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The Wednesday Documentary: One Block In Harlem

The Documentary: One Block In Harlem: Episode 2

Episode 2

One Block In Harlem

BBC World Service - The Documentary, One Block In Harlem, Episode 2

Who will 'own' Harlem if African Americans become a minority?

Michael Goldfarb explores Harlem in New York City, the most dynamic African-American neighbourhood in the US.

Around the world the name Harlem is synonymous with people's knowledge of the black experience in America - it means ghetto, cultural achievement, political activism and impoverished despair.

But in the last decade the area has been going through dramatic changes. First, former President, Bill Clinton, opened his post-White House office there. Then, as Manhattan real estate prices rocketed, wealthy people, many of them white, began moving in.

Michael Goldfarb traces the iconic neighbourhood's story by telling the history of a single street in Harlem - 120th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues - from 1910 to the present day.

Although Harlem is the best-known African-American neighbourhood in the world, a hundred years ago 120th Street was, like most of the area, a Jewish neighbourhood.

Michael describes life as it was and life as it is today and asks - what price has been paid by long-term black residents for the area's gentrification? How important is it for African-American culture that Harlem remain what it has been since the 1920's, the undisputed capital of Black America.

Along the way Michael meets the people of 120th Street in Harlem, Professor of History at Columbia University, Manning Marable; architectural historian Michael Henry Adams; and Jeffrey Gurock, Professor of History at Yeshiva University and author of When Harlem was Jewish.

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