Striver’s Row was built near Convent Avenue as speculative housing for up-and-coming “Negroes,” professional people who lucked into the system and were holding on. It was designed as a self-contained unit by Stanford White and it does stand out from the Victorian grab-bag Harlem came to be. These houses are sparer and blond-white – though I doubt if there are any racial messages here. I think the great architect simply wanted a way to unify the structures. He’d done something similar with the old Madison Square Garden, where he was shot to death for poaching on somebody else’s chorus girl. (Norman Mailer played White in “Ragtime,” the movie made from E. L. Doctorow’s magnificent novel.)

Harlem was, of course, synonymous with “Negro” culture from the First World War till well past the Second. Nightclubs sprang up along 7th Avenue to serve the hoity white clientele who like to play at being colorblind at the Cotton Club or Savoy Ballroom. Cutting contests were held in small apartments or basement night-clubs as hot new musicians established turf and, as a consequence, broadened style and technique. Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday came of age here, as did Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and scores of other great musicians who would become known around the world.

Striver’s Row was, however, tucked away from the nightclubs and frankly didn’t have much to do with them. Harlem’s professional class was perhaps even more aloof than its white-skinned counterpart downtown. It had more to prove and was appropriately self-conscious. It took a lot to be a “Negro” doctor in those days. The most prosperous man in old black communities ran the funeral parlor. Here in Manhattan it was possible for a black lawyer or doctor to live in an exclusive sort of place without having to crash already-established white enclaves. As cosmopolitan a city as New York was, it was still a segregated one.

As an artist, you are privileged to breach social and economic barriers – at least while you’re working. When you’re trying to hustle, well, that’s a different sort of thing altogether. In those days I identified with the black professionals who had to live by themselves – or suffer a deliberate ostracism that was built-in to a system working-class people would later smash.