Dreams of a Harlem renaissance have been deferred.
At least 14 projects along 10 blocks of 125th Street have been delayed, mothballed, killed or downgraded as a much-heralded development boom fails to materialize on uptown’s iconic main street.
Instead of planned office and retail towers, a pro-sports television station, high-rise hotels and a culinary-arts school, there are vacant storefronts and trash-strewn lots.
Dozens of often bitter mom-and-pop businesses — including neighborhood staples like Bobby’s Happy House, M&G Diner and Manna’s Soul Food — were booted for high-rises that never rose.
The dormant development sites have doubled the retail-vacancy rate along one five-block section of the strip to 16 percent, said Barbara Askins, head of the 125th Street Business Improvement District.
“This is the grand letdown,” said Evan Blum, owner of The Demolition Depot salvage store.
He criticized the city for banking its redevelopment efforts on corporations instead of local business owners.
“All they know is corporate America, and corporate America is kaput now. It’s us little guys that got kicked out, that are unique and specialized, that bring people to New York,” Blum said
The biggest blow to revamping 125th Street, also known as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, was the death of “Harlem Park,” a proposed $435 million tower at Park Avenue that at one point was to include TV studios for the Major League Baseball Network.
That killed two projects on neighboring lots and fueled a 31 percent decline in the asking price for one of the lots, said Randy Modell of ABS Partners Real Estate.
Lawsuits have delayed at least three other projects: transformation of the burned-out Corn Exchange building into a culinary school; a $40 million office and retail tower; and several phases of a planned 6-acre, city-administered entertainment and residential complex in East Harlem.