Manhattan could soon gain another landmarked property that helps chronicle the history of New York’s earliest Black residents.
On June 18, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) voted to take the first step toward designating the three-story building at 50 West 13th Street a city landmark. The building, currently deserted and unoccupied, is a property that has, for centuries, been an important part of New York City’s cultural transformation.
“In the 19th century––for most of the 19th century––Greenwich Village was actually the center of Black life in New York and had New York’s largest Black community and Black population,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation, the historic preservation organization that has pushed for the landmarking of 50 West 13th Street. “It was mostly centered further south from here, around what’s now Minetta Lane and Minetta Street. But as we showed in some of the data that we submitted, there was this significant Black or African American population scattered all throughout the neighborhood, including on this block.”
An April 23, 1966, edition of the New York Amsterdam News reflected on the historical movement of Black communities throughout New York City. The article “How New York’s Negro Population Grew,” notes that “As early as 1860, Negro Colonies existed in Greenwich Village, the West Twenties and east Eighties. By 1930, Negroes tended to move to a single area in Manhattan––Harlem. In Brooklyn, Negroes moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant.
“An 1835 reference was made to a small Negro settlement in the Greenwich Village area. Some fifteen years later the majority of the city’s Negroes were living in the southern part of Greenwich Village and the area immediately south of it.”
Greenwich Village was “Little Africa”
By the time of the U.S. Civil War, so many Black people had settled in what is today Greenwich Village that the area was known as “Little Africa.”
Kat Lloyd, vice president, programs & interpretation at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, said that what we know of today as Soho and Greenwich Village was at that point the home to the largest Black community in the city. “About 15% of the neighborhood at that point were Black New Yorkers, which was larger than in any other area of the city,” Lloyd said. “This area was really the hub for the churches that were founded and run by Black New Yorkers, mutual aid societies, schools, literary societies, social organizations, just, you know, the entire sort of social, political, cultural infrastructure was really centered in that area. In particular, that area right around Minetta Lane and Washington Square Park, which isn’t too far away from where this building is.”
Documentation submitted to the LPC by Village Preservation shows that 50 West 13th Street, a Greek Revival style row house, was owned by the businessman Jacob Day between the years 1858 and 1884. A successful private caterer and one of New York City’s wealthiest African Americans, Day was a member and served as the treasurer of the Abyssinian Baptist Church (at the time, located on Waverly Place), and was a supporter of Little Africa’s branch of the Freedman’s Bank. Once he purchased the West 13th Street property, Day’s family lived upstairs while he and his sons ran his catering business from the downstairs level. “By the time of his passing in 1884,” Village Preservation notes state, Day “had properties in Brooklyn on Prospect Place, Jamaica, Queens; Fishkill, New York; and at 50 West 13th Street.”
On top of increasing his personal wealth with real estate, Day was a Black community activist. He was an abolitionist before the Civil War, campaigned against efforts to repatriate Blacks back to Africa following the conflict, and pushed to eliminate the requirement that city residents needed to own property before they could vote. Census records and city directories show Day rented out his apartments at 50 West 13th Street to like-minded progressive African Americans. Before marrying Henry Highland Garnet in 1875, the educator/suffragist Sarah Smith Tompkins rented a unit at Day’s house from 1866 to 1874. This was as she served as the city’s first Black female public school principal: she taught and led the (Former) “Colored” School No. 4, in a building located at 128 West 17th Street, which was designated a landmark by LPC just last year.
Incredibly significant cultural history
Village Preservation began lobbying to save 50 West 13th Street in 2020, following the death of Edith O’Hara. O’Hara had held a minority stake as a co-owner of the building: in 1972, she began running the 13th Street Repertory Theater out of its basement. Following its ownership by the Day family in the 1800s, the building went through a couple of iterations, with its spacious lower level serving as a commercial store, then being used for classes, and later occasional performances. In the late 1960s, the building was the location where the Afro American Folkloric Troupe would create performances based on the words of Black poets and folklorists.
With the start of the off-off Broadway movement in the 1970s, 13th Street Repertory Theater had its own illustrious history there: it was lauded as a location where the musician Barry Manilow had his first musical performed, and where actors like Bette Midler, Richard Dreyfus, and Chazz Palminteri once graced the stages.
Ever since O’Hara passed in 2020, Village Preservation has been urging LPC to landmark the property. The nonprofit worked with the independent historian Eric K. Washington to document the sites’ ties to Black history. But the LPC had reportedly remained reluctant to landmark the building––if based solely on its architectural assets. With the structure rapidly deteriorating, Village Preservation has insisted that landmark designation would be the only way to prevent the building’s destruction.“We submitted requests and documentation to them year after year starting in 2020, and they continually refused to act. And for whatever reason, only recently, very recently, obviously, they did,” Berman told the AmNews. “When they voted, the focus was largely on the cultural history of the building, both Jacob Day, Sarah Smith-Garnet, and the 13th Street Repertory Theater. They did speak to the architecture of the building as well, but I have no doubt that were it not for the incredibly, incredibly significant cultural history of the building, they would not have moved. But they’ve been aware of that cultural history for a couple of years now and did not act. So, I’m not sure what got them to the tipping point, but we’re glad they did.”
Bravo, Amsterdam News for covering this important subject, and all the detail and links you put into this story And for shining a light on all the work that Village Preservation has done to research this building and promote its really important history.