Photographer Joseph Byron took images of a mostly white society uptown but his photo of Grant's Tomb at 122nd Street and Riverside Drive shows a group of African American gentlemen visiting the monument in 1903. The final resting place of the 18th President would be finished in 1897 and these gentlemen might have been visiting from the minority neighborhood around midtown on 7th Avenue called the Tenderloin which was also dubbed the African Broadway. By 1914, middle-class blacks would start moving to the Harlem from midtown and thus take root in yet another phase of the historic village's revival. Another photographer known as James Van Der Zee would then takeover and become the record keeper of the new society unfolding in Harlem.
Archival photo by Byron courtesy the Museum of the City of New York
With all due respect (always!) to Ulysses, there were sizable African-American neighborhoods uptown much closer to Grant's Tomb than the Tenderloin in 1903--Philip Payton's Afro-American Realty was started in 1904, but he had been putting Black tenants into Black buildings uptown for at least four years. And starting in the late-1890s, the black-owned and operated New York Age carried advertisements for luxury apartments—including closets, heated hallways, kitchen ranges, walnut mantelpieces, and marble fireplaces--in the Sumner and the Garrison, on Broadway between West 125th and West 126th streets, Blacks-only buildings named after Whites abolitionists.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jonathan! It's always amazing to get your insight since you wrote the most updated book on the history of Harlem. Phillip Payton lived in Central Harlem and not much has been written about the migration to West Harlem. Based on some demographic numbers of 1910, less than 5 percent of greater Harlem was African American during the early century as opposed to Central Harlem which was approximately 10 percent.
ReplyDeleteI really love this kind of history and wish there were more frequent posts that elicited it! The historic images are really good context for what we see in Harlem today. Please Ulysses and Jonathan keep up this sort of dialogue. Thanks!
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