see her, she says she's retiring. But then she doesn't. What that means to me when someone says they're retiring and then they don't is that they simply don't want to work anymore."

Mendez seems genuinely surprised by the harsh criticism. "We've always worked well together and he comes to my fund-raisers and supports me," she says of Rodriguez. "We humans are full of surprises, I guess. But I do my job, and when my constituents need me I'm there."

But as the Puerto Ricans of East Harlem look toward the future, there are larger issues at stake than the performance of a state senator who at most will serve one more term -- particularly the issue of holding on to East Harlem as a social, political, and cultural center for Puerto Ricans. Help may lie across the Harlem River in the Bronx, which, thanks to Borough President Freddy Ferrer and Democratic county boss Roberto Ramirez, has become a Puerto Rican political powerhouse.

"I've said to the Bronx that they'd better do something about East Harlem," says Rodriguez. "I've told them I'm not running for anything, but they still see me as a threat. I've also told them, Freddy Ferrer, we don't see you. You're supposed to be a leader of the Puerto Rican community, not just of the Puerto Ricans in the Bronx. Our leaders have to see these voids. They have to recognize the possible loss of Manhattan as a Puerto Rican enclave."

Implicit in this statement is that Ferrer also has to make sure he has a unified Latino base if he plans a run for mayor in 2001. "The only real future we have," says Rodriguez, "is if we work together and consolidate the two communities."