East Side Story

Granville Woody hasn’t had much luck in the bagel department. When the 67-year-old East Harlem resident gets a hankering for a bagel, he places his black derby cap on his head and walks to the grocery store on 125th Street.

“I’m not real sure about this bagel stuff,” he said with a shrug. “I like em’ but I don’t eat em’ that often.”

As Granville gave me a tour of the 300-dollar a month rent-stabilized apartment he’s resided in for more than 30 years, I learned that he was born on a farm in Halifax County, Virginia. Granville moved to Harlem in 1956 for a job at a pickle factory in Long Island City. Soon after arriving here, he met his wife, Florence, on the sidewalk along 17th Street. When I prodded him on how he approached her, he winked at me.

“She found me,” he said laughing. “That woman couldn’t keep away.”

He married her soon after, and the couple had seven children together; six of them live in various apartments in Harlem. In the nearly four decades Granville has been in the neighborhood, he’s seen the area change substantially.

“There were abandoned buildings everywhere. [In the 70’s] there was a lot of rioting. People were real poor. They were upset about things and they took it out on the neighborhood.”

In fact, Harlem lost 30 percent of its population in the seventies. But population numbers began rising in the late 90’s and by 2000 central Harlem’s population leapt by a stupendous 22 percent.

Now Granville finds himself living on the edge of a gentrification wave that could soon crash into his neighborhood; it's already happened a few blocks west. But Granville is taking it in stride and says he enjoys looking at the new faces pass by his ground-floor apartment window.

“It’s really something to see," he said. "I never thought it would happen here."