July 23, 2012 |
Short Order
Farewell Sylvia Woods, Harlem’s Queen of Soul
It was good to see the newspapers giving Sylvia Woods her due as the city’s beloved Soul Food Queen and a keeper of Harlem’s political salon. I didn’t realize she’d met the man she would marry, Herbert Woods, picking cotton in the fields of South Carolina. She was 11, he was 12.
I was surprised the Times gave me credit for discovering Sylvia in her narrow little luncheonette on gritty Lenox Avenue in 1970. It’s so easy to forget. But Sylvia always thanked me. She had seen how my March 12,1979 review, “Harlem on My Mind,” in New York magazine brought downtown uptown at a moment when few white people ventured north.
Editor Ed Kosner was worried about sending readers to 125th Street. “You just jump in a cab and don’t say where you’re going till the meter drops,” I told him.
But I had doubts too when my friend Harley Baldwin insisted we get into the BMW and drive to Harlem for ribs, three of us. I wasn’t sure a duo of aging blond preppies would be all that welcome, ribbing and fried chicken-hopping beyond what was then a great divide. But there she was, behind the counter, grinning. “Look who’s here,” Sylvia cried. They hugged. “What you want to eat, Harley?” she cooed. We settled at the counter for the moist and sassy ribs, fabulous collard greens and candied sweets.
After two or three visits – I discovered salmon patties, perfect scrambled eggs, and her amazing biscuits at breakfast – I sat at my typewriter, exhilarated to be reporting my discovery, a new scene the readers would want to explore, an adventure worth the detour. Neither Sylvia nor I could have predicted the response to that article. How quickly her empire expanded up the street, that Sylvia’s would become the commissary for the Harlem establishment.
I could compare her to Diane de Poitiers in the Court of King Francis 1 or Madame Julie de Lepinasse with her salon that shaped French public opinion…but clearly in that growing success — the community gatherings, the banquet hall, the catering service, the canned products with her face on the label, the tour buses bringing crowds to her gospel brunch — Sylvia remained the same, like family, modest and welcoming, with the same smile.
When I learned that she had died at 86, I thought of the astonishing renaissance in Harlem we’ve seen — I credit the real estate boom and Bill Clinton’s presence for the new look of 125th Street. I think of the huge family she left behind, the children and grandchildren running all her businesses, the Woods Foundation for scholarships and her loyalty to Citymeals. I got down the plaque she engraved for me from the evening she and Herbert hosted a benefit for Citymeals-on-Wheels at the new grand, expanded Sylvia’s. It sits next to my keyboard as I write this.
“Thank you for putting Sylvia’s Restaurant on the map,” it says.
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