In the 1940s, Harlem was a state of mind.

Every weekend, neighborhood residents put on their best shirts and ties, made sure their pants were creased, shined their shoes and walked down the street in the blazing summer to go to church. If there was a parade that day, everyone on the block was out in full regalia, and parents would collectively watch the neighborhood children. By night, Harlemites would trade their Bibles for dancing shoes and go out on the town’s cooling asphalt.

As a young boy, Alvin Reed Sr. — now 67 — was just old enough to see the last remnants of Harlem’s glory days while he lived on 133rd Street.

“People had white stitches in their shoes,” Reed said. “Everybody was sharp. People would be poor, but they never looked poor.”

For Reed, the 1940s were timeless. Older generations would patrol the blocks to keep the younger crop out of trouble and away from drugs, and grocery store clerks would accept his word as credit when he bought milk, cheese and eggs for his parents, he said.

“We’d bring it up to the counter, they’d write it in the book and we’d come back at the end of the week when our parents got paid and pay them back,” he said. “It was almost like a handshake.”

But Reed’s years of Jackie Robinson and the Negro baseball leagues, post-war air raid drills and the unsung heroes of Harlem that kept kids in line were soon over after heroin and crack cocaine began flowing into the area in the ’60s. Harlem’s title of “Black Capital of the World” took a turn for the worse, and Reed moved out to the Bronx railroad flats with his new wife, a girl who lived a block over from him when he was a kid.

“It was a whole different ballgame then,” Reed said. “Although I lived somewhere else, I was there everyday. That’s home.”

Now, after decades of decay, Harlem is once more on the upswing. The abandoned, decrepit brownstones are being snapped up faster than Prada handbags, and a new generation of newlyweds and students are moving into the historical neighborhood’s gutted residences and restoring Harlem’s vitality.

“There’s been a lot of a money changing hands in Harlem,” said Gary Malin, chief operations officer of real-estate brokerage firm Citi Habitats. “A second renaissance is certainly underway.”
And with this second renaissance, Malin said Harlem’s negative connotation has changed in the last few years. College students have been steadily streaming uptown, he said, renting apartments on Morningside Avenue between 110th and 125th streets, 110th to 135th streets between Lennox Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard and between 140th and 145th streets in Hamilton Heights.

Now that there is a new housing policy that will allow students to ask for a refund of their $500 housing deposit if they receive an unfavorable housing assignment, students may choose to move to these areas — especially those looking for a good financial deal.

“If you’re a student, you’re looking for the best bang for your buck,” Malin said. “They like the prices and the chance to become a part of the community.”

One of those students, NYU alumnas Jennifer Jordan, moved up to Washington Heights after she graduated, where the average income is less than $30,000. Jordan said Harlem is still in transition, and has plenty of strides to make before it truly achieves its “second renaissance” moniker.

“I have heard that there are trendy areas of Harlem. This is not where I lived in Harlem,” she said.

Jordan said she lived in a building that was “a tenement in a row of identical tenements,” the residents were of which poor and almost entirely unemployed — some even dealt drugs.

“In fact, our druggie roommate took to smoking meth with the upstairs high school students,” she said.

Along with the commute, Jordan said her experience was so bad that she moved out before her lease expired, opting for “homelessness and nomadry” over living in the area.

“In December, I found a half-digested mouse that the cat had gotten to,” Jordan said. “That for me was the breaking point.”

But this second renaissance — with the construction of a Starbucks and Citarella gourmet bakery on 125th Street — quietly silences the skepticism that the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares could be revitalized. Stacia Holley, 22, said she remembers when the plot of land that Magic Johnson Theatre sits on was only an abandoned building, and said that Harlem’s commercialization is making the run-down marriage of rust and concrete a distant memory.

“125th was the spot to go hang out, shop and eat on the cheap,” Holley said. “We didn’t have these nice new shops to go into.”

Reed, who bought the famed jazz club Lenox Lounge on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in 1988, said patrons told him they were glad it was still black-owned and begged him not to sell out to corporate heavyweights buying up property.

“It’s changing fast. It’s kinda scary,” Reed said. “But it’s for the better. We just hope we don’t lose the soul.”

Holley said, like Reed, she too had mixed feelings about Harlem’s revitalization. While it benefits the area, the new commercialization could prove to be detrimental to longtime, low-income residents, she said.

“The people who have been the true Harlemites are forced out,” she said. “The streets are so dog-eat-dog [now]. People are so money-hungry to keep up with the changes going on around them and to be able to pay rent to afford food in the grocery store.”

Nevertheless, there is no end in sight to the gentrification of Harlem, and an increasing number of students move from pricey downtown galleries and studios to fill the area’s rising number of retail shops and high-rises for what Malin calls “a new flavor and appeal.”

“A colleague told me 65 percent of Harlem is already gentrified,” Malin said. “Harlem is certainly changing.”

Reed said that though the new residents of Harlem want to protect its rich cultural history as much as he does, Harlem’s identity and responsibility as “Black Capital of the World” is at stake.

“For black people, Harlem is home,” he said. “When the dynamics change, will it still be the black capital of the world? Is Harlem gonna be Harlem?”