Perhaps no other area in New York so eagerly honors its history as Harlem. Streets have been renamed for Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. North of the bakery, a 10-foot-tall, 2-ton statue of Harriet Tubman leans forward, like the prow of a ship about to sail into the green ocean of Central Park.
Despite the interest in what came before, these days Harlem seems utterly future-oriented. Over the past few years, several restaurants, bars, and even a hotel, the first in four decades, have opened on or near Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Attuned to marketing opportunities, some real estate agents champion “SoHa,’’ or South Harlem, as the latest “it’’ location. We wanted to see how the new was getting on with the old.
The previous night, we had sampled the locally brewed Sugar Hill Golden Ale at one of Bier International’s communal tables, then stopped into a speakeasy called 67 Orange Street. Opened in late 2008, it is named for the address of a black-owned, 19th-century bar.
Dressed in suspenders and soft, saggy denim, our bartender would have fit right into the original, sartorially speaking. Biceps undulating, he shook up a Corpse Reviver #2, which we ordered for the moniker, a mix of gin, lemon juice, tequila, Lillet Blanc, and absinthe. The Upper Manhattan, which we ordered as a nod to geography and because we wanted the brandy-soaked cherry, had rye, bitters, and vermouth. Each was eye-poppingly strong.
Our choices disappointed the woman next to us. “You should have had a Cleopatra’s Lust,’’ she said, laughing. As her husband, an off-Broadway playwright, looked over the bartender’s headshot and asked about his experience on “Law & Order,’’ she got to talking.
“I’m from Brooklyn,’’ she said. “But walking around this neighborhood is like walking around the world.’’
