Historic Harlem’s queerest ‘landmark,’ 1890 Seventh Avenue, is unprotected

You’d be shocked at what went on in such places, but I am not referring to the Mount Morris Park Bathhouse, nor any particular church, brothel, or movie theater balcony.

No, I’m talking about a building that went cooperative around 1929 and was a rental again by 1940. Moreover, I’m focusing on one apartment, 5C, where, irrespective of gender, whether young or old, Black or white, everyone seems to have been Queer.

Completed in 1913, the brick and terra cotta Strathmore Apartments, at 1890 Seventh Avenue, were designed by architects Gronenberg & Leuchtag in a progressive modernistic idiom.

Here, where no African Americans lived before the late 1920s, by 1932, every tenant, except for one, was Black. Nonetheless, over the next quarter century, thanks to the multi-generational mixed-race household at 5C, diversity flourished.

What’s the big deal about diversity? “Before the Harlem Renaissance,” said Grafton Trew, Sugar Hill socialite, “before the 1920s, people were strictly segregated socially, that’s what! If you were Black and attended a party where someone white was present, unless you’d been warned ahead, you’d be pretty pissed. Unless you’d been very well brought up, the same would be true if someone odiously gay was in attendance,” he laughed.

“It was at a Greenwich Village party of Muriel Draper’s,” recalled gay dance impresario Lincoln Kirstein, discussing his meeting a gifted and beautiful Black dancer in the late 1920s, “that I realized I had never before ever had a personal or friendly conversation with a colored person…”

It had taken the upheaval of the First World War, the enactment of Prohibition, and the emergence of jazz as a worldwide indicator that jazz fans were cool, to make Black and white, straight and gay Americans first consider becoming friends openly. “Such boldly

unconventional action marked one as a progressive person, at least with other enlightened folks,” said Isabel Washington Powell, a dancer, showgirl, actress, and first wife of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Until finally, with whites racing up to Harlem in order, local pastors preached, “to give their morals a vacation!” and the most sophisticated Blacks attending all the best Greenwich Village soirees, that great frontier was crossed.

“I was the envy of all downtown,” architect Philip Johnson said of his two-year liaison with smart song-stylist Jimmie Daniels. It happened in 1933. They had met at a Harlem nightclub, the Hotcha, where Jimmie was the star.

Their rendezvous occurred most often in a large Harlem apartment, occupied by a Black and white lesbian couple and a husband. They met under circumstances indicative of a spate of exciting situations prevailing in Harlem then. As much as Harlem was “The Black Mecca,” said Mrs. Powell, the gap between Black and white wealth was so great,

that even before the Great Depression, most people had roomers and, afterward, very few indeed lived without them. “Sometimes, your roommates had roommates!”

Number 5C was owned by distinguished actress Edna Lewis Thomas, immortalized by her interpretation of Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles’ stage debut in 1934, “Voodoo Macbeth.” Born in 1884 or 1885 in Lawrenceville, Virginia. Her mother was a 13-year-old nanny who had been raped by someone associated with her white employers.

Harlem’s leading stage actress was reared in genteel poverty in Boston. With gray eyes and light brown hair, “rape-colored skin” and “near-white beauty,” admired, envied, and scorned, until finding her milieu in Harlem and lower Manhattan, she had a difficult time gaining acceptance. She seems to have arrived in New York in advance of Madam C.J. Walker’s move here in 1916. First married at 17, by then she was already widowed and remarried. Her second husband, Lloyd Thomas, worked as the Black hair care product entrepreneur’s beauty salon manager. Edna Thomas was employed as Madame Walker’s social secretary. This was how they met. Unlike most men she encountered, this new bisexual suitor was cool and collected. As a contrast to hyper-masculine

harassment she abhorred, she found Lloyd Thomas’ reticence delightful. He later managed the Dark Tower catering hall-arts club established in the living quarters above the Walkers’ 136th Street beauty parlor. In time, he would operate Club Ebony, The Hotcha, and a couple of restaurants; occasionally representing performers also fell under his purview.

By 1918, Edna Thomas had joined the Lafayette Players, the nation’s first professional African American repertory theater company. Next, joining the Alhambra Players, in 1926 Thomas made her Broadway debut in “Lulu Belle.” Her starring turn in “Porgy” included a run in London’s West End.

Michael Henry Adams photos

But it was not in London, but in Harlem, where these two married lovers met.

Lloyd Thomas’ wife’s white lover, a recovered cocaine addict, was a member of one of England’s most distinguished families and newly married. Olivia Madeline Grace Mary Wyndham had, in fact, only become Mrs. Harold Howland Sherwood Spencer on the eve of being introduced by Lloyd Thomas to his wife at a party hosted by A’Lelia Walker.

Previously thrice married, Spencer made a career of marrying rich women and was also gay. He miscalculated in choosing Olivia Wyndham, a great-great-granddaughter of the last Earl of Lincolnfield, related to the wealthiest aristocrats, but herself poor by New York society standards. She too had blundered, imagining Spencer to be much more

affluent, as well as a trouble-free “beard,” someone who would give her security, as well as respectability.

On meeting Mrs.Thomas, Mrs. Spencer wasted no time in immediately expressing her attraction. Taken aback momentarily, Edna’s reaction was offended and icy. Afterward, calling to apologize, asking if she might come over to say goodbye before returning to England so her family could meet her husband, Olivia had not been rebuffed a second

time. No sooner had Edna related that even her “initial response had not been as indifferent as she’d pretended,” than Olivia had aggressively pounced! Married to a man for the second time, Edna confessed how never before that day had she ever experienced an orgasm. According to the 1950 census, the unusual trio was still in residence.

As for Johnson and Daniels, with space and privacy at a premium, one needed to be especially tactful. Sometimes their lovemaking was overheard by Daniels’ gay roommate, the great novelist Wallace Thurman of “The Blacker the Berry” and “The Infants of the Spring” fame. His stop with the Thomases was after Thurman’s ill-fated six-month marriage to celebrated Communist and writer Dorthy Thompson.

“As a roomer, one did not always feel at liberty to disturb your ‘host’ in their part of the ‘house,’ not even for meals. You were careful not to spend too much time in the bathroom either. Sometimes there was nowhere else to go when your roommate, who you shared a bed with, ‘entertained.’ Sometimes,” Daniels told Trew, who told me, “Wally, he’d just quietly hide under the bed and try to sleep.”

America’s most acclaimed modernist architect, Johnson termed his new lover, “the first Mrs. Johnson.” Compared to Bobby Short, Daniels was a fashionable cabaret singer with his own nightclub nearby at 114 West 116th Street, “Gradually,” Johnson told me, “we drifted apart,” maintaining both, how when they parted, “I was sadder than I’d thought I might be,” and that the passionate youth had, “probably left me for someone who was better in bed…”

Johnson’s inability to protect his Black boyfriend from the indignity of fancy downtown restaurants failing to provide service on account Jimmie’s color, and his admitted failure to consult, consider, or always include him at parties and on trips, seems a more logical

reason for their breakup. Jimmie next hooked up with Kenneth McPherson, a Scottish poet married to a rich English lesbian.

Among Daniel’s best friends was hat check girl-turned Broadway star Blanche Dunn. Born broke but beautiful, leaving Jamaica and hardship behind by the time she was 14, Harlem’s it girl, who drove men crazy, at least for a year or so, seems to have been “gay for pay.” Starting in 1940, competing with Marlene Dietrich, for a year she was the live-in girlfriend of Marion Barbara “Joe” Carstairs, a butch British lesbian. A Standard Oil heiress, Miss Carstairs had tattooed arms and wore well-tailored male attire. Given a Steiff doll by her girlfriend, Ruth Baldwin, naming it Lord Tod Wadley, all her life she habitually carried him about as a personal talisman. A champion speedboat racer,

Carstairs’ expansive retreat occupied her own Bahamian island, Whale Cay. A hospitable hostess, she was visited by celebrities who included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Mabel Mercer, and Dietrich. An odd couple’s love affair, fraught in the best of times, this tempestuous relationship was bound to end — and rather pleasantly, it’s

said, with the 1950’s finding Dunn living at continental resorts and in Paris, ending up married to an Italian aristocrat, at home on the isle of Capri.

How do we know all this personal stuff about some Harlem queers, you ask? Remember Reed Peggram’s good girlfriend, pioneering lesbian sexologist Jan Gay (nee Helen Reitman)? Impressed by studies by other gay sex researchers such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, she conducted interviews for an investigation called Sex Variants (1938). Her straight collaborators had nutty ideas about determining sexuality by measuring and comparing genitalia. Believing that love is love, Gay also felt certain that sex is sex too. Using pseudonyms, her interviews, which gained Wyndham’s and Thomas’ sex histories among dozens of others, show just that.