Local resident explores Harlem’s history after a lifetime in the neighborhood
George Lee Miles is a walking encyclopedia of Harlem. An actor, tour guide and self-taught historian, his apartment at 143rd Street and Malcolm X Boulevard is filled with thousands of books, many on the history of the neighborhood. If you ask him one story about Harlem, he’ll tell you at least three.
But, while Miles’ memories of the neighborhood where he’s lived for almost 60 years are overflowing, he says in today’s Harlem a lot of the past is lost.
George Lee Miles stands outside a housing project at Malcolm X Boulevard and 116th Street, where Malcolm X used to address Harlem crowds. Miles lived across the street and remembers wading through those crowds when he’d go out to buy milk.
“The task that we have is to reconnect with our history,” he said. “People are still trying to hang on to these little threads of their lives.”
In his new Harlem Gangster Walking tour, Miles guides tourists through Harlem’s underworld in an attempt to shed light on the neighborhood’s notorious days of drugs and gangland violence. It includes moments that Miles remembers from his own youth in Harlem, in the 1960s.
The tour highlights 116th Street where, in the 1960s, in broad daylight, drug lord Frank Lucas shot dead a man who owed him money. Then there’s the hotel where Robert Kennedy’s son David was mugged by a drug addict, and a multi-million dollar apartment complex that stands in the place of what used to be a rundown drug den.
The tour is part of Miles’ efforts to tell a different side of Harlem’s history – one that’s not just numbers and facts, but about the colorful people who’ve shaped Harlem for good and bad.
“I like to bring some sense of reality,” Miles said. “The truth is not always easy to take, there’s always a sensitivity about it … I simply try to tell it as it is and as I know it to be.”
Miles has a vast repertoire of stories about all sorts of characters he encountered growing up in Harlem. His occasional run-ins with gang members and junkies were mixed with more glamorous sightings. He remembers sneaking peeks from the back of Minton’s club on 118th Street to watch jazz great Thelonius Monk perform, and rubbing shoulders with performers like Jackie Wilson and Brook Benton, who stayed at the Cecil Hotel when they came to town for Apollo Theater performances.
“I meet and hang with people from the penthouse to the basement,” he said.
George Lee Miles was born in Edisto Island, South Carolina. He moved to Harlem at age five.
After graduating from George Washington High School in Washington Heights in 1963, Miles took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts alongside Danny DeVito, then an actor-in-training. Miles was one of the few African Americans in the program, at a time when blacks still struggled for civil rights, and some white classmates refused to do scenes with him.
But Miles stuck with acting, and performed in unpaid roles at Harlem’s YMCA before moving on to his first theater paycheck at Harlem’s Black Arts Repertory Theater.
After returning from service in the Vietnam War from 1965-1967, he came back to Harlem and continued with theater. In the 1970s, Miles directed newly-arrived actor Samuel L. Jackson in a set of three short, dramatic plays at the Manhattan Theater Club. In those days before Hollywood stardom, Jackson made ends meet by working as a security guard at the Manhattan Plaza apartment complex on 43rd Street.
Miles has had bit parts in films like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Malcolm X and Ridley Scott’s 2007 American Gangster. The film chronicles the life of Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, and Lucas’ schemes to smuggle heroin from South East Asia into Harlem in the 1970s. Miles played a non-speaking role as Lucas’ attorney.
“I enjoyed the movie,” Miles said, although he added that after growing up in Harlem, he found some elements of American Gangster “kind of fake.” An example: the fancy leather, fur-trimmed jacket worn by Cuba Gooding Jr. as he played drug dealer Leroy “Nicky” Barnes.
George Lee Miles at Minton’s jazz club on 118th Street. As a child, Miles visited Minton’s to sneak a peek at jazz greats like Thelonius Monk and Max Roach. “They didn’t give us any trouble if we didn’t try to drink,” he says.
Occasionally, Hollywood’s stereotypes have prompted Miles to turn down a role. He passed up an offer to play a pimp in The Gambler, the 1974 film starring James Caan. The casting director he said “no” to never offered him another role.
“A great deal of what Hollywood portrays about black people is pretty much a contradiction,” he said, adding that most films totally ignore Harlem and its struggles. “The entertainment industry really doesn’t pay too much attention to poor people.”
As a tour guide, Miles reminds people that Harlem’s gangsters were more complex characters than the surface stereotypes often used in portraying them.
“I always like to look at the reasons that things happen,” he said. “Most of these people came out of dire circumstances … it grew out of a lack of opportunity – a lack of the ability to move forward in any promising way.”
Miles says that kind of analysis doesn’t always work in walking tours.
“I do have to be careful from time to time because people can misconstrue it,” he said. “In the tourism industry you’re supposed to be happy go lucky.”
But in Miles’ mind, he’s just trying to preserve elements of Harlem’s past before they’re lost to new generations. Other tours he gives include Harlem in Transition, Harlem Jazz and Harlem Gospel – as well as more typical downtown tours. But wherever he’s walking, Miles’ focus is always on the people. He wants those who’ve created the modern city to be remembered.
“There was a sense of neighborhood – that doesn’t exist anymore. There was more a sense of a connection with people,” Miles said. “Those of us connected to this community owe it to ourselves to rebuild that connection.”
Photos by Bradley Gallo.
{ 2 comments }
Nice article.
This is great!!
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