Uptown, according to the Urban Dictionary, is the part of New York north of 110th Street, the part of Manhattan north of Central Park. That is the sense the word has in hip hop and in this blog.
The Wikipedia draws the line at 59th Street, but that makes the word next to useless: that would take in the rich white parts of the city to the east and west of Central Park. It is the sort of New York you see in children’s books, a very different world from what lies north of 110th Street.
Until the other day I never thought of Uptown as one thing, as one place. There was Harlem, of course, in the middle and then the places round the edges of it: Spanish Harlem, Columbia University, City College and the Dominican neighbourhoods beyond that.
I did not see Uptown whole: I saw it cut to pieces by language and race. That is the way I thought of it when I lived there and I think most people who live there do the same.
But when you step back, when you compare it to the rest of New York City and the rest of the country, especially when you look at the books and films and songs that Uptowners, black or white, have come out with, then it hangs together as one place.
Differences of race and language do matter – Uptown is far from colour-blind – but there is also a common experience that affects everyone who lives there with an honest heart.
They call that common experience “New York” or “the city” or “the world”, but it is in fact just Uptown that they are talking about. Because that is the New York, the city and the world they know. I left Uptown long ago but that picture of the world is still in my head.
And in that world there are hundreds of thousands of blacks who are poor, mostly through no fault of their own (yes), while down below 96th Street are some of the richest white people in the world. It is very hard to see that day after day and year after year. The world is the opposite of a Norman Rockwell painting.
And so when you hear how wonderful America is, when you see the smiling white people on television, you want to pretty much throw up. The injustice and the lies that the country is built on become crystal clear. Everything comes down to power.
You have little patience for sentimentality because in your experience it is almost always the sugarcoating for some sickening lie.
And so from out of that world comes Billie Holiday and “Scarface”, the Harlem Renaissance and the beats, “I’ll Fly Away” and James Baldwin, Howard Zinn and Bigger Thomas, “My Name is Luka” and “Milkshake”.
Spike Lee often sets his films in Harlem but you can tell he is not from there: he looks at Harlem through rose-coloured glasses that no one there wears.
See also:
- New York
- Harlem
- The best writers live north of 110th Street
- Those who have lived Uptown:
Leave a comment