Save Harlem Now! (SHN!) recently celebrated their 11th anniversary with the landmarked, neo-Gothic Riverside Church as the setting for their third annual awards dinner. In an imposing stone-walled hall, brightened by Vincent Falls’s beautiful bouquets of yellow peonies, with vibrant jazz stylings providing an atmospheric musical backdrop, more than 100 celebrants feasted on a delectable buffet from ceviche to chocolate tortes.
The organization was established to stop the mass destruction of area historic buildings and landscapes. Recent casualties of indifference to Black heritage include the loss of the Art Moderne-style Lenox Lounge. Hotel Olga — Harlem’s best accommodation that allowed Black guests before 1937, including Louis Armstrong and Alain Locke — was destroyed to make way for Project 145. The Childs Memorial Temple Church of God in Christ, the site of Malcolm X’s funeral, is now a contested vacant lot. Over the past five years, even five individual residential buildings that were already official landmarks were destroyed. Many more unprotected places, such as Small’s Paradise Nightclub, the Victoria Theater, and St. Thomas the Apostle Church, have been partially demolished or disfigured by inappropriate alterations.
Photos by Michael Henry Adams
Award recipient Brent Leggs, executive director of National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, congratulated by SHN! officers Lynn Hendy and Valerie Jo Bradley. 
Awardee and arts advocate Voza Rivers with Harlem political powerhouse Inez Dickens. 
SHN! officer Lynn Hendy, Dwight Casimere, Kathleen Benson Haskins (widow of historian James Haskins), and Schomburg veteran Sharon Howard. 
Devine Donna Van Der Zee, widow of the photographer; architect and CCNY Professor Jerome Hafred; Walter Nagel, life-partner of the late Bayard Rustin; and newly minted historian David Levering Lewis. 
Resplendent in cerise silk with marvelous gold necklace, Rev. Dr. Patricia A. Singletary leads Harlem African Burial Ground Initiative.
Located in the West 130th–132nd Street Historic District, newly designated through the effective efforts of SHN! nearly three years ago, the townhouse owned by legendary stage-star Aida Overton Walker (107 West 132nd Street) burned in a fire that killed two tenants. Vacant and in disrepair ever since, recent repairs to restore it have finally begun thanks to the intercession of SHN!’s board member architect Roberta Washington.
Since Save Harlem Now!’s hopeful first meeting in 2015, it has become an award-winning nonprofit that has raised more than $1 million to date toward protecting and celebrating the architectural heritage of the African American Cultural Capital.
That’s where their Ella Baker Leadership Award, given to preservationist Brent Leggs this year, comes in.
As executive director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, the entity he launched in 2017, Leggs has made significant contributions to restore and sustain historic sites exemplary of the African American experience. To date, the fund has raised $200 million to support more than 378 related preservation projects across the country.
While the largest-ever undertaking in support of African American historic sites, some still see this effort as inadequate, noting that more than $100 billion in trust-led private investments have gone to the restoration of hundreds of thousands of buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places over the past 60 years, primarily benefiting properties that exemplified white heritage. A good many even have Confederate histories.
Envisioning Leggs as the sort of person likely to become president and CEO of the National Trust, I asked him about this disparity. Initially, he only cited his record fundraising on behalf of the trust and its work in Harlem.
Harlem’s diverse Action Fund recipients include the Apollo Theater a year ago. The previous year, the New Amsterdam Musical Association received grant funds to restore their West 130th Street building. Save Harlem Now! in 2021 received money to hire its first executive director. “Before that, $100,000, apart from a few hundred dollars SHN! got from individuals like Christabel Gough and $7,500 we got from a Facebook birthday fundraiser, we were nowhere. It was a gift that put us on the map!” said Washington.
Action Fund support for While We Are Still Here, for their “Signs of the Times: Harlem Markers” projects in 2020, has attracted caution. The West Harlem Preservation Organization, for one, pointed out that putting up signs about buildings and history can sometimes only “be a Band-Aid” when it comes to unprotected landmarks.
The Craig Harris Group’s warmly received “Harlem on My Mind” musical performance expressed the evening’s theme, extolling Harlem’s specialness. Praising Ethel Waters’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s 1925 song hit, which inspired it, Bradley took exception to the Met Museum’s 1969 exhibition of the same name. “It didn’t include Black art,” she said, echoing the complaint of many Harlem artists at the time.
Meant to portray Harlem’s transition from an intact Black neighborhood, boasting such a concentration of Black bodies, culture, artistry, and entertainment, that people came here from around the globe regardless of race, the show sought to explain how this changed. Seemingly overnight, most who could afford to abandoned or avoided a 1950s–1970s Harlem, seen as a dangerous no man’s land, best left to die.
Using journalism, including articles in the Amsterdam News, curator Aaron Siskin illustrated Harlem’s embattled history with photographs. Most significantly, “‘Harlem On My Mind’ was the first major showing of Van’s work,” James Van Der Zee’s widow, Donna Van Der Zee, was quick to exclaim. As a champion of her husband’s legacy, she was a SHN! honoree last year.
Lana Turner, conferred with SHN!’s A. Philip Randolph-Bayard Rustin Lifetime Achievement Award a year ago, served as this year’s mistress of ceremonies and presented the same award to another Harlem cultural icon: Voza Rivers. A founder in 1964 of the New Heritage Theatre Group, he has served as their executive producer since 1983. Rivers also co-founded and chairs the Harlem Arts Alliance and is co-founder and executive producer of HARLEM WEEK, an annual festival, which has evolved into a month-long celebration, akin to Black History Week.
Like Turner, Rivers’s lifetime achievement consists of being a guardian elder, keeping the flame alive; the flame that is the spirit of Harlem.
Turner and Bradley were full of praises for Harlem African Burial Ground Initiative awardees Rev. Dr. Patricia A. Singletary, the Hon. Melissa Mark-Viverito, Sharon Wilkins, and Melinda Velez. They received SHN!’s Arturo Schomburg Stewardship Award for working to identify, preserve, and commemorate what is perhaps Harlem’s most sacred shrine to the ancestors. Only the late State Senator Bill Perkins, whose pivotal insistence during his public hearing that the MTA search harder for human remains — remains they long insisted did not exist — succeeded, was absent.
Marta Moreno Vega, Ph.D., founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, received the Frederick Douglass Visionary Award. Her organization has given purpose and heightened meaning to one of New York’s most architecturally notable former fire stations, on 125th Street.
In saying goodnight, Turner made sure to announce that with “Dr. David Levering Lewis, who wrote When Harlem was in Vogue, amongst us, we were in the presence of greatness.” Told his 90th birthday was just days away as Lewis smiled shyly, those in attendance cheered and clapped, singing “Happy Birthday.” Once more, by creating a moment in Harlem History, Turner had done what she does so well.
After all the speechmaking, over drinks at Four West Lounge with a small group, Leggs finally had a chance to better answer my query. I decried the trust’s earlier President Richard Moe telling me in the mid-1990s that they couldn’t buy and make Villa Lewaro (Madame Walker’s estate) a house museum, because under his tenure he intended to “move the Trust away from their preoccupation with houses of the rich.” Leggs said he agreed that “uniquely, Villa Lewaro would make an excellent house museum.” Then, he said what I was truly eager to hear: “Of course, whenever given the opportunity, I’ll do all I can to broaden support for Black historic sites. Black history is American history.”
A little over a decade ago, Clement Alexander Price observed: “As America increasingly grows more diverse, unless preservationists learn to make their work seem more important to people of color, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant.” Evidently, this is something Brett Leggs, the National Trust, and Save Harlem Now! are happily taking to heart.
