Thursday, May 2, 2024

A Look at Historic Astor Row, John Jacob Astor's Gift to Harlem

row house harlem

She didn’t cook regular meals and never lost an opportunity to let them know that their pres­ence was a burden. Assante had agreed to house them, so Afeni sent the kids ahead of her until she could come up with some money for a ticket of her own. One day she got a call from Assante saying that the kids needed a new home. The boy who arrived in ‘the Jungle’ was a deep-thinking bohemian who understood the works of Shakespeare and had donned a leotard for his dance classes and acted in several school plays. June 1988 – Tupac’s family moved in Marin City, California,  a residential area five miles north of San Francisco.

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Several factors contributed to the area's growth in the 20th and 21st centuries. For starters, Skid Row became something of a refuge for veterans returning from World War II and Vietnam, especially those who faced rejection in other places. The area offered support for drug and alcohol addicts, and served as a haven for people who felt out of place. Granted, the deacon board is not under oath, and the pastor’s office is not a criminal courtroom.

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For starters, people are falling into homelessness at a fast rate. Though advocacy groups are able to place some people in permanent housing, they can't keep up with the inflow of new people who need help. This is due to the lack of affordable housing and skyrocketing rents in the city.

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It is bound by 3rd Street in the north, 7th Street in the south, Main Street in the west, and Alameda Street in the east, according to the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. Before long, street lights were installed and a campaign was launched to get "hobos" off the street. Though the area changed, most people living in the area simply moved east — into what became Los Angeles' modern Skid Row. There, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce reports that "skid roads" were used by loggers to transport their timber to ports. But by the 1930s, the term "skid row" began to refer to run-down urban areas, where bars and brothels that had once served loggers began to cater to low-income people and the unhoused. The 28 Astor Row Houses occupy the south side of the street between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue, while the north side of the street has the traditional townhouses pictured below.

row house harlem

And as a result, inexpensive hotels, bars, and brothels also began to spring up in the area, catering to the low-income customers. Tupac lived in the Oakland for only four years, but in those four years he set the foundation for the rest of his career – a career that pushed people to seek change and hold onto hope for those who are less fortunate. Tupac claimed Oakland as his own and pushed the community to fight for change. Eventually, it became common for local hospitals to drop off unhoused people in Skid Row, even if they didn't live there. And, today, the "containment" policy is widely considered a failure.

She saved most of her venom for Tu­pac, who represented every black male who’d ever hurt her or let her down. Whether on a family outing, a romantic date or a social gathering, Row House offers the ideal setting to make your night complete. Yeiser has since denied that he made any confession to the deacons or to anyone else. He has maintained his innocence, and even sued the Porters and other church members for defamation. Enter the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, which stepped in when Bragg stepped aside. But prosecutors there quickly backed off, saying they didn’t have enough evidence and resources to pursue criminal charges of grand larceny, according to the New York Times.

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Among those backing Porter are members of Abyssinian’s deacon board, who say Yeiser confessed his sins to them during a meeting in 2019 with the church’s esteemed pastor, the Rev. Calvin Butts, who died in 2022. Bragg, the prosecutor, has been forced to watch from the sidelines because of his obvious conflict of interest. Not only is Bragg a church member, but he is also a Sunday school teacher whose students include the daughters of the accused deacon.

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Bragg is a member of Harlem’s historic Abyssinian Baptist Church, where a deacon, Jerome Yeiser, is accused of posing as a contractor and scamming home-owning parishioners out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are no politics more brutal than church politics, and there is no politician who knows that better than Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Untapped New York unearths New York City’s secrets and hidden gems. Discover the city’s most unique and surprising places and events for the curious mind. Today, while Astor Row looks very much the same as it did when they were built, the surrounding area– particularly on Lenox Avenue–have sprouted  coffee houses, a condominium, a new supermarket and even a gourmet mini-donut shop. There are one and two bedrooms, some modernized, some with original details like marble fireplace mantles.

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Today, most of the houses have been restored but a few still remain unoccupied and boarded up.Many of the owners and renters take great pride in their summer gardens. They are as different as the people who tend them and range from traditional annuals and perennials to heavily manicured–or very much overgrown. The Astor Row Houses were designated a New York City Landmark in 1981 despite their decaying condition. The community came together to raise money and restore their facade, improve the plumbing, heating and the electrical. Together, several preservation groups, banks, foundations and the Abyssinian Development Corporation–along with a $1.7 million dollar donation by Brook Astor to the New York Landmark Conservancy–moved forward with this restoration. Even Ella Fitzgerald performed a benefit in 1992 at Radio City Music Hall to help raise money for the restoration.

But at the time, police in the city had only 36 hours of mental health training (now, 40 is required), meaning they were often ill-equipped to respond to people having mental health crises. Both economic crises and the city's housing policies have contributed to the area's growth in recent years. And, as the ongoing fentanyl epidemic ravages people living in the area, L.A.

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A few of them have been sold with prices going as high as over $2 million dollars.

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An estimated 5,000 of them live in Skid Row, in tent encampments, cars, or nearby homeless shelters. (Some estimates put that number as high as 15,000.) And city officials say that there's no end in sight to the city's homelessness problem, which has been steadily growing. Feigen is a longtime opponent of change on his block, on West 158th Street in Upper Manhattan — change that has taken the form of a 140-unit apartment building. Meanwhile, more and more people poured into Skid Row as time went on. The city instituted a "containment" policy in 1975, which sought to concentrate homeless people and very-low-income housing in the same region and to "buffer" them from the rest of the city. But the city has also become notorious for its Skid Row neighborhood, where thousands of homeless people live across more than 50 city blocks.

Yeiser admitted that he owed the Porters money, which he estimated to be around $40,000. Yeiser became extremely emotional at being confronted by his wrongdoing and began crying. "There are gangs who are pretending to be homeless and use the tent encampments to sell fentanyl and other drugs," LAPD senior lead officer Deon Joseph told The New York Post. "The cocaine and heroin epidemics were bad enough, but you mix that with fentanyl, there are now even more overdose deaths. It's probably the worst I've ever seen in over 20 years." As LAist reports, there are several reasons for the continuing crisis of homelessness in Los Angeles, and specifically on Skid Row. "We really need to normalize the fact, unfortunately, that we're living in a crisis," Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said while renewing her administration's emergency declaration on homelessness.

Look through 44 photos of Skid Row above, from its beginning as a railroad terminus, to the epicenter of the homeless crisis in Los Angeles it is today. In addition, Skid Row is struggling with the fentanyl crisis, which has caused tens of thousands of overdose deaths across America in recent years. As these men began to live in single room occupancy hotels and hang out in bars in the area, this slice of Los Angeles began to be known as the "Hobo Corner." And by the turn of the century, some saw the area as a problem. Though this area may seem like a modern problem, and a sharp contrast to L.A.’s glittering luxury homes and five-star hotels, Skid Row has actually been part of the city for well over a century. Just a couple of decades after Los Angeles incorporated as a municipality in 1850, one region of the city became the “last stop” on early trains that traveled across the United States. Assante was a raging alcoholic who often passed out on the floor and lay there sleeping for hours.

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