Good Morning POU!
Prior to 1900, Harlem was 90% white – Eastern Europe immigrants and upscale white families called the area home. This week will feature the stories of Philip Payton and John Nail, the men who made Harlem as we know it, blaaaaack.
In July 1906, after the trial of Hannah Elias, two apartment buildings on West 135th Street in Harlem were purchased by an anonymous buyer through the Afro-American Realty Company for $100,000 ($2.7 million). A few days later, notes were slipped under the doors of the white families in the buildings. The notes told them to vacate their homes within twenty-four hours and that in the future the dwellings would only be rented to “respectable colored families.”
After the tenants got their eviction notices, the papers howled, “white tenants evicted by Hannah Elias.” An article published in the New York Evening World read, “Hannah Elias the negress that got $685,000 from John R. Platt, has jarred a godly part of Harlem by ordering all the white tenants out of two big flat buildings.” The article concluded that her move was part of a larger plot. “This indicates that the wealthy colored woman will make a colored settlement out of one of the choicest neighborhoods above 125th street.”
Elias denied having any part in the building purchases or the evictions, but she had indeed begun investing in Harlem with a handful of other powerful African Americans. The upper Manhattan neighborhood was nearly all white, but changes were afoot.
The area was dotted with farms, Victorian mansions, wood frame homes with lawns, new brownstones and empty lots on a grid of tree lined streets. Andrew Green, the New York City planner whose murder, Hannah Elias had indirectly been involved in, had facilitated the development of two elevated trains that connected Harlem to lower Manhattan. When the commuter rails opened at the turn of the century, it set off waves of migration to Harlem. The first migrants were white Manhattanites, Eastern European and Italian immigrants. They were followed by middle class African Americans. Blacks began moving to Harlem with the help of African American real estate developer Philip A. Payton Jr. and this company, The Afro-American Realty Company.
Philip A. Payton
Philip A. Payton Jr. was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, on February 27, 1876. He was the second of four children, one girl and three boys. His father was a barber and his mother a hairdresser. His father insisted that the children learn a trade, and so trained him in the family profession twice a week after school. Payton claimed to be a full-fledged barber by the age of fifteen.
Dr. Joseph Charles Price, founder of Livingstone College in North Carolina, was a personal friend of Payton’s father, and Payton attended the institution, and graduated from the institute in 1899. His sister graduated from the state normal school (later Westfield State College), and both of his brothers attended Yale University.
Payton worked in the family barber shop until April 1899, when he decided to make more of himself, and left for New York City, against the wishes of both parents. There, he worked as a department store picture and weighing machine attendant at $6 per week, a barber at $5–6 per week, and finally as a porter in a real estate office at $8 per week. While working as a porter, he got the idea of going into the real estate business on his own.
During the turn of the 20th century, there was a significant amount of African-Americans migrating up North from the South due to disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow laws. The northerners were not totally sold on this movement and didn’t necessarily accept the African-American migrators. This forced them to find a community to move into. Harlem, at the time, was becoming a melting pot for new communities. Harlem quickly became the area to continue African-American traditions through the arts. Thus, the Harlem Renaissance begins, and the demand for African-American apartment communities rises, making this the perfect time to corner the African-American real estate market in this area.
Philip Payton first got into the real-estate business as a porter, and after seeing how the business operated, he decided he wanted to create his own firm. Payton and a partner opened the Brown and Payton real estate firm in October 1900. In June 1901, Payton married. The business was unsuccessful, and Brown left in the spring of 1901. Payton continued the business alone, while his wife sewed to support them.
At the low point, in April and May 1901, the Paytons’ cat and dog died, partially due to hunger, and the Paytons were evicted from an apartment house he had been managing, for being unable to pay their rent. Soon after this, though, business improved. Payton got charge of more houses, and began to deal in real estate for himself as well as for others, until he was making profits of thousands of dollars per month.
I knew that if I made one good sale I could make enough to keep me going for a year. I came so near making a good sale so many times that I knew I was bound to hit it before long.
— Philip A. Payton Jr., quoted in The Negro in Business
Mr. Payton still struggled not only to cover his costs but also to remain confident. ”All my friends discouraged me,” he later remembered. ”All of them told me how I couldn’t make it. They tried to convince me that there was no show for a colored man in such a business in New York.”
Philip Payton, Harlem c. 1915
The New York Times states that by 1900, Payton was already managing several buildings housing African-Americans. Payton’s first success came when he approached the manager of an apartment house on West 133rd Street, which tenants were fleeing because a murder had been committed there, and persuaded him to have the chance to fill it with black families. For one thing, he assured the manager that blacks would pay a five dollar premium to live in an apartment in the building.
On June 15, 1904, with the help of other affluent blacks, Payton chartered the Afro-American Realty Company, issuing 50,000 shares at $10 each. Payton’s business partner was a mortician named James C. Thomas. Along with Thomas, Payton formed the Afro-American Real Estate Company. He appealed to black investors specifically, both to their social justice and profit motives, with an ad stating: “Today is the time to buy, if you want to be numbered among those of the race who are doing something toward trying to solve the so-called ‘Race Problem.'” His prospectus claimed: “The very prejudice that has heretofore worked against us can be turned and used to our profit.”
This would be the beginning of the Harlem takeover.