May 16, 2021 - Revisiting Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

Certain avenues in Manhattan I only find myself biking every now and again ––––  places where I used to live, which were once so familiar ––– that I now go back to as a different person, and see with new eyes. One of those avenues is Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr., boulevard. And the intersection I’m thinking of is ACP (or Eighth) and 125th Street (or 25th).

The first place I lived when I moved to New York almost ten years ago was Harlem: 148th and Malcolm X (or Lennox). Nearly a decade later, this morning, biking up Adam Clayton Powell and approaching 125th Street, I paused at a red light and looked across the intersection. As clear as day I could remember my twenty-four-year-old self, working as an administrative coordinator at Harlem Arts Alliance, and helping to set up for the tree lighting festival at the corner of Eighth and 25th.

I remember seeing the bronze monument of Clayton Powell Jr. for the first time; and thinking about how commanding, certain, and inspired he looks: bounding up a flight of stairs, with his overcoat flapping behind him like a cape in the wind. That was ten years ago. I was about the same height and weight, 5’10, 165. But everything else has changed.