The City of Strangers by Michael Russell

Author:Michael Russell [Russell, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-10-09T23:00:00+00:00

16. A Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street

Negro Harlem started at 125th Street. If New York was the biggest Jewish city on earth and the third largest Irish city, Harlem was the world’s greatest black city, in fact its only great black city. And like any other great city it teemed with the rich and not-so-rich and the poor, the idle and the ambitious, the builders and the breakers. Like any other city, it had its high-maintenance boulevards and its back-street tenements, and it threw them together, dancing cheek to cheek, like everywhere else in Manhattan. Nothing distinguished Harlem from any other low-rise part of New York in the appearance of its houses, apartment blocks, shops, theatres, churches, libraries, schools, gas stations, restaurants, diners. The dance halls and clubs weren’t any different to look at; there were just more of them, though pouring out of them, apparently with about as much ease as it took to smoke a cigarette or drink a beer, was some of the most vital, new, original music the world had ever heard. It was only really the colour of people’s faces that changed.

Riding uptown on 7th Avenue, for twenty-five solid blocks north of 125th, almost everybody on the streets was black. There was nowhere else like it; it had a faster heartbeat than anywhere else in the world’s fastest city. Harlem wasn’t a creation of concrete and steel; it was re-made every day by the people who walked its streets. It had none of the skyscrapers of lower and midtown Manhattan, but it also defined what New York City truly was.

At fourteen storeys the highest building in Harlem was the Hotel Theresa, on the corner of 125th and 7th. People called it the Black Waldorf-Astoria. There wasn’t too much Waldorf-Astoria about the unimposing white building with too many small windows; the gables and columns that sat on top, that the architect might have called Renaissance if he’d been pushed, were facades that looked like they’d been lifted up from another building, maybe a rail terminus, that should have been twelve storeys lower. The Theresa was more big hotel than grand hotel, but it did something no other big hotel south of 125th Street did, all the way through Manhattan down to Battery Park; it was a big hotel a black man could walk into and get a room to sleep in. When you hit the Hotel Theresa, you were in Harlem.

Longie Zwillman’s driver pulled left off 7th Avenue into 124th Street and stopped the car just past a row of garbage bins and some high wooden gates. Stefan and Kate sat in the back. She knew where they were, at the back of the Hotel Theresa; he had no idea. Sam had said little and explained nothing. He was doing what his boss had told him; his passengers would do the same. Zwillman and the gunman they now knew as Rick had been dropped off over the Brooklyn Bridge before the Pontiac headed north to Harlem. Longie’s last remark had been curt; it had been an instruction, not a suggestion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.