By David Snyder

Unlike some Harlem landmarks destroyed by bulldozer and wrecking ball, the Renaissance Ballroom has survived - barely.

The legendary dance hall’s ceiling has holes the size of beach balls. The expansive hardwood floors where poet Langston Hughes once kicked up his heels have turned to mush. The marquee that novelist Zora Neale Hurston would have seen from her front stoop sits broken and rusted in the building’s ghastly foyer, where potato chip bags and empty plastic bottles litter the floor.

"This is what is left after 20 years of rain and ice," said Chris Falco, a consultant for Harlem’s Abyssinian Development Corporation, as his flashlight beam roamed through the wreckage inside the low-slung two-story structure, which has been vacant since 1980. "It will take a lot to bring this place back."

As outside investment money has energized Harlem’s economy, sparking new development, jobs and economic bustle where there has been none in decades, a rescue of the Renny is being mounted. But the very forces that have brought much of Harlem back to life could actually hinder the ballroom’s rebirth. With much investment money from the "new Harlem Renaissance" focused on development - in whatever architectural package - many fear that the icons of the original Harlem Renaissance may vanish, replaced by newer more cost-effective structures.

"This is really a test case," said Karen Phillips, Chairman and CEO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, which has already spent $3 million and 10 years trying to restore the ballroom, to no avail. "It could show that Harlem has the ability to support something besides a new chain store."

While investors have been willing to put money into new development projects across once-devastated areas of Harlem, they have shown little if any interest in restoring the buildings that, as Phillips put it, "make Harlem Harlem."

The question is one of cash: can restoration and profit go hand in hand? ADC believes so. But they have yet to sell that belief to an investor who could make the project go.

Restoration is very expensive - ADC estimates it will take about $11.5 million to bring the Renny back. City, state and national landmark designation can provide tax breaks for investors (both the city and state have indicated they would support landmark status for the ballroom), but the designation also significantly limits the amount of structural and cosmetic alterations that can be made to the building.

"The economic development in Harlem in the past two years has done more damage to the character of the neighborhood than the previous 30 years of neglect," said Michael Henry Adams, a preservationist who is writing an architectural history of Harlem. "This could be the beginning of Harlem becoming some place else."

Not everyone agrees with Adams’ assessment. Many say the new buildings along 125th Street replaced old eyesores that had no historical merit. Still others, like Phillips, believe there can be a compromise between meat-and-potatoes economic development and the finer points of historic preservation.

Tiffany Ellis, a marketing strategist for Jazz at Lincoln Center who has volunteered her expertise to help ADC come up with entertainment programming for a restored Renny, said restoration is inherently good business.

"Tourists aren’t coming to Harlem because they want to see the new Disney store," she said. "They want to what it is about Harlem that makes it special. They will pay money to see an actual place that still exists from Harlem’s heyday."

For many, the 4,000-square-foot Renaissance Ballroom best symbolizes the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, when the neighborhood was at the epicenter of the greatest flowering of African-American culture in the nation’s history. Built in 1924, the black-owned and black-operated ballroom featured some of the top jazz acts of its time: Chick Webb, Fletcher Henderson, Edgar Hayes and Al Sears. The nation’s first professional basketball team, the Harlem Rens played there. David Dinkins had his wedding there.

Since 1989, ADC has worked to rescue the Renaissance from a decline that began when the ballroom was vacated in 1980. They have floated about a half-dozen proposals to potential investors, everything from turning the two-story brick building into a movie theater to making it a catering venue. Nobody has yet been willing to accept the financial risk of investing in an area where the median household income, $12,660, is less than two-thirds the national average. They are afraid no customers will come.

But with the initial commercial successes of businesses like Harlem’s new Blockbuster Video Store investors have become more open to the idea of investing in Harlem entertainment spots, Phillips said.

"In 1988, people wouldn’t be in Harlem after dark," she said. "It was in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic. It was a different market and a different time. Talking to financial institutions, they just couldn’t fathom making the Renny into something you would use at night."

But investors still have yet to put down enough money to turn the ballroom’s deterioration around. So it has deteriorated further.

The market for entertainment and catering businesses appears to exist. Wells Restaurant, just down the street from the Renny, routinely fills its small dining hall for jazz performances. Aside from theaters at nearby Columbia University and City College, there are few live-entertainment venues in Harlem. The argument, by ADC and other Harlem development advocates, is that since Harlemites generally must travel outside the neighborhood to find what they need -- even the most basic services -- they will gladly embrace businesses within Harlem.

Within a 10-block radius of the Renny, there were once more than a dozen nightclubs and bars, including the famed Savoy Ballroom. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd., then called Lenox, was fertile ground for poets, writers and musicians. Novelist Zora Neale Hurston lived in a house a half-block from the Renny. Cab Calloway, it is said, regularly made appearances at the ballroom. Langston Hughes lived nearby.

"This area was it," Adams said. "This was the center."

Now, there are as many vacant buildings surrounding the Renny as occupied ones. Boarded-up apartment houses stare down the block like macabre Advent calendars, and graffiti scars the lower facades of even the occupied homes. The Renny is no exception. Black, red and blue spray-paint scrawl coats the building inside and out. The rolling gates that protect the building’s main entrance are rusted and besmirched with grime. Adams, who believes that "most of Harlem" should be landmarked, said owners’ unwillingness to seek landmark status is "short-sighted and damaging."

"When tourists come to Harlem, they come to see Harlem’s history, not a parking lot behind a Disney store," he said.

Whether the Renaissance would merit designation by the Landmarks and Preservation Commission remains to be seen, said Andrew Dolkart, an associate professor of architecture history at Columbia University.

"I think the building is important as a building," said Dolkart, who has studied the ballroom. "But its importance is made much greater by the role it played in the community. This is where the people from the neighborhood went for entertainment."

When the ballroom went out of business in 1980, it left a tangled legacy of unpaid taxes and mortgage payments. With no investors willing to shoulder the enormous burdens the building had amassed, it fell quickly into disrepair. The roof rotted, and rainwater stained, and then destroyed, the dance floor.

Then, in the early 1990s, ADC began a lengthy legal battle to take over the property from its owners, Baruch Singer properties, which is based in New Jersey.

In 1997, ADC finally wrested control of the property from the former owners, and acquired the title to the building. Since then, several investors have "expressed some interest" in putting money into a renaissance for the Renaissance, Falco said. None has yet committed money to the project, he said.

Until they do, the ballroom will remain vacant and continue to decay.

"It can’t go through another winter," Phillips said. "The rain and the freeze really takes a toll."

Though the building’s interior retains many of its original features - a gargantuan chandelier, a proscenium stage and pressed-tin ceilings -- they languish in a state of slow but perpetual decay. Fire destroyed a back corner of the ballroom, where rusting electrical wires tangle with charred pillars, creating a surreal and gloomy effect that is heightened, somehow, by the shafts of sunlight that beam through the gaping holes in the ceiling. An elm sapling has sprouted out the building’s roof, and the majestic marquee that once announced the Renny to passersby sits in a rusted heap in the building’s foyer. Rain has mixed with dissolving concrete to create bizarre, gray stalactites that hang from the lobby’s ceiling.

Beyond the cost of repairing such a mess, investors worry that a new business would flounder in an area that has had few commercial successes in recent decades. Will there be enough commercial traffic along 138th street to sustain a large restaurant and catering outfit?

"Money begets money," Falco said. "And the area around the Renaissance has not had much money in it for some time."

It is the same concern many corporations had before they invested in new stores on 125th street. While many of those businesses ultimately opened (and have had commercial success), it was only after years of planning, prodding and negotiations with government officials.

The Renaissance is in a much different world. While 125th street bustled with pedestrian and car traffic and supported some small businesses even during the worst of times, the neighborhood surrounding the ballroom has had very little commercial activity in decades. There is far less evidence that new businesses can succeed.

Thirteen blocks north of the bustle of 125th street, the ballroom is down the street from Striver’s Row, a street of stately homes that was once the heart of Harlem’s black middle class - and the core of the Renny’s constituency. Like much of Harlem, the area has seen bad times in the decades since the glory days of the Renaissance.

Many of that era’s icons have been leveled in recent years to make way for new developments.

The Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was murdered, was destroyed in 1994 to make way for a Columbia University science center. The Savoy Ballroom, where Duke Ellington once held forth, was torn down years ago. Minton’s Playhouse, where be-bop was born, remains vacant despite high-profile restoration efforts by a group of investors that includes actor Robert DeNiro.

ADC, which owns and has redeveloped several apartment houses in recent years, wanted the Renaissance partly because of what it symbolizes, Phillips said.

"This is the last remaining intact ballroom in Harlem," she said. The Cotton Club, which was perhaps Harlem’s most widely renowned ballroom, "is the one that people from the outside came to, but this is where the residents of Harlem came."

The Ballroom "symbolizes everything that Abyssinian wants to do in Harlem," Phillips said. "It is for the community and of the community." And that, she said, has been worth the cost.

"The psyche of the community is more valuable than having a Starbuck’s on every corner," she said. "It would be a sad, sad thing if Harlem starts to look like Anywhere, USA."

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