Black historical figures decorate a store’s security gate in Harlem.

Gentrification has brought a construction boom to Harlem, and shops like BBraxton, a stylish men’s salon.

By TRYMAINE LEE

The boy pressed his face to the window of the men’s salon, his breath fogging the glass. He stood there, on a wintry day, staring at the well-dressed men swathed in hot towels.
After a few minutes he walked in, his tattered sneakers squeaking on the gleaming hardwood.
“He asked what we did here,” said Tony Van Putten, who owns the year-old shop, called BBraxton, at Fifth Avenue and 116th Street in Harlem. “And when I told him that we cut hair, he gave me this look.
And he asked if it was O.K. if he could get his hair cut here, too.”
The boy seemed more accustomed to the streets than to a place like BBraxton, Mr. Van Putten said, but inside the shop he saw men who were black like him although they were wearing expensive clothes and shined shoes. The boy’s eyes seemed to ask: Am I good enough to be in a place like this?
For the past decade, Harlem has been gentrifying rapidly. But while affluent white professionals are the visible symbol of that change, the fact is that often the wealthy arrivals, like the patrons at BBraxton, are black.
Gentrification in any color makes similar impacts - rising rents, high-end merchants, displacement, home renovations - but black gentrification has an emotional texture far different from the archetypal kind, both for residents and for newcomers. This is particularly true in Harlem, the historic capital of black America.
Some local residents are a bit uncomfortable with the wealthy set but aspire to join it. Others resent the incursions on their neighborhood and feel that the newcomers, like other affluent professionals, are interested mostly in maintaining property values and their comfortable lifestyles.
The black arrivals, in turn, may feel a special duty as blacks to help Harlem and its people, or they may feel ill-treated by them, or they may feel guilty knowing that others of their own race are in need - and often standing right outside the polished doors of their new brownstones.
“There are black people here in Harlem who share physical residence,” said Howard Dodson, general director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the major repository in Harlem of books and other artifacts of African-American cultural life.“But saying ‘a community’ is another thing. The question is: Can community be built across these racial and class lines in the new Harlem, in this new reality?”
Some black entrepreneurs say they have encountered hostility, but in the opinion of Kevin McGruder, a Harlemite who is a co-owner of Harlemade, a Harlem-centric gift shop on Malcolm X Boulevard, black residents are generally more accepting of the black newcomers than of white ones.
“People focus on the white people and that’s more the fear,” Mr. McGruder said. “There is a feeling that a black person, even if he or she is upper-income, many or most will be able to identify with things that are happening in Harlem. ”
Warner Johnson, a 45-year-old Internet entrepreneur , suggests that tradition also helps to smooth black-on-black relations.
“You always had people that had means and people that didn’t have means in Harlem,” he said. “If you were black back in the day and had money, there was nowhere else you could live. So we never looked at that as something of a dividing point.”
Mr. Johnson, who moved to Harlem in 1993 (“when police helicopters were still flying outside of my window”), also says Harlem’s role as the nation’s black capital helps ease black-black tensions.
“Being a culture mecca,” he said, “supersedes all the notions of the affluence component.”
When Kim Martin-Shah, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mom, looks out from her plush Harlem condominium apartment, she sees a world that saddens her. She sees black mothers struggling to feed their children while she and her husband, who works for the investment bank Merrill Lynch, and their 22-month-old son, Ameer, live the American dream.
Ms. Martin-Shah is hardly unaware of her racial kinship with the less fortunate outside her window.
“I don’t think I have done anything wrong, nor do I feel I am responsible for the dire situation many of my neighbors are in,” Ms.
Martin-Shah said. But she added, “These are my people, even though I might not relate to some of their financial woes.”