Marcus Samuelsson is a chef who inspires me everyday. He has such a deep understanding of flavors and techniques. His food is representative of the diverse world that we live in. What he has done in Harlem with Red Rooster is very special. Marcus is not just a chef, he's a food activist.
Aaron Sanchez
'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?
Alex Gibney
I've played with jazz and toyed with it when I used to live near the St. Nicholas Pub in Harlem.
Amanda Seales
I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.
Amiri Baraka
With 'Dope Walk,' I wanted to bring back kids dancing and having fun again. That's how it used to be in Harlem. I remember everybody Harlem-shaking and 'Chicken Noodle Soup'-ing. Those were some of the most fun and memorable times in my life.
ASAP Ferg
For me, growing up in Harlem and then migrating down to SoHo and the Lower East Side and chillin' down there and making that my stomping ground... That was a big thing, because I'm from Harlem, and downtown is more artsy and also more open-minded. So I got the best of both worlds.
ASAP Rocky
In Harlem, I got all my black friends. But when I go downtown, I got black, white, Asian, Indian friends. There's no borders, no barriers.
He was a manager, one of the singers, I guess talent coordinator for the local talent in Harlem. His name was Lover Patterson. He was living right across the street from where my dad had his restaurant. I guess he saw a lot of kids come in, a lot of my buddies.
Ben E. King
Appropriation is a fact of life; no point in complaining about it. But if that's the way the game's being played, let's do it on both sides. I don't want some white guy making 'A Rage in Harlem III' if I can't do 'The Godfather V' or 'E.T. III.'
Bill Duke
You cannot mention Harlem Heat without mentioning Sherri Martel at the same time.
Booker T
I always say that Sheri Martell was that one thing that put Harlem Heat on the map, made us a legitimate tag team.
I got Sonny up to Harlem, and we started street playin' in New York. We did that for three or four years and survived. We brought it back to the streets again.
Brownie McGhee
I grew up in New York City: Harlem, New York. I played ball for probably two of the biggest amateur basketball organizations in the city.
Cam'ron
I'm just a Harlem dude that can rap, and people dig my style and persona.
When we did Diplomats music, it was all genuine, and I think that's why people love it so much, because they seen a group of kids from Harlem that had almost nothing come up to be platinum-selling artists, and people rode that wave with us.
Just growing up in Harlem, it didn't matter what you had to do to get fresh - you would do it.
I'm the only tenured black faculty in the sciences at Columbia, in the middle of Harlem.
Carl Hart
I majored in directing. However, I did spend some time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, so I am somewhat well-versed in African Studies.
Chadwick Boseman
People still knew me as Charles, so when I came across Charlemagne in a history book, that sounded good: Charles the Great, a warrior who used his power to spread religion and education. He was the head of the Carolingian dynasty, and with me being from South Carolina, that clicked.
Charlamagne tha God
We can't have Harlem become one borough for the rich.
Charles B. Rangel
We don't windsurf in Harlem.
Honestly, what 'Luke Cage' is - it's a hip-hop Western. And you have Luke Cage as the sheriff of Harlem.
To me, Harlem is one of the most important places on the earth, particularly when it comes to talking about African Americans.
As long as black people preserve their culture in Harlem, Harlem will always be alive.
In the imagination, Harlem will always be the spiritual capital of black excellence in America.
Harlem has always been the nexus of music, politics, culture, criminal figures.
The thing that surprised me the most is just how much money women that weren't rich were paying for their hair. When you're in a beauty parlor in Harlem next to abandoned buildings and somebody's paying five grand for a weave, that's a bit much.
Man I mean, the great thing about playing clubs in Harlem is people have an appreciation not just for the music but for the history of the music.
The first 'Charlemagne' album is metal, of course, but what I sang was more symphonic.
I was born in Harlem, raised in the South Bronx, went to public school, got out of public college, went into the Army, and then I just stuck with it.
Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.
I've always written about social concerns. My first book was about Spanish Harlem.
I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem.
In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics - all with their own markets.
For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, 'Quicksand' and 'Passing,' and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.
Harlem exists in retrospect, in the memory of grandparents or elderly cousins, those 'old-timers' ever ready with their geysers of remembered scenes. The legends of 'Black Mecca' are preserved in the glossy musicals of Times Square and in texts of virtually every kind.
Jean Toomer is a phantom of the Harlem Renaissance. Pick up any general study of the literature written by Afro-Americans, and there is the name of Jean Toomer. In biographies and memoirs of Harlem Renaissance figures, his name is invoked as if he had been one of the sights along Lenox Avenue.
Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'
'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.
Spanish Harlem is like every ghetto in America. There's every distraction possible. To make it up out of there is really a task itself.
I always wanted to do something I knew I could love to wake up and do every day, and rap was just second nature to me, growing up in Harlem. I never really had to try.
Since the '80s, Harlem has the place to go. Before the '80s, just as far as hip-hop go, Harlem has always been a strong point, fashion-wise, music-wise, all of that.
I've been able to provide for my family, move out of Harlem and travel the world.
A lot of creativity coming from the east side of Harlem. It really built my character and who I am.
Where I'm from in Harlem, everybody look like a rapper.
Growing up in Harlem, I was always in the parks playing ball.
I'm grateful for my health, glad I'm making people laugh, glad my wife still likes me after a lotta years, grateful my daughter is growing, glad I don't take myself too seriously, glad L.A. has Astro Burger, grateful to be coming home to Harlem soon. It's a gratitude list. It works.
Harlem was a development, a developer's dream and a place where residents had more space and more amenities than ever before. The subway reached 145th street about 1904, and it seemed that Harlem's destiny was to become largely a preserve of successful ethnics relocating and arriving. Then, overnight, the bust took place.
Harlem was the main chance for the east end of New York, for eastsiders, as that real estate boom that took place in the 1890s - and it was a preposterous one where people bought and sold, and everything appreciated with each sale - and eventually, of course, the house of cards would crumble.
Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.
