But the tide turned when Percy Sutton, then the Manhattan borough president and New York City’s highest-ranking Black elected official, launched a campaign to bring back vitality to the historically African American neighborhood that had been known as a global Black mecca of arts,

Harlem’s deserted streets and tumbledown tenements told the story of a neighbourhood left behind. Decades of disinvestment had culminated in a mass exodus known as urban flight and residents watched as their wealthier,