Harlem, as everybody knows, is the predominantly black neighborhood of New York. In my first visit in 1992, me and two friends went for a walk in the heart of Harlem, 125th Street, also known as Martin Luther King Boulevard. It was quite eerie to be the only whites in sight, and some buildings had symptoms of having burned recently.
But since Rudolph Giuliani hired 40,000 policemen for the city of New York while he was mayor, the crime rate descended dramatically, and actually Harlem has become one of the trendy areas of the city to live, a more quiet one, far away from Lower Manhattan, bustling with tourists and executives.
Harlem extends, more or less, from 110th Street (the northern edge of Central Park) to 155th Street (Manhattan ends at 225th Street approximately). Although in the East, Spanish Harlem extends down to 96th Street, whereas in the West it doesn't start until the 125th.
As you can see in the map, located in the middle of Harlem is the campus of the City College of New York, the university which will be my operational base during this visit. And in one corner of campus, marked with the red dot, you can find The Towers at CCNY, an apartment complex belonging to the university, and in which the studio 1-414-A will be my home for the next seven months, at the reasonable price of $1100. Although the price includes high-speed Internet, so I can update this blog very easily.
