Father Of Harlem Real Estate

FATHER OF HARLEM REAL ESTATE


February 28, 2008 -- The famed Village of Harlem did not become the black capital of the world overnight. An overextended real-estate market and the ingenuity of Phillip Peyton, Jr. provided its surge.

NEWYork's famed Harlem has come a long way from its beginnings. It was first settled by Dutchman Hendrick de Forest in 1637. It became Nieuw Haarlem (New Harlem) in 1658. Right from the start, the name was synonymous with good living.

Harlem was the scene of a battle during the Revolutionary War. The Battle of Harlem Heights was fought on Sept. 16, 1776, on what is now 125th Street.
During the early 1800s, Harlem was occupied by wealthy farm owners, but by the late 1800s, the area began to decline. Most of Harlem's early residents were Jewish. Blacks began arriving around 1880, living in the Negro tenements. But a real-estate boom was under way by the turn of the century, with elegant apartments intended for well-to-do whites. Harlem was one of the most expensive places to live in New York City. Average rents downtown were between $10 and $18 dollars a month. Harlem rents started at $80.

Most blacks in Manhattan lived in the rundown San Juan Hill area near what is today Lincoln Square. Blacks migrated to Harlem in droves in the early 1900s, but were not welcomed by landlords outside of the tenements. But what goes up eventually comes down, and Harlem's real-estate bubble burst, leaving landlords with few tenants or buyers. Enter Phillip Peyton, Jr.
Born in Westfield, Mass., on Feb. 17, 1876, Peyton was a barber by trade, but also worked as a handyman and custodian. Peyton eventually became a real-estate agent, managing the colored tenements.

"My first opportunity came as a result of a dispute between two landlords onWest 134th Street. To 'get even,' one of them turned his house over to me to be filled with colored tenants," Peyton said.
He opened his Afro-American Realty Co. at 67W. 134th St., and began filling the empty buildings with black tenants. Two years later, he began buying his own buildings.

Peyton still faced opposition from white real-estate agents who did not want blacks in their buildings. So began a game of one-upmanship.
Peyton sold three buildings on 135th Street to the white-owned Hudson Realty Co., which, in turn, evicted the black tenants and filled the buildings with whites. Peyton reciprocated by buying two adjacent buildings and evicting the white tenants and filling it with blacks. Whites were now leaving Harlem and Hudson Realty sold the buildings back to Peyton and took a loss. Peyton's reputation was established, and his company grew to be worth more than $1 million. And he was not yet 30 years old.

Eventually, Peyton became as overzealous with his purchases as his white counterparts had been, and he soon found himself stuck with empty buildings and angry stockholders. His enterprise crashed with the 1907-08 recession.

But the wheels were in motion, and there was no stopping the migration of blacks to Harlem. By 1915, more than 50,000 African-Americans lived there, including many of the great artists, musicians and writers who would spur the storied Harlem Renaissance.

Peyton did not live to see his dream of a black Harlem fully realized. He died in 1917, at age 41. But there is no doubt that his efforts in opening Harlem's doors to blacks led to Harlem becoming the Black Capital of the World.