Meet Zakiya

Zakiya Raines grew up in an apartment in Graham Court on Seventh  Avenue with her mother and her sister, “I’ve lived in Harlem pretty much all my life with exception of like 1 1/2 years… I lived in Florida... and that was when I was about 24 so [with] the exception of that I've lived in… Harlem my whole life.” She says, “I mean, I was there when they filmed New Jack City... And they made it look way worse than it was. They made it look like it was this condemned building... and it wasn't even like that... There was a sense of community there. If I didn't have my key, I could go to my neighbor and be like, ‘Oh, I don't have my key’ ...and she’d let me stay in her house and do my homework at her table until my mom came home…” She says, “The apartments in Graham Court, depending on where you are, are pretty big. So I didn't grow up in a really tiny, typical New York shoebox apartment. Like it was a prewar, really large high ceiling apartment so… It was me and my mom and my sister.” Her sister and her niece still live in the apartment she grew up in while her mom splits time between the Graham Court apartment and Zakiya’s brownstone. 

Many of the places she loved growing up are no longer here. She reminisces about the events she used to go to and places she used to love, saying, “There used to be a place called Pan Pan which was like a food place and it was in Alicia Keys’s video, ‘You don't know my name’... They knocked that building down… And then there was a place called Georgie’s… I mean, I've never had a doughnut like theirs before, ever in my life… [The owner] retired and then the shop shut down.” She continues, “They used to have all these candy stores on 7th Ave like between 111th and 115th St… The whole wall would be these little five and 10 cent candies… If I went in there with like $2.00 I felt like I was rich… And they used to have the butchers on 125th Street by the Hudson River… There used to be like all these delis on 1st Ave., East Harlem and a lot of those are gone. They would have fresh cold cuts and salami… and that isn't there anymore. Like a lot of the artisanal shops that people think is a big deal now… back then it wasn't fancy… That was just what [it] was.” 

“Blowing up the balloons for Thanksgiving [in the Upper West Side], that used to be like a New Yorker’s only event that New Yorkers only knew about. And so the night before, everyone would be outside of their homes… drinking hot apple cider watching balloons being blown up.”

Where she spends her time now is centered around her children, “The kids like coming here, [Sugar Hill Creamery], because I have 4 kids, so everything revolves around them basically… I sometimes hang out at Barawine. When the pools open during the summer, we go there a lot in the summer... And then when I walk my dogs, I might walk them at Marcus Garvey Park, Morningside or Central Park depending on how much time I have… [And] my kids like Sottocasa.” Zakiya feels her children are living in a different era in Harlem when things are less social. She would make plans with her friends to go to Central Park and eat pizza or go to the movies, and feels her kids go out less than she did growing up. Many transactions were in person as well. Her mother used to send her to get groceries and pay the Con Edison bill when she was around 14 years old, but now you can do a lot more online. There are some aspects of Harlem she misses for her kids, she reminisces, “Blowing up the balloons for Thanksgiving [on the Upper West Side], that used to be like a New Yorker's only event that New Yorkers only knew about. And so the night before, everyone would be outside of their homes… drinking hot apple cider watching balloons being blown up. And it was not the crazed, crowded thing that it is now... So that's something I would go to when I was like 13/14, in some cases by myself.” People would even invite others inside for hot cider or hot chocolate and engage in conversations as they would watch the balloons. 

She spends most of her time with her children and also works as an author and artist. Harlem has helped thicken her skin as an artist, “I like to draw a lot of large portraits… I would say that [Harlem] contributes to… [me] having boundless creativity and not being so concerned with what people think all the time… It’s made me more resilient… I can't care less what someone thinks of me or what I'm wearing or what I paint…” Her mother was raised in Harlem, Zakiya and her grandmother were born and raised in Harlem, and now so will her children. Zakiya’s favorite thing about Harlem is the community, spending most of her life in Harlem and having formed lifelong bonds in the community, she cannot see herself living anywhere else long term. She says, “I would say [Harlem is]… a part of who I am… If Harlem didn’t exist it would kind of be like a piece of myself, a piece of my past, didn’t exist.”