All Bloomberg Needs Now Is To Give Kanye An Opportunity To Say That He Doesn’t Care About Black People

With any luck, this should make that ridiculous VP talk go away as well:

The street may not be much to look at now, say people who grew up in Harlem during the 1950s and 1960s, but back then, 125th Street seemed like the bustling center of the world.

At Moore’s book shop, a lawyer named Thurgood Marshall was often seen browsing through volumes of African-American history, while at the corner of Lenox Avenue, Malcolm X could be heard proselytizing as a young boxer named Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, listened intently among the crowd.

Up the street, Aretha Franklin or Stevie Wonder performed periodically at the Apollo Theater, and Fidel Castro once conferred with Nikita Khrushchev over lunch at the Hotel Theresa. Blumstein’s may not have been Macy’s, but it did have black mannequins and, at Christmastime, a black Santa Claus.

The street has long been in decline, though national chain stores like Starbucks have taken an interest in it more recently. Now the Bloomberg administration has proposed the most sweeping zoning changes for the street since 1961, when there was a citywide rezoning and 125th Street was at the heart of African-American cultural life.

The rezoning, which is expected to be approved by the city’s Planning Commission in the coming weeks, is part of package of city plans that call for the thoroughfare to be transformed from a low-rise boulevard lined with businesses like hair salons and buffet-style soul food restaurants into a regional business hub with office towers as high as 29 stories and more than 2,000 new market-rate condominium apartments, as well as hotels, bookstores, art galleries and nightclubs.

The corridor between 124th and 126th Streets from Broadway to Second Avenue would be rezoned, which could ultimately force out more than 70 small businesses and their 975 workers and might lead to the razing of some of the street’s century-old buildings.

. . .

“This would be signing Harlem’s death warrant,” said Craig Schley, executive director of a group called VOTE People, which opposes the rezoning. “It is part of the continuing ‘Katrina-fication’ of Harlem, carried out with a pen instead of a hurricane. They intend to remove people in this area, plain and simple.”