The Man Who Remade Harlem
In the early spring of 1990, Rev. Calvin O. Butts III started painting over billboards. As cherry trees blossomed, the pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church took long rollers and whitewash to ads for alcohol and tobacco on the neighborhood’s streets. By April, he and his congregants had turned dozens white.
One result was a public conversation about corporations hawking harmful products—more lethal than drugs, Butts explained—in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Another was to force the hand of those companies, several of which turned their billboards over to public service announcements. A third was to pale the large, colorful broadsides that bedecked uptown streets, a makeover of Harlem’s built environment that registered the recently appointed pastor’s brash crusade and his rising power, too.
Butts, who died October 28, 2022 of pancreatic cancer, led one of the nation’s most influential Black churches, ran SUNY-Old Westbury for over two decades, and was one of New York City’s leading powerbrokers. He also effected big changes in the built space of Harlem beginning in the 1980s, when the community’s economic bottom had largely fallen out. As with the whitewashed billboards, which angered advertisers, this work was at once visionary, profound, and controversial.
Figure 1. Calvin Butts at the groundbreaking ceremony for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C., 2012. Video still from Smithsonian Institution, “NMAAHC Groundbreaking 2012 Highlights.”
The flood of posthumous commemorations last fall recognized a figure who had changed Harlem perhaps more than any other in the late twentieth century. Butts’s death also offers an opportunity to contemplate the consequences of that work, which evolved hand in hand with the larger field of community development—and Harlem’s gentrification. As much preacher as dealmaker, Butts embodied contradictions that were mirrored in his vision of Harlem as a mixed-income community that was open for investment, an objective with highly uneven outcomes that left many behind.
Any such reflection on Butts following his death necessarily must center on the Abyssinian Development Corporation. A community development corporation, ADC began as a housing ministry in the mid-1980s and quickly gained a national profile. At the time, Harlem faced a growing epidemic of poverty, abandonment, and deterioration both literally (witness the church’s increasingly empty block on W. 138th Street) and existentially, as fearful congregants moved or stayed away.
Focused initially on serving its elderly members, the church embarked on Abyssinian Towers, a senior housing venture on W. 131st Street. By decade’s end, the church formalized that work as ADC, an effort that soon encompassed housing on many surrounding blocks.
Figure 2. West One Three One Plaza, at 51 W. 131st Street, the first condominium project of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, completed in 1993. Photograph by Brian D. Goldstein, 2012.
ADC symbolized, and was among the best known of, a new generation of CDCs. CDCs had first grown out of demands for racial self-determination in the radical 1960s, depending mostly on federal Great Society funding. In the 1980s, with retrenchment of the federal welfare state—in community development but also low-rent housing—they navigated a new policy landscape that was more fragmented and reliant on a mix of public, private, and foundation funding.
Butts’s rise in profile as Abyssinian’s executive minister corresponded with that of ADC and the broader field of church-based community development. This is a history I chronicle in my book The Roots of Urban Renaissance, but for here suffice it to say that to build housing in the 1980s and 1990s required a large degree of pragmatism, and Butts was nothing if not pragmatic.
Amid an alphabet soup of city agencies, non-profits, government policies (like LIHTC), banks, and housing intermediaries, not to mention city, state, and federal governments that were swinging from left to right to left, nothing served housing ambitions better than the ability to make friends and influence people. And as obituaries have noted, Butts was a political shapeshifter, who insulted Mayor Ed Koch but endorsed independent presidential candidate Ross Perot, supported Republican Rudy Giuliani’s first mayoral bid (and later disclaimed him) and Democrat Charlie Rangel’s congressional candidacy too, and invited Republican gubernatorial candidate George Pataki to speak at Sunday services on the way to his 1994 victory.
Butts made alliances where they would benefit his work, an expedience equally evident in ADC’s approach to housing. Even as abandonment wracked Harlem, incipient signs of middle-class arrival surfaced in some corners of the neighborhood. This sparked opposing reactions—fear for some, opportunism for others—and for Butts it brought a response as pragmatic as his political maneuvering. ADC, he explained to the New York Amsterdam News, would seek “a mixture of income levels in the housing units we provide.”
Among other influences, this concept of mixed-income housing—premised on attracting middle-class residents to subsidized complexes—drew from the work of sociologist William Julius Wilson, who distinguished between segregated but mixed-income neighborhoods common under Jim Crow and the concentrated poverty of city-center communities of the 1980s. CDCs’ move to fostering income integration in response represented a marked shift from founding ideals of community development, which had focused largely on addressing the needs of the poor, existing residents of disinvested neighborhoods.
Butts’s vision was concretized in West One Three One Plaza, a middle-class condo project completed in 1993 that appealed to buyers to “Become a Harlem Homeowner!” Soon ADC’s work expanded, including a range of rental and owned units that served everyone from the formerly unhoused to low- and moderate-income tenants to middle-class buyers. From new construction to rehabbed brownstones, ADC rebuilt many Harlem lots and set a pace that CDCs throughout the United States followed.
By the 1990s, ADC broadened its activities, most evocatively on W. 125th Street at Lenox Avenue, where its Harlem Center brought an office tower and shopping center full of national retail chains, making a major corner in Harlem look much like such intersections in more prosperous parts of the city. Built in partnership with now-defunct mega-developer Forest City Ratner, the center’s 2000 launch marked a major step in the transformation of Harlem.
Figure 3. Harlem Center, an office tower with first-floor retail, was developed by ADC and Forest City Ratner at the intersection of W. 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Photograph by Brian D. Goldstein, 2012.
ADC’s involvement was no coincidence: built on state-owned land, few were surprised when Governor Pataki handed the project to the CDC. “You support somebody and they in turn support you,” Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) said, “and I think Reverend Butts understands that.” Projects like Harlem Center and the nearby Harlem USA shopping mall announced Harlem’s “Second Renaissance.” They also made it easier for Harlemites to buy CDs and clothes, and go to the movies, near home. Down the street, at a Pathmark grocery store that ADC developed with the Community Association of the East Harlem Triangle—a community group with radical roots in the 1960s—Harlemites gained their first real supermarket in generations.
Although fresh meat and produce were no small matter, like ADC’s condos these commercial projects, intended to place Harlem into what advocates viewed as the economic mainstream, raised concerns. Preston Wilcox, a steadfast activist who never shied from confrontation, assessed Butts’s work critically and with characteristic frankness. “He has put himself in the position of a slave catcher to help Pataki take over Harlem.”
Such assessments were harsh, yet beneath Wilcox’s brutal language was an underlying truth: there was a cost to Butts’s pragmatic dealmaking, his vision of a healthy Harlem as one that required more affluent residents. In the years after unveiling Harlem Center, ADC would prompt profound questions about who benefitted from its brand of community development. Many, in particular, scrutinized its plans for redeveloping Harlem’s historic Renaissance Ballroom, which the group bought in 1991. Initially, ADC planned to restore the two-story structure. By 2006, however, plans called for replacing it with 116 condos, 80 percent of them to be sold at market rates.
“Even as Butts led the reconstruction of faltering blocks, his tenacity brought apprehension . . . for those who had fought for alternate visions of the neighborhood.”
To the relief of critics, as ADC ran into financial troubles that were only partially related to the Great Recession, that project stalled. Yet concerns persisted. In a 2013 exposé, the Village Voice debt at ADC exceeding nine figures by 2011, attributed in part to “the (very) earthly pursuits of Rev. Calvin O. Butts III.” Butts angrily denied the allegations, which included mismanagement, waste, fraud, political favors, and manipulation of small Harlem landowners.
Rev. Butts portrayed himself as a victim of developers conspiring to take over Harlem. In this light, the truth proved especially ironic. In 2015, DNAInfo that ADC had been on a liquidation spree, selling off more than $100 million worth of property over the previous nine years, including the Renaissance Ballroom and, in 2014, the Pathmark supermarket. A year later, the Community Association of the East Harlem Triangle had not seen a cent of its share of the proceeds, nor had the city, which maintained an ownership stake. Meanwhile, the Pathmark closed, and new owner Extell Development prepared plans to redevelop it as an office tower. (Given the weak office market, the company is now planning a residential high-rise with an upscale grocery store.)
As the news spread, many felt betrayed. “I don’t ever want to see Butts on the east side again,” said Derrick Taitt, president of East Harlem Triangle’s board. “He should’ve never been given this authority over Harlem.”
Figure 4. The Pathmark at W. 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, the first new supermarket in Harlem in years when it opened in 1999. In 2014, ADC sold it to Extell Development; it closed shortly thereafter. Photograph by Brian D. Goldstein, 2012.
The sale and closure of Pathmark did not make the vast majority of obituaries for Butts, an omission that is hardly surprising. There is a tendency to tell the best stories about the recently departed, but also a desire for a straightforward narrative. As Sam Roberts wrote in the New York Times, Butts “helped revive Harlem with housing—mitigating gentrification by reserving a portion for existing residents—a supermarket and other commercial development, and a high school.” Harlem’s transformation was an upward slope, in other words.
Something is lost in such a gloss, however, and not just accuracy. Community development is complicated work, not so different from the alliance building and political calculation fundamental to development in general, and Butts was superlative in that kind of brokering and dealmaking. But such maneuvering came at a cost in a neighborhood that was never one Harlem, but many. Even as Butts led the reconstruction of faltering blocks, his tenacity brought apprehension, often justified, for those who had fought for alternate visions of the neighborhood, and those who were losing out.
Upon his death, the architectural historian Michael Henry Adams, long one of the loudest voices for historic preservation uptown and a frequent Butts adversary, offered a different commemoration. “Polished, engaging and active, Calvin Butts was a worthy opponent, one who it was foolish and indeed impossible to ignore.” That, too, was true of the figure whose lead role in making today’s Harlem is indisputable.
