Surveillance Camera Players writes

"Surveillance Cameras in Harlem"

Not Bored

"[In the 1930s and '40s] after-hours clubs thrived on white celebrities and society folks and those slummers weren't mistreated — the ex-slaves stood off to the side in awe, watching the wealthy visitors like they was gods arriving for inspection. Crimes were ten to one in Brooklyn and the Bronx compared to Harlem — man, we policed the district ourself for muggers 'cause we knew it would kill business. But the white press ran night-life business out of Harlem with propaganda that still lasts today — that in every shadow there's a big black nigger with a knife or gun ready to rape or stick up white folks." — Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog, 1971.

In June 2001, members of the New York Surveillance Camera Players (SCP–New York) scouted and mapped out the locations of public surveillance cameras in a portion of Harlem, a large and very famous neighborhood in Manhattan. Once called Spanish Harlem, this Upper East Side neighborhood in New York City is defined to the south and north by 125th and 135th Streets, and to the east and west by Lexington Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The SCP–New York chose this area for mapping because, as recently as 1998, it was still pocked by large numbers of abandoned buildings and empty lots where burnt-out buildings used to stand, and so could be used as a starting point for documenting the connections between public surveillance and capitalist reclamation ("gentrification").