There are three new signs now along West 125th Street in Harlem, where shoppers and diners move in and out of chain stores including Whole Foods, CVS, Starbucks, Chipotle and Golden Krust.
One on Lenox Avenue marks the former location of the Lenox Lounge, the iconic bar that opened in 1939 and hosted the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane in its heyday before closing in 2012 when the rent got too damn high.
The former Art Deco Lenox Lounge in Harlem. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Another sign on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, still known by some long-time locals as 7th Avenue, stamps Nelson Mandela’s visit there in 1990, just after he was freed from a South African prison.
A stone’s throw away, outside of what’s now the Touro College of Orthopedic Medicine, a third sign marks the old location of the Blumstein Department Store, in what was then the second-biggest building in Harlem after the Hotel Theresa.
The plaque notes the store was the site of a “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign led by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. that compelled the Black neighborhood’s white-owned shopping destination to finally hire 34 Black people after years of protests.
All those signs, and 18 more are now installed on blocks from the northern end of Central Park on West 110th Street up to West 162nd Street and Jumel Terrace, veering into Washington Heights. It’s the culmination of a project started a decade ago by the nonprofit group While We Are Still Here, to “educate, enshrine and preserve the extraordinary legacy of Harlem as an influential incubator that was vital to the intellectual, cultural, social, and political advancements of the Harlem community as well as the African Diaspora.”
There are four more signs yet to go up due to sidewalk sheds, ongoing construction or construction taking place when technicians tried to install the plaque — a reminder of how quickly Harlem is continuing to develop and change, becoming ever taller and pricier.
Those include two that will be right by 125th Street. One notes the former location of the Hotel Theresa that was sometimes called “The Waldorf of Harlem,” and is now an office building, where guests included such luminaries as Josephine Baker and Fidel Castro, who met in his room there with Malcolm X, whose Organization of Afro-American Unity was headquartered at the hotel.
Charles Rangel, who worked there as a clerk in the 1950s before serving Harlem as a U.S. congressmember for 46 years, recalled in a 2015 interview that “funniest woman in the world,” stand-up comedian and pioneer in the “Chitlin Circuit” of Black vaudeville spaces Moms Mabley, lived at the hotel and would tell guests in the lobby to “‘Give the boy some money. He’s trying to go to law school.’”
Hotel Theresa is seen in an archival photo. Credit: New York Pubic Library Digital Archives
The other will honor Lewis Michaux, whose International Memorial African Bookstore stood from 1939 to 1974 as “a hub of activism [filled] with titles from the diaspora.”
“It’s just a wonderful feeling to know that, from now going forward to the future, people will have at least some idea of Harlem’s history that’s right on the street level that they can see immediately,” Karen Taylor, the group’s director, told THE CITY in a phone interview about the completion of the long-running project to put up the purple-and-gold plaques.
The organization started in 2015 with many long-term residents of 409 and 555 Edgecombe Ave. — a building whose residents over the years have included heavyweight boxing great Joe Louis, the singer, actor, attorney and All-American football player Paul Robeson, and Jane Bolinl, the first Black female judge in the United States — working to record the history of their buildings.
555 Edgecomb Ave. is part of the Harlem Markers Project, Jan. 24, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
“Over time,” the group explains on its website, “due to the input of our neighbors, we broadened the scope to include Harlem, in general.”
What became the “Signs of the Times” project originated in an essay written by scholar and historian William Seraile, who’s lived in Harlem for over a half-century, detailing some of the many Black people who put their stamp on the neighborhood, and calling for historic markers to honor them.
“I realized there’s nothing in Harlem really about the history that people can see just walking around,” he told THE CITY in January, noting that the essay was partly inspired by trips to southern states like Mississippi where he saw Black history more visibly featured.
Signs of the Times launched in earnest in 2020, when While We Are Still Here held a public forum in Harlem to solicit ideas for what people and locations to commemorate from about 50 community members.
From there, they needed to obtain permits for each of the 25 planned markers from the city’s Department of Transportation, Public Design Commission and Landmark Preservation Commission. With support from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that fundraises for initiatives that preserve Black history in the United States, they’ve spent about $100,000 to cover the design, purchase and installation of the markers, along with permit fees and some money for a videographer and a photographer to document the work.
While We Are Still Here hired Signarama, a company that installs signs around the five boroughs, to secure the permits and drill the plaques into the sidewalk.
“We had to secure multiple DOT permits that would allow us to open up the sidewalk and drill for the foundations, for the poles,” Mike Ziccardi, vice president of Signarama, told THE CITY in a phone interview, noting that they also needed to verify with utility companies to ensure that the installations did not interfere with any electric or gas lines. “We drill a hole. Then my crew of sign hangers sinks the pole into the ground, cements it back in, and then we installed the top of the pole using bucket trucks.”
Now that the work is done and the words are there, Seraile said “I see some level of gratitude that something I thought of happened, and then I hope that people who see these things would be interested maybe to Google the person that they’re looking at on the signs; get more background.”
‘Move Forward and Perservere’
Where the 13-story Hotel Theresa once stood out as Harlem’s tallest building, high-rise apartments now line 125th Street, and chain businesses and fast casual eateries have pushed out many of the small businesses that once dotted the busy thoroughfare.
The Hotel Theresa on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard is part of the Harlem Mural Project, Jan. 24, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Between 2010 and 2020, Harlem gained more than 18,000 white residents and lost 10,805 Black residents, according to census data. That’s part of a broader trend, as the Black population of New York City has gone down by about 200,000, or 9%, over the past two decades, largely because of the rising cost of raising a family here.
“People call what’s happening in Harlem gentrification. I have trouble with the word, but so that I’m understood, I use the word. But in a building, for instance, like 555 Edgecombe Avenue, or 409 Edgecombe Avenue, many of the white people who are moving in are younger people. They seem to be college students,” said Taylor.
“In 555, for example, we have a federal judge who lives here. We’ve got a physician who lives here. We’ve got college professors who live here. You know, all of these very illustrious people who’ve won Grammy Awards and Tony Awards and Emmy Awards, they live in this building. So that’s why I think I have trouble with this terminology, “gentrification,” because it appears to mean white person and that just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Seraile, for his part, says that he’s seen positive changes in his 50 years living in Harlem, including better grocery options and less drug activity.
“When we first came here in ‘74, to do any major shopping for food I would have to go to the Upper West Side or go to New Jersey to Pathmark because you didn’t have any large supermarkets here. All you had was little small stores, and a lot of times the food wasn’t fresh,” he said. “I noticed when I first lived here, there was a lot of drugs around 145th Street and Bradhurst Avenue. And every two weeks, you see three or four police vans out there picking up people. So that’s negatives that’s gone away.”
At the same time, however, Seraile noted that the cost of shelter has gone up sharply.
“I couldn’t afford to buy my house today,” he said. “My house cost $24,500 in 1973 and I could sell it for $2 million because that’s the price you find in Harlem now.”
A sign marking the Lenox Lounge is part of the Harlem Markers Project, Jan. 24, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY
As Harlem continues changing, the markers installed by The Signs of the Times Project stand as a testament not only to its past, but to the residents connected to it who are still there.
The idea, said Taylor, is that “We should just go ahead and do it and not wait for other people.”
She continued: “We just have to move forward and persevere in what I call the tradition of Black perseverance. We just keep persevering and trying until things turn out right.”
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