Harlem is the capital of Black America — not a museum of it, a living one, still writing the next chapter on a Tuesday afternoon. The walk that follows treats it as a neighbourhood you've been let into, not a spectacle: three kilometres from 125th Street up to the Schomburg, paying attention, keeping out of the way.
Begin under the Apollo's marquee, where Amateur Night has made and unmade careers since 1934, and the Studio Museum a block on, which backed Black artists before the wider art world thought to. Walk 125th itself — the record shops, the churches, the vendors, the soul-food tables — as a working high street, because that's what it is. Then up to Marcus Garvey Park and its iron watchtower, and on to Striver's Row, the three blocks of 1890s rowhouses so fine that the people who reached for them named the streets.
End at the Schomburg Center, where Langston Hughes is interred in the lobby floor — the memory of a whole people, kept on 135th Street. The 2/3 is right there. Sunday mornings, the gospel carries from the churches; go to listen, not to look.
