I grew up in Esplanade Gardens on 147th and Lenox. View of the Bronx. Harlem Renaissance women down the hall who took me hat shopping at Lord & Taylor and didn’t have to give a damn about me but did anyway.
I left when I was 18. I didn’t really go back.
Last month I did.
I was convinced I was going to find bike lanes and cat cafes and a neighborhood that had been quietly handed off while I wasn’t looking. What I found was more complicated than that — and honestly more depressing in ways I didn’t expect.
This is a 16 minute gonzo walk through the neighborhood that made me. It’s about gentrification, Mamdani, the classy Black women of the Harlem Renaissance, a minister who came to serve God and somehow ended up in my building, and why “affordable housing” is a promise that lands differently depending on who you are and what you’re starting from.
I just want to make sure people who want to stay here can.
