It was mainly a West Indian block, said Leake. They glared, and waited, and glared some more, but nobody approached. Figures in blue-hooded sweatshirts popped out from behind doors and under stoops. “They’ll usually come right up to the car,” he said. The younger detective, Joe Leake, rolled down his window. We drove slowly down the marijuana street - 123rd, I think it was.
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Everybody’s free to put their wares out.” “That’s not how it works,” Gates answered. “But where exactly is Nicky Barnes’s turf?” I shouted.
So, naturally, the customers and the whores themselves are people who buy drugs.” And 127th Street is big because it has five or six fleabag hotels, it’s always been an area frequented by prostitutes. The Lenox Avenue subway, the Eighth Avenue subway. As for 116th Street, that’s big because of the easy access. “Wherever there are a lot of abandoned buildings,” said Gates, “the junkies and dope dealers feel they can congregate without anybody complaining. They started shouting coordinates at me - 127th and Eighth, 128th and Lenox, 131st and Madison… and when I’d filled an entire page of my notebook, I said that was enough: I got the idea. We turned onto Lenox and I asked them where the main drug locations were. “Because they’ll come out and protect their property,” he said. “The hoodlums don’t fuck with those people.” “Those are the only stores in Harlem with no shutters,” Gates said as we stopped for the light. The ground floor contained Muslim-run shops. A few doors down, on the corner of Lenox, stood the light blue mosque with its galvanized dome. They showed me the block where Nicky Barnes grew up, between Manhattan and Eighth, and some hotels where dealers operated, and the Jack Daniels Bar, a one-story hole that had witnessed three or four drug-related murders. It was a street where you could make big weight connections, they said. We rode down 116th Street, which was largely bombed out but still teeming with life. A man is holding a knife around the baker’s neck.” That was work for the uniformed cops.
“Robbery in progress at bakery, 125th and Eighth. The police radio was crackling beneath the dashboard, and whenever a bulletin of particular interest came across, Gates turned up the volume. “Hardly anybody’s so poor he don’t get a wreath when he dies.” “Funerals,” shouted the older detective, Jeddy Gates, who was driving. A number of the flower shops had spanking-clean facades that stood out from their surroundings and I asked why they were so prosperous. There were hundreds of storefront churches, and quite a few barbers, fish stores, pet shops, and florists.
A disproportionate number seemed to have orange facades, and the incidence of astrological references was striking: Zodiac Bar, Gemini Fresh Scooped Ice Cream, Libra Cleaners, etc. Most of the small shops were shabby but relatively intact. The whole place looked just like everybody said - a bombed-out town. One graffito was everywhere, always in the same hand: BECOME A CATHOLIC. Looking inside, you could sometimes see calendars still fixed to the peeling walls, or pinups, or a leaking pipe.
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Large stores and whole rows of tenements had black gaping windows and doors bricked up with cinder blocks or covered with galvanized sheeting. Handsome neo-Renaissance apartment buildings from the turn of the century stood, hollow with decay. It was more like the South Bronx than I had expected - somehow I hadn’t realized that Harlem was burning too. From the back seat I shouted questions about Harlem drug traffic, and the detectives threw back answers about things that had happened on 16th Street or 47th Street, and for a while I thought there must be some huge drug operation downtown that I had never heard of - until I realized they were just dropping the hundred. As the car bounced down the potholed street, the snow chains set up such a deafening whackety-whack that we had to converse in shouts. Lenox Avenue looked very much like Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, which was actually Seventh Avenue - or maybe Eighth I couldn’t keep them straight. I kept losing my sense of direction, and only occasionally did I know precisely what street we were on. A cold white sun was gleaming in the February sky, and jagged mounds of pockmarked snow were piled at the curbs. On my first day at the Sixth Homicide Zone in Harlem, I went out in a radio car with two black detectives.
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