Famous Ankles

During my recent wanderings of Spanish Harlem, I saw a sight that I knew was special. On 119th Street, just outside of the “Italian Harlem” area, was a nice looking church. I took just one picture. I figured it would just be another picture in my Spanish Harlem posting.

Wrong. It’s the Holy Rosary Church and I found it interesting enough to give it a solo post.  It turns out that it wasn’t part of the Italian Harlem area at all, but was founded by German and Irish worshippers in 1884 and the present building was done in 1900. 

I found a number of interesting things about the place.  First, it is a wonderful and impressive structure.  Second, according to the article I found on it, as late as 1975 it was doing Masses in English, Spanish, and Italian.  (I just like that idea.  Unfortunately, now it is just English and Spanish.)  Third, the website of the Church is a dead link.  C’mon guys, get with the program.  [UPDATE 8/8/08:  the website is active again.]  And, fourth, the place was locked up as tight as can be on a Saturday afternoon.  That’s sad.

-H

Yeah. “Italian Harlem”. I didn’t know it existed until recently and found a very small article on it. I knew I was headed to Spanish Harlem and thought I’d stop by. The article had mentioned the area was very small and confined to just a single street (Pleasant Avenue) from 114th Street to 119th. I had to check it out. If nothing else, I figured I could get some good Italian food.

I also wanted to see a better Manhattan home for the Italians than the rapidly vanishing Little Italy.  (It turned out that the next day I went to Brooklyn and saw a thriving Italian area where the Giglio festival was held.  But that’s not Manhattan.)

Folks, just from my eyeballing, there’s very, very little left of Italian Harlem.

And I couldn’t find any restaurants. There were a couple of little foodstores like everyplace in Manhattan. I saw a number of people who could have been Italian (they didn’t look particularly Spanish/Hispanic to me, at least; and I heard a few talking in idiomatic American accents). But the place is just…zip.

It has a couple of impressive areas. The first was the “Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics“. It’s a magnet high school for science and has a long history in the area.

So I wandered through the area. It was really, really empty. It had some nice buildings and the like, but nothing that made you want to move there or to renovate. If you go a little further to the north and west, in regular Harlem you’ll find lots of magnificent buildings (although many in sore need of some really heavy duty maintenance). Here, just okay stuff.

At the north end of Pleasant Avenue, there’s a huge expanse of an exercise area. Really, really big. And by big, I mean huge. All cemented flat and designed as a sports area. There was a cement baseball/softball area, there were a number of basketball hoops (I saw three or so just near the fence). But not a single person. The place, like most of Italian Harlem, just seemed to be…empty and locked up.

There are two major Churches in the area: Holy Rosary Church and Mt. Carmel. There’s even a small school in the area. Not unexpected and it was empty, too. Of course, I went on a Saturday and didn’t expect the kids to be hanging around there. But to have a huge exercise area just empty? I dunno. (It wasn’t in good repair, but seemed servicable for softball/kickball/whatever. The hoops were all bent out of shape, though.)

Pleasant Avenue is bounded by a park to the south (I’ll post on that separately) and what look like projects to the north. In between, it’s mostly just quiet. Now, in Manhattan that’s a good thing, but I had hoped for a little more.

For full disclosure, it did have one really nice feature. There were a number of community gardens scattered in the area. Regular readers know I love those community gardens and I did find one very unusual one (well, at least different) and I’ll post on those separately.

-H

I’ve said it on this blog many times: NYC is filled with community gardens. Small and intimate, many of these are the work of a handful of volunteers and communities that want to have some small part of nature in this town. Yeah, we’ve got Central Park and a dozen other big parks; but there’s great pleasure in having a pleasant area all of your own…you and a few thousand of your neighbors.

In Spanish Harlem, on Pleasant Avenue are several of these gardens. And, of course, I went to ’em all. This first one is called Pleasant Village Community Garden. It’s somewhere around 119th Street or so. According to a nearly ruined sign on the exterior fence, it was created between 1978 and 1982 by Rose Gardella. However, it seems to have taken until 1997 to become a park.

The area of Harlem I was walking through was pretty deserted that day, but each of the gardens had people there. That’s the mark of a pretty good thing, I would say.

As I always love to point out, NYC parks (and gardens) generally have lots of places to sit.

All in all, this place really wasn’t a regimented garden. Stuff grew here and there. One thing I liked about it was the surrounding buildings. They looked pretty run down, but you don’t sneeze at a view of a garden in NYC, so I’d call the residents pretty fortunate to have one.

And speaking of the gardens, this was one that seemed to take the idea of a “garden” pretty seriously. There seemed to be a number of individual plots where residents had veggies growing. Now, that’s what makes a real garden.

-H