You have to admire the guts of buying and renovating a townhouse in 2000 in West Harlem, even if the storytelling in “Home Girl” is cheerful to the point of provocation. Looking at “entire blocks of abandoned buildings,” Julia Matloff “swooned” at seeing a succession of “For Sale” signs, “politely averting” her “eyes from comatose men lying in the vestibules.” The “majestic but fire-scarred Victorian relics offered promise.” The commute was only 15 minutes on the express train to Times Square. “Danger, schmanger,” she said to herself. “Harlem was it!”
Surely a New Yorker like Matloff, who grew up in Queens and worked đas a foreign correspondent in Russia and Africa, could not be ađ¸s simple-minded as she presents herself.
Perhaps this is just a literary device; setting up the heroine’s travails, Perils-of-Pauline style, and her ultimate rescue via personal grit, loving husband and the NYPD’s war on drugs that eventually made it over to her plantain-shaped neighborhood. But even so, Matloff is describing West Harlem (Amsterdam Avenue to the Hudson River, 135th to 155th streets), where a serious cocaine trade, accompanied by violent crime, flourished until recently. In 2001, when Matloff moved in, the 30th precinct had 11 murders, versus one so far in 2008. Back then there were 28 rapes and 380 felonious assaults.
Matloff does have some local touches just right: medallion taxi drivers do have trouble finding the neighborhood. After all, the map posted on the back of their seats stopped at 110th Street, the northern border of Central Park. By subway, Matloff emerges from the 145th Street station and crosses Amsterdam Avenue, “that invisible line where black Harlem cedes to Dominican turf.” Smells shift from goat curry to mofongo, mashed fried green plantains.
Early on a handsome black woman living two doors down announces that the neighbors were very happy to see a white family move in. “The police will listen to you whites,” she said, adding that they had been writing and lobbying all the mayors – Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani – unsuccessfully for years. Now that whites were moving uptown, things would change, she predicted. And indeed they did. Would they have changed anyway? Maybe, but as another neighbor, Leticia, noted, roundup arrests of lower-level drug dealers did almost no good because “as soon as one lot gets arrested, the gangs send more foot soldiers from the Dominican Republic.” The neighborhood needed the kind of organized, relentless anti-drug campaign that the NYPD routinely conducted in wealthier neighborhoods further south.
The neighborhood finally got it in 2002 via Operation Crackdown, in part because they started strongly pressuring the police department, aggressively using even bland, official vehicles like the 30th Precinct Community Council. Matloff also credits NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, who personally worked with Captain William Taylor to deploy huge numbers of officers, including those they knew to be the “best men of the five boroughs.” By 2008, the neighborhood had become so safe that the police-community meetings were mainly devoted to gripes about noise.
The end of the story is, of course, happy – a restored brownstone, lovely neighbors, safe streets. But that doesn’t mean there’s integration. Matloff notes that some of the more recent gentrifiers are uneasy raising children in West Harlem, but implies they will do as she did – send them to “a fancy private school” downtown. Her son, she says a little smugly, has his own apodo uptown, “El Gringo,” since he’s the only white child on his Dominican baseball team.
Home Girl
Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block
by Judith Matloff
Random House