But in other sections of the district, robbery, rape and murder are rampant and raw. Prostitution is scandalous. With certain elements, assault has become not only a profession, but a pastime.
The New York newspapers, by common habit, rarely publish anything about Harlem crime. The city editor looks at the address and spikes the item.
Police shrug their shoulders and turn their backs not only on complaints, but on misdemeanors and felonies within their own sight. This is especially true where no whites are involved.
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Harlem was made out of bounds for white service personnel, with armed M.P.'s and S.P.'s stationed at close intervals. Night life became practically one hundred per cent Harlem-patronized.
The days when a metropolitan black belt was picturesque and novel are gone. The decade and more when low-class and high-priced slumming in black-and-tan dives was a big-city fad has passed, too.
Today, Harlem's chief attraction is the famous Savoy Ballroom. This is not a taxi dance hall. There are no hostesses or hired partners. The gents bring their own dames or pick up unaccompanied girls, who also pay their way in. Most of these are not out-and-out hustlers. In the old days the Savoy was a wow. The unrestrained dancing and the first roots of jive and boogie-woogie were beginning to appear. Both the music and the hoofing were fascinating to outsiders. But now few whites come to the doors of the Savoy, and those who do are firmly discouraged from entering.
America stole the Negroes to work the land it stole from the Indians. It has not played white with either.
The living, throbbing Harlem—110th Street, 116th Street, 125th Street, 135th Street, Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, the west side of Fifth Avenue from 110th Street up—those highways which in their time have known throngs of sightseers, which in the heyday of Harlem hotspots housed cabarets and after-hour joints known around the world, are now beset by gangsters, streetwalkers, sluggers and muggers who often bash and slash for the mere mischief and sadism of inflamed imagination and unbridled, coddled encouragement to misbehave.
On these and the dimly lit side streets which cross them property and life are rarely safe.