Good Morning POU
For almost two centuries after its founding in the 17th century, Harlem remained a quiet, neatly laid out community of estates and farms. Its peaceful environment attracted a number of wealthy families of diverse European backgrounds. In the early 19th century, Alexander Hamilton built a country home, the Grange, which still stands. But the soil in Harlem was exhausted by the mid 1840s and Irish squatters occupied the land. At one point, so many hogs roamed parts of 125th and 126th Streets that the area earned the nickname Pig’s Alley. Its lower section was known as Goatville.
Harlem escaped becoming a perpetual backwater when New York City annexed it in 1873 and drained some of its marshlands for new housing. The subsequent erection of an elevated railway revitalized the area, and once abandoned land took on the aspects of a well-planned and well-groomed town. Its boulevards were wide, the side streets quiet, middle class residential byways. Fancy apartment buildings were no more than 5 or 6 stories high. The lack of tall buildings and broad avenues combined to create an unusual sense of space. It was idyllic ambience, unlike Manhattan south of Central Park with its busy streets and crowded thoroughfares.
18th century mile marker
Harlem, was, at the turn of the century, a white enclave with a mixed ethnic character that was part German, part Irish and part Eastern European. It’s religious structures reflected the diversity: St Paul’s German Evangelical Lutheran Church on west 123rd was completed in 1898. St Thomas the Apostle Roman Catholic Church on West 118th Street could seat 1000 parishioners and Temple Anshe Chesed on 7th Avenue was designed by the noted architect Edward I. Shire.
An even more famous architect, Stanford White, was responsible for the rows of graceful houses that lined West 138th and 139th Streets, some of which sported wrought ironed balconies in the style of the Florentine Renaissance. On other cross streets, imposing brownstones dating from the 1880s and 1890s stood. Jewish merchants operated most of the stores along the shopping thoroughfare of 125th street.
The change in Harlem’s complexion was swift. At the time the Lenox Avenue portion of the West Side IRT was completed in 1904, the nation was plunging into a major depression. The many new apartment houses that had been built sat virtually empty. There were just too many of them, and not enough white could be persuaded to move up to Harlem to occupy them. The first African American migrants to Harlem came from Greenwich Village and Brooklyn and met resistance from whites as soon as they arrived.
A reporter for The New York Times expressed amazement on Saturday when he witnessed Harlem’s transition from white to black. He had come upon a street clogged with horse drawn moving wagons, many of which had to wait around the corner until they were able to get into the street: “A constant stream of furniture trucks loaded with the household effects of a new colony of colored people who are invading the choice locality is pouring into the street. Another equally long procession, moving in the other direction, is carrying away the household goods of the whites from their homes of years.”
As Philip Payton’s Afro-American Realty Company quickly helped blacks move into lower Harlem, the neighborhood’s white citizens organized to prevent blacks from moving deeper in. Led by John G. Tyler, a white separatist Harlemite and real estate developer, a slew of antiblack, anti-integration proponents quickly began to organize: the Save-Harlem Committee, Anglo-Saxon Realty, and the Harlem Property Owners Association.
“Their presence is undesirable among us [in Harlem],” and entry in the New York Indicator, a Manhattan real estate journal, stated, adding that blacks should be “segregated into some colony in the outskirts of the city, where their transportation and other problems will not inflict injustice and disgust on other worthy citizens.”
After blacks rapidly moved into lower Harlem after the opening of the train station at 125th Street in 1905, whites focused their efforts on preventing blacks from encroaching higher drawing a line at 130th Street, which served as the border between integrated and nonintegrated Harlem.
In 1905, the Hudson Realty Company, a white-owned real estate company, had bought a tract of land on West 135th Street near Lenox Avenue, in the heart of Harlem, for residential development. To make the development property more attractive to prospective builders, it also bought three neighboring tenement buildings from Afro-American Realty, evicted their black tenants, and replaced them with white tenants. Hudson’s builders agreed to only rent their properties to whites. In response, the Afro-American Realty Company bought two adjacent apartment houses, evicted their white tenants, and moved in the blacks evicted by Hudson. Eventually, Hudson sold the original three buildings back to the Afro-American at a large loss. The incident augmented Payton’s reputation and drew investors to his company. The New York Times called the moves by Hudson and Afro-American Realty a “Real Estate Race War”
The Afro-American Realty Company bought and leased property in Harlem neighborhoods never until then “invaded” by black tenants, occasioning near panic among neighboring owners In July 1906, the New York Herald wrote:
An untoward circumstance has been injected into the private dwelling market in the vicinity of 133rd and 134th Streets. During the last three years the flats in 134th between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, that were occupied entirely by white folks, have been captured for occupation by a Negro population. Its presence there has tended also to lend much color to conditions in 133rd and 135th Streets between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. One Hundred and Thirty-third Street still shows some signs of resistance to the blending of colors in that street, but between Lenox and Seventh Avenues has practically succumbed to the ingress of colored tenants. Nearly all the old dwellings in 134th Street to midway in the block west from Seventh Avenue are occupied by colored tenants and real estate brokers predict that it is only a matter of time when the entire block, to Eighth Avenue, will be a stronghold of the Negro population. — ”Negroes Move into Harlem”, New York Herald, December 24, 1905
White residents were outraged; one sign advertising for colored tenants for a formerly white building was burned to local acclaim.
The Afro-American Realty Company grew to $1 million in assets with annual rent receipts of $114,000. It was not as successful as some stockholders had anticipated, though, and in October 1906, 35 of them brought a lawsuit, charging that the prospectus was fraudulent and overstated the company holdings when it was issued. Payton was arrested on civil fraud charges in January 1907, and the courts ruled in favor of the plaintiffs for investments, damages, and legal costs, later that year. The company issued its first and only dividend in June 1907, but never recovered from the negative publicity effects of the lawsuit and the depression of 1907, stopping operations in 1908.