Harlem is embracing LDS presence

HARLEM — It's a sultry summer night on 129th Street, where residents have congregated around a charcoal barbecue grill set up outside the local branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Not that they're here for religion, per se, but they enjoy the fact that there's a piece of greenery — even though it's fenced off — amid the never-ending columns of multistory apartment buildings, most of which have seen better days. Sans landscaping, architectural niceties or a steeple, the building looks like a former auto repair shop. The strip of grass and garden sits next to the LDS building, a continual draw in a neighborhood where heat radiates off the perpetual concrete and asphalt landscape.

Other than this patch of green, only a mural opposite the garden provides an escape for the eye along the block.

Yet it is spiritual escape that church leaders say has drawn increasing numbers to this building — so many that Sunday worship services inside are now standing-room-only. It's a far cry from the tiny gatherings that were held in this area only six years ago.

Joseph Appiah remembers well. It was 1998, and his first Sunday as an LDS missionary in Harlem after coming to the United States from his native Ghana. Gloria Lynch, who now serves as the Relief Society president in Harlem, was the only person at the service other than leadership.

"This woman was the only one who grew up in Harlem and went to church that day. Other than her, we had four missionaries, the branch president and his family, and that was it. That's when the church just started in Harlem. We had just moved from Sylvia's Restaurant where we met initially" around the corner on Lenox Avenue and 126th Street.

Sylvia's is known locally as the "Queen of Soul Food," the most famous restaurant in Harlem, and these days more of a tourist attraction than most anything else north of Central Park. Celebrities frequent the place, whose history features a rags-to-riches story of Sylvia Woods, a former waitress whose relatives mortgaged the family farm in South Carolina to help her purchase what was formerly a luncheonette back in 1962.

Grown legendary among locals by the mid-1990s, restaurant co-owner Van Woods helped arrange housing for the LDS Church's early meetings there.