"Welcome To New Harlem!"

By RICHARD CORLISS

He lived there for years, and New Yorkers even named a street in his honor. But these days would dapper Duke Ellington feel at ease taking the A train 2 1/2 miles north from midtown Manhattan to black Harlem? Not if he believed the vision this New York City community conjures up in the minds of apprehensive whites: a postnuclear landscape of poverty and blight, where crack dealers plan gang wars in cratered tenements. To most Manhattanites from the wealthy southern part of the island, Harlem hardly exists, except as an old, obscure head wound -- the beast in the attic, a maximum-security prison for the American Dream's unruly losers. Why would a white person go to this Harlem, except to buy drugs?

Now pose the question to a white European visiting New York City, and brace yourself for a surprise. He will inform you that black Harlem is one of the city's main attractions; that its 330 years echo with history, beauty and drama; that its imposing, if often scorched, architecture tells tales of the exuberant black metropolis that flourished in the 1920s; that in no other New York City district can you find the vitality and graciousness of Harlem on a , good day. Maybe, too, the foreigner wants to brag to friends back home that he saw Harlem and survived. Sure enough, on a bus trip run by Harlem Spirituals Inc., the black guide announces -- in German, the language of many of the passengers -- that they are passing the spot "where the late son of the late Senator Robert Kennedy was suspected of buying drugs."

So on a spring morning, dozens of Europeans and Asians line up for excursions through Harlem, which sprawls northward from the top of Central Park for about 50 blocks. They gasp at the area's high and low life and attend a joyful church service. Typically, few of the tourists are black; fewer are New Yorkers. On a recent trip, one of these few spoke with a librarian at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and was complimented on his good English. When the downtowner asked if many New Yorkers took such tours, the librarian smiled: "Honey, you're about the first."

Is the white American who avoids Harlem missing something? Yes: for starters, a poignant and profound social textbook lying open for study in the heart of a great city. One gazes at block after block of abandoned brownstones -- their fronts corked by arson, their doorways cemented shut, their empty windows gaping like a skeleton's eye sockets -- and realizes that agonizing irony is Harlem's chief industry. Perhaps, then, the European tourists are seeing things. Yes, they are: spectacular things. Any tour of Harlem compresses into a few square miles the melodramatic contradictions of urban life. Horror dwells in the basement of propriety. Hope is just around the corner from drugs and decay.

A Sunday stroll down Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (but everybody still calls it 125th Street) between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue) takes the visitor past an armory of corrugated metal doors drawn protectively over shop facades. But on each of these doors a street genius named Franco has painted Pop-art murals appropriate to the goods sold inside: an underwater paradise for the fish shop, a spangled Eiffel Tower for the travel agency, a chain- laden Mr. T for the jewelry store. Midblock stands the legendary Apollo Theater, which brings Harlem alive every Wednesday with its Amateur Night display of singers, rap masters and a wonderfully gaudy fashion show. Next door is a vacant lot bearing the sign DANGER: KEEP OUT!

Harlem is certainly not a harmless place for residents or itinerants, but neither is it the city's worst crime area. In any case, fear is no excuse for missing out on Harlem's cultural and historical bounty. Prudent visitors, black or white, can ride a tour bus or a subway uptown during the day, drive or call for a cab at night, stroll with a worthy purpose on a Sunday-go-to- meeting afternoon. They will feel as comfortable on Amateur Night, with its superefficient security staff, as they would at Carnegie Hall. They will be made as welcome at a restaurant like Sylvia's as they would at an aunt's dinner table. They can take care and have fun.

Do this, and see the Harlem beneath the cliches, beyond its familiar notoriety as a graveyard for Great Society programs. True, the place is not what it was during Harlem's toniest decades, when swells partied at the Cotton Club (now defunct) and Joe Louis stayed at the Hotel Theresa (today an office building). Nor is Harlem what it may become in a looming decade of gentrification and white encroachment. But it is, at its best, a community that radiates warmth to outsiders who dare to embrace it. During Sunday service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Pastor Samuel Proctor greets white visitors (including chicken mogul Frank Perdue) to his congregation and asks if there are any from foreign lands. The roll call is impressive: a dozen countries, including the Netherlands. "The Netherlands!" booms Dr. Proctor. "That's where old Haarlem is. Well, friends, welcome to new Harlem!"

Peter Stuyvesant established Nieuw Haarlem in 1658, and it was later connected to New Amsterdam with a ten-mile road built by black slaves. During the colonial period, Harlem became a retreat for the Bleeckers, Delanceys, Beekmans and Rikers and in the 19th century a chic suburb for the well-to-do. Then, around 1880, the city extended its elevated lines to the north. Handsome neighborhoods sprang up, and by the early 1900s, Harlem bustled with urbanity. But the speculators had built too much too fast. So in 1904 a black real estate agent named Philip A. Payton rented apartments to blacks who were even then being displaced from their midtown homes by the new Pennsylvania Station railyards. The scheme succeeded beyond the speculators' wildest nightmares. By the 1920s, Harlem was mostly black.

Today many of the early edifices -- the sturdy brownstones, inspiring churches, elegant warehouses -- still stand. It is one of the few perks of slumdom: if property values do not rise, venerable properties are less likely to fall. Most midtown movie palaces were razed ages ago, but New York's first, the Regent, retains its Venetian splendor in Harlem, though it now does business as the First Corinthian Baptist Church. Above the marquee of another ancient Harlem theater, the Nova, is chiseled its original name, THE BUNNY (in honor of movie idol John Bunny), flanked by two grinning stone rabbit heads.

Residents have meticulously preserved some of the area's most gorgeous homes, like those on Strivers' Row -- two blocks of houses (some designed by Stanford White) where ragtimers Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake lived. The homes of two earlier, more antagonistic Harlemites are open to the public: the Morris-Jumel mansion, once the home of Aaron Burr, and Hamilton Grange, the last abode of Alexander Hamilton. Near the Grange on still posh Sugar Hill is a quiet riot of Tudor and Romanesque residences that shelter the faculty of City University. Around the corner is Harlem's favorite archival trove, Aunt Len's Doll and Toy Museum, where Lenon Holder Hoyte, 83, will show off her collection of more than 5,000 dolls. She's one too.

For these and other sights of Harlem, the anxious white visitor can hop a Harlem Spirituals bus at 9 some Wednesday morning. As the bus heads uptown, a guide sketches a history of the district. A walk through Hamilton Grange and Sugar Hill precedes a stop at the Schomburg Center. And then . . . nirvana. At the Manhattan Christian Reformed Church, a storefront mission run by and for recovering addicts, the Rev. Reggie Williams spins a stirring homily: "You have the power to pray when you wanna party! The power to close your veins to dope and open your brains to hope!" An old hymn like Amazing Grace percolates with urgent rhythms. Secular songs like Higher and Higher gain turbo power as spirituals. At the end, everyone joins hands in a big chain of redemption.

The tour is over, but the visitor should stay for the day in Harlem, beginning with a saunter down Seventh Avenue to the Mount Morris Park historical district. Girding the rocky park, today named for Marcus Garvey, are rows of beguiling Victorian houses. Head north on Fifth Avenue for an unpretentious lunch of pork chops and collard greens at La Famille.

Then flag down an astonished cabbie ("White people!" his face says) and go back through Sugar Hill to 145th Street and Broadway. The character of this area, with its many Dominican immigrants, is raffish and polyglot. One store, the House of Talisman, is downright polytheistic. In the window of this religious-goods mart, wooden Indians rub elbows with statues of the Madonna and an ebony St. Martin of Tours; inside, Holy Seven Spiritual Good Luck Bath Oil and the ever reliable Gamblers Drops are for sale. Next door is a nice place for early dinner: Copeland's, which speaks in tasteful tones (carnations on each table, a harpist on weekends) and cooks in Southern and Cajun accents. "Chitterlings and champagne, m'sieur?"

Another quick cab ride deposits the visitor at New York's most ecstatic secular event: Amateur Night at the Apollo. A great seat for this slice of Harlem history costs just $12. Almost all major black entertainers played the Apollo, and many got their start at the Amateur Nights that have been held for 50 years. From the beginning, the host has been Ralph Cooper, who can still boogaloo and scooby-doo like a septuagenarian Michael Jackson.

At Amateur Night, a blend of revival meeting and The Gong Show, the Apollo audience is the true star. A favored artist -- say, the 300-lb. gent whose falsetto carries him through an all-stops-out aria from Dreamgirls -- wins whooping applause from this Colosseum of 1,500 self-appointed Caesars. Less appreciated acts -- the Whitney Houston clones and clumsy break dancers -- are pelted with catcalls until a figure known as the Executioner darts across the stage in clown garb and chases them into the wings. Usually the performers soldier on to the end, broken but unbowing. Surely, as starmaker or heartbreaker, every audience member has a fabulous time.

Two Harlem events are sacred to born-again visitors: Amateur Nights on Wednesdays and church on Sundays. Book a table for Sunday brunch at Sylvia's, Harlem's friendliest eatery. But first, for God's sake, go to the Abyssinian Baptist Church. The pioneer architect Charles W. Bolton designed the church as an amphitheater, and for good reason: its pastor was the spell-weaving Adam Clayton Powell Sr. His son won even more fame, first as a preacher there, then as Harlem's first black Congressman. The bold spirits of both men inform the place.

On Easter Sunday the church was packed. A cadre of deaconettes -- stately matrons attired in white -- ushered hundreds to their seats, while dozens more stood. The Rev. Dr. Proctor, who will retire in June after 17 years as pastor, raised spirits and rafters with a 45-minute sermon, titled "Believing the % Unbelievable," that addressed issues ranging from Jesus' Resurrection to Joel Steinberg's fall. As 17 souls were baptized in the pool behind the pulpit, the Jewel Thompson choir tore into Take Me to the Water. That joyful noise is the church's heartbeat.

The Abyssinian congregation makes every timid white sojourner feel serenely at home. At the service's end, one parishioner approached a visitor, extended his hand and said, "Thank you for joining us. Won't you come again?" It is an invitation no "foreigner" could refuse, after a trip uptown that he began in fear and skepticism and ended by believing the unbelievable. "Harlem," he says, invoking Duke Ellington, "I love you madly."