"We've got about $1,200 worth of work that needs to be done," he said. And there may be people in the church who are making a little money on the side."ĭuring his sermon, Smith appealed to the congregation to help pay for repairs to the church's aging organ. "It's created a problem, because many of them are getting a lot of money from the tourists in order to get into a church. "Some of the tour operators really have made this whole thing about money," Kebe said. Others, like Mother AME Zion, make money by encouraging visitors to drop a suggested donation into the collection basket. On a busy summer Sunday, Harlem Spirituals, one of the oldest and largest tour operators, might run 15 full buses, said Erika Elisabeth, a company vice president. The gospel tour industry has exploded since it was born in the early 1980s. "They want to see what they've seen in the movies." "They want to see what they've seen on television," said Larcelia Kebe, president of Harlem Your Way! Tours Unlimited. At Mother AME Zion, there were nearly 200 of them, overwhelming the congregation by at least 5-1. Yet the tourists' presence is undeniable. "You don't pay people to experience the Lord, to come and pray. "I refuse to commercialize the church worship experience," he said. He doesn't even like to use the word "tourist," preferring instead to call them part of his "international congregation." And he won't turn anyone away. Gregory Robeson Smith, Mother AME Zion's pastor, refuses to work with tour operators. Some churches provide assigned seating for tourists, while others demand a list specifying which countries the tourists are from and whether they speak English.Īnd still more forbid the tour companies from advertising which churches are on the tour in hopes of curbing the number of unwanted visitors. Some pastors quietly manage the crowds by requiring a written confirmation of guests from tour operators, refusing walk-in visitors. "But when we ask you to stop and you continue to do so after the fact, that's disrespectful." "I understand that you're visiting and you want to have a memory of it," said Carlos Smith-Ramsay, who joined the church several years ago. Ushers roam the pews like security guards, stopping more than one person from filming on digital cameras. They are printed on pamphlets and multilingual signs and announced at the start of every service. The rules are simple enough: No photography, no flip-flops, no exiting during the sermon. "Our building is in need of repair," church member Paul Henderson said after the service. But the reality is that these visitors are often filling church pews that would otherwise remain empty - and filling the collection basket with precious dollars. To preserve the sanctity of the service, pastors struggle to enforce strict rules of conduct. With a record number of tourists descending on New York City last year, the crowds of foreigners irritate some faithful churchgoers. It's one of many Harlem churches that have become tourist attractions for visitors from all over the world who want to listen to gospel music at a black church service. Since the fictional Ushers derive their money primarily from addictive pharmaceuticals, it’s easy to equate them with the real-life Sackler clan, whose role in the opioid crisis led The New Yorker to brand them “the family that built an empire of pain.The clash between tourists and congregants plays out every Sunday at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the oldest black church in New York state. Other more powerful and supernatural forces are manipulating them all, usually in the direction of a gruesome demise. The series is essentially Succession filtered through the macabre lens of Poe, with the assorted Usher children vying for dominance in their toxic empire while still under the thumb of a powerful and charismatic patriarch. In the series, Bruce Greenwood plays Roderick, who is reimagined as the head of the unspeakably wealthy Usher family-whose members have done unspeakable things to attain their riches. The Netflix series itself takes its name from Poe’s 1839 short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which a disturbed man named Roderick recounts his gloomy family history to a bewildered friend, culminating in the apparent resurrection of his recently deceased sister, Madeline, and the literal collapse of their decaying mansion. Some are right there in the open, lunging for the viewer’s attention, while others are tucked away in a corner-easily unnoticed unless you’re looking for them. The Fall of the House of Usher’s Edgar Allan Poe references appear much the way ghosts and specters did in The Haunting of Hill House, Mike Flanagan’s similar gothic-remix series.
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