Owen Levy moved into his Harlem apartment just north of Central Park in the summer of 1979. “I never imagined that I would live here for 46 years,” he said. “That’s more than half my life.”
He found the place after responding to an advertisement in The New York Times. The rent-stabilized unit was cheap — $325 a month — and, more important, the landlord was kind.
“Her name was Ms. Brown and before I opened my mouth, she said, ‘You have the apartment — it’s yours.’ I guess I was in a suit and tie and she figured, ‘This is a good bet.’”
Ms. Brown was so kind, in fact, she reduced the rent. “She gave me a discount because I was going to do the renovations of the apartment,” he said. “She knocked off $25 so it was only $300.”
Mr. Levy’s early childhood was spent in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where his enterprising mother was a soda fountain attendant.
“We were one of the first interracial families on the block, and that was in the mid-fifties,” he recalled. “We brought down the neighborhood values, because we’re people of color. Back then when they were redlining the neighbors, because my mother was white, she was able to get a mortgage.”
Mr. Levy graduated from Hunter College in 1969. When he found the apartment in Harlem a decade later, everyone advised him against taking it.
“I got a lot of discouragement from friends,” he said. “They told me, ‘It’s a bad neighborhood. Do you want to live up there?’”
Even his mother, who had lived in Harlem in the 1940s and early ’50s, discouraged him from taking the apartment. “She said, ‘No, no. The neighborhood has really changed and I really don’t want you up there.’ I said, ‘Mother, it’s an unbelievable rent, unbelievable space, and I’ve always wanted to be on Central Park.’ So I moved in.”
Harlem, once thriving with Black homeowners and Black-owned businesses, was in an economic free-fall, feeling the brunt of New York City’s near-bankruptcy in the 1970s. Residents, particularly middle-income households, moved; buildings were abandoned and went into disrepair.
Early on there were some rough edges to the experience. Many of the buildings on the block were burned out and abandoned, and Mr. Levy formed certain habits to guard his safety. “The park-side subway exit was more convenient for me to walk home but I would always come up on the housing side,” which felt safer, he said.
And the neighborhood lacked amenities. “Eighth Avenue was a real no man’s land,” he said, recalling the five-minute walk from his apartment. “There were boarded up stores, a lot of vandalized properties. You didn’t walk there at night because there was just no activity. There were no services. I used to have to go to Broadway to shop, to do laundry.”
The neighborhood also affected Mr. Levy’s social life. “I couldn’t get a date for a while who would come up here,” he said, laughing. “Everyone would tell me, ‘Oh, no, no, that’s a bad neighborhood. I’m not going up there.’”
$1,500 | Harlem
Owen Levy, 78
Occupation: Writer and retired publicist
On Lauren Bacall: Mr. Levy once worked on publicity for a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” starring Jason Robards. “One night he said to me, ‘Listen, my ex-wife is coming. Please don’t let anyone take a picture of us together because it makes my current wife mad.’ Well, the ex-wife was Lauren Bacall, which was a little intimidating,” Mr. Levy said.
On homesteading: Mr. Levy spent several years trying to buy property in Harlem. “I realized there were other people like me moving into the area, so I organized a little group of homesteaders, the new pioneers, middle class people like myself, mostly Black, who had professional jobs or they were artists,” he said. The group met several times but was never able to buy anything. “It died down after a while because we all moved on in life, basically,” he said.
But there was also strong social fabric in his Harlem neighborhood. It wasn’t just Ms. Brown but his downstairs neighbor, Teddy, a retired seaman who had moved into the building in 1936, who stridently guarded Mr. Levy’s parking spot while he was at work. “He was retired and sat in the window. When people tried to park in front of the building, he would scream at them, ‘No, no, no. That’s Mr. Levy’s place.’”
Mr. Levy also had plenty of room to stretch out in his spacious apartment. He converted one of the three bedrooms into a walk-in closet. “People said to me, ‘You’re taking a whole bedroom as a closet?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, people do live like that in some places.’”
A few years after Mr. Levy settled in, Ms. Brown decided to sell the building, offering it first to Mr. Levy. “She said if I could raise $200,000, I could buy the building,” he said. “Great, but in 1982, I didn’t have $200,000. I tried to see if I could get four or five tenants and we would make it a co-op. But there was nobody in the building that had that kind of money.”
He still thinks about the opportunity. “If I’d been able to buy, I’d be very rich today. I’m just absolutely amazed at the prices that they’re getting up here now. When I moved into this apartment, you could buy some buildings for $35,000. Now, they’re selling for $3 million.”
Mr. Levy first started noticing significant changes in the late 1980s. The state office building on 125th, completed in the 1970s, had already started bringing more residents to the neighborhood. “That was the first inkling of the gentrification to come,” he said.
It was around then that the northern reaches of Central Park also started to improve. “I sat on a group for the Central Park Conservatory about ways we could preserve the park,” he said. “It was a little jungle because it was very poorly maintained. Tree roots and stuff were taking out the pathways.”
Changes to the neighborhood have only accelerated over the past decade or so. “When I get off the subway,” Mr. Levy said, “I’m one of the minority in a way, a person of color. Now, it’s almost all white people.”
But Mr. Levy has never lost his sense of belonging, and he’s grateful for the freedom the apartment has afforded him over the decades. “I could live very flexibly because I’ve never had a really high rent bill,” he said.
Mr. Levy, who spent most of his career as a theater publicist, is retired now and spends his days writing from the comfort of the apartment that has been his home for nearly half a century. He’s published two novels and has a third on the way.
“So yeah,” he said, “this place was a good find.”
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