A few days ago I was leaving a show and decided to meander over to my old stomping ground—Convent Avenue and 149th Street in Harlem.  I didn't actually stomp there, I was mostly scrimping and surviving.  From the outside, the building was pretty amazing.  Six stories of classic Uptown and some of the biggest picture windows in the history of Gotham City architecture.  Inside that joint?  Pure chaos!

Back when I was a starving, struggling artist who on many a day had to decide whether my stomach could tolerate one more boiled green banana, I was living in Harlem.  Sugar Hill.  The building across the street allegedly once housed Countee Cullen or Paul Robeson, somebody black and brilliant... I don't remember.   But again, inside my abode... War. 

My landlord had owned the building for years.  Most of his tenants were working-class African-American families [and a few penny-pinching artists] who tolerated the occasional mice dropping and the loitering of young drug dealers on the front stoop.  Soft-drug pushers, nothing too extreme... at least in their opinion.  Then I moved in.  Fresh from Tornado Alley with deer and lakes in my memory and a master's degree from Iowa tucked in my backpack.  I wasn't having it. The random gun shot was okay.  The mice... uh, I survived I guess.  The rat and human... I'll spare you the disgust.  But it was the steady increase in Malian immigrants on the sixth floor that piqued my curiosity.  

Let me paint a detailed picture:   Tenants passively complained about the dirty lobby, the decrepit elevator, the marijuana smoke everywhere one sniffed, and the mysterious evictions of long-term residents who refused to pay some illegal 20 percent increase in their leases.  Flip to:  Ten, twenty, forty Malians moving into these vacant apartments. Twenty, thirty Malians demanding paint jobs, the allocation of some apartments for bathing, some cooking and others for sleeping.  Something was up and I decided to congregate the other artists to get to the bottom of it. 

Well, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to conclude my landlord saw the gentrifiers coming and needed to bring his building up to code by any means in reach.  His tactic?  Taking $20,000 per month from the immigrants and completely ignoring our requests to have something done about the rats in the walls and the soft drug dealers in the lobby who were now dealing hard-core.  

But the more we complained, the more we were ignored, and the more the immigrant tenants were living the good life. The landlord eventually told some of the Malian tenants that a group of artists in the building were trying to get them evicted.  A few of the Malians were livid.  And at times, threatening.  But it wasn't true.  We simply wanted to expose how the landlord was exploiting the immigrant population in the building as well as the long-standing working class folks. We took him to court and lost.  And I was immediately asked to leave:  One, I was a troublemaker.  Two, I had been withholding my rent in a vigilant act for improved housing quality.  They weren't buying it.

The outcome?  Well, I walked by the building a few days ago and man!  It was like Trump blew some of his magic real estate dust on the place.  It was what I like to call "Spotty".  Of course there was no sign of the Malian immigrants, or the other tenants who lived there for decades.  Man, I wanted to knock on every apartment door of that building and explain what had to happen for the place to now look so nice.