"To me, as to most white New Yorkers, Harlem was essentially unknown and very nearly forbidden territory. ....Coming home from a trip to Connecticut or Westchester, I would sometimes get off at the 125th Street station instead of going all the way down to Grand Central. Given the crime in Harlem, it was always a nervous experience, looking for a taxi to take me home. After a while I decided that the time saved was not worth it."--from One Man's America: A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country by Henry Grunwald (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1998, paperback).
Grunwald is describing Harlem as it existed in the 1950s and 1960s. No one then could have imagined the profound changes to the community that would take place 40, 50 years hence with the emergence of multi-million-dollar condos and co-ops and upscale boutiques and restaurants. Even black celebrities of the time who lived on Sugar Hill would have been dumbstruck.
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