People are going back to Senegal, moving out of the area, or further uptown. “We used to be such a close community but now it is being spread around ," he says. “It’s tearing the community apart," says Sow. The biggest roadblock for the 14 volunteers who staff Sow’s group, which was established to provide help to Senegalese as they settle and integrate into American life, is finding affordable housing for them in the neighborhood. The challenge facing Little Senegal today He worked to finance his studies, earning enough to be able to receive a B.A. Many, like Diafoune, started out as street vendors. Sow says the Senegalese are known for being both entrepreneurial and hard-working and as soon as they arrived, they began to set up taxi bases, restaurants and grocery stores along West 116th Street. Eventually, their family members joined them, growing the size of the community. They left their families behind, sending much of their earnings back home to their relatives. Like so many immigrants before them, the men came to the United States from their homes on the West Coast of Africa to find work and a better life-impossible in Senegal at the time because of drought and an economic recession. “Not that many people wanted to live here then," says Sow. "The Senegalese played a major role in Harlem’s renewal, in its latest Renaissance.” When the first Senegalese-mostly male-settled in Harlem in the 1980s, it wasn’t the desirable neighborhood it is today. Gentrification and its threat to his Senegalese community was what spurred him to join the Community Board to help address the reality that higher and higher rents are driving Senegalese from their homes and businesses. Only two of his friends still live in the area, he says, and the rest have moved to Brooklyn and the Bronx. Ibrahima Diafoune, a member of Community Board 10 who came to the United States from Senegal in 1991, says that “the face of the community has changed” because of gentrification. The reason, says Papa Ibrahima Sow, president of the Senegalese Association of America located on West 116th Street, is no surprise: “The increase in rents are changing the demographics of the neighborhood." First up: Little Senegal in West Harlem.įor three decades, the blocks on West 116th Street from Morningside Avenue to Fifth Avenue have been known as “Little Senegal.” But in the past few years, Little Senegal has gotten even littler. We're proud of our melting pot-a mixture of cultures, languages, and customs from around the world. Here are some of my favorite West African eateries.In Brick Underground's newest column, Immigrant New York, we celebrate the immigrant enclaves that make our city the vibrant metropolis it is. Sometimes sauces contain all the proteins at hand they are then called mixed meat. The food is distinctive and delicious, based on starches like rice and white yam fufu topped with meat, fish, and poultry sauces often referred to as soups. The countries represented include Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Togo, Nigeria, Chad, and Ghana (we once had ones from Sierra Leone, Mali, and Liberia, too). There are now around 60 West African restaurants in the city by my estimate, mainly in the middle Bronx, Harlem, Jamaica, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Temporary restaurants soon became permanent ones, and West African restaurateurs gradually became more savvy in attracting customers not limited to their countrymen and -women. Nigerian immigrants arrived at about the same time, riding the crest of an oil boom that transformed that country’s economy. Senegalese street vendors were the harbingers, and they soon set up kitchens in single-room-occupancy hotels around Times Square to meet their culinary needs. But a new wave of West African migration arrived more recently, beginning around 1980. Such dishes as collard greens, fried chicken, stewed okra, and hoppin’ john (black-eyed peas and rice) came from West Africa with unwilling immigrants on slave ships. West African fare has exerted a profound influence on America’s food culture. But new places have popped up to replace them, making our collection of West African restaurants better than ever - a hopeful light in a dark time. Yes, we’ve lost some important places in the last nine months, including Medina (Senegalese in downtown Brooklyn), Ebe Ye Yie (Ghanaian in Fordham Heights), and Chez Adja (Nigerian and Senegalese in Staten Island). The pandemic appears to have dealt a softer blow to West African restaurants than to many others, mainly because a wide swath of them always depended on carryout for a substantial part of their business, while the dining rooms often functioned as clubhouses for homesick immigrants.
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