In New York, city landmarking is the most effective tool to protect and preserve historic buildings. In a city and country where almost everything is subject to a constant state of flux, preventing demolition, except under extraordinary circumstances, and overseeing and regulating repairs and exterior alterations, landmark designation promotes continuity and is a godsend.
It is not a panacea, however. Sometimes, greater measures than just ordinary landmarking are required to sustain Black heritage. In Brooklyn, 375 Stuyvesant Avenue, which I recently featured, is an example of this.
It’s up for sale, to settle an estate. To maximize its profitability, it’s liable to be gutted. This threat prompted neighbors to put in a request for it to be made an interior landmark to save extraordinary decorative features otherwise likely to be lost. The staff of the Landmarks Commission responded, stating the obvious. In a letter dated February 10, they wrote to Brooklyn’s Black preservationist Omar Walker: “further study would be needed to fully understand the building in the context of comparable houses, its significant associations with figures in Black professional, medical, and civic history, as well as its broader importance to the social history of New York City. We note that, as this building is located in a historic district, it is regulated and protected by LPC. We also note that LPC has designated only 125 interior landmarks across the city, and those spaces must be ‘customarily open or accessible to the public.’”
Efforts made to address these concerns in the original emergency appeal apparently matter little. As of now, the building is still “customarily open or accessible to the public.” Yes, there are comparable, even superior, contemporaneous interiors in Brooklyn and in Manhattan, but something makes these particular spaces unique. In 1941, When Dr. Charles N. Ford acquired this house, arguably, no African American lived in a grander house in the whole city, in the entire nation, even anywhere!
Ford was a founder and president of the first Black-owned insurance company registered in New York State, among the top five largest Black-owned insurance companies in the nation, as well as an owner of Harlem’s Deerfield Apartments, the Rockland Palace dancehall, and the headquarters of the first Rose Morgan House of Beauty spa and styling salon — no one’s ordinary Negro. Although now largely forgotten, he was recognized in his lifetime as a rags-to-riches super-star.
A Harlem instance where being part of a landmarked historic district is not enough is the house at 107 W. 132nd Street, which was owned by Aida Overton Walker. In 1902, the turn-of-the-20th-century song-and-dance great was a part of the first all-Black Broadway show, “In Dahomey.” By virtue of this revolutionary vehicle, seemingly overnight, she became the “Cakewalk Queen.”
This means this is hardly just another historic structure. Designed by Cleverdon & Putzel in the Queen Anne mode, the brick and brownstone rowhouse was completed in 1886. Walker lived there in widowhood and died there in 1914.
After her death, her house seems to have been acquired by the African American-led Golden Democratic Club by the 1920s. In this guise, all through the 1940s, every sort of meeting, campaign caucus, and social event seemed to have occurred there. Some activists were not necessarily conventional, as a clip from the 1927 AmNews attests: “86 MEN TAKEN IN CLUB RAID FREED.” This was in the wake of two raids on the Golden Democratic Club at the house, when 86 men were arrested on charges of playing старs, early on a Sunday morning. All the men, when arraigned before Magistrate Bernard J. Douras in Washington Heights Court later, were discharged.
In time, the three-story house that was once home to the “Queen of the Cakewalk,” was a multi-family SRO rental, housing 11 separate households. However, as a part of the Central Harlem-West 130th–132nd Streets Historic District, designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission at the instigation and urging of Save Harlem Now! in 2018, it could have been assumed that this important part of Black heritage was at last well protected.
Out of the blue, though, disaster struck. Just after midnight on November 25, 2023, an unwatched lighted candle started a raging conflagration. Two people died and two more were injured and hospitalized. Horrified neighbors gasped at the scene. Four screaming residents, one after the other, leapt to safety from upper windows as firefighters frantically performed CPR on survivors.
Almost three years later, well after the fatal fire, Walker’s house remains unrepaired, replete with broken windows, a chained but open front door, and huge holes in the roof. Who owns this building, currently assessed at less than half its pre-fire $1.7 million valuation? Why hasn’t the Building Department or the Landmarks Commission compelled or fined the owner for not minimally maintaining their property? Where is a concerned block association, fearful lest this damaged house negatively affect their own property values, or local elected officials who like to boast of their dedication to maintaining affordable housing and working to improve the community?
This is the case of the fate of an outstanding and singular landmark of Black accomplishment, from an era when perhaps only 400 Black New Yorkers owned the places where they lived. Seemingly, ever so slowly, it’s being destroyed by dismissive neglect.
It’s about time to revive the stature of our once-colossal star. Signs point to the time being ripe. For instance, Daniel E. Atkinson, an independent scholar who earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington, has just published the first biography of Aida Overton Walker’s husband, “The Rediscovery of George ‘Nash’ Walker: The Price of Black Stardom in Jim Crow America.”
What can we do to help reverse Aida Overton Walker’s unceremonious erasure? Shouldn’t we, at least, pledge our commitment to restoring her Harlem home?