2013 – “Is Harlem safe to visit?”

2017 – “Are the subway’s safe?”

I can’t recall the number of times I was asked the Harlem question during Bloomberg’s reign as Mayor (2001-2013), and the subway question during de Blasio’s tenure (2014-2021).

Usually, these questions happened on the Manhattan Bridge and near the end of a 3-hour tour of lower Manhattan, my favorite walk.

Thinking back to the beginning years of these tours makes me cringe sometimes. If you took one from me before 2013, sorry!

I was nice and patient, people gave me 5-stars, and the repetition pushed me on the path towards becoming a more effective teacher.

I knew how to use a camera and how to explain it, but I hadn’t taught enough to adapt to each person. I read NYC history books and collected interesting facts, but I hadn’t developed a perspective on how to explain the city and the neighborhoods as they are today.

At the time, TripAdvisor gave tons of leads, until one day they didn’t. Thankfully, I had always diversified how to find people, but that was one of the early realizations to never trust these platforms with something as important as my living. They give and then they take.

I also hadn’t had the life experience yet to step back and take some perspective on the place as it rapidly changed, becoming more surreal by the day.

And I didn’t have the confidence built to speak my mind and to kindly push back when warranted.

One of these profound realizations occurred when Democrat Bill de Blasio became mayor in 2014, when I was 32.

During the previous decade, New York had a perception of being safe, one rooted in reality. According to Bloomberg’s website, during his term, “New York City cut crime by more than 32% between 2001 and 2013, far outpacing the nation.”

Popular kids moved to New York, rejecting the disconnection of modernist suburban sprawl. Law and Order and similar crime shows made way for Seinfeld, Friends, Sex and the City, and Girls. The city was endlessly promoted, most famously culminating in fresh-off-the-boat Taylor Swift becoming an NYC ambassador and teaching people how to pronounce Houston Street and what a bodega is, in 2014.

(Disclaimer: I also teach people how to pronounce Houston Street (hau-stuhn). It’s where I start my tours).

But was Harlem safe to visit? Day after day that question was asked in the early 2010s.

Deep down, I didn’t feel like the right person to answer, even though my father had moved to a new development there. But it was safe to visit, so I’d say yes. Tourists flocked to Harlem and constantly talked about Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster, but I didn’t take them. I didn’t feel like I understood the place well enough to take them.

Then, overnight when de Blasio became mayor, the Harlem question stopped and hasn’t returned. Not once.

You might remember that year, when the NY Post articles started popping up on Facebook’s algorithm documenting each and every subway crime, even though crime rates were the lowest they had been since the 1950s.

(And I’m no de Blasio fan, he was a man whose ego clouded his effectiveness in the same ways that ego clouded Bloomberg’s overall vision for New York).

But this was a right-wing newspaper hiding under the respectability of the New York name, while simultaneously undermining that name, and then being promoted by tech industry billionaires riding the novelty of news sharing. 

And it was popping up in the feeds of people all over the world, many of whom finally felt the impulse to ask just before our tours ended.

Suddenly, those adventurous Harlem questions shifted to wary subway questions, slashings specifically for awhile, and I had to learn safety statistics and craft ways to call out this bullshit.

Now if someone were to ask me if Harlem was safe to photograph, which they don’t, I would tell them, “Yes, if you do it respectfully and kindly, but is it the right place to photograph as a tourist right now?”

I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s important to ponder. The effect of gentrification there is massive. There’s a reason people were suddenly hearing about it in touristic ways.

And certainly crime rose during the pandemic (which has somewhat normalized), but that was from historic lows and significantly based on a mental health crisis that is occurring everywhere. Crime is nowhere near the 1990s or 2000s.

But that hasn’t stopped our Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul from sending thousands of extra police officers to the subway system as a political stunt in a political year.

Straight from the NY Post playbook, Mayor Adams now simultaneously talks about how safe NY is and how only he can stop the rampant crime.

As you see each New York™ crime reported this year, talks of subway cops and of it being a hell-hole and shit-hole, in the wishes of people who still visit for 5-star meals subsidized by their companies and donors.

Here are the statistics. There are:

“One violent crime per one million rides on the subway.”

14.3 U.S. traffic deaths per 100,000 people in 2021.

So is Harlem safe? Perhaps you may be asking the wrong question.

And is the subway safe? It depends on what your vision of safety is.

Or what makes you feel safe.

 

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