It's been said that one cannot be either too rich or too thin. Petite, prosperous and supremely stylish, my friend Chiu-Ti Jansen, Publisher of YUE Magazine, certainly seems to subscribe to this adage. For she is elegantly as imperially slender as a reed and wears such perfect, beautifully made and accessorized clothes, always, that she gives every appearance of being as rich as Richard Corey!
The divine Ms. Jansen chaneling Sargent's Madame X
So did all her friends last Monday night who gathered as she hosted the magazine’s third anniversary celebration at the Harmonie Club. Designed over a hundred years ago by Stanford White, the venerable association sits serenely aloof on East Sixtieth Street, near Fifth Avenue. It proved to provide the perfect backdrop for the festive black tie gala honoring eight of the most powerful Chinese and Chinese American influencers in the world of philanthropy. This wonderful group included David Henry Hwang, Yue-Sai Kan, Anla Cheng Kingdon, Michelle Kwan, Lang Lang, Richard Lui, Hao Jiang Tian and Shirley Young.
"YUE," is derived from the Chinese rendition of New York. Literally, it means rendezvous and promise. More than a lifestyle magazine, YUE is about building an exciting community around shared ideas and aspirations. "What could be a better way to accomplish this objective than giving back to our communities?" Ms. Jansen remarked: "As we raise a toast to the third anniversary of YUE, we are privileged to honor great leaders in philanthropy and present their accomplishments as a meaningful way to understand that generosity is a time-honored tradition in the Chinese cultural makeup."
In addition to the worthy honorees and their guests, the fun party brought together Chinese and New York elite youth for crispy crab cakes, spring rolls and other delectable hors d'oeuvres accompanied by quite good wine and Royal Salute Scotch whiskey generously provided by Pernod Richard. Fittingly, Royal Salute's brand ambassador, Peter Ly, was on hand to be thanked and also acted as a presenter. Vertu, the presenting sponsor, offered an array of mobile devices featuring unique sound and visual experiences which showcased some of the honorees’ charitable achievements. The attending honorees were bestowed with finely engraved sparkling crystal Baccarat Louxor Obelisks that I coveted. Beijing Council, the associate sponsor, provided additional support for the event.
Notable guests at the gala, in addition to the honorees and senior executives of YUE luxury advertisers, included: Mr. and Mrs. Chen Guoqing, the co-founder of the HNA Group and Hainan Airlines, Datuk Zang Toi the brilliant fashion designer, who wore a glorious orchid,
Geoffrey Bradfield one of Architecture Digest top 100 interior designers, and RenéBelcer a Law & Order producer and Ms. Carolyn Hsu Belcer, among others, who happily and delightfully, included the darling Harlem developeer Diane Eamtrakul, and me! How lucky!
Honoree Lang Lang was a piano prodigy who performed at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. His Lang Lang Foundation promoters classical music education
Honoree Shirley Young is President of Shirley Young Associates; Chair of Lang Lang International Music Foundation; former VP at General Motors Corp, former member of the Business Advisory Council for the US State Department and the Agency for International Development; contributor to New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera
Mrs. Young dazzeled in a spectacular necklace of jadite and pearls
Elegant honoree Yue-Sai Kan, who shimmered in silver, is an Emmy-winning television producer and bestselling author whose programs Looking East and One World introduced the East and West to each other; Chairman of the China Beauty Fund, she advocates for the rights for women and children
The most extraordinary gown among so many exquisite dresses, was inspired by the couture of Worth from a century ago, exhibiting brocaded wisteria
Hao Jiang Tian, seen with his wife, Martha Liao and Harlem's Diane Eamtrakul, is an operatic bass who has sung with the Metropolitan Opera since 1991. He feels strongly about investing in young talent, as a supporter of the Asian Performing Arts Council, and I SING BEIJING, which fosters a Chinese-American exchange
More beguiling in conception? Taking his lead from housing peojects blocks away, David Adjaye referennces structures that tower outside of the historic Sugar Hill neighborhood, but which are not, and never have been, a part of it
What makes one so denounce David Adjaye's new "Sugar Hill Apartments"? Unmistakably the Anglo-African-rock-star-architect has created a stand-out structure, taller and larger than any of its neighbors. Cleverly, it's articulated by seemingly random square and rectangular windows, which imbue what might have been an otherwise utterly ponderous mass, with considerable redemptive vitality.
The new Sugar Hill housing development, designed by the architect David Adjaye, at 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue
A white friend of mine who moved uptown, has in the vicinity, the most marvelous Victorian house. Her tenants, in a ground floor and cellar duplex apartment, pay a rent for their loft-like unit, that's generous enough to cover my friend's taxes, utilities and mortgage. Yet she objects to all new affordable housing. She contends that there's enough already, that Harlem is saturated with poor residents perpetuating a cycle of failure and despair. Vainly, I have attempted to convince her otherwise, to explain how the displacement of ten families and 30 people her house alone, as a former rooming house, represents, was a great disservice to long-term former Harlemites. 'The security of decent housing can help to stabilize and uplift poor people!' I tell her. I have also noted the arrival of $3,000.00-per-month studio apartments for rent and $1-million-plus penthouses condominiums in Harlem. 'So, as long as people as well-off as you, are willing to pay $3-million or more for a row house, the supply of affordable housing will never meet the demand.' I assure her.
She is not persuaded, but she is not me, and happily, she is even an exception. Very few oppose the worthy and elusive goal of housing people at a rate within reach. It's because apart from caring for others, most of us have had a difficult time finding somewhere nice to live for a reasonable outlay.
So, most significantly, in a rapidly gentrifying community, where the demographic is ever increasingly more and more affluent, David Adjaye's new "Sugar Hill Apartments" boast 124 units meant to house low-income and formerly homeless residents. So far, so good! What's not to like?
Robert Wright for The New York Times
Looming 13 stories on the rocky precipice of Coogan’s Bluff, at 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, Adjaye's building is clad in pre-cast gun-metal colored concrete. This material is so dark that it appears black, completely obscuring reliefs of stylized roses, said to relate to historic buildings nearby. Worse, the building looks rather like three gigantic and teetering stairs that might with the slightest breeze, topple away. This is meant to be a nod at the current vogue in architecture for what is billed as a 'playful' and 'provocative' dialogue: between buildings and people. Neo-Baroque, gravity-defying gestures like "Sugar Hill's" dramatically cantilevered overhangs, are intended to impress us as brilliantly unexpected, counter intuitive examples of the designer's daring, as well as his engineer's skill. Instead they strike timid me, as a needlessly nihilist in-joke between people who will, and would never, live in such a place. Offensively, they make me and others afraid and uneasy, merely for the fun of it!
Topping off all these other things, Mr. Adjaye's "Sugar Hill Apartments are disrespectful of the very Sugar Hill Historic District it occupies. It's not a matter of local critics not appreciating modernism, as he contended with slurring defensiveness in a recent New Yorker article. The Tudor Revival tapestry brick and glazed terra cotta commercial garage raised for his building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Completed in the 1920's, it was designed by Springsteen & Goldhammer as an amenity to accommodate area residents with cars as well as Giant's fans attending the Polo Grounds. This was not a building that was meant to call attention to itself. Constructed with all the care and attention to detail exhibited by Sugar Hill apartment houses, it succeeded as contextural architecture that fit in.
Its replacement does the exact opposite. Instead of harmoniously blending in, it is that spoiled child amongst the tolerant elderly, jumping up and down, screaming, "Look at me! Look at me!" It is not a great work. But, depending on the future of design, things could turn out alright: It may well become for St. Nicholas Avenue, what the Guggenheim is to Fifth Avenue, or what the Church of the Crucifixion, to Convent Avenue, an iconoclastic landmark of the future. One gathers that was Mr.Adjaye's egotistical intent. Instead, for now, it is only an overpowering, over-scaled aesthetic affront, utterly unrelated to an otherwise highly intact historic precinct hallowed as an historic district of cohesive architectural distinction and black accomplishment.
Some neighbors say Adjaye's building looks like a prison. An “arty fortress,” was New York Magazine’s phrase.
On October 6, Michael Kimmelman of the Times, by contrast, was full of praise. From the headline, Building Hope and Nurturing Into Housing: Sugar Hill Housing Will Have a School and a Museum, to an effusive close, he championed all the architect maintains he has attempted:
It has been conceived to serve some of the very poorest New Yorkers, who will move into anything but a run-of-the-mill building. Designed by a marquee architect, with no concessions to timid taste, the project aspires to must-see status...measuring its success, now or ever, anything but simple... I like the building’s exterior. Most people I’ve quizzed on the street during a half-dozen visits to the area turn out to like it, too.
The architect is David Adjaye, the gifted British star. Along with getting the commission for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, he has produced expensive private houses with dark, fashionably textured exteriors. “Why is it that this is ‘cool’ for rich people but ‘tough’ for poor people?” he is right to ask, albeit houses and apartment blocks are different in scale.
"NO!!!!" posted Mary Marshall a local resident on Facebook.
It has shortcomings, but "high density housing project" isn't one of them...This design does not fit in with my neighborhood. This neighborhood is not the "poor" neighborhood that the NYT depicts. Yes, poor people live here; but it is also the neighborhood that Caucasians are moving in so fast I can hardly blink. And, it isn't because there are so many vacancies. It's because as apartments become available, landlords raise the rents so high others in the area can't afford them. It's because Columbia University has decided to rent apartments for students. Once that started to happen, landlords simply wouldn't rent to "us JUST folk." Students move in and out as students do. That means those "just" folk in that building who are subject to rent increase, when such increases are approved, will have higher than expected rents and be forced to move. No housing project I know of in NYC has what this one will have or had the millions put into it. No housing project I know had art exhibits going on so that artists from SOHO and international cities could exhibit BEFORE the building was finished. I thought I might like to live there when I first learned of it. As the months passed and I watched its growth, read about it and listened to community objections as well as did my own investigation, I changed my mind. Yes, I'm happy for those who will get an apartment, especially those who have been in shelters and homeless or both. Supposedly a few homeless artist will also live there. We will see. This building does not honor the history of Sugar Hill if that's the ruse under which it was builtThose selected to live there are being selected through lottery. However, in my sleuth style investigation, it appears that even the lottery was selective within the lottery contrary to what several articles written Bout this building indicated. With shelters over flooded and so many people homeless, the lottery should have been just that: a lottery with whomever chosen given the opportunity to say yes or no, whether artist, homeless, in shelter or whatever their circumstances. This site used to be a garage. Whenever there was a Yankee game, you'd better get your car in so that your PAID MONTHLY space wasn't taken. An apartment building may be a better use of the space, as Michael Henry Adams and so many from the community have said and continue to say, it looks like a prison. Even the NYT had to admit one has to get right up on the brick face to see the ROSE pattern. And, I do mean RIGHT UP ON IT. 100 spaces for pre-K is good. Now, did they come from this district alone? Ok, I'll stop I need to get to Harlem more often. I assumed that this was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
In response, Michael Benn, an attorney from downtown and an Adjaye defender wrote:
Quality, functional and affordable housing for those who need it is most important to me. I agree that it should not come at the expense of this neighborhood's cultural/historic integrity. The discussion around aesthetics is obviously important/necessary and should take place, in this case, especially because of the historical significance of the neighborhood. I’m a fan of Adjaye’s work …and don’t necessarily have a problem with a new building having a very different architectural style than its neighbors….. IF IT WORKS. Can be interesting if it engages a conversation between styles that WORKS. Sounds like a lot of locals don’t think it does.
Despite Mr. Kimmel's contention, this seems abundantly true, particularly among Facebook respondents:
"Looks like the sort of thing we'd be taking down, not putting up." said Don Matheson
Tod Roulette asked: Bauhaus--maybe it should be another color? or glass?
While Ms.Rene Gatling observed: They do a lot of this kind of buildings inEurope. Very depressing to see it here.
Onan Delorbe: It looks like the love child of Rikers Island's OBCC, and an aboveground BART Station .
Ellyn Shannon: Yup I thought it was Soviet Union too- before I read. Is the Community Board supporting this?
A.d. Minter, a Communiy Board menber, was the most adamant in his disdain, insisting that Adjaye's new "Sugar Hill Apartments" were but the latest example of the sport of the Illusion of Inclusion of Harlem Residents: This building was to provide a number of units under the NY Affordable Housing Agreement and the 60/40 clause but it also had over 40,000 applications most of which were/are willing to pay TOP DOLLAR to live there. I watched it being built from ground break to completion (took photos) and there were practically NO MINORITIES working on the construction site. When I addressed the issue, the next week the Developers hired a (Black) woman and a young Latino guy to sit doing security and a few day (Black and Latino) laborers holding signs to direct traffic.
If you want to make an issue (which is pretty much after the fact) you need to address your grievance to the following people who signed off on the deal, gave no oversight, no accountability for follow through or construction as well as a hands-off on their continued management of this building:
Charles Rangel
Inez Dicksens**
Robert Jackson**
Bill Perkins
Sharon Johnson-Mitchell : Why doesn't the bastard that design it live there with his family? Wouldn't let's my dog live there, or they can rent it to the exodus of White's coming to HARLEM. OH, THE NEW EUROPEANS.....
Jelena Pasic: I was wondering for a while why is this depresivne thing going Up. i drive by daily while going to NJ to pick up my kids to school. It is just ugly.
J.C. Calderón: You are absolutely right Michael Henry Adams. It once again it reminds us that even with fame and money good architecture is not guaranteed. Far from it.
Jonathan Robinson: This is hideous building is bloodless abstraction made to please Architects with Hollywood egos . Architects want to "F" us in the eye with their version of modernism. I just wish they'd get out of our face
Eliza Simmonds: This is an ugly building. Looks like a prison. Who wants to live in that? Truly sad....
Diane Zoetemelk : Oh Dear..yes this looks like a prison...so let me get this straight,do they envision family happiness living in this..or just house them ...?
Lauren Flanigan : Michael Henry Adams plus someone should look into how long the affordability clause will be in effect. I was a part of a project to buld affordable housing over a church on the upper west side until I learned that the plan was ponly affordable for twenty years and then all the apartments went up to fair market value. It's a little know thing developers do to reap the benefits of HUGE tax breaks and garner public favor unfortunately the "affordable" part usually has an expiration date. Oh yeah - And why do we insist on making lower and middle income people and the homeless live in ugly bunkers? It's super weird.
Indeed the usual plan for Broadway Housing, "Sugar "Hill's" developers, is for units’ income and price restrictions to generally expire after only 15 or 30 years, all the while generating a 10 percent return for the partners. As Broadway Housing's Director Ellen Baxter put it, "permanent affordability is not really accurate. It’s our intention, … but it is legally impossible to write into the documents because that would control the market."
This seems not to overly concern Michael Kimmelman:
Broadway Housing Communities is pushing the envelope, admirably. Mr. Adjaye has squeezed a lot into the building. But subsidized housing always involves trade-offs.
The housing shouldn’t be one of them.
Of course, even convinced that "Sugar Hill " was inappropriate for any historic district, too ungainly and stridently dissimilar to all around it, much as if it were the state of Israel, one was unprepared to oppose it. Greater injustices, a shortage of non-luxury housing and gentrification, would make one heartless to oppose almost any relief.
Neither difficulty, persecution or hardship, always engender empathy. Those who have suffered, yet meet out suffering, like those who profess that their hurt or good works makes them superior, can be insufferable. David Adjaye is unquestionably a darling of the intellectual elite. So to community residents who suggested that his building might be more acceptable in a more sympathetic color, Mr. Adjaye contended that such a compromise of his integrity, would be unconscionable.
Ellen Baxter is a quite different matter. Broadway Housing is a not-for-profit developer with an exceptional record. Yet Broadway Housing Communities' founder and executive director, having driven away her able and restraining African American assistant, is more reckless than ever. Presiding over what has evolved into an all-but-exclusively white-run organization, her suggestion that anything she might do, is both imperative and fair, as she works so hard and does so much, to help the poor, ignorant, down-trodden Coloured folks, has become more arrogantly emphatic than ever.
Indicative of Ms. Baxter's being a victim of "starcatecture', was her emphasis of seeking out "fresh perspectives" by an emerging architect to create an "icon". Such 'branding' she deemed, "Should be celebrated, and the result should be evaluated in the context of the financial and regulatory constraints BHC faced in developing the building."
Wonderfully light-filled, Adjaye's interiors are enlivened by both square and rectangular windows. Unfortunately, his small square casements open only a fraction, inhibiting cross ventilation or escape in case of fire
So lame a rational was why Broadway Housing choose Adjaye Associates, a prestige firm totally inexperienced in multifamily housing, but renowned for cool urban chic, to design its first ground-up project. Just what might such a building contribute, architecturally, to how affordable housing is furthered in Harlem?
As Mr. Benn suggests, the heart of the troubles pitting housing, jobs, a museum and pre-school against Harlem's heritage, are politicians. Most view culture as expendable while people who lived here making an abandoned neighborhood viable, vanish. It comes as no surprise then to learn that while three quarters of Greenwich Village is protected by landmarking and on the upper-West side half of the buildings are official landmarks, in Harlem, only five percent are protected.
It was hardly a mistake when this arresting photograph was selected for the cover of Harlem Lost and Found all those years ago. Paul Rocheleau's image depicts the very heart of Sugar Hill, where aristocracy have always lived. From far below this lofty elevation, whether Irish immigrants, or African American participants in the 'Great Migration', many have gazed upward with wistful admiration, imagining that here, in fine houses, life must be sweetly trouble-free. This was supposed to be so, because folks who lived on the hill, had plenty of 'doe, ray, me', the sweetness that makes the world go around.
Constant with narratives of the American Dream, are unlikely luck, unexpected misfortune and outstanding outcomes, Harlem's Sugar Hill has always been a destination of aspiration, if in doubt, just take a listen to Billy Strayhorne's and Duke Ellington's Take the A-Train.
The Westminster, a turreted bastion-like apartment marked the entrance to the fashionable section of St. Nicholas Avenue at West 145th Street. Designed by Theodore E. Thompson and completed in 1893, it was ajoined by a contemporary 5 house row to the north, on St. Niholas Avenue and backed by a group of 10 houses on Edgecombe Avenue. In 1915, on Edgecombe, Judge and Mrs. John P. Cohalan resided at number 706. At 263 lived Mr. and Mrs. Maximillian D. Berlitz of the Berlitz School of Languages fame .
In 1956 all these buildings gave way to the Bowery Savings Bank Apartments, a 13-storey structure designed by York & Sawyer. Long home to song stylist Miss Dinah Washington and home for a short span for singer Sarah Vaghan, according to the New York Times, the Bowery Building was Harlem's first "unsubsidised housing since 1938 with the first new bank here in fotyy-eight years..."
Stamped sheet metal cornices and parapets were originally painted stone-color to be indistinguishable from masonry. Today frequently black or green, they detract from rather than enhance architectural compositions.
The Albertina, from 1896, a drugstore and flats has lost its impressive stamped tin parapet. To the north stands Schwartz & Gross' neo-Georgian Harvard Court built in 1906.
1909: Retained by mason-builder Hugh Reynolds, in 1891, architects Thayer & Robinson designed a row of five houses, numbers 713 to 721 at the southwest corner of 146th Street. Here they devised a prominent corner tower like no other ever built. Buff-colored brick trimmed with agitated courses of red brick, they almost reach an A-B-A-B-A symmetry, until the corner house, which is, as historian Christopher Gray describes it, " a hot-air balloon of masonry."
First adapted into the exclusive Heights Club, by 1897, and converted within two years into the respected Barnard School for Boys by William Livingston Hazen, as Thaddeus Wilkerson's photograph from 1909 shows, number 721 apparently never did have a conical, or any other conventional kind of roof. From about 1920 through 1964 it was occupied by one of the area's first speakeasies, the Silver Dollar Cafe.
Ca. 1885: Koch's New Mount St. Vincents Hotel, originally Dr. Samuel Bradhurst estate called Pinehurst.
Ca, 1887: Rudimentary stables at Koch's New Mount St. Vincents Hotel are indicative of its role as a roadhouse catering to sports who raced their Thoroughbred steeds from Central Park along St. Nicholas Avenue.
West of Pinehurst, around 1842, Mary Elizabeth Bradhurst Field and her husband Hickson Field built this elegant villa where Broadway and 150th Street would one day cross
Ca. 1845: Elizabeth Bradhurst Field and her husband Hickson Field, Esq.
The New York Tennis Club courts behind Theodore Minot Clark's remarkable houses at 727-731 St. Nicholas Avenue.
Built for merchant Nathan Hobart’s occupancy, the impressive four-story northwest corner house was demolished by 1906, to be replaced by 723-727 St. Nicholas Avenue, a six-story Colonial Revival style apartment building, designed by Lorenz F. J. Weiher. Before it was unceremoniously swept away, the grand former 729 St. Nicholas Avenue was not after all ever inhabited by Mr. and Mrs. Hobart their two sons and four daughters. Instead, they lived next door, at 731, while their intended residence, boasting one of only two elevators private Harlem house, became a private club. First it served as the New York Tennis Club, and then as the elegant Heights Club.
Late in the 1890's the astonishing Hobart houses on St. Nicholas Avenue became even more extraordinary with the addition of a sensuously graceful new bronze railed stoop at number 331.
Frederick P. Dinkelberg's houses with iron s-scrolled bracketed parapets at numbers 401-409 West 147th Street.
Paul Franklyn Higgs' Italian Renaissance style for wealthy William Haigh built in 1890 at 412 West 147th Street.
Completed in 1893, architect Arthur Bates Jennings' seven-house row including numbers 718-730 St. Nicholas Avenue combine all of the elaboration and swager he habitualy displayed on the fifty-foot frontages of tycoon's mansions, on these twenty-foot houses built on speculation.
1909: St. Nicholas Avenue and Place looking north from West 148th Street showing Frederick P. Dinkelberg's numbers 757-775 St. Nicholas Avenue from 1896. The round tower at the center of Thaddeus Wilkerson's photograph anounces houses designed by Frank Wennemer, including 819-814 St. Nicholas Avenue and 11-19 St. Nicholas Place. The three houses on the east side of St.Nicholas Avenue are part of Paul Higgs' row comprising numbers 760-766 from 1895. Further north stands John P. Leo's dormered Purling Apartments at 768-770 from 1902 and Henri Fouchaux's Arundel Court at 772-778 from 1905.
Brick and brownstone tenements by W. H. Boylan from 1899, 783-789 were the most humble type of housing provided in this swell neighborhood. Yet 789 is significant as the home of Norman Rockwell and his family, from 1900 through 1902.
The engaged tower and bow window of Clarance True's 842 and 844 St. Nicholas Avenue, from 1894, correspond to the gifted designer's singular group of eight individualy treated speculative houses on St. Nicholas Place. Skillfully they reflect the ensemble to the north, built the same year from designs by John C. Bunre. More conventional, this swelled front brownstone group cost $25,000 each. African American engineer Leroy Frederick Florant, who studied at Howard and Columbia Universities, lived at 848 while working on the Manhattan Project from 1944-1946.
Clarance True's 842 and 844 St. Nicholas Avenue.
Frederick P. Dinkelberg's rythmic row, streching from 148th to 149th Streets, 757-775 St. Nicolas Avenue, unified by robust bowed fronts is subtly differentiated through contrasted materials and finely crafted detailing, including stone carving by Nugent & Doxey. The ten imposing five storey houses were built by local developer William Broadbelt, who like the family of Norman Rockwell was a parishioner of St. Luke'sEpiscopal Church where he led the vestry and Norman sang in the boy choir.
Splendidly detailed with bronze capitaled granite Ionic columns, 400 West 149th Street was home from the late 1920's onward, to Caribbean native and dentist, Dr. Charles Ford. A founder of the United Mutual Life Insurance Co. Ford became a wealthy property owner.
A remarkable entrepreneurial success Rose Morgan, though lesbian, married boxing great Joe Louis. Early in the 1940's she opened Rose Meta's House of Beauty, a pioneering day-spa-beauty salon catering to black women, on three floors of 401 West 148th Street, which was also known as 757 St. Nicholas Avenue. Late in the 1940's it caused a scandal when Miss Morgan was discoverd with singer Marion Bruce here in a situation of compromising intimatey
In 1943, famed stride pianist Charles Luckeyth Roberts, seen above, hat in hand, seated next to Willie 'The Lion' Smith, acquired number 753 St. Nicholas Avenue which had earlier been the Moonlight Bar and Grill. He opperated a nightclub here until 1947, before moving on to the ground floor of 773, which from 1935 to 1940 had served as the Poosenpahtuck Night Club. Robert's "Lucky's Renddezvous" was a gay-friendly club with a stellar clientelle. Clifton Webb, Lena Hornr, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorne and Billie Holliday all came here. One attraction was the waiters, classically trained artist who sang arias and ballads while delivering drinks. Evolving into the Pink Angel and the St. Nicks Pub, Harlem's oldest continuous jazz venue only recently closed.
Looking south at the towered row houses designed by Frank Wennemer, including 819-814 St. Nicholas Avenue and 11-19 St. Nicholas Place and W. H. Boylan's tenements from 1899, including 783 -789 St. Nicholas Avenue Number 789 is significant as the home of Norman Rockwell and his family, from 1900 through 1902.
Neville & Bagge's 828-834 St. Nicholas Avenue, also known as 31-37 St. Nicholas Place, were built in 1896. Written late in life, in his memoir Norman Rockwell recalls his family living here with his coal dealer grand father John William Rockwell from 1902 to 1903.
Number 464 St. Nicholas Avenue extends all the way through the blook to Edgecombe Avenue, incoperating numbers 313-317. Completed in 1901 the St. Nicholas Court Apartments were designed by prolific Henri Fouchaux boasting the areas most flamboyant cornice above an Ionic colonnade. Origionally this sheet metal projection would have been painted to match this stonwork. The entire complex cost $230,000. Durring the 1920's St. Nicholas Court was home to writer Arna Bontemps.
Henri Fouchaux's Arundel Court at 772-778 St. Nicholas Avenue, from 1905, by masking the newly mandated light-court with an arch and recessing fire escapes in subordinate archways, assumes a far more monumental presence than it might have otherwise. Operatic impresario Oscar Hammerstein was an early resident.
Featuring a canted square corner tower, 881-887 St. Nicholas Avenue and 411-425 West 154th Street, were designed as rental houses by James Stroud for retired City Comptroller 'Honest John' Kelly. Completed in 1885, this group with fanciful porches and roof tops was among the most semi-suburban in the area. By 1920, the towered corner house was replaced by a restrained neo-Classical six-storey brick apartment house by Rosario Candella, who was to gain fame devising luxury housing for the rich quite unlike this modest structure.
Community Hospital at 8 St. Nicholas Place.
Built originally as two imposing residences for prosperous merchants, the picturesque Queen Anne style John W. Fink house, on the left, started as number 8. Jacob P. Baiter’s residence next door, on the right, was number 6. Designed by Richard S. Rosenstock, the Fink house was completed in 1885. Despite an abundance of vacant lots still available in 1892 when Baiter commisioned Theodore G. Stein to design his house, it was optomistacally given the form of a conventional townhouse. A yeast manufacturer, Baiter had an elevator, employed eight live-in servants and had patronized the Linspar Decorating Company. In his great novel The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington's anti-hero George A. Minafer puzzles over the quandary that faced many as to the proper way to build in the absence of zoning codes,
"Well, for instance, that house----well, it was built like a townhouse. It was like a housemeant for a street in the city, What kind of a house was that for people of any taste to build out here in the country?"
Minifer's love interest trys to explain how her father and others feel that soon houses being built in the city towards this very allotment, will merge it with the teaming metropolis only further confuse him. On St. Nicholas Place, the two magnate's houses were joined together in 1912, by Dr. Henry Lloyd as a private clinic. By 1927 Dr. Lloyd's Sanitorium was re-established as the interracial Peoples Hospital. Langston Hughes’ mother was a paitent here, as was local photographer Thaddeus Wilkerson, who died at People's Hospital in 1943.
1890: St. Nicholas Place.
The picturesque Queen Anne style John W. Fink house built in 1885 to designs by Richard S. Rosenstock incoperates a terra-cotta griffin on the crest of the roof's jerkin headed gable.
1885: The John W. Fink house from Edgecombe Avenue where stacked slate slabs await being set as sidewalk pavements.
The circus showman famed as James A. Bailey lived here in a magnificent house he built in 1888.
he is said to have chosen what by now was being called Washington Heights because St. Nicholas Avenue was a traditional route for racing and due to the proximity of the newly projected ‘speedway’, a public highway built by taxpayers along the Harlem River, given over as a place where the elite could drag race .
Ca. 1903: The Harlem River Speedway
1909: St. Nicholas Place's double row of vaulting elms.
Ca. 1895: Dr. J. Gardener Smith parked in his sleigh outside 10 St. Nicholas Place.
An example of how strong ties linked Harlem’s German-speaking residents, Nicholas C. and Agnes Benziger’s house at 345 Edgecombe Avenue was devised in 1890-91, by William Schickel. A Swiss native, Mr. Benziger’s family supplied missals, candles, and other ecclesiastical goods for Roman Catholic Churches. All-but astylar externally, replete with stained glass portraits of their children and Swiss-Gothic style furniture, the dining room was also custom designed by Schickel. From around 1914-1940, the Benziger house functioned as the psychiatric ward of Dr. Lloyd's Sanatorium. During the 1940's it was a daycare center attended by Sylvia Waters. The view from St. Nicholas Place illustrates why residents of the Harlem Valley long imagined that people on 'the hill' lived the 'sweet life'.
Like the Disney Castle, integrating iconic elements of the Chateauesque style with aspects of the Romanesque, constructed between 1886-1888, according to plans drawn by architect Samuel Burrage Reed, showman James A. Bailey’s stone mansion occupied five building lots and cost $80,000.
Ca. 1888: Number 10 St. Nicholas Place from West 150th Street.
Ca. 1890: Mrs. James Anthony Bailey on her front porch at 10 St. Nicholas Place.
A stylized sunrise.
In the tower a ship's lantern is suspended from a sunburst
Ca. 1900
2000: Marguerite Marshall and Warren Blake
As a 16-year-old, Marguerite Marshall, who loved the movies, inexplicably, dreamed of helping make people beautiful. Her talented mother danced at the Cotton Club, but she wanted to become a plastic surgeon. Imagine a woman, an African-American woman, becoming a plastic surgeon in the late 1930s!
Marge also used to walk past the extraordinary, 30-room limestone house at 10 St. Nicholas Place, at the corner of 150th Street, built by circus showman James Anthony Bailey. With her Wadleigh High School friends, Nellie and Edith, she'd dream about what it would be like to live there. One day, she impulsively rang the bell and asked the owner, Dr. Franz Koempel, and his wife Bertha, if she could have the right of first refusal if the house was ever sold. Koempel, the third person to own the house, was famous internationally as a pioneering X-ray specialist. A founder of the Steuben Society, he and his wife spent each summer at their villa in Bavaria.
Several years later a ''For Sale'' sign appeared on the Koempel's lawn, and Marge rang the bell again, reminding the owner of her promise. The widowed Bertha Koempel happily conceded that an understanding existed, but she insisted that any acquisition must also include two shingled houses north of hers, which had been acquired years earlier to protect the house's light and air. The asking price was $86,000, just $6,000 more than number 10 had cost to erect in 1888. It was an astonishing amount for most blacks of the period.
Marge, her husband Warren, an early black police officer, and her parents, pooled their resources. ''There was a lot of scraping around and getting it together, but I got the house,'' she later recalled.
Marguerite Marshall Blake lived there from 1951 until 2007, operating a funeral home on the ground floor since 1955.
This was how one of New York's most extraordinary landmarks was saved from total destruction. Subsequently the Blakes were inundated by offers to buy their house, inevitably from whites. Warren felt that these prospective buyers were often motivated, at least in part, by a feeling that their house was "too good, too special for blacks to own."
This magnificent structure, then, is his and Marge's enduring monument. Thanks to them, generations not yet born will be able to enjoy this gift from our past to the future, and the true hero of this story, of course, is the beautiful, kind and ingenious lady, Marguerite Marshall Blake. All of us who knew her were blessed, and, through her foresight, she blesses everyone, forever!
The view from Sugar Hill.
Affordability and insight were what Jie and Martin Spollen brought to the table acquiring number 10. Placing their $1,500,000 bid, they won an ill-treated, but they well realized, salvageable treasure, one unable to be replicated at any cost, but capable with careful planing of restoration. With painstaking devotion they are investing a fortune in time and money to restore what was with the utmost authentic fidelity.
A pair of attached houses, designed to be read as a single imposing villa, number 14 and 16 St. Nicholas Place, built between 1883-83, were designed by William Milne Grinnell
Costing $10,000 each they were erected for developer James Montieth who promptly died. Number 14 was acquired in 1893 by educator and publisher A. Thomas Alexander. For many years number 16 was occupied by spinster Emmeline Reiner, a woman of independent means with property worth $250,000
Starting in 1938, with her husband, educator James Egbert Allen, Dr. Alma Mary Haskins, who was one of only two woman, and the only African-American woman, practicing podiatry in New York City in the mid-twentieth century, lived at number 16. A native of Greenwood, South Carolina, James Allen, who had received degrees from Smith University, City College, and New York University taught in New York City public schools and was a tireless advocate for establishing Black History Week to celebrate African American attainment.
Part of the Koempel estate bought by Marguerite Marshall Blake in 1950, today both houses at 14 and 16 St. Nicholas Place again have a single owner. Much as the deterioration of number 10 helped make it affordable, following a widespread fire at number 14, through the heroic efforts of local historian Lana Turner, longtime resident Francis Redhead was able to affordably purchase 14 and 16 together. It’s no exaggeration to say Mr. Redhead's ongoing restoration efforts have been as extensive and admirable as the Spollen’s.
The Rev. Dr. Maunsell van Rensselaer and Maunsell van Rensselaer , Jr., residences, numbers 22-24 St. Nicholas Place.
Ca. 1895: the Rev. Dr. Maunsell van Rensselaer.
The Rev. Dr. Maunsell van Rensselaer and Maunsell van Rensselaer , Jr., residences, numbers 22-24 St. Nicholas Place. Before their untimely demolition in 1906 , the houses served for six years as a private girls school
Number 401 West 153rd Street was built in the mid 1880's for Frederick Nelson Dubois, principle of a leading wholesale plumbing supplier. The last free-standing private house to survive on the north end of St. Nicholas Place, it was demolished in 1930 to make way for the neo-Gothic style apartment house designed by architect Horace Ginsberg at 66-74 St. Nicholas Place. The notable author, poet, and writer, Langston Hughes would lease a studio apartment hide-away here from 1937 to 1941.
Built in 1894, Clarence True’s houses at 43-57 St. Nicholas Place and 842- 844 St. Nicholas Avenue, are exemplary of the American basement plan, where one enters near the ground level. In place of a straight flight inside to upper floors, a U-shaped stair is placed in the center of the building. This expedient allowed reception rooms, at the front and the back, to extend the full width of the house. Referencing Flemish and Northern European Renaissance sources, with stepped gables, light colored materials and large round corner bays, in plan as well as design these houses are among the most sophisticated ever produced in 19th-century Harlem.
1909: When the photograph immediately above was made Paul Cadmus and his sister Fidelma,who would latter marry her brother’s onetime lover, art impresario and patron Lincoln Kirstein, had escaped a hateful tenement on Amsterdam Avenue at 103 Street, for the comforts of 849 St. Nicholas Avenue. Designed by Janes & Leo, number 849 with 853 had been completed in 1898. Paired windows below pediments at the top storey give the domestic illusion of dormers in a mansard roof.
An important Sugar Hill watering hole, eating place and place of assignation for over 50 years, Troger's Hotel at 92 St. Nicholas Place, was built on land leased from some of the City's wealthiest real estate operators, Robert and Ogden Goelet. The developers, who spent just seventy-five hundred dollars building this resort, were Henry and Frederick Toger, proprietors of Troger's Brothers Liquors on Columbus Avenue. The success of their operation was assured by convenient proximity to both the Polo Grounds' grandstand and the Harlem Speedway. Many a discriminating sportsman who patronized both facilities could often be found taking refreshment here following a game or race. There were even a limited number of private rooms for dinning and sleeping for more intimate meetings.
Continuing under white management a full decade after the environs had become New York's elite African American neighborhood, in the 1930's Troger's became one of two branches of Bowman's Cafe and Grill. Bowman's, in 1958, in turn gave way to the Bankers' Lounge, featuring jazz trios and organ soloist like Gloria Bell or Kenny Burrell's Trio, well into the mid-1960's.
George Martin Huss’ Hooper Memorial Fountain.
A one-time director of the Iron Steamboat Company, John Hooper also served as president of the Colwell Lead Company and the North River Savings Bank, When Hooper died in 1889, he willed the cities of Brooklyn and New York $10,000 to construct two fountains “whereat man and beast can drink.”
Lassoed by young vandals in the 1981, the toppled column was broken in half. Following designation of the 155th Street Viaduct, so responsible for Sugar Hill development in the late 1890's and early 1900's, the bridge and salvaged fountain elements, were carefully restored.
By what accident did the Georgian-revival style Colonial Parkway Apartments at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, familiarly known as ‘409', come to be Sugar Hill’s most sought after address? Designed by the architectural firm Schwartz & Gross, and built for the Candler Holding Co. in 1917, it didn’t open to African-Americans until the late 1920’s. Moderately elegant, home to Giants’ great Miller Huggins, it attracted numerous outstanding black leaders, both because it had previously barred them and because it was the tallest, most elevated building open to blacks. W.E.B Dubois, Walter White, William Stanley Braithwaite, Aaron Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, Jimmie Lunceford, Mercer Ellington, Billie Strayhorne, Jules Bledsoe, Roy Wilkins and journalist Marvel Cook all lived here. It was to Harlem of yesteryear what the Lenox Terrace is today. But in time, as affluent African Americans came to have more options to establish 'suburban Sugar Hills' at places like New Rochelle, Addisleigh Park and Patterson, Sugar Hill declined.
Subject to catastrophic losses in terms of neglect and the careless destruction of an extraordinary built environment, Sugar Hill, slow to be rediscovered and landmarked, ravaged by epidemics of drug abuse and political indifference, endures. Nonetheless, even poised for reinvestment and metamorphosis, terrible, stupid, needless threats persist.
Ellen Baxter, Broadway Housing Communities founder and executive director, calls her new project that destroyed a national landmark, but provides 124 units of affordable housing and a children's museum at 155th Street and Street Nicholas Avenue, "a remarkable development on Sugar Hill," Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the $80.2 million asymmetrical tower designed by British architect David Adjaye offers not only necessary affordable housing but also a, "rich cultural resource that will build on the grand tradition of arts in Sugar Hill."
One cannot possibly argue with either assessment. Certainly in the face of gentrification, more and better affordable housing is needed than ever before. Only, why when presented with some benefit, is Harlem always made to sacrifice some landmark or otherwise to relenquish our cultural legacy? Why is a building so needed that some might happily see it made twice as high, colored black, made to appear unstable and designed in every way to detract from the surrounding city, state and federally designated historic district, rather than imagined in a way that might compliment it? Imposition, dismissal, condescension, and insistence that every choice, be a ‘Sophie’s choice’, or no choice at all, these are all today’s subtler, but no less dire forms of racist, paternalistic, elitism.
It was a handsome subject, photographed for Geoffrey Holder's 1986 book ,"Adam", intimating intimacy, who first suggested to me that the artistic giant might be gay
Geoffrey Lamont Holder, 1930-2014
Circa 1954: Kindred spirits, handsome and highly talented brothers, Geoffrey and Boscoe Holder. Boscoe had been christened Arthur Aldwyn Holder
A figure study painted by Boscoe Holder.
Like John Singer Sargent, Boscoe Holder painted a large number of dynamic male nudes, boasting a deft spontaneity and fluid sensuality. Not exhibited during his lifetime, apparently, they were painted purely for the artist's pleasure.
"I met Boscoe at a party in Port-of-Spain." said a man who encountered Geoffrey Holder's then still charmingly spry older-artist-dancer brother in 1990. "Afterwards, he invited me to his home for drinks, where I met his wife as well. Besides having some of his paintings on display, his house, in an older, mixed-income section of the city, struck me as a treasure trove of memorabilia."
"Boscoe, was pretty openly bisexual. If you met him, you would assume he was gay. We had lunch a few days later, at which he offered to procure for me as a favor whatever I wished in the way of a male Trinidadian...His attitude towards gayness was what I would call “old school”: It was a recreation, a pleasure, but the idea of a committed gay couple seemed an absurdity to him..."
One hardly overlooks the long and productive marriage, the evident enduring love and commitment of Geoffrey Holder and Carmen de Lavallade, the beautiful and gifted dancer and choreographer, or their son Leo Holder. But it is this attitude and taste, for casual, recreational homosexual activity, that I believe Geoffrey Holder shared in common with his older brother and many others
Geoffrey and Carmen Holder
Friday Geoffrey Lamont Holder was laid to rest. Some might imagine that raising the question of his sexuality lacks respect and is immaterial to his greatness. But whatever he was, and all that he was, made him the person we so esteem. To hope to alter any part of his makeup is as futile as attempting to hold back the tide at full moon. Still many people, particularly, of a certain age, contend sexuality is of little consequence today. "Gays march nearly naked on parade!", they say, and "marriage equality is well on its way to become the law of the land."
Perhaps. Two years ago a great pal and his wife of 20 years divorced. Most of his friendships, including our friendship, precluded his revealing the cause of his hurt and loss. But he did confide in his cousin, who revealed what had happened to my friend's mother. She told me.
"I'm not happy," my shocked friend's wife had informed him, out of the blue, apropos of nothing, one night following a delicious dinner. "I want a divorce..." she continued. "But, how long? How long have you felt this way?" my friend pleaded. "For about the past 18 years," his wife replied. "But, that's most of the time we've been together!" my friend answered, starting to weep.
Only once they sold their green shingled house in Berkeley, after my friend moved back to Harlem, did he learn that his ex was a lesbian, who married her girlfriend soon after their breakup.
As for Mr. Holder, whatever he was: Gay, straight, bisexual, larger than life, extraordinary, difficult, a joy; unhappy, he was not!
In his final decade, by which time he was a multi-millionaire, without a trace of irony or even a hint that he recognized how ridiculous his denial might appear to many, my friend Bobby Short, who nearly married, more than once, commented
"I have a living to make! I can't afford to march in the Gay-Pride Parade."
None the less, undoubtedly in part motivated from fear of such changes as much as from malice, on Malcolm X Boulevard, in the heart of Harlem, a church displays an enormous sign as hateful as any message ever offered by the KKK. Surmounted by a lighted cross, it's changed periodically, but routinely denounces President Obama and incites, supposedly Biblical based, violence towards "homos." "Jesus would stone homos..." is one example but, "Obama has released the homo demon on the black man, look out black woman. A white homo may take your man.", is my favorite. Reminiscent of sermons I have listened to exasperated, calling out the "sin" of a "man lying with a man" while giving a pass to far, far more pervasive heterosexual "fornicators", it prompted me, well knowing my community, to think, 'what about white women?'
'DL', down low, undercover same sex activity is, all the same, a constant of black life. With the advent of the internet indeed, all manner of unconventional sexual expression has found an outlet to flourish. Transgendered, Islan Nettles, just 21, was befriended by Paris Wilson on Facebook. Some say they started a relationship, that Wilson had reason to be fully aware of Nettles' status. But it's alleged, that gathered with his friends, across the street from PS A6, a public housing police station on Frederick Douglas Boulevard near West 147th Street, things were different. Confidently, he made a pass at his Facebook friend. Once one of his crew announced Islan was a "faggot", transgendered, Paris Wilson, to save face some say, struck her forcefully. Once, and then again, he continued beating after she had fallen to the ground, leaving Islan unconscious, with one eye swollen shut and her delicate face streaming with rivulets of blood. Rushed to Harlem Hospital, falling into a coma, Islan died the following week.
Initially charged with misdemeanor assault, when another man came forward to say he was the culprit, too drunk to remember what exactly had happened, college bound Wilson was let go. Prosecutors declining thus far, to bring either man before a grand jury, the sordid case remains open.
Islan Nettles, fatally attacked by an embarrassed suitor, August 16, 2013
Thinking of innumerable luminaries over the centuries, Oscar Wilde, Stanford White, Adrian, Carry Grant, Patrick Dennis, Countee Cullen, Lorraine Hasberry, Leonard Bernstein, Audre Lorde, David Hicks, Samuel Delany, Carter Burden, Nick Ashford, John Travolta, and many more, youth today, unencumbered by yesterday's shame and stigma, might ponder, 'Why on earth would someone gay pretend they were not gay, even going to the great lengths of marrying someone straight and having their children?' Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston's singular saga's often give rise to this dogged conundrum. Gore Vidal said it might be due to how once men near 50, troubled thoughts of reproducing oneself become most acute.
Differing doctrines aside, almost everywhere around the globe, gays are despised! Demeaning women and hating gays seems to be something all religions can agree on. However weird or odd or scary Michael Jackson became, irrespective of disfiguring mutilations and seemingly aberrant behavior, by the ruse of maintaining he was straight, Michael continued to be loved. Conversely, the contempt of gays is so potent that questioning if someone regarded as heterosexual, might instead to have been gay, is considered by some a libelous condemnation, an unforgivable slur.
However, question one must, the lives of those suspected of seeking to 'pass' undetected. Believing black is beautiful, and gay is good, there is neither judgement nor denigration intended in this exploration: merely a reclamation by which heroes are acclaimed, and gays are redeemed.
With the gay identity of Langston Hughes and George Washington Carver down-played, a concurrent effort to retroactively "straighten out" august gay icons of longstanding, is gaining intensity.
Langston Hughes
George Washington Carver
Experiences in the military and prison show conclusively, that sexual relations between men do not inherently 'betray' a gay identity. They do however show something more valuable, the humanity of those who are LGBT. We posses no malevolent ability, to either diminish or harm heterosexuals, not to any greater degree than straight women or men at least. This is why same-sex exploits enjoyed by colossal personalities like Josephine Baker, Malcolm X, Chester Himes, Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Pottier are so illuminating. Nowadays though, even the bold James Baldwin's sexuality is often obscured, by those out to manufacture a more palatable type of hero.
The inducement of a family fortune helped to influence many white gays like Carl Van Vechten, Harold Vanderbilt, and Cole Porter to 'settle down'.
But apart from ambiguous beauty-products heiress, A'Lelia Walker, who married three times and adopted a teen-age daughter, but lived longest with a paid female companion in a one-bedroom apartment, such considerations seldom applied to African Americans. In some ways one might explain Harlem poet Countee Cullen's first wedding to Yolande DuBois on Easter Monday in 1928, as the outcome of
the extravagant hopes of his father-in-law and certain other blacks, for the formation of an exemplary dynasty of exalted intellectual accomplishment.
Given her own easy-going personality, as incurious as that of many other young people, it's fairly certain that this was not the objective of his bride. Despite any outsized ambition of William Edward Burkhart DuBois, who edited TheCrisis Magazine of America's foremost civil rights organization, the NAACP, his daughter had merely been interested in romantically 'falling in love' with someone who looked nice, and who was a good dancer.
That was why initially, she'd been more encouraging toward his friend, who would serve as Cullen's best man, Harold Jackman. Widely deemed 'Harlem's handsomest bachelor,' though flattered and amused by Miss DuBois' crush, Jackman was uninterested. This is what made Harlem's 'poet laureate' suddenly so much more appealing.
Until her death in 1917, Cullen had lived with his grandmother, Amanda Porter in Louisville, Kentucky. He then moved with the Reverend Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Asbury Cullen, into the parsonage of Harlem's Salem United Methodist Episcopal Church, and soon adopted their name.
Led to their pews on April 9th by ushers, including Langston Hughes, who almost to a man were exclusively gay --- how the fashionable congregation had whispered, one to the other--- "What do you think, does she know?" Completely discounting the couple's week-end wedding trip, when Cullen embarked days later with his father and handsome Harold for Paris on his Guggenheim fellowship, everyone, including Yolande, had thought the worst--- that this was their honeymoon. But they, Harold and Countee, were only friends. Divorced in record time, when he remarried ten years later, in 1940, Countee was more careful to select a more 'suitable' helpmate. Both Ida Mae Robeson Cullen's brother and her first husband were gay, and hence she had to 'know the score.'
"Lithe, handsome, fun and charismatic, sexually, Jimmie was the most responsive lover I ever had! "When aspiring architect Philip Johnson and cabaret song-stylist Jimmie Daniels conducted assignations in the mid-1930's, they occurred most often in a large Harlem apartment, occupied by a black couple and the wife's white lesbian lover. Their apartment in the building at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street was a cooperative unit owned by distinguished actress Edna Thomas,
immortalized by her interpretation of Lady Macbeth in Orson Wells' stage debut in 1934. Lloyd Thomas, her husband, like his wife had started out working for legendary black-beauty-products millionaire, Madame C. J. Walker.
Olivia Wyndham Spencer, Mrs. Thomas' girlfriend, a recovered cocaine addict, was a member of one of England's most distinguished families. Mrs. Howland Spencer's husband made a career of marrying rich women and was also gay. Only he miscalculated in choosing Olivia Wyndham, a great-great-granddaughter of the last Earl of Egremont. Related to Britain's wealthiest aristocrats, she was herself poor, by New York society standards at least. And she too had blundered, imagining Spencer to be much more affluent as well, a trouble-free 'beard,' able to offer both security and propriety.
Jimmie Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmie is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
The life-long lesbian lovers were introduced at one of the phenomenal parties of heiress A'Lelia Walker,
by Edna's husband, Lloyd Thomas. Olivia immediately expressed her pronounced attraction and in un-uncertain terms. Taken aback momentarily, Edna's reaction was an aloof iciness. But, calling to apologize, asking if she might come over to say goodbye, Olivia was not rebuffed a second time. No sooner had Edna related that even her, "initial response had not been as indifferent as I'd pretended," than Olivia had aggressively pounced and ravaged her! Married to a man for the third time, Edna confessed how never before that day had she ever experienced an orgasm.
Married to distinguished black research scientist Elmer S. Imes, who taught at Fisk University, novelist Nella Larsen, was a member of the 'sisterhood' headed by Thomas and Wyndham that centered around intimate weekends parties at Minedo Farm, their country place in Connecticut. Winning the Harmon Foundation's bronze medal in 1929, a few years later, accused of plagiarism, Larson was disgraced and abruptly cut ties to all her former friends including Wyndham, Thomas and the Van Vechtens. Divorced, alone and working as a nurse in obscurity, this writer whose work explored the confused social, sexual and racial boundaries of 1920's Homo-Harlem, died
As for Philip Johnson and Jimmie Daniels, whom the architect later termed "the first Mrs. Johnson", gradually they too drifted apart. Johnson maintained, that when they parted, "I was sadder than I'd thought I might be," and that the passionate youth Jimmie had, "probably left me for someone who was better in bed..."
Johnson's inability to protect his black boyfriend from the indignity of fancy 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. Replete with a very rich and encouraging lesbian wife, the acclaimed poet, 'Brynher' [nee Winifred Ellerman] Daniels was more fortunate in his choice of his next long-term lover, Kenneth Macpherson, the Scottish poet.
After the Harlem Renaissance, wayward artist and writer, Richard Bruce Nugent , photographed in the 1950s with his wife Grace, took the precaution to marry, so someone could take care of him
Born in Grants Town in 1902, Paul Meeres, like many Bahamians came to the U.S. as a farm wotker. Without formal training, he developed a smooth dancing style that put him on the international entertainment stage. Strikingly handsome, nicknamed "The Brown Valentino," he married Thelma Dorsetta, an immigrant from Jamaica, who became his dance partner. Billed as "Meeres & Meeres", the 'the Negro Astairs', they had a son and daughter, but divorced in 1930. In the 1940's he opened Chez Paul Meeres, a combined theatre and nightclub in Nassau. Beautiful Paul Meeres, Jr., who also became an entertainer, was a gay as his father
In black America, in 1955, nothing was official until it was announced in "Jet Magazine". Attitudes have also changed since then. Today few patrons could be characterized as "ofay" without incident
"I've been happily married, to Carmen, for a thousand years. We have a son. What do you mean by asking me, if I, am gay?", replied Geoffrey Lamont Holder the first time I asked him directly. Earlier queries had been more oblique, more circumspect: 'There is a nude photograph of you in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale, by Carl Van Vechten.' "You must mean my brother, Bosco?", he'd said. 'No, it's you...I'm amazed at how many people involved in Harlem's artistic past were gay!'
What a pity that Geoffrey Holder's completely nude photographs at Yale are no longer available on-line
"What? How do you make the connection between a photograph, and being gay? ...In earlier times, people did not have the hang-ups they do today. People were artists. One appreciated the beauty of bodies. It had nothing to do with who was gay. If you appreciated a fine body, you ask your friend to photograph, or to paint them. A man, or a woman, it was about beauty, it wasn't necessarily about sex. Everything is not always about sex... "
Just beginning research for a book entitled Homo Harlem: A Chronicle of Lesbian and Gay Life in the African American Cultural Capital, 1915-1995, either as a participant, or as a talisman-like role model, I felt confident that Geoffrey Holder had a place in my story. For, brandishing bravura and poise, the un-Cola Man of my youth appearing on TV to sell Seven-Up soda, had shown an entire generation of questioning boys another way to fabulously be a man.
Until I was 24 and came out to myself, I felt sure I'd marry some beautiful girl. My furtive, fumbling, fugitive and few searches for sexual fulfillment were primarily with young women. Even latter, once I knew the score, friends advised, "why yes you're gay, but you'd make such a wonderful father. You're kind and have so much to offer a woman. There are many who would be understanding, you should get married. It will help to protect you"
For the longest time such advice was widely taken as gospel. The person with whom most gays and lesbians wished to establish a marital alliance in the past, invariably was someone of the opposite sex able to offer plausible deni-ability.
Famed as a booster of Harlem and African Americans, Iowa native, critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten, was emphatically gay.
Yet, he married twice with deliberation. His marriage to his first wife, a long-time friend from home, lasted only a few years, while marriage to the petite actress Fania Marinoff endured for a lifetime, from 1914 until Van Vechten died in 1964.
Affairs, fights, and copious drinking, like many involved in old-style 'gay marriages', the Van Vechtens were, in their way, a deeply dependent and devoted couple.
1955
As they preferred cats to infants, the hook for them, seems never to have involved any hopes of offspring. Instead, it was how the 'respectability' of matrimony made inheriting a million-dollar-plus trust fund more secure. These riches seem to have helped sustain their attraction.
None of Holder's depictions of abstracted naked, men that I've come across, are more than passively erotic
1986: A tappering torsoe, photographed by Holder for "Adam"
Mysterious and exotic naratives, none of Van Vechten's nude and semi-nude portrayals of Holder were as revealing or as blatantly salacious as the images he made to titillate and trade with gay friends. Nor are any of Holder's depictions of naked men that I've come across, more than passively erotic.
Fania Marinoff, Carl Van Vechten's long-suffering but devoted actress-wife
Circa 1940: Hugh Laing cavorts with Allen Juante Meadows
As much as Carl Van Vechten loved to make photographs of the famous and promising, Negros and nude portraits and figure studies were his speciality
There never was a more emphatic denial expressed to me as to his sexuality by Geoffrey Holder. Yet, what actually do artistic sensitivity or flamboyant dandism prove alone? Were it not for the casually tossed off comments of certain friends and acquaintances, people who were Holder's contemporaries, other artistic types who knew him or people who did, I might have abandoned my quest. Alvin Ailey, Henry Van Dyke, Freddie Hamilton, Bobby Short, Walter Nicks, Grafton Trew, Marvin Smith; all had their tales to relate. It was important for me to learn at first, not to probe too much, attempting to discover history that validated gays. Lest my wary informants retreat, it was essential to learn restraint and discretion. For these were men who spent a lifetime strategically hiding, or at least compartmentalizing, their true identities behind a public persona. Resolute not to "hurt" anyone with outing, even when dead, finding my interest appealing and suspect at the same time, to "protect a friend', they were easily liable to amend or even to retract a revelation in its entirety! If seeking out history, discovering those who have come before one, is generally daunting for African Americans, for gay people of color, the task is more perilously elusive still.
Although their mother was from Martinique, a French colony, prodigious brothers Boscoe and Geoffrey Holder were born into a middle-class Trinidadian family. That ultimate emblem of Victorian respectability, a piano graced the Holder's parlor. Both Boscoe and Geoffrey, younger than his brother by ten years, played piano and danced. Inasmuch as Boscoe taught himself to paint, as Geoffrey emulated everything Boscoe did, Geoffrey painted too.
To be gay is still taboo in Caribbean counties. Initially Boscoe's inevitable marriage failed to separate the inseparable pair. Inspired by the western elegance espoused by movies, local folk lore, African rhythms, ritual and music also informed the Holder brother's artistic pursuits. At the forefront of a movement that showcased Afrocentric artistic expression, Boscoe, with his wife Sheila and Geoffrey each left home. Going their separate ways they disseminated a sparkling outpouring of joie de vire and theatrical creativity into the warmly welcoming wider world.
Sheila, Mrs. Boscoe Holder, depicted by her husband
One might say that Boscoe Holder's profusion of gay friends from the theatrical sphere, such as Noël Coward and Oliver Messel, was telling. Geoffrey and Carmen, also darlings of the world of theatre and as prominent and stylish fixtures in fashionable society as Amanda and Carter or Wyatt and Gloria, surly had their quotient of gay friends too. Of Messel, the facile designer who created the fairytale-like stage setting for House of Flowers, also known for his fetishistic enthusiasm for Caribbean men, Holder was adamant: "He was a condescending bitch!" More mixed was his regard for fellow dancer Alvin Ailey.
In a way, one might say that Geoffry Holder could afford to be somewhat sanguine and magnanimous towards Ailey because despite his colleague's early and longstanding friendship, since George Washington Carver Junior High School, with Carmen, she had chosen him to marry and make a home and family. Aware of Alvin Ailey's troubled life as a black gay man, his driven pursuit of countless, endless and empty assignations with youth encountered in pinball arcades and "bookstores", one might doubt that he'd ever wished he was in Geoffrey's place, married to Carmen. While it's uncertain that such an alliance would have brought him the calm of mutual reinforcement, the sustenance of shared admiration and love, it's beyond doubt that Alvin too had wished to marry Carmen. Her rejection left him distraught, dejected and suicidal.
De Lavallade was born on March 6, 1931 in Los Angeles, California, to Creole parents from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father, Leo de Lavallade, was a postman and bricklayer. Before her early death Carmen's mother, Grace Grenot de Lavallade, was in ill health. Born between sisters Yvonne and Elaine, it was Carmen's father, and his sister Adele de Lavallade Young, owner of the Hugh Gordon Book Shop, one of the first African American bookstores in LA, who reared her. If Geoffrey had had Boscoe as a model to emulate, immense inspiration was derived by Carmen from her cousin, Janet Collins, who became the first full-time African American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet! Just 14 de Lavallade began ballet training with Melissa Blake, and two years later she won a scholarship to study modern dance with Lester Horton. Joining the Lester Horton Dance Theater de Lavallade became its lead dancer . Besides taking private ballet lessons with Carmelita Maracci, she also studied a variety of dance styles, and took acting lessons with Stella Adler who once lived in the same building where Leo Holder lives on today on Riverside Drive. Carmen won dancing parts in several minor Hollywood movies early in her career. In 1954, Carmen Jones gave her the chance to dance with Alvin on screen and led to their being invited to dance in the Broadway musical House of Flowers by the same choreographer, Herbert Ross. This was how Carmen and Alvin first met fellow cast member Geoffrey Holder.
Determined, tall, talented, persisting, after a four-month courtship Geoffrey Holder wed Carmen de Lavallade, in 1955.
Featured in several exhibitions, Geoffrey Holder is pictured with Museum of the City of New York's Phyllis Magidson, Curator of Costumes and Textiles
Beyond all else, an accomplished couturier, Geoffrey Holder had but one muse, and mostly, one marvelous patron, Carmen!
A good deal more happened after Geoffrey and Carmen married. It's delightfully related in their compelling documentary from 2004, Carmen and Geoffrey.
Their accomplishments have also filled numerous appreciations which quickly followed Geoffrey's passing. Utterly unrelated, it was a piece by a young journalist, Alvin McEwen, called The Erasure of 'Gay' From Black History & the Black Community Must Stop that mostly prompted this blog post. Hidden in the past, gays are also deliberately erased in the present. As most black people know, and all African American gays learn, the most vexing and prevalent form of bigotry at play today, is the passive-aggressive oppression of being dismissed to the point of being ignored completely, as if one did not exist. It's not just the history books, but in the Times Home Section or Style Magazine that this occurs for blacks. Similarly for African Americans who are LGBT, our disappearance is in plain sight. We are everywhere, from church on Sunday, to the football arena on Monday, but officially, we are nowhere. As Mr. McEwen puts it:
As a gay African-American, I've heard the argument about how "you can't compare the gay civil rights movement to the African-American civil rights movement" more times than I care to count. in the black community where LGBT people of color run up against a massive brick wall. There is a pattern of erasure which strips our presence from the majority of black history...
When African-American civic organizations talk about "the state of Black America," we are omitted. We are talked about as examples of how tolerant the black community is becoming...
To some African-American heterosexuals, we are mere sidebars or addenda. We are objects they hurl Biblical scripture at to cover up their own religious shortcomings or soulless reservoirs of salacious gossip holding court in places like beauty parlors...
Morgan Powell, 1973-2014
The crusading activist of Bronx history, culture and landscapes, was found dead in Brooklyn. In a hostile world, confusion and ambivalence about one's identity can prove to be deadly
No matter what, no one ever, nor ever will, ignore a true original, Geoffrey Holder.
Born just after slavery's end, America's first self-made black woman millionaire, Madam C. J. Walker built the finest house inhabited by a 'Negro'. Today it is in jeopardy due to avarice and racism, that dismisses African American history and attainment as unimportant. Symbolic of the depth and breath of America's unrealized offer of possibility, Villa Lewaro is an inspirational monument all patriots must join in preserving and opening to the public as a museum dedicated to faith and determination
Masterful magnate, Madam C. J. Walker, 1867-1919, the hair-care-beauty specialist who built the most spectacular residence ever owned by an African American in 1918: Villa Lewaro! Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building such a showplace. Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the ability and value of African American faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1908
Circa 1910
Circa 1912
1924: Villa Lewaro, Irvington-0n-Hudson, Walker Company employees, sales agents and beauty culturists' convention outing.
"The sprawling mansion, which served as a gathering place for notable leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, may soon be on the market — but it is not legally protected from demolition..." warns Peter Souleo Wright in the September 8, 2014 New York Daily News
Why is it that a man, just as soon as he gets enough money, builds a house much bigger than he needs? I built a house at Akron many times larger than I have the least use for; I have another house at Miami Beach, which is also much larger than I need. I suppose that before I die I shall buy or build other houses which also will be larger than I need. I do not know why I do it – the houses are only a burden.…all my friends who have acquired wealth have big houses…Even so unostentatious a man as Henry Ford has a much bigger house at Dearborn than he really cares about. I wonder why it is …In a few cases, a big house is built just as an advertisement that one is rich; sometimes a big house is built so great entertainments may be given. But in most cases, and especially with men who have earned their own money, the house is just built and when it is done, no one quite knows why it was started…Henry Ford 1926, Men and Rubber; The Story of Business
There are only a few houses ever built in America that hold such significance that they become the very embodiement of the American Dream. Completed in 1918, Villa Lewaro is such a house. Henry Ford may have been preplexed as to why he had built a big dwelling, but Madam Walker experienced no such confusion. Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building a showplace. For her, Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the value of African American ability, faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1789: West Front of Mount Vernon, by Edward Savage.
Distinguishing historical substance from symbolism is imperative. Taught that Washigton was incapable of telling a lie, that he valued liberty above all else, the life of slaves at his vast plantation, with meager rations, communal accomodation and twelve hour workdays, reveals a harsher truth.
For those who are un-knowledgeable, a cursory glance mightn't leave much of a lasting impression. For many examining the surface of things, the constituent elements, making an aesthetic evaluation, their final conclusion might be that they'd seen a conventionally 'nice' mansion, in well-kept, but not extensive grounds. They might determine that the house Sarah Breedlove-McWilliams-Davis-Walker built at Irvington, New York, "Villa Lewaro" was, as nice as it is, hardly exceptional.
But from a better-informed vantage point, the Villa Lewaro, named a National Treasure this year by the National Trust, the grandest house ever built by an African American before 1960, is something else again. Howsoever 'modest' it might appear materially, in relation to grandiose abodes built by whites; placed in context, contrasted with the isolated and unequal conditions characteristic of African American life, it is as magical as the Summer Palace of China's dowager empress, as incomparable as the backdrop of the glittering court of the Sun King at Versailles.
1858: Mount Vernon by Ferdinand Richardt
By repeatedly expanding his father's existing one-and-a-half-storey farmhouse, over several decades, Washington created a structure with 11,028 square feet ! Mount Vernon dwarfed most dwellings in late 18th-century Virginia, which typically comprised one to two rooms, ranging in size from roughly 200 to 1200 square feet.
Following George Washington's death, on the eve of a new century in 1799, his beloved Mount Vernon Plantation passed on to a succession of less capable heirs overwhelmed by its costly upkeep. Martha Washington's awareness had caused her to free slaves, otherwise freed by provision of her husband's will, upon her death.
Increasingly Mount Vernon fell into disrepair after a failed attempt by Washington’s great-great nephew John A. Washington to sell it to the United States or the Virginia Commonwealth in 1853.
This prompted Ann Pamela Cunningham to establish the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which began an unprecedented national campaign to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it as a talisman of American history. This collaborative effort of patriotic and patrician white women from the north and the south alike, formed the nexus of the United State's historic preservation movement.
Every attempt was made to sanitize the memory of our foremost founding father. Acting to transform a bastion of white America's self-entitled wealth-through-oppression, into an icon of liberty, destroying the old slave quarters became the first imperative item of business before Mount Vernon was opened to the public as a shrine.
Building one of the largest houses in Virginia, among the most commodious in the new nation, Washington had hardly sought to outdo the Dukes of Marlborough, whose house was one of the largest and grandiose in England. The Baroque masterpiece boast 175,000 square feet!
As an historian and a preservationist, one learns a good deal about where people stand historically, by looking at where, and how they live. A visit to venerable Addisleigh Park, in Saint Albans, Queens, is a revelation. Billed as the 'suburban Sugar Hill,' in reference to black Harlem's elite address of the 1930's and 1940's, the spic-and-span community offers neat mock-Tudor and Colonial Revival houses surrounded by supremely manicured lawns. Initially met by restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks, after 1945 the enclave rapidly became home to a score of celebrities, from Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, to Jackie Robinson, Count Basie and Joe Louis. A few houses boast double lots. Four or five even had swimming pools and tennis courts. But at best, the biggest houses here had about two-thousand square feet of space for living large.
"Hyde Park", 1895, by McKim, Mead & White
Just as America's founding fathers wasted little time attempting to emulate far richer nobles in England, neither did Madam Walker seek to 'compete' with the splendor of the nearby Frederick William Vanderbilt estate, or the even closer and equally palatial Rockefeller place, at Tarrytown. With fifty rooms comprising 44,000 square feet and two hundred acres, "Hyde Park" was one of the Hudson Valley's most notable showplaces.
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, California, the largest houses of the most celebrated white stars, averaged around ten-thousand square feet. Accessing the extent of success accorded the United State's most acclaimed African Americans, it's useful to keep such observations of dramatic inequality in mind.
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back-woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguished her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Twenty-three years ago, Thursday, August 29, 1991, expertly edited by Yanick Rice Lamb, my article, A Mansion With Room for the Great and Humble, was published in the Home section of the New York Times. "MY great-great-grandmother meant for her four-acre estate to be a showplace for black Americans that would motivate them to realize their own dreams," related A'Lelia Perry Bundles. Then a producer with ABC World News Tonight in Washington, Ms. Bundles was unknown to me. Now retired, as a philanthropist serving on the board of trustees of both Columbia University and the National Archives, my esteemed dear friend is more active and occupied than ever before. Beyond her endeavors to promote age-old Walker family interests, in education at Columbia, or history at the National Archives, it is A'Lelia Bundles veritable crusade to preserve and make known her own legacy, to protect and perpetuate her heritage, that's most commendable.
Lincoln Family log cabin, Sinking Spring Farm, Hodgenville, Kentucky
This is reported to be the place where Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Seven US presidents were born in log cabins, including Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan. Ironically, Whig contender William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, hardly born in a log cabin, nonetheless cynically appropriated this meager type of habitation as a symbol that he was a man of the people. Other candidates followed Harrison's example, making the idea of a log cabin, a background of modest means, a childhood spent overcoming the adversity of hard times, a recurring and classic campaign theme.
A lowly log cabin has been a potent symbol of heroically-humble origins in US literature and politics since the early 19th century.
Renovated and featured in innumerable pieces since 1991, now threatened Villa Lewaro is ever so slowly gaining recognition as a singular monument to the American dream. When my story appeared, even after Stanley Nelson's titanic Walker documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream appeared, this was not so.
Designed by Ventner Woodson Tandy, New York State's second registered black architect after his partner George Washington Foster, the neo-Palladian-style structure was built at Irvington-on-Hudson between 1916 and 1918. Close at hand are other larger historic houses on more ample acreage, that were built for famed whites. Several of these, writer Washington Irving's "Sunnyside", feared robber-baron Jay Gould's "Lyndhurst," and John D. Rockefeller's "Kykuit", are all operated as house museums and opened to the public. 'Why ought not this to be the case at Madam Walker's house?', I mused after my first visit to Villa Lewaro in 1988.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, America's bicentennial anniversary year, Villa Lewaro's then-owners, Ingo and Darlene Appel, greeted me warmly and encouraged my research and advocacy. They had actually started exploring ways to make Madam Walker's house into a museum. As a result they'd engaged with several groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Madam C. J. Walker Committee of Westchester County.
"I think the time is right now," they were told by Steve Pruitt. A government relations adviser, he was speaking on behalf of Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois, who would introduce a bill calling for Federal funds to purchase and safeguard Villa Lewaro. Historian Alex Haley of Roots fame, Oprah Winfrey and many others concurred.
Statesman Frederic Douglass lived in this respectable dwelling with his family from 1878 until his death in 1895. It's hardly a surprise learning that the largest contributor to a fund saving "Cedar Hill", and open it as a museum, an effort analogous to the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, was made by Madam Walker, to the National Association of Colored Women. Today a comparable undertaking is needed to preserve and open Villa Lewaro for public edification
I agreed too with this splendid idea. So I was elated when a new 'Diversity Scholars' fund initiated by the Trust, picked up the tab for my airfare and hotel, enabling me to attend the nation's premiere preservation organization's annual conference at Miami Beach that autumn. This opportunity would give me a chance to ask Richard Moe, the Trust's new director, what he thought about the amorphous and tentative plans to make Madam Walker's house into a museum.
"Cultural Diversity" was the conference's theme. So why had it opened on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement? The seductive local ought to have further given me pause. Why meet at Miami Beach? After local white politicians ignored recently freed Nelson Mandela durring his seven-city tour of America, black civil rights activists instituted a 1,000-day boycott against the local convention and tourism business. African American groups refusing to hold meetings or to book group tours in the region, meant an eventual loss of more than $50 million.
Still I stayed, undeterred, and had my chance to question Mr. Moe. Perfectly pleasant, he answered politely,
"Under my tenure, I intend to lead the trust out of the business of collecting and opening the houses of the rich. We're past that..."
Protests that it might be a fine idea, once the Trust saved and showed at least one rich person's house that had not been built by a white Christian man, were to no avail.
I'm in agreement with the stellar biographer Jean Strouse; no fabricated story can ever match history for drama, the unexpected, or valuable instruction. So I'm still convinced that Richard Moe's response to being cornered and confronted with a proposal that the Trust find some way to acquire Villa Lewaro, was shortsighted, a missed opportunity. For what an inspirational and encouraging tale can be told, examining the house that Madam Walker built.
"Villa Lewaro was", A'Lelia Bundles reiterates, "a symbol of what my great-great-grandmother termed 'the wealth of business possibilities within the race to point to young Negroes what a lone woman can accomplish and to inspire them to do big things.' "
Ms. Bundles's portrait of her ancestor is titled On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. Published by Scribner's in 2001, it quickly became a national bestseller. How superbly A'Lelia Bundles un-spools the saga. How affectingly it resonates, as part primer, part cautionary tale. What is it that makes it so moving and so timeless? This is a question that's answered easily enough. For all the nuanced specificity of Madam Walker's distinctly American life, an incessant journey seeking truth and meaning, bravely facing defeat and boldly tracking down triumph: her story is universal, too.
Adamantly a 'race woman', Madam Walker was hardly deterred by condescension; neither from whites who disdained her very presence, nor from elitist blacks who felt past poverty and deficient education made her unacceptable. In America, wealth seldom hurts. But Madam Walker's assets exceeded wealth alone. This was why Booker T. Washington, who initially tried to thwart her ambitions as a civil rights activist, had ended by becoming her friend.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Especially impressed by two nearly identical country houses near New York, Tandy adopted their design with only slight modifications. At Villa Lewaro, for instance, he used the simpler Ionic order in place of Composite columns with fluted shafts
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut. Mr. Bedford was president of Corn Products Refining Co. and a director of the Standard Oil Co.
Villa Rosa Terrace, S. Z. Puli residence by Brown & Von Beren, 1914, Woodmont, Conneticut
Italian immigrant Sylvester Zefferino Poli a theater magnate associated with William Fox in the Lowe’s-Poli theater chain, started out sculpting wax figures for sensational and historic displays. Named for his wife, their waterfront estate consisted of the main house, and ten cottages deeded to five children
How slightly Vertner Tandy seems to have bothered to differentiate Villa Lewaro from the two nearby sources of inspiration he found illustraited in architectural journals
Circa 1928: Villa Lewaro, the Irvington, New York 20,000 square feet country house of Madam C. J. Walker, from 1918 to 1919. Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire, through the manufacture and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks.
Circa 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
Were one Jewish a century ago, chances are that attempting to move into a neighborhood that was not already substantially Jewish, would meet with resistance. Blacks were more fortunate, in one tiny paticular. For Negros, before the 1940's there was little fear of restrictive deed covenants, that prohibited the sell, or even a future sell, sometimes into perpetuity, to a 'Colored person'. The common supposition was that Negros could not afford to buy property in nice neighborhoods. For all practical purposes, this was all too true.
Unlike most mansions on the Hudson, which sit like castles on the Rhine, Villa Lewaro is best seen from Broadway, the main street of Irvington. A two-storey semicircular portico dominates the street facade.
Circa 1949
In the 1980's the huge trees that first attracted Madam Walker saved the house from a developer who wanted to erect condominiums. A tree ordinance protected the property.
After establishing a foothold in the 'Negro promised land' at Harlem, building a combination town house-beauty college-salon, the Walkes set their sights on a hose in the country. Madam C. J. Walker's bid to live in Irvington-On-Hudson, near Livingstons, Goulds and Rockefellers, was in fact her second try at locating where the action was, in the very midst of the country's most affluent whites. In the New York Times, March 25, 1916, it was announced that Mrs. C. J. Walker, through Samuel A. Singerman, her lawyer, had acquired "Bishop's Court". The price was given as around $40,000. Vertner Tandy filed plans for a house not so different from Villa Lewaro, but missing the graceful semi-elliptical portico. Madame Walker's entre into sacred precincts had commenced. Or had it?
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
2011: Villa Lewaro, the porte cochere. Tandy's triumphal arch-like shelter for protection from the weather when alighting from or entering an automobile, is topped off by a sleeping porch and balcony
Like the would-be buyer, the seller of the "old English design, brick and timber house", set on a plot, 200 X 300 feet, was also black. Most unusual! His house was located at the North East corner of State and North Pine Streets, in an exclusive section of Flushing. Born in Antigua, in 1843, the Right Rev. William B. Derrick had a white Scottish father and a black Caribbean-born mother. According to his Times obituary, in 1913, educated in England, this African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion prelate's jurisdiction included the West Indies, South America and the Islands Beyond the Seas. For this reason the renowned preacher was much involved outside the US, in setting up churches in Panama for blacks working to dig the canal, for instance. Having rushed back from Britain to enlist in the Civil War, becoming sought after as a king-maker, able to reliably rally Negros to vote for Republicans, he was rather busy at home as well. "Bishop's Court" was his reward for a well-lived, sober life. White residents had certainly not welcomed his arrival around 1896. They had felt powerless indeed to prevent it. Over the years his sedate style of living had caused them to thank providence that it had not been worse. They were however, not about to take the same risk to property and propriety twice. All were determined, the Negro, former wash woman, from the west, was not to be admitted to their community. A reprise almost occurred at Irvington. But this time, Tandy did not produce drawing until after the deed was recorded.
Madam Walker's ambitious mansion was designed by Striver's Row resident,Vertner Woodson Tandy. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Tandy studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He finished his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was one of seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black college fraternity. He was also the first black to pass the military commissioning exam, and eventually became a major in the New York National Guard.
Following his partner George W. Foster, Tandy would become New York’s second black registered architect, and the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. Apart from Madam Walker's two houses, among many alterations to existing buildings, he designed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Sadly, among his oeuvre, he only planned about ten additional houses, most of which have been greatly changed or destroyed.
Vertner Tandy died in 1949 at age 64.
Villa Lewaro, which Madame Walker built as a country house, was Tandy's "masterpiece," said Roberta Washington, a Harlem architect, who sits on the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. She discusses his career in depth in her forthcoming history of African American architects who practiced in New York State over the past century. "Yes, his work is derivative. He copied other people. Most designers did and do. But, just look at that novel way he introduced a light well, for the basement kitchen. The big terrace completely obscures the servants' area downstairs, giving them lots of light and air and privacy at the same time. That's good design in my book."
Villa Lewaro's upper terrace conceals the kitchen light well and contains a home gymnasium
Circa 1924: Durring the blaze of a 1920's summer, from Villa Lewaro's palm decked terrace, the Hudson might as well to have flowed into the Mederterainian.
Three terraces step down to the swimming pool. Very few houses had swimming pools as early as Villa Lewaro.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
Set at the center of a hedge-enclosed sunken garden, that swimming pool at the Walker estate originally was lined with black masonry, enabling it to effectively act as a decorative reflecting pool too. Taken in the midst of a festive house party, this photograph shows brightly colored paper lanterns strung down the center of the garden.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
In addition to having a dark interior, the pool boasted a setting resplendent with perennials planted in herbaceous borders in raised beds, retained by bolder walls, that embowered guests with blooms and fragrance
Today the pool's raised borders at Villa Lewaro only have grass
A pergola, with a curving center bay once framing the river view, has been restored. As to the dramatic prospect of shimmering water that the Walkers were so justly proud of , that has long ago vanished behind the dense foliage of untended trees
The Window punched into the side of Villa Lewaro's upper terrace, indicates Madame Walker's gymnasium, while an archway led into the kitchen light well and a service entrance. Surmounted by a colonnaded pergola, the lowest terrace at Villa Lewaro was economically and beautifully constructed from rubble stones excavated on the property. Nearby, Madam Walker's ample garage at the edge of the property, provided extra accomodation for staff outside of the main house's top floor and basment.
The Villa Lewaro garage
2010: Villa Lewaro's great hall-living room
1918: The Living Hall, or living room. Vertner Tandy's trabeated ceiling, as much as Righter & Kolb's custom-designed furniture, combined to give Villa Lewaro an authentic Renaissance atmosphere
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
Even as a 19th century copy, this masterful Mannerist painting, reproducing a grand fresco with its vivid dissonant color harmony, never failed to make an impact on Villa Lewaro visitors
Manufactured by Grand Rapids' Berkey & Gay Furniture Co., the walnut center table seen in Villa Lewaro's living room below, was based on 16th-century originals, like this example owned by great architect Stanford White
Skillfully devised by Tandy to facilitate flexibility when entertaining, the reception rooms grouped on the first floor of Villa Lewaro easily flow one into the next. Alternately offering a relatively open combined envelope, or more compartmentalized spaces, it is the ultimate gala party setting
Entry into Villa Lewaro was carefully calculated to best dramatize festivities held here with a maximum sense of pomp and pageantry. From the very instant one came inside everything was designed to express that here was a realm apart. Leaving the entrance hall, two steps down, access into the Villa Lewaro living room was planned so that the arrival of each new guest, could be clearly observed by those assembled. Tandy was at pains to have a marble staircase, with all the splendor this implies. But aware of his client's oopposition to extravagance, making reductions whever possible, in the entrance hall he cut corners for Madam Walker, by providing a machine-forged metal balustrade for the staircase, as opposed to a more expensive one, hand wrought from iron.
Provided a needlework-covered Louis XIV-style rocking chair, Villa Lewaro's welcoming fireside, was immediately adjacent to a pierced grill of the Estey organ's sounding chamber.
The table lamp has a pierced brass Middle Eastern-style shade, glittering with glass jewels and beaded fring. Lighted, it must have added as much ambiance, with its pattern of colored shadows, as the sonorous music
Flower-form Arts and Crafts andirons graced the living room's Renaissance-style hooded mantelpiece, made of 'cast stone.' On the mantle shelf, Booker T. Washington's bust holds pride-of-place with two vases, formed from World War I German shell canisters, made of copper and silver loving cups, which attested to Madam Walker's generous philanthropy.
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured on the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
The eclectic decor of Villa Lewaro was devised by Frank R. Smith, who apparently was employed by Righter & Kolb, the decorators of the Walker town house. Favorably describing two rooms in the "home of Mrs. C. J. Walker, at Tarrytown, N. Y." they further related that, "Besides outlining the decorative scheme, Mr. Smith also supplied all the furniture, some of which he also designed..."
Villa Lewaro's formal reception rooms, which open into one another along a straight line, form a series of contrasting areas. Neo-Renaissance in style, the great hall-living room and the barrel-vaulted dining room originally had furniture custom-made by Brekey & Gay, the Grand Rapids furniture manufacturers. The Louis XV-style music room still retains an Estey player-pipe organ with speaker ducts, which let music be heard throughout the house.
Villa Lewaro's decorator, Frank R. Smith of Righter & Kolb, had previously appointed Walker's Harlem townhouse. As the rendering above shows, his ideas for decorating Villa Lewaro, sometimes were more lavish than Madame Walker was willing to pay for
Beyond formal entertaing spaces, the living room, dining room, library, music room and solarium, thirty additional rooms included accommodations for eight servants and as many guests, a nursery, billiard room, gymnasium and laundry.
As for so many other builders of pleasure domes, it was all over rather quickly. Madam Walker died in 1919. Her daughter found the role of Lady Bountiful somewhat confining. Villa Lewaro was for her a less stimulating environment than Harlem.
But when duty beckoned, the house was the backdrop for a party: Lady Louis Mountbatten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker beauty-parlor girls and Pullman porters were all welcomed. In the 1920's A'Lelia Walker also let the house be used as a location for the black silent-movie classic "Secret Sorrow."
Courtesy of Half Pudding, Half Sause
1932: In Great Depression ravaged America, many fine houses besides Villa Lewaro, sold for a song
Even prior to A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy's death in 1931, an effort had been made to 'unload' costly-to-maintain Villa Lewaro. Two much-discussed auctions of its contents were staged. In December of 1930, veteran dealer Benjamin Wise, with his force of black salesmen, conducted the first. It lasted three days. "White Buyers Strip Villa", screamed Harlem's Amsterdam News' headline, expressing something of the loss and heartache ordinary blacks felt, learning the news. A'Lelia's ormolu-mounted grand piano, Persian carpets, a French tapestry, a large spinach jade table lamp, beautifully bound sets of books, from a deluxe bible to the multi-volume memoirs of Casanova----all went under the hammer and were knocked down for a paltry $58,500! In light of prices payed to obtain these precious objects, just a little more than a decade earlier, this indeed represented pennies on the dollar. But, all things considered, this was not such a bad result. Things went to hell in America after the debacle of November, 1929. Art and antique collectors once worth hundreds of millions, men like William Randolph Hearst or Clarence McKay, were forced to dispose of their treasures at department stores, for what really amounted to bargain basement prices, as well. In Newport, the ultra exclusive seaside summer resort, things were no better than at Irvington. "Marble House"was the palatial 'cottage' of Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who as Mrs. Willie K. Vanderbilt had been the first social leader to divorce and remarry without sanction. Her 'cottage' is said to have cost $11,000,000.00 at the start of the 1890's! This is unlikely inasmuch as, well before the crash Mrs. Belmont challenged a property tax assessment based on a nearly $700,000.00 valuation. Indignant, she countered that around $400,000.00 was closer to the true value. Naturally, making this claim, she did not include the sumptuous contents of Marble House. Yet when she sold the four acre property in 1932, the house, lock, stock and barrel went for just a little over $100,000.00.
Even so, at Villa Lewaro, sufficient unsold remnants from six china dinner services, several sets of glassware, and other furnishings remained unsold to form the basis of a collection of Walker heirlooms that bring these figures to life, more vividly than anything that one could write.
Once A'Lelia passed away, Villa Lewaro was bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sold it in 1932 for $ 47,000.00 to the Annie E. Poth home for aged members of the Companions of the Forest in America, a fraternal organization. Under their care it remained largely intact for the next 50 years.
The Annie Poth Home was a refuge for the widows and orphans of the Frinds of the Forest Fraternal Society for over fifty years.
1918: The vaulted dining room. Tablets among the ceiling's arabesque include the coupling of what appear to be a pair of same-sex lovers?
Robust cast plaster cornucopia fittingly ornament Villa Lewaro's dining room
An anonymous writer in Good Furniture Magazine, in 1918, praised Villa Lewaro's decor, observing of the dining room: "The arched ceiling is beautifully treated with a design of graceful lines and colors. The walls are without pictures or any ornamentation whatsoever. The furniture is of walnut, designed especially for this particular room. The result is a dinning-room, which unlike other dinning-rooms, is light, unstuffy and beautiful..."
A trumpet-shaped "brilliant cut' glass vase of the type seen on the Villa Lewaro sideboard, in the view above.
Breaking with tradition, this silver flatware once owned by Madam Walker, was engraved with her third husband's initails
Table linen, owned by A'Lelia Walker, 'corectly' bears the monogram, AWR, for A'Lelia Walker Robinson
1904: The East Room at the White House offered inspiration for Villa Lewaro's music room and many other ballrooms, private and public: earning for its designers the new name of "McKim, White & Gold"
Circa1920: The Music Room
Terpsichore
Crimsom silk velvet curtains in Villa Lewaro's music room, were embelished by satin madalions and silk tape articulation. The Queen Ann style davenport was covered in a flowered brocade
After her mother died A'Lelia Walker replaced the music rooms conventional Steinway piano for one with an 'art case' in the Louis XV mode, mounted in ormolu. These gilded ornamental articulations caused her Peck-Hardman & Co. instrument to be named 'the gold piano'. In the 1930 sale it fetched only $450.00
A gilded harp of the type found at Villa Lewaro
Nearly a century after they were installed, cut-glass chandeliers, with rocco ormolu mounts, still sparkle in Villa Lewaro's music room
Circa 1920: Righter & Kolb were so exacting, that in Villa Lewaro's music room even the Victrola phonograph had its cabinet customised. It was painted with pastoral scenes in keeping with the rooms Watteauesque Lunettes and Louis XV sensibility. In 1930 it brought around $46.00
WHAT WAS A NEF?
A nef was an extravagant ship-shaped table ornament centerpiece and container used in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Quite rarely made of glass, usually they were elaborately fashioned from silver, silver-gilt, or gold and often enameled and jewel-encrusted, Nefs were placed in front of the most important person at table as a mark of their status. When not just used for decoration, it might hold salt, spices, napkins, cutlery or even wine. For this reason some nefs had wheels to allow them to be rolled from one end of the table to the other, but most had legs or stood on pedestals.
Posed, poised and privileged alongside a graceful bureau plat, raffinée A’Lelia Walker, gowned in dark lace, looks every bit the pampered heiress. Most extraordinary among the accoutrements lending this scene such élan, is her repousse silver nef, a fantastic object with billowing sails and a large crew of minute hands, each exquisitely differentiated from the next. Most likely a late 19th-century copy of a late 16th-century example made in Augsburg, even these command $20,000.00 and more nowadays
Emblems of Apollo enriched Villa Lewaro's splendid clock
Circa 1930: A'Lelia Walker sits in a Louis XV-style bergere beside a porcelain kater on a porcelain pedestal. Behind her is a Louis XIV-style clock of great presence. Like the clocks above and below, it was made to seem to be a timepiece in a nebulous of clouds amidst which puti play, resting on a terminal plinth, overlain with gilt bronze arabesque and festoons. Instead, it is a tall case or grandfather's clock, the ormolu-mounted center panel, opening to reveal the pendulum and weights.
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Neo-classical statuettes, such as this tinted alabaster nymph, graced each corner of Villa Lewaro's music room
Villa Lewaro's $25,000 Estey Pipe organ
As with many others who gain great riches, the Walkers set great store by quality. The best, the brightest, the biggest, ever held great appeal for them. Universally, the millionaire of 100 years ago esteemed the ultimate status symbol of a hone pipe organ. Largest and most complex of musical instruments, organs traditionally had only been found in churches and royal palaces. Then, in the mid-19th century, organs started to be installed in houses of the well-to-do. Certainly the music was soothing, but so too must have been knowledge that home organs cost as much as, and sometimes more than, an ordinary houses!
The Estey Organ Company, founded in 1852, went on to become the largest manufacturer of organs in the nation, with customers besides Madam Walker, including Henry Ford. Automatic player devices provided those who could afford them with a self-playing organ identified an elite among the elite.
The Greek Slave 1848, Parian ware figutine by England's Minton's Pottery works. Parian, Minton's name for 'statuary porcelain', alludes to the white marble from the Greek isle, Paros.
The Greek Slave is a marble in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Ostensibly it is merely a Grecian maiden, enslaved by Turks. But a cross and locket, amid the drapery, make it clear that she is a Christian, and betrothed.
Powers intention was that one see her suffering, as transcendent, raised above outward degradation. Innate purity and force of character bestow on her an uncompromising virtue that cannot be shamed. Many viewers on the eve of civil war, drew parallels between The Greek Slave and African American slaves in the South, with some abolitionists adopting the work, which was widely reproduced in ceramic reductions like Madame Walker's, as symbol. Compared with "the Virginian Slave", it was the subject of a John Greeleaf Whittier poem, inspiring as well a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lucy Stone, stopping to admire the statue broke into tears. For her it was emblematic of male misogyny. Thereafter, Stone included women's rights issues in her speeches
A bust of Beethoven like the one atop Madam Walker's organ console
Circa 1935
1919: A Villa Lewaro bedroom
It's more usual than not, that children of the rich, raised in stately houses, fail to comply with the hope that they, and their children might always live in their childhood home. As James Maher noted in his poetic treatise on American palace builders, The Twilight of Splendor, a reoccurring motivation for building grand, has been the desire to establish a seat where one's well-established family might prosper and flourish for generations. Like countless others, the Walkers were not able to hold onto Villa Lewaro. Yet Madam Walker still initiated a dynasty, ambitious, socially conscious, bright, black and proud. A'Lelia Bundles part in the ensuing line of succession has been varied; filled with recognition and rewards for a groundbreaking career as a TV journalist, and that's quite wonderful. Work for which she will most be remembered is quite different. One rarely grows rich writing history. But doing what A'Lelia has done and continues to do, with unstinting care and craft, one is granted the consolation of immortality!
Receiving such a warm reception with On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, A'Lelia Bundles is continuing as she started. She is in the final stages of rewriting, polishing her manuscript, well beyond the the superficial degree that others might. She is a perfectionist, like Walker women before her, and so will not be satisfied until her dulcet prose shines forth like a diamond.
Once she has finished, we will learn about all sorts of things long the cause of wonder. Was A'Lelia Walker's first husband, John Robinson, the hotel waiter, really the love of her life? Or, notwithstanding three tries tying the knot, was she also gay, like a score of her best friends, like several of her set who also married persons with a different gender than theirs?
We already know, that due to her industry, networking skills and keen instincts, that much of the success of the Walker Company was due to A'Lelia Walker. But far more awaits us, because once A'Lelia Bundles has completed her task, metaphorically, but still most magically, she will take us by the hand to the much changed world and times of her namesake. Guiding us into our recent history , like Dicken's spirit in A Christmas Carol, with but a touch of her gown, we'll be transported. Revealed will be a world familiar and foreign. Most surprisingly, we'll discover, that like our epoch, like our lives, it was hardly all bad, that many things were quite wonderful in fact. More amazing still, going back in time, communing with her people, our people, proud, prepared, purposeful and black, we will discover in them, those who have gone before us, our own wonderful selves.
Circa 1912: Madam C. J. Walker by Addison Scurlock
Like remarkable historians who have come before, whether Stephen Birmingham, who wrote Certain People, David Levering Lewis, the author of When Harlem was in Vogue, or Gerri Major, who penned Black Society, A'Lelia Bundles is engaged in establishing a legacy too.
2013
Ca. 1913: Incomparable A'Lelia Walker
Circa 1919: A'Lelia Walker by Addison Scurlock
1911: Turban with egret aigrette and turquoise jewel by Paul Poiret
Circa 1911: A'Lelia Walker wearing brocade turban with egret aigrette by Paul Poiret. The innovative Paris couturier, who banished corsets, was a friend who A'Lelia Walker entertained.
That late great trailblazing historian from San Francisco, Eric Garber, wrote of A'Lelia's penchant for parties and gay people:
"Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambiance. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities..."
Much earlier, novelist Marjorie Worthington remembered:
"We went several times that winter to Madame Allelia [sic] Walker's Thursday "at-homes" on a beautiful street in Harlem known as, Sugar Hill...." [Madame Walker's] lavishly furnished house was a gathering place not only for artists and authors and theatrical stars of her own race, but for celebrities from all over the world. Drinks and food were served, and there was always music, generously performed enthusiastically received."
Madam Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. Madam Walker's initial gala, a luncheon party for nearly 100, blacks and whites, was hosted in honor of the Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War in September of 1918. President wilson, after first objecting, at last allowed blacks to fight in the World War, and Mr, Scott is the closest African Americans have to a cabinet officer. Madame Walker's guests lunched out on the terrace before entering the music room for musical entertainment. J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", "The African American National Anthem", eminent organist Melville Charlton and other musicians played and sang. It was a lovely afternoon, but not without purpose. Determined that like official entertaining at the White House, that her social gatherings contributed to political action, Madam Walker used this occasion to implore blacks to set aside differences, and support the war-effort. She also asked that Washington take note of black participation in the defence of democracy and outlaw lynching.
The Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War
As for A'Lelia Walker, she was more easy. Many recollections confirm her generous nature, her delight in enjoyment, and in providing pleasure as well. By all accounts, everyone from chorus girls to artists to socialites to visiting royalty would come at least once to enjoy her engaging hospitality. Whether at the Dark Tower, 80 Edgecombe, or Villa Lewaro, wherever she was, though not named 'Laeticia', A'Lelia was the "joy goddess."
They say that whatever one's race, class, condition or sexuality today, that people are, on the whole, rather impatient. If then you are an intrepid exception, and have made it this far: through over one hundred pages, numerous pictures and 8,176 words or so, besides offering my congratulations, I ought perhaps to summarize of my intent. Originalist ideologues, nostalgic for paternalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy notwithstanding, ever-changing America, has not changed enough. Justice delayed is, justice denied. Long ago, any landmark as significant to white history, as Villa Lewaro is to blacks, would have been made a museum.
Still beckoning and golden, the American Dream must not be allowed to become irrelevant. It is still so rich and real and robust, but for fewer and fewer, seems within reach. As America evolves to grow ever more diverse, opportunity and reward, ought to expand and not retract to enrich just some few at the top.
Madam C. J. Walker, her daughter A'Lelia Walker, both strove towards such an empowering and beneficial end. An outstanding relic of their faith in our country, Villa Lewaro, as much as Mount Vernon or Monticello, is a shrine that deserves to be on public view, as a museum dedicated to determination and the humanitarian impulse to help others.
Madam Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. They included not only eminent blacks like the poet William Stanley Braithwaite and the composer and concert singer Harry T. Burleigh, but Walker beauty-shop operators. One guest, Enrico Caruso, coined the villa's name, using two letters from each name of Madam Walker's only child, A'lelia Walker Robinson.
Lloyd and Edna Thomas
Edna was a great actress. A blunder-some miss-identification confuses her with another Edna Thomas, a white contemporary who sang Negro spirituals, as "the Lady from Louisiana". Although Harlem's Edna Thomas possessed a pleasant voice, she never sang professionally and started out as Madam Walker's social secretary. One of her jobs, according to Jimmie Daniels, was to look up words Walker did not understand reading the newspaper. Regretting having only a scant education, Madam Walker exploited any opportunity to enhance her knowledge.
Lloyd Thomas managed their 136th street beauty salon for the Walkers. In 1929, at a party given by A'Lelia, Lloyd introduced Edna to English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham. For the rest of their lives the women were a devoted couple
A manservant for Mrs. and Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Edward Perry studied painting with Winold Reiss, before moving on to acting and stage management. Esteemed as Harlem's Elsa Maxwell, late in life he had a career as a party consultant
1929: Harold Jackman by Richmond Barthe
Designated the "handsomest man in Harlem," London-born Harold Jackman, who had an unknown white English father and a black West Indian mother, was a high school teacher, model, actor, writer, and patron, with a life-long interest theater and in documenting African American cultural life. Gay in most every way, he nonetheless managed to have a daughter, with a white friend, to whom he left half his estate
Circa 1926: Carl Van Vechten. Music critic-novelist-photographer-party goer-host with the most, VanVechten's most important role was as an impresario who orchestrated the acceptable presentation of Afrcan American culture to, an at first wary, white public. His notorious novel Nigger Heaven, drawing heavily on his Harlem escapades, was viewed as a betrayal by some, but not by A'Lelia Walker, who vainly attempted to induce the affluent writer to buy Villa Lewaro. Twice married, but gay, he wrote "A thing of beauty, is a boy forever..."
1927: Spirited off as a young boy to England by an aristocrat who lived on London's Lilac Sweep, Caska Bonds grew to become a music coach, with attractive protegees of uneven talent. A particular friend of A'Lelia's he gained the lease of her apartment when she died. He lived there with a youth named Embry Bonner
Cocaine-addict and Harlem lover Princess Violette Murat, was born Violette Jacqueline Charlotte Ney d'Elchingen. Writer Zora Neal Husrton called her "Princess Muskrat". Fortunately, as she was a lesbian, her husband, Bonaparte Prince Eugene Louis Michel Joachim Napoleon Murat, pre-deceased her by almost 40 years
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was a once-renowned, but now forgotten baritone, the first 'Joe' in "Showboat" and the first African American artist to gain regular employment on Broadway. None the less, finding legitimate operatic roles scare in the States, he concertized to acclaim and profit in Europe. Here he met his well-to-do Dutch lover, sometime-diplomatic cultural attache, Adriain Frederick Huygens
Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, playwright, matanee and film star became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his operatic-coach-mother Clara Davies, was the teacher of Caska Bonds. Norvello's first big success was as a songwriter was the World War I favorite "Keep the Home Fires Burning"
Geraldyn Hodges Dismond, Harlem's 'Lady Nicotine', a inveterate journalist from Chicago, who in time, ditched her philandering husband, to become Gerri Major of Jet Magazine
The 'Night Hawk', Gerrie's husband, the college football star, World War I hero, Dr. Binga Dismond, a man said to have too much, of everything!
Jimmie Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmie is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
Masterful magnate, Madame C. J. Walker, 1867-1919, the hair-care-beauty specialist who built the most spectacular residence ever owned by an African American in 1917: Villa Lewaro! Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building such a showplace. Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the ability and value of African American faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Why is it that a man, just as soon as he gets enough money, builds a house much bigger than he needs? I built a house at Akron many times larger than I have the least use for; I have another house at Miami Beach, which is also much larger than I need. I suppose that before I die I shall buy or build other houses which also will be larger than I need. I do not know why I do it – the houses are only a burden.…all my friends who have acquired wealth have big houses…Even so unostentatious a man as Henry Ford has a much bigger house at Dearborn than he really cares about. I wonder why it is …In a few cases, a big house is built just as an advertisement that one is rich; sometimes a big house is built so great entertainments may be given. But in most cases, and especially with men who have earned their own money, the house is just built and when it is done, no one quite knows why it was started…Henry Ford 1926, Men and Rubber; The Story of Business
There are only a few houses ever built in America that hold such significance that they become the very embodiement of the American Dream. Completed in 1918, Villa Lewaro is such a house. Henry Ford may have been preplexed as to why he had built a big dwelling, but Madame Walker experienced no such confusion. Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building a showplace. For her, Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the value of African American ability, faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1789: West Front of Mount Vernon, by Edward Savage.
Distinguishing historical substance from symbolism is imperative. Taught that Washigton was incapable of telling a lie, that he valued liberty above all else, the life of slaves at his vast plantation, with meager rations, communal accomodation and twelve hour workdays, reveals a harsher truth.
For those who are un-knowledgeable, a cursory glance mightn't leave much of a lasting impression. For many examining the surface of things, the constituent elements, making an aesthetic evaluation, their final conclusion might be that they'd seen a conventionally 'nice' mansion, in well-kept, but not extensive grounds. They might determine that the house Sara Breedlove McWilliams Walker built at Irvington, New York, "Villa Lewaro", as nice as it is, is hardly exceptional.
But from a better-informed vantage point, the Villa Lewaro, named a National Treasure this year by the National Trust, the grandest house ever built by an African American before 1960, is something else again. Howsoever 'modest' it might appear materially, in relation to grandiose abodes built by whites; placed in context, contrasted with the isolated and unequal conditions characteristic of African American life, it is as magical as the Summer Palace of China's dowager empress, as incomparable as the backdrop of the glittering court of the Sun King at Versailles.
1858: Mount Vernon by Ferdinand Richardt
By repeatedly expanding his father's existing one-and-a-half-storey farmhouse, over several decades, Washington created a structure with 11,028 square feet ! Mount Vernon dwarfed most dwellings in late 18th-century Virginia, which typically comprised one to two rooms, ranging in size from roughly 200 to 1200 square feet.
Following George Washington's death, on the eve of a new century in 1799, his beloved Mount Vernon Plantation passed on to a succession of less capable heirs overwhelmed by its costly upkeep. Martha Washington's awareness had caused her to free slaves, otherwise freed by provision of her husband's will, upon her death.
Increasingly Mount Vernon fell into disrepair after a failed attempt by Washington’s great-great nephew John A. Washington to sell it to the United States or the Virginia Commonwealth in 1853.
This prompted Ann Pamela Cunningham to establish the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which began an unprecedented national campaign to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it as a talisman of American history. This collaborative effort of patriotic and patrician white women from the north and the south alike, formed the nexus of the United State's historic preservation movement.
Every attempt was made to sanitize the memory of our foremost founding father. Acting to transform a bastion of white America's self-entitled wealth-through-oppression, into an icon of liberty, destroying the old slave quarters became the first imperative item of business before Mount Vernon was opened to the public as a shrine.
Building one of the largest houses in Virginia, among the most commodious in the new nation, Washington had hardly sought to outdo the Dukes of Marlborough, whose house was one of the largest and grandiose in England. The Baroque masterpiece boast 175,000 square feet!
As an historian and a preservationist, one learns a good deal about where people stand, by looking at where, and how they live. A visit to historic Addisleigh Park, in Saint Albans, Queens, is a revelation. Billed as the 'suburban Sugar Hill,' in reference to black Harlem's elite address of the 1930's and 1940's, the spic-and-span community offers neat mock-Tudor and Colonial Revival houses surrounded by supremely manicured lawns. Initially met by restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks, after 1945 the enclave rapidly became home to a score of celebrities, from Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, to Jackie Robinson, Count Basie and Joe Louis. A few houses boast double lots. Four or five even had swimming pools and tennis courts. But at best, the biggest houses here had about two-thousand square feet of space for living large.
"Hyde Park", 1895, by McKim, Mead & White
Just as America's founding fathers wasted little time attempting to emulate far richer nobles in England, neither did Madame Walker seek to 'compete' with the splendor of the nearby Frederick William Vanderbilt estate, or the even closer and equally palatial Rockefeller place, at Tarrytown. With fifty rooms comprising 44,000 square feet and two hundred acres, "Hyde Park" was one of the Hudson Valley's most notable showplaces.
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, California, the largest houses of the most celebrated white stars, averaged around ten-thousand square feet. Accessing the extent of success accorded the United State's most acclaimed African Americans, it's useful to keep such observations of dramatic inequality in mind.
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back-woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguished her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Twenty-three years ago, Thursday, August 29, 1991, expertly edited by Yanick Rice Lamb, my article, A Mansion With Room for the Great and Humble, was published in the Home section of the New York Times. "MY great-great-grandmother meant for her four-acre estate to be a showplace for black Americans that would motivate them to realize their own dreams," related A'lelia Perry Bundles. Then a producer with ABC World News Tonight in Washington, Ms. Bundles was unknown to me. Now retired, as a philanthropist serving on the board of trustees of both Columbia University and the National Archives, my esteemed dear friend is more active and occupied than ever before.
Lincoln Family log cabin, Sinking Spring Farm, Hodgenville, Kentucky
This is reported to be the place where Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Seven US presidents were born in log cabins, including Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan. Ironically, Whig contender William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, hardly born in a log cabin, nonetheless cynically appropriated this meager type of habitation as a symbol that he was a man of the people. Other candidates followed Harrison's example, making the idea of a log cabin, a background of modest means, a childhood spent overcoming the adversity of hard times, a recurring and classic campaign theme.
A lowly log cabin has been a potent symbol of heroically-humble origins in US literature and politics since the early 19th century.
Restored and featured in innumerable pieces since 1991, Villa Lewaro is ever so slowly gaining recognition as a singular monument to the American dream. When my story appeared, even after Stanley Nelson's titanic Walker documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream appeared, this was not so.
Designed by Ventner Woodson Tandy, New York State's second registered black architect after his partner George Washinton Foster, the neo-Palladian-style structure was built at Irvington-on-Hudson between 1916 and 1918. Close at hand are other larger historic houses on more ample acreage, that were built for famed whites. Several of these, writer Washington Irving's "Sunnyside", feared robber-baron Jay Gould's "Lyndhurst," and John D. Rockefeller's "Kykuit", are all operated as house museums and opened to the public. 'Why ought not this to be the case at Madame Walker's house?', I mused after my first visit to Villa Lewaro in 1988.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, America's bicentennial anniversary year, Villa Lewaro's then-owners, Ingo and Darlene Appel, greeted me warmly and welcomed my interest. They had actually started exploring ways to make Madame Walker's house into a museum. As a result they'd engaged with several groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Madame C. J. Walker Committee of Westchester County.
"I think the time is right now," they were told by Steve Pruitt. A government relations adviser, he was speaking on behalf of Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois, who would introduce a bill calling for Federal funds to purchase and safeguard Villa Lewaro. Historian Alex Haley of Roots fame, Oprah Winfrey and many others concurred.
Statesman Frederic Douglas lived in this respectable dwelling with his family from 1878 until his death in 1895. It's hardly a surprise learning that the largest contributor to save "Cedar Hill" prior to it being opened to the public, came from Madame Walker
I agreed too with this splendid idea. So I was elated when a new 'Diversity Scholars' fund initiated by the Trust, picked up the tab for my airfare and hotel, enabling me to attend the nation's premiere preservation organization's annual conference at Miami Beach that autumn. This opportunity would give me a chance to ask Richard Moe, the Trust's new director, what he thought about the amorphous and tentative plans to make Madame Walker's house into a museum.
"Cultural Diversity" was the conference's theme. So why had it opened on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement? The seductive local ought to have further given me pause. Why meet at Miami Beach? After local white politicians ignored recently freed Nelson Mandela durring his seven-city tour of America, black civil rights activists instituted a 1,000-day boycott against the local convention and tourism business. African American groups refusing to hold meetings or to book group tours in the region, meant an eventual loss of more than $50 million.
Still I stayed, undeterred, and had my chance to question Mr. Moe. Perfectly pleasant, he answered politely,
"Under my tenure, I intend to lead the trust out of the business of collecting and opening the houses of the rich. We're past that..."
Protests that it might be a fine idea, once the Trust saved and showed at least one rich person's house that had not been built by a white Christian man, were to no avail.
I'm in agreement with the stellar biographer Jean Strouse; no fabricated story can ever match history for drama, the unexpected, or valuable instruction. So I'm still convinced that Richard Moe's response to being cornered and confronted with a proposal that the Trust find some way to acquire Villa Lewaro, was shortsighted, a missed opportunity. For what an inspirational and encouraging tale can be told, examining the house that Madame Walker built.
"Villa Lewaro was", A'Lelia Bundles reiterates, "a symbol of what my great-great-grandmother termed 'the wealth of business possibilities within the race to point to young Negroes what a lone woman can accomplish and to inspire them to do big things.' "
Ms. Bundles's portrait of her ancestor is titled On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker. Published by Scribner's in 2001, it quickly became a national bestseller. How superbly A'Lelia Bundles un-spools the saga. How affectingly it resonates, as part primer, part cautionary tale. What is it that makes it so moving and so timeless? This is a question that's answered easily enough. For all the nuanced specificity of Madame Walker's distinctly American life, an incessant journey seeking truth and meaning, bravely facing defeat and boldly tracking down triumph: her story is universal, too.
Adamantly a 'race woman', Madam Walker was hardly deterred by condescension; neither from whites who disdained her very presence, nor from elitist blacks who felt past poverty and deficient education made her unacceptable. In America, wealth seldom hurts. But Madame Walker's assets exceeded wealth alone. This was why Booker T. Washington, who initially tried to thwart her ambitions as a civil rights activist, had ended by becoming her friend.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Especially impressed by two nearly identical country houses near New York, Tandy adopted their design with only slight modifications. At Villa Lewaro, for instance, he used the simpler Ionic order in place of Composite columns with fluted shafts
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut. Mr. Bedford was president of Corn Products Refining Co. and a director of the Standard Oil Co.
Villa Rosa Terrace, S. Z. Puli residence by Brown & Von Beren, 1914, Woodmont, Conneticut
Italian immigrant Sylvester Zefferino Poli a theater magnate associated with William Fox in the Lowe’s-Poli theater chain, started out sculpting wax figures for sensational and historic displays. Named for his wife, their waterfront estate consisted of the main house, and ten cottages deeded to five children
How slightly Vertner Tandy seems to have bothered to differentiate Villa Lewaro from the two nearby sources of inspiration he found illustraited in architectural journals
Circa 1928: Villa Lewaro, the Irvington, New York 20,000 square feet country house of Madam C. J. Walker, from 1918 to 1919. Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire, through the manufacture and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks.
Circa 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
Were one Jewish a century ago, chances are that attempting to move into a neighborhood that was not already substantially Jewish, would meet with resistance. Blacks were more fortunate, in one tiny paticular. For Negros, there was little fear of restrictive deed covenants, that prohibited the sell, or even a future sell, sometimes into perpetuity, to a 'Colored person'. The common supposition was that Negros could not afford to buy property in nice neighborhoods. For all practical purposes, this was all too true.
Unlike most mansions on the Hudson, which sit like castles on the Rhine, Villa Lewaro is best seen from Broadway, the main street of Irvington. A two-storey semicircular portico dominates the street facade.
Circa 1949
In the 1980's the huge trees that first attracted Mme. Walker saved the house from a developer who wanted to erect condominiums. A tree ordinance protected the property.
The Villa Lewaro mansion Vertner Tandy designed for Madame Walker in exclusive Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, started to be restored in the 1980s by Ingo Appel. In the following decade this comendable undertaking was completed by Harold Doley, shown here with his wife Alma and their son. A native of New Orleans, Mr. Doley was the first black to buy an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
After establishing a foothold in the 'Negro promised land' at Harlem, building a combination town house-beauty college-salon, the Walkes set their sights on a hose in the country. Madame C. J. Walker's bid to live in Irvington-On-Hudson, near Livingstons, Goulds and Rockefellers, was in fact her second try at locating where the action was, in the very midst of the country's most affluent whites. In the New York Times, March 25, 1916, it was announced that Mrs. C. J. Walker, through Samuel A. Singerman, her lawyer, had acquired "Bishop's Court". The price was given as around $40,000. Vertner Tandy filed plans for a house not so different from Villa Lewaro, but missing the graceful semi-elliptical portico. Madame Walker's entre into sacred precincts had commenced. Or had it?
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
2011: Villa Lewaro, the porte cochere. Tandy's triumphal arch-like shelter for protection from the weather when alighting from or entering an automobile, is topped off by a sleeping porch and balcony
Like the would-be buyer, the seller of the "old English design, brick and timber house", set on a plot, 200 X 300 feet, was also black. Most unusual! His house was located at the North East corner of State and North Pine Streets, in an exclusive section of Flushing. Born in Antigua, in 1843, the Right Rev. William B. Derrick had a white Scottish father and a black Caribbean-born mother. According to his Times obituary, in 1913, educated in England, this African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion prelate's jurisdiction included the West Indies, South America and the Islands Beyond the Seas. For this reason the renowned preacher was much involved outside the US, in setting up churches in Panama for blacks working to dig the canal, for instance. Having rushed back from Britain to enlist in the Civil War, becoming sought after as a king-maker, able to reliably rally Negros to vote for Republicans, he was rather busy at home as well. "Bishop's Court" was his reward for a well-lived, sober life. White residents had certainly not welcomed his arrival around 1896. They had felt powerless indeed to prevent it. Over the years his sedate style of living had caused them to thank providence that it had not been worse. They were however, not about to take the same risk to property and propriety twice. All were determined, the Negro, former wash woman, from the west, was not to be admitted to their community. A reprise almost occurred at Irvington. But this time, Tandy did not produce drawing until after the deed was recorded.
Madame Walker's ambitious mansion was designed by Striver's Row resident,Vertner Woodson Tandy. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Tandy studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He finished his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was one of seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black college fraternity. He was also the first black to pass the military commissioning exam, and eventually became a major in the New York National Guard.
Following his partner George W. Foster, Tandy would become New York’s second black registered architect, and the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. Apart from Madame Walker's two houses, among many alterations to existing buildings, he designed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Sadly, among his oeuvre, he only planned about ten additional houses, most of which have been greatly changed or destroyed.
Vertner Tandy died in 1949 at age 64.
Villa Lewaro, which Madame Walker built as a country house, was Tandy's "masterpiece," said Roberta Washington, a Harlem architect, who discusses his career in depth in her forthcoming history of African American architects who practiced in New York State over the past century. "Yes, his work is derivative. He copied other people. Most designers did and do. But, just look at that novel way he introduced a light well, for the basement kitchen. The big terrace completely obscures the servants' area downstairs, giving them lots of light and air and privacy at the same time. That's good design in my book."
Circa 1924: Durring the blaze of a 1920's summer, from Villa Lewaro's palm decked terrace, the Hudson might as well to have flowed into the Mederterainian.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
From Villa Lewaro's garden elevation, where an elevator bulkhead seems to have been added to the roof-line, three terraces step down to the swimming pool. Very few houses had swimming pools as early as Villa Lewaro.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
Set at the center of a hedge-enclosed sunken garden, that swimming pool at the Walker estate originally was lined with black masonry, enabling it to effectively act as a decorative reflecting pool too. Taken in the midst of a festive house party, this photograph shows brightly colored paper lanterns strung down the center of the garden.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
In addition to having a dark interior, the pool boasted a setting resplendent with perennials planted in herbaceous borders in raised beds, retained by bolder walls, that embowered guests with blooms and fragrance
Today the pool's raised borders at Villa Lewaro only have grass
A pergola, with a curving center bay once framing the river view, has been restored. As to the dramatic prospect of shimmering water that the Walkers were so justly proud of , that has long ago vanished behind the dense foliage of untended trees
The Window punched into the side of Villa Lewaro's upper terrace, indicates Madame Walker's gymnasium, while an archway led into the kitchen light well and a service entrance. Surmounted by a colonnaded pergola, the lowest terrace at Villa Lewaro was economically and beautifully constructed from rubble stones excavated on the property. Nearby, Madame Walker's ample garage at the edge of the property, provided extra accomodation for staff outside of the main house's top floor and basment.
Manufactured by Grand Rapids' Berkey & Gay Furniture Co., the center table seen in Villa Lewaro's living room below, was based on 16th-century originals, like this example owned by great architect Stanford White
1918: The Living Hall, or living room. Vertner Tandy's trabeated ceiling, as much as Righter & Kolb's custom-designed furniture, combined to give Villa Lewaro an authentic Renaissance atmosphere
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
Even as a 19th century copy, this masterful Mannerist painting, reproducing a grand fresco with its vivid dissonant color harmony, never failed to make an impact on Villa Lewaro visitors
Skillfully devised by Tandy to facilitate flexibility when entertaining, the reception rooms grouped on the first floor of Villa Lewaro easily flow one into the next. Alternately offering a relatively open combined envelope, or more compartmentalized spaces, it is the ultimate gala party setting
Entry into Villa Lewaro was carefully orchestrated to best dramatize festivities held here with a maximum sense of pomp and pageantry. From the very instant one came inside everything was calculated to express that here was a realm apart. Leaving the entrance hall, two steps down, access into the Villa Lewaro living room was planned so that the arrival of each new guest, could be clearly observed by those assembled. Tandy was at pains to have a marble staircase, with all the splendor this implies. But aware of his client's oopposition to extravagance, making reductions whever possible, he cut corners for Madame Walker, by providing a machine-forged metal balustrade, as opposed to a more expensive one, hand wrought from iron.
Provided a needlework-covered Louis XIV-style rocking chair, Villa Lewaro's welcoming fireside, was immediately adjacent to a pierced grill of the Estey organ's sounding chamber. The table lamp has a pierced brass Middle Eastern-style shade, glittering with glass jewels and beaded fring. Lighted, it must have added as much ambiance, with its pattern of colored shadows, as the sonorous music
Flower-form Arts and Crafts andirons gracing the living room's Renaissance-style hooded mantelpiece, made of 'cast stone.' On the mantle shelf, Booker T. Washington's bust holds pride-of-place with two vases, formed from World War I German shell canisters, made of copper and silver loving cups, which attested to Madame Walker's generous philanthropy.
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured on the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
The eclectic decor of Villa Lewaro was devised by Frank R. Smith, who apearently was employed by Righter & Kolb, the decorators of the Walker town house. The formal reception rooms, which open into one another along a straight line, form a series of contrasting areas. Neo-Renaissance in style, the great hall-living room and the barrel-vaulted dining room originally had furniture custom-made by Brekey & Gay. The Louis XV-style music room still retains an Estey player-pipe organ with speaker ducts, which let music be heard throughout the house.
Villa Lewaro's decorator, Frank R. Smith of Righter & Kolb, had previously appointed Walker's Harlem townhouse. As the rendering above shows, his ideas for decorating Villa Lewaro, sometimes were more lavish than Madame Walker was willing to pay for
Beyond formal entertaing spaces, the living room, dining room, library, music room and solarium, thirty additional rooms included accommodations for eight servants and as many guests, a nursery, billiard room, gymnasium and laundry.
As for so many other builders of pleasure domes, it was all over rather quickly. Madame Walker died in 1919. Her daughter found the role of Lady Bountiful somewhat confining. Villa Lewaro was for her a less stimulating environment than Harlem.
But when duty beckoned, the house was the backdrop for a party: Lady Mountbatten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker beauty-parlor girls and Pullman porters were all welcomed. In the 1920's A'Lelia Walker also let the house be used as a location for the black silent-movie classic "Secret Sorrow."
Even prior to A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy's death in 1931, an effort had been made to 'unload' costly-to-maintain Villa Lewaro. Two much-discussed auctions of its contents were staged. In December of 1930, veteran dealer Benjamin Wise, with his force of black salesmen, conducted the first. It lasted three days. "White Buyers Strip Villa", screamed Harlem's Amsterdam New, newspaper, expressing something of the loss and heartache ordinary blacks felt, learning the news. A'Lelia's ormolu-mounted grand piano, Persian carpets, a French tapestry, a large spinach jade table lamp, beautifully bound sets of books, from a deluxe bible to the multi-volume memoirs of Casanova----all went under the hammer and were knocked down for a paltry $58,500! In light of prices payed to obtain these precious objects, just a little more than a decade earlier, this indeed represented pennies on the dollar. But, all things considered, this was not such a bad result. Things went to hell in America after the debacle of November, 1929. Art and antique collectors once worth hundreds of millions, men like William Randolph Hearst or Clarence McKay, were forced to dispose of their treasures at department stores, for what really amounted to bargain basement prices, as well. In Newport, the ultra exclusive seaside summer resort, things were no better than at Irvington. "Marble House"was the palatial 'cottage' of Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who as Mrs. Willie K. Vanderbilt had been the first social leader to divorce and remarry without sanction. Her 'cottage' is said to have cost $11,000,000.00 at the start of the 1890's! This is unlikely inasmuch as, well before the crash Mrs. Belmont challenged a property tax assessment based on a nearly $700,000.00 valuation. Indignant, she countered that around $400,000.00 was closer to the true value. Naturally, making this claim, she did not include the sumptuous contents of Marble House. Yet when she sold the four acre property in 1932, the house, lock, stock and barrel went for just a little over $100,000.00.
Courtesy of Half Pudding, Half Sause
1932
Even so, at Villa Lewaro, sufficient unsold remnants from six china dinner service, several sets of glassware, and other furnishings remained unsold to form the basis of a collection of Walker heirlooms that bring these figures to life, more vividly than anything that one could write.
Once A'Lelia passed away, Villa Lewaro was bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sold it in 1932 to the Annie E. Poth home for aged members of the Companions of the Forest in America, a fraternal organization. Under their care it remained largely intact for the next 50 years.
The Annie Poth Home was a refuge for the widows and orphans of the Frinds of the Forest Fraternal Society for over fifty years.
1918: The vaulted dining room. Tablets among the ceiling's arabesque include the coupling of what appear to be a pair of same-sex lovers?
Robust cast plaster cornucopia fittingly ornament Villa Lewaro's dining room
A trumpet-shaped "brilliant cut' glass vase of the type seen on the Villa Lewaro sideboard, in the view above.
Breaking with tradition, this silver flatware once owned by Madame Walker, was engraved with her second husband's initails
Table linen, owned by A'Lelia Walker, 'corectly' bears the monogram, AWR, for A'Lelia Walker Robinson
1904: The East Room at the White House offered inspiration for Villa Lewaro's music room and many other ballrooms, private and public: earning for its designers the new name of "McKim, White & Gold"
Circa1920: The Music Room
Terpsichore
After her mother died A'Lelia Walker replaced the music rooms conventional Steinway piano for one with an 'art case' in the Louis XV mode, mounted in ormolu. These gilded ornamental articulations caused her Peck-Hardman & Co. instrument to be named 'the gold piano'. In the 1930 sale it fetched only $450.00
A gilded harp of the type found at Villa Lewaro
Circa 1920: Righter & Kolb were so exacting, that in Villa Lewaro's music room even the Victrola phonograph had its cabinet customised. It was painted with pastoral scenes in keeping with the rooms Watteauesque Lunettes and Louis XV sensibility. In 1930 it brought around $46.00
WHAT WAS A NEF?
A nef was an extravagant ship-shaped table ornament centerpiece and container used in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Quite rarely made of glass, usually they were elaborately fashioned from silver, silver-gilt, or gold and often enameled and jewel-encrusted, Nefs were placed in front of the most important person at table as a mark of their status. When not just used for decoration, it might hold salt, spices, napkins, cutlery or even wine. For this reason some nefs had wheels to allow them to be rolled from one end of the table to the other, but most had legs or stood on pedestals.
Posed, poised and privileged alongside a graceful bureau plat, raffinée A’Lelia Walker, gowned in dark lace, looks every bit the pampered heiress. Most extraordinary among the accoutrements lending this scene such élan, is her repousse silver nef, a fantastic object with billowing sails and a large crew of minute hands, each exquisitely differentiated from the next. Most likely a late 19th-century copy of a late 16th-century example made in Augsburg, even these command $20,000.00 and more nowadays
Circa 1930: A'Lelia Walker sits in a Louis XV-style bergere beside a porcelain kater on a porcelain pedestal. Behind her is a Louis XIV-style clock of great presence. Like the clocks above and below, it was made to seem to be a timepiece in a nebulous of clouds amidst which puti play, resting on a terminal plinth, overlain with gilt bronze arabesque and festoons. Instead, it is a tall case or grandfather's clock, the ormolu-mounted center panel, opening to reveal the pendulum and weights.
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Villa Lewaro's $25,000 Estey Pipe organ
As with many others who gain great riches, the Walkers set great store by quality. The best, the brightest, the biggest, ever held great appeal for them. Universally, the millionaire of 100 years ago esteemed the ultimate status symbol of a hone pipe organ. Largest and most complex of musical instruments, organs traditionally had only been found in churches and royal palaces. Then, in the mid-19th century, organs started to be installed in houses of the well-to-do. Certainly the music was soothing, but so too must have been knowledge that home organs cost as much as, and sometimes more than, an ordinary houses!
The Estey Organ Company, founded in 1852, went on to become the largest manufacturer of organs in the nation, with customers besides Madame Walker, including Henry Ford. Automatic player devices provided those who could afford them with a self-playing organ identified an elite among the elite.
The Greek Slave 1848, Parian ware figutine by England's Minton's Pottery works. Parian, Minton's name for 'statuary porcelain', alludes to the white marble from the Greek isle, Paros.
The Greek Slave is a marble in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Ostensibly it is merely a Grecian maiden, enslaved by Turks. But a cross and locket, amid the drapery, make it clear that she is a Christian, and betrothed.
Powers intention was that one see her suffering, as transcendent, raised above outward degradation. Innate purity and force of character bestow on her an uncompromising virtue that cannot be shamed. Many viewers on the eve of civil war, drew parallels between The Greek Slave and African American slaves in the South, with some abolitionists adopting the work, which was widely reproduced in ceramic reductions like Madame Walker's, as symbol. Compared with "the Virginian Slave", it was the subject of a John Greeleaf Whittier poem, inspiring as well a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lucy Stone, stopping to admire the statue broke into tears. For her it was emblematic of male misogyny. Thereafter, Stone included women's rights issues in her speeches.
A bust of Beethoven like the one atop Madame Walker's organ console
Circa 1935
1919: A Villa Lewaro bedroom
Madame Walker initiated a dynasty, ambitious, socially conscious, bright, black and proud. A'Lelia Bundles part in the ensuing line of succession has been varied; filled with recognition and rewards for a groundbreaking career as a TV journalist, and that's quite wonderful. Work for which she will most be remembered is quite different. One rarely grows rich writing history. But doing what A'Lelia has done and continues to do, with unstinting care and craft, one is granted the consolation of immortality!
Receiving such a warm reception with On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker, A'Lelia Bundles is continuing as she started. She is in the final stages of rewriting, polishing her manuscript, well beyond the the superficial degree that others might. She is a perfectionist, like Walker women before her, and so will not be satisfied until her dulcet prose shines forth like a diamond.
Once she has finished, we will learn about all sorts of things long the cause of wonder. Was A'Lelia Walker's first husband, John Robinson, the hotel waiter, really the love of her life? Or, notwithstanding three tries tying the knot, was she also gay, like a score of her best friends, like several of her set who also married persons with a different gender than theirs?
We already know, that due to her industry, networking skills and keen instincts, that much of the success of the Walker Company was due to A'Lelia Walker. But far more awaits us, because once A'Lelia Bundles has completed her task, metaphorically, but still most magically, she will take us by the hand to the much changed world and times of her namesake. Guiding us into our recent history , like Dicken's spirit in A Christmas Carol, with but a touch of her gown, we'll be transported. Revealed will be a world familiar and foreign. Most surprisingly, we'll discover, that like our epoch, like our lives, it was hardly all bad, that many things were quite wonderful in fact. More amazing still, going back in time, communing with her people, our people, proud, prepared, purposeful and black, we will discover in them, those who have gone before us, our own wonderful selves.
Circa 1912: Madame C. J. Walker by Addison Scurlock
Like remarkable historians who have come before, whether Stephen Birmingham, who wrote Certain People, David Levering Lewis, the author of When Harlem was in Vogue, or Gerrie Major, who penned Black Society, A'Lelia Bundles is engaged in establishing a legacy too.
2013
Ca. 1913: Incomparable A'Lelia Walker
Circa 1919: A'Lelia Walker by Addison Scurlock
1911: Turban with Egret aigrette and turquoise jewel by Paul Poiret
Circa 1911: A'Lelia Walker wearing brocade turban with egret aigrette by Paul Poiret. The innovative Paris couturier, who banished corsets, was a friend who A'Lelia Walker entertained.
That late great trailblazing historian from San Francisco, Eric Garber, wrote of A'Lelia's penchant for parties and gay people:
"Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambiance. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities..."
Much earlier, novelist Marjorie Worthington remembered:
"We went several times that winter to Madame Allelia [sic] Walker's Thursday "at-homes" on a beautiful street in Harlem known as, Sugar Hill...." [Madame Walker's] lavishly furnished house was a gathering place not only for artists and authors and theatrical stars of her own race, but for celebrities from all over the world. Drinks and food were served, and there was always music, generously performed enthusiastically received."
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. Madame Walker's initial gala, a luncheon party for nearly 100, blacks and whites, was hosted in honor of the Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War in September of 1918. President wilson, after first objecting, at last allowed blacks to fight in the World War, and Mr, Scott is the closest African Americans have to a cabinet officer. Madame Walker's guests lunched out on the terrace before entering the music room for musical entertainment. J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", "The African American National Anthem", eminent organist Melville Charlton and other musicians played and sang. It was a lovely afternoon, but not without purpose. Determined that like official entertaining at the White House, that her social gatherings contributed to political action, Madame Walker used this occasion to implore blacks to set aside differences, and support the war-effort. She also asked that Washington take note of black participation in the defence of democracy and outlaw lynching.
The Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War
As for A'Lelia Walker, she was more easy. Many recollections confirm her generous nature, her delight in enjoyment, and in providing pleasure as well. By all accounts, everyone from chorus girls to artists to socialites to visiting royalty would come at least once to enjoy her engaging hospitality. Whether at the Dark Tower, 80 Edgecombe, or Villa Lewaro, wherever she was, though not named 'Laeticia', A'Lelia was the "joy goddess."
They say that whatever one's race, class, condition or sexuality today, that people are, on the whole, rather impatient. If then you are an intrepid exception, and have made it this far: through over one hundred pages, numerous pictures and 12,275 words or so, besides offering my congratulations, I ought perhaps to summarize of my intent. Originalist ideologues, nostalgic for paternalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy notwithstanding, ever-changing America, has not changed enough. Justice delayed is, justice denied.
Still beckoning and golden, the American Dream must not be allowed to become irrelevant. It is still so rich and real and robust, but for fewer and fewer, seems within reach. As America evolves to grow ever more diverse, opportunity and reward, ought to expand and not retract to enrich just some at the top.
Madame C. J. Walker, her daughter A'Lelia Walker, both strove towards such an empowering and beneficial end. An outstanding relic of their faith in our country, Villa Lewaro, as much as Mount Vernon or Monticello, is a shrine that deserves to be on public view, as a museum dedicated to determination and the humanitarian impulse to help others.
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. They included not only eminent blacks like the poet William Stanley Braithwaite and the composer and concert singer Harry T. Burleigh, but Walker beauty-shop operators. One guest, Enrico Caruso, coined the villa's name, using two letters from each name of Mme. Walker's only child, A'lelia Walker Robinson.
Lloyd and Edna Thomas
Edna was a great actress. She started out as Madame Walker's social secretary. One of her jobs was to look up words Walker did not understand reading the newspaper. Regretting having only a scant education, in this way she could learn and expand her vocabulary.
Lloyd Thomas managed their 136th street beauty salon for the Walkers. In 1929, at a party given by A'Lelia, Lloyd introduced Edna to English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham. For the rest of their lives the women were a devoted couple
A manservant for Mrs. and Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Edward Perry studied painting with Winold Reiss, before moving on to acting and stage management. Esteemed as Harlem's Elsa Maxwell, late in life he had a career as a party consultant
1929: Harold Jackman by Richmond Barthe
Designated the "handsomest man in Harlem," London-born Harold Jackman, who had an unknown white English father and a black West Indian mother, was a high school teacher, model, actor, writer, and patron, with a life-long interest theater and in documenting African American cultural life. Gay in most every way, he nonetheless managed to have a daughter, with a white friend, to whom he left half his estate
Spirited off as a young boy to England by an aristocrat who lived on London's Lilac Sweep, Bonds grew to become a music coach, with attractive protegees of uneven talent. A particular friend of A'Lelia's he gained the lease of her apartment when she died. He lived there with a youth named Embry Bonner
Cocaine-addict and Harlem lover Princess Violette Murat, was born Violette Jacqueline Charlotte Ney d'Elchingen. Writer Zora Neal Husrton called her "Princess Muskrat". Fortunately, as she was a lesbian, her husband, Bonaparte Prince Eugene Louis Michel Joachim Napoleon Murat, pre-deceased her by almost 40 years
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was a once-renowned, but now forgotten baritone, the first 'Joe' in "Showboat" and the first African American artist to gain regular employment on Broadway. None the less, finding legitimate operatic roles scare in the States, he concertized to acclaim and profit in Europe. Here he met his well-to-do Dutch lover, sometime-diplomatic cultural attache, Adriain Frederick Huygens
Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, playwright, matanee and film star became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his operatic-coach-mother Clara Davies, was the teacher of Caska Bonds. Norvello's first big success was as a songwriter was the World War I favorite "Keep the Home Fires Burning"
Geraldyn Hodges Dismond, Harlem's 'Lady Nicotine', a inveterate journalist from Chicago, who in time, ditched her philandering husband, to become Gerrie Major of Jet Magazine
The 'Night Hawk', Gerrie's husband, the college football star, World War I hero, Dr. Binga Dismond, a man said to have too much, of everything!
Jimmy Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmy is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
Is this really respectful, traditional mourning attire, or not? NO!
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Ar has announced its first autumn fashion exhibition since 2007! Perhaps eager to capitalize on a new lugubrious public sensibility nurtured by Dark Shadows, Six Feet Under and True Blood "Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire” examines Victorian and Edwardian Era fashions of the bereaved between 1815 and 1915.
Looking lost and nun-like above, Queen Victoria, extravagantly mourned her husband Prince Albert's death for three decades. It was her example which helped to establish the conflicting characteristics of this ritual of grief in the West. The photograph was taken in 1863 to mark the wedding of her son, the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward to PrincessAlexandra of Denmark. Even the bride's going away attire has been constrained by the Queen's bereavement. Fortunately, all white is considored the deepest mourning whatever. But, there is no lace or satin, rather the only decorative trimmings consist of bands of pleated silk.
Mindful of her position as the worlds most influential monarch, eventually Queen Victoria sanctioned jet and lace, in addition to un-colored jewels, as appreciate royal mourning as well as crepe and dull silks. But for the rest of her life, she otherwise never diverted from black clothes relived by white.
The late Ms. Joan Rivers with her daughter and clergyman, leaves the funereal of her husband. Even by standards of fifty years ago, her crepe dress devoid of decorative embellishments, her sedate pearls and veiled hat represent the strictest form of mourning. Her daughter's white blouse buttons, like the brass buttons on her jacket, do not
Circa 1880: Alexandra, the Princess Albert Edward of Wales
Even while mourning a loved one, duty, such as the annual State Opening of Parliament, required of royal ladies a brilliant display of color-less jewels. Black gloves, considered outre when not in mourning with evening dress, are the give-away of bereavement
1901: Observing court mourning for Queen Victoria, the new Queen Alexandra is resplendent for the annual State Opening of Parliament,
1901: Princess Mary in court mourning
1909: The new mourning queen dispenses with the prohibition against sequins to open Parliament
On a crucial diplomatic tour with King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, mourning the death of her brother, wore a Norman Hartnell designed white wardrobe
1953: Three Queens wear deepest mourning for a father, husband and son, King George VI
1972: The Queen and "the woman he loved" 'mourn' the Duke of Windsor. Her Magesty's brass-bound buttons would not seem to comply with mourning
A friend of the current Prince of Wales, a woman notwithstanding the provocation or even the occasional offensiveness of her biting barbs and quips, Ms. Joan Rivers, ironically greatly admired conventional form and decorum as well. Highest praise praise from her for an actor was once to admire his fortunate "WASP good looks". This why it seemed fitting to access the stately send-off lovingly planed by her daughter Ms.Melissa Rivers, if not with the same 'shade' they might have employed on Fashion Police, at least with similar serious interest.
1997: Windsor Princes and the Earl of Spencer mourn the Princess Diana. Many show people today, opting for a four-in-hand necktie with evening dress, rather than seeming smartly dressed for a festive occasion, appear instead, to be wearing mourning
Minimal and modest jewelry, hats, black stockings are all indicative of mourning
Strictly speaking, black trousers should accompany a morning coat as mourning. The Queen's black gloves are ever increasingly, rarely encountered, However, her lack of black stockings and shiny shoe ornaments are unfortunate. If anyone knows better, it's she
As early as 1922, writing in the very first edition of her invaluably thorough and authoritative treatise on correct behavior, Emily Post was totally without equivocation. To properly express loss and bereavement, certain conventions, as to dress and comportment, ought to be carefully observed. Were these strictures, or even their modern equivalent, strictly observed at Joan Rivers' funereal service?
Sunday, September 7, 2014: Ms. Joan Rivers' decorous funereal service was filled with ceremonial pageantry
Lace? Polka dots, after Labor Day, no less? Fuchsia-colored shoes?---are NOT traditionally correct mourning. Calling a ceremony commemorating loss. a celebration of the loved-ones life, many, indeed most, eschew such old-fashioned notions
Correct
Incorrect! However boring, a blue necktie is not mourning
Neither is a striped suit, though many wear them to funereal services, unless one has no black suit or a very dark blue suit, even a discretely stripped suit is all wrong
Mourning, except for the miss-matched shoes, surely a last joke between Ms. Goldberg and the deceased?
Because her hat was merely a utilitarian precaution against the weather, Barbra Walters' mourning attire was touchingly appreciate
Nothing one might wear is a protection against grief
Proof that mourning and chic are not incompatible, Carolina Herrera channels Evita Peron
The conflict between high fashion and expressing one's sorrow through ones garb has always been thus. A highpoint of the British social season for two centuries, Royal Ascot represents a glittering legacy. Only a 100 years ago tragedy struck. HIM King Edward VII died! What was the world of fashion to do? A passionate devote' to the sport of kings, the late Sovereign would have never countenanced suspension of the week-long race meet. So although the Royal Box was quite deserted, with the Royal Family in the seclusion of deepest mourning, outside of the Royal Enclosure it was as packed as ever, although out of respect, the elite were clad from head to toe in black. Beplumed, beflowered, clad in satin and shod in patent leather, despite as much jet jewelry as one sees on Downton Abby, it was not quite 'true' mourning, as much as a respectful fashion statement.
1910
Satin and shoe buckles, not mourning!
Fringe, not mourning
We all know what the most correct mourning looks like thanks to our sad history of martyred heroes, one after the other, in the 1960's. By then, mourning etiquette was not nearly as rigorous nor as rigid as Emily Post's dicta in 1922:
A generation or two ago the regulations for mourning were definitely prescribed, definite periods according to the precise degree of relationship of the mourner. One’s real feelings, whether of grief or comparative indifference, had nothing to do with the outward manifestation one was obliged, in decency, to show. The tendency to-day is toward sincerity. People do not put on black for aunts, uncles and cousins unless there is a deep tie of affection as well as of blood.
Many persons to-day do not believe in going into mourning at all. There are some who believe, as do the races of the East, that great love should be expressed in rejoicing in the re-birth of a beloved spirit instead of selfishly mourning their own earthly loss. But many who object to manifestations of grief, find themselves impelled to wear mourning when their sorrow comes and the number of those who do not put on black is still comparatively small.
1963: Via TV we all mourned together
PROTECTION OF MOURNING
If you see acquaintances of yours in deepest mourning, it does not occur to you to go up to them and babble trivial topics or ask them to a dance or dinner. If you pass close to them, irresistible sympathy compels you merely to stop and press their hand and pass on. A widow, or mother, in the newness of her long veil, has her hard path made as little difficult as possible by everyone with whom she comes in contact, no matter on what errand she may be bent. A clerk in a store will try to wait on her as quickly and as attentively as possible. Acquaintances avoid stopping her with long conversation that could not but torture and distress her. She meets small kindnesses at every turn, which save unnecessary jars to supersensitive nerves.
Once in a great while, a tactless person may have no better sense than to ask her abruptly for whom she is in mourning! Such people would not hesitate to walk over the graves in a cemetery! And fortunately, such encounters are few.
Since many people, however, dislike long mourning veils and all crepe generally, it is absolutely correct to omit both if preferred, and to wear an untrimmed coat and hat of plainest black with or without a veil.
1968: Mrs. Kennedy comforts Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2004: Another widow wearing impecable clothes, mourns
MOURNING MATERIALS
Lustreless silks, such as crepe de chine, georgette, chiffon, grosgrain, peau de soie, dull finish charmeuse and taffeta, and all plain woolen materials, are suitable for deepest mourning. Uncut velvet is as deep mourning as crepe, but cut velvet is not mourning at all! Nor is satin or lace. The only lace permissible is a plain or hemstitched net known as “footing.”
Fancy weaves in stockings are not mourning, nor is bright jet or silver. A very perplexing decree is that clothes entirely of white are deepest mourning but the addition of a black belt or hat or gloves produces second mourning.
Patent leather and satin shoes are not mourning.
People in second mourning wear all combinations of black and white as well as clothes of gray and mauve. Many of the laws for materials seem arbitrary, and people interpret them with greater freedom than they used to, but never under any circumstances can one who is not entirely in colors wear satin embroidered in silver or trimmed with jet and lace! With the exception of wearing a small string of pearls and a single ring, especially if it is an engagement ring, jewelry with deepest mourning is never in good taste.
The black stockings, gloves hats and modest ornaments are exemplary. Apart from the gray gloves and trousers of the men, the Japanese Royal Family scrupulously upholds the strictest, deepest Western mourning tradition
EXTREME FASHION INAPPROPRIATE
Fancy clothes in mourning are always offenses against good taste, because as the word implies, a person is in mourning. To have the impression of “fashion” dominant is contrary to the purpose of somber dress; it is a costume for the spirit, a covering for the visible body of one whose soul seeks the background. Nothing can be in worse taste than crepe which is gathered and ruched and puffed and pleated and made into waterfalls, and imitation ostrich feathers as a garnishing for a hat. The more absolutely plain, the more appropriate and dignified is the mourning dress. A “long veil” is a shade pulled down—a protection—it should never be a flaunting arrangement to arrest the amazed attention of the passerby
The necessity for dignity can not be overemphasized.
BAD TASTE IN MOURNING
Mourning observances are all matters of fixed form, and any deviation from precise convention is interpreted by the world at large as signifying want of proper feeling.
How often has one heard said of a young woman who was perhaps merely ignorant of the effect of her inappropriate clothes or unconventional behavior: “Look at her! And her dear father scarcely cold in his grave!” Or “Little she seems to have cared for her mother—and such a lovely one she had, too.” Such remarks are as thoughtless as are the actions of the daughter, but they point to an undeniable condition. Better far not wear mourning at all, saying you do not believe in it, than allow your unseemly conduct to indicate indifference to the memory of a really beloved parent; better that a young widow should go out in scarlet and yellow on the day after her husband’s funeral than wear weeds which attract attention on account of their flaunting bad taste and flippancy. One may not, one must not, one can not wear the very last cry of exaggerated fashion in crepe, nor may one be boisterous or flippant or sloppy in manner, without giving the impression to all beholders that one’s spirit is posturing, tripping, or dancing on the grave of sacred memory. This may seem exaggerated, but if you examine the expressions, you will find that they are essentially true.
Draw the picture for yourself: A slim figure, if you like, held in the posture of the caterpillar slouch, a long length of stocking so thin as to give the effect of shaded skin above high-heeled slippers with sparkling buckles of bright jet, a short skirt, a scrappy, thin, low-necked, short-sleeved blouse through which white underclothing shows various edgings of lace and ribbons, and on top of this, a painted face under a long crepe veil! Yet the wearer of this costume may in nothing but appearance resemble the unmentionable class of women she suggests; as a matter of fact she is very likely a perfectly decent young person and really sad at heart, and her clothes and “make up” not different from countless others who pass unnoticed because their colored clothing suggests no mockery of solemnity.
Mourning Afternoon Ensemble, 1870-1872, Black silk crape, black mousseline from the forthcoming exhibition; The Metropolitan Museum of Art“Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire,” October 21 – February 1, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Masterful magnate, Madame C. J. Walker, 1867-1919, the hair-care-beauty specialist who built the most spectacular residence ever owned by an African American in 1917: Villa Lewaro! Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building such a showplace. Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the ability and value of African American faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Why is it that a man, just as soon as he gets enough money, builds a house much bigger than he needs? I built a house at Akron many times larger than I have the least use for; I have another house at Miami Beach, which is also much larger than I need. I suppose that before I die I shall buy or build other houses which also will be larger than I need. I do not know why I do it – the houses are only a burden.…all my friends who have acquired wealth have big houses…Even so unostentatious a man as Henry Ford has a much bigger house at Dearborn than he really cares about. I wonder why it is …In a few cases, a big house is built just as an advertisement that one is rich; sometimes a big house is built so great entertainments may be given. But in most cases, and especially with men who have earned their own money, the house is just built and when it is done, no one quite knows why it was started…Henry Ford 1926, Men and Rubber; The Story of Business
There are only a few houses ever built in America that hold such significance that they become the very embodiement of the American Dream. Completed in 1918, Villa Lewaro is such a house. Henry Ford may have been preplexed as to why he had built a big dwelling, but Madame Walker experienced no such confusion. Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building a showplace. For her, Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the value of African American ability, faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1789: West Front of Mount Vernon, by Edward Savage.
Distinguishing historical substance from symbolism is imperative. Taught that Washigton was incapable of telling a lie, that he valued liberty above all else, the life of slaves at his vast plantation, with meager rations, communal accomodation and twelve hour workdays, reveals a harsher truth.
For those who are un-knowledgeable, a cursory glance mightn't leave much of a lasting impression. For many examining the surface of things, the constituent elements, making an aesthetic evaluation, their final conclusion might be that they'd seen a conventionally 'nice' mansion, in well-kept, but not extensive grounds. They might determine that the house Sara Breedlove McWilliams Walker built at Irvington, New York, "Villa Lewaro", as nice as it is, is hardly exceptional.
But from a better-informed vantage point, the Villa Lewaro, named a National Treasure this year by the National Trust, the grandest house ever built by an African American before 1960, is something else again. Howsoever 'modest' it might appear materially, in relation to grandiose abodes built by whites; placed in context, contrasted with the isolated and unequal conditions characteristic of African American life, it is as magical as the Summer Palace of China's dowager empress, as incomparable as the backdrop of the glittering court of the Sun King at Versailles.
1858: Mount Vernon by Ferdinand Richardt
By repeatedly expanding his father's existing one-and-a-half-storey farmhouse, over several decades, Washington created a structure with 11,028 square feet ! Mount Vernon dwarfed most dwellings in late 18th-century Virginia, which typically comprised one to two rooms, ranging in size from roughly 200 to 1200 square feet.
Following George Washington's death, on the eve of a new century in 1799, his beloved Mount Vernon Plantation passed on to a succession of less capable heirs overwhelmed by its costly upkeep. Martha Washington's awareness had caused her to free slaves, otherwise freed by provision of her husband's will, upon her death.
Increasingly Mount Vernon fell into disrepair after a failed attempt by Washington’s great-great nephew John A. Washington to sell it to the United States or the Virginia Commonwealth in 1853.
This prompted Ann Pamela Cunningham to establish the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which began an unprecedented national campaign to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it as a talisman of American history. This collaborative effort of patriotic and patrician white women from the north and the south alike, formed the nexus of the United State's historic preservation movement.
Every attempt was made to sanitize the memory of our foremost founding father. Acting to transform a bastion of white America's self-entitled wealth-through-oppression, into an icon of liberty, destroying the old slave quarters became the first imperative item of business before Mount Vernon was opened to the public as a shrine.
Building one of the largest houses in Virginia, among the most commodious in the new nation, Washington had hardly sought to outdo the Dukes of Marlborough, whose house was one of the largest and grandiose in England. The Baroque masterpiece boast 175,000 square feet!
Monticello, 1769-1809 by Thomas Jefferson
Introducing the first dome on an American house, counting the cellars, Monticello has around 11,000 square feet of living space.
Ickworth, 1795-1830 designed by Mario Aspurcci, executed by Francis and Joseph Sandy, laocated at Horringer, Burry St. Edmunds. Suffolk, England
Not completed until well after the death of its builder, connoisseur collector Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol, in 1803, Ickworth, with its central rotunda and curving wings, was truly a temple of art. Monticello, by contrast, is not even as large as the servants' quarters here.
As an historian and a preservationist, one learns a good deal about where people stand, by looking at where, and how they live. A visit to historic Addisleigh Park, in Saint Albans, Queens, is a revelation. Billed as the 'suburban Sugar Hill,' in reference to black Harlem's elite address of the 1930's and 1940's, the spic-and-span community offers neat mock-Tudor and Colonial Revival houses surrounded by supremely manicured lawns. Initially met by restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks, after 1945 the enclave rapidly became home to a score of celebrities, from Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, to Jackie Robinson, Count Basie and Joe Louis. A few houses boast double lots. Four or five even had swimming pools and tennis courts. But at best, the biggest houses here had about two-thousand square feet of space for living large.
"Hyde Park", 1895, by McKim, Mead & White
Just as America's founding fathers wasted little time attempting to emulate far richer nobles in England, neither did Madame Walker seek to 'compete' with the splendor of the nearby Frederick William Vanderbilt estate, or the even closer and equally palatial Rockefeller place, at Tarrytown. With fifty rooms comprising 44,000 square feet and two hundred acres, "Hyde Park" was one of the Hudson Valley's most notable showplaces.
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, California, the largest houses of the most celebrated white stars, averaged around ten-thousand square feet. Accessing the extent of success accorded the United State's most acclaimed African Americans, it's useful to keep such observations of dramatic inequality in mind.
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back-woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguished her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Twenty-three years ago, Thursday, August 29, 1991, expertly edited by Yanick Rice Lamb, my article, A Mansion With Room for the Great and Humble, was published in the Home section of the New York Times. "MY great-great-grandmother meant for her four-acre estate to be a showplace for black Americans that would motivate them to realize their own dreams," related A'lelia Perry Bundles. Then a producer with ABC World News Tonight in Washington, Ms. Bundles was unknown to me. Now retired, as a philanthropist serving on the board of trustees of both Columbia University and the National Archives, my esteemed dear friend is more active and occupied than ever before.
Lincoln Family log cabin, Sinking Spring Farm, Hodgenville, Kentucky
This is reported to be the place where Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Seven US presidents were born in log cabins, including Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan. Ironically, Whig contender William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, hardly born in a log cabin, nonetheless cynically appropriated this meager type of habitation as a symbol that he was a man of the people. Other candidates followed Harrison's example, making the idea of a log cabin, a background of modest means, a childhood spent overcoming the adversity of hard times, a recurring and classic campaign theme.
A lowly log cabin has been a potent symbol of heroically-humble origins in US literature and politics since the early 19th century.
Restored and featured in innumerable pieces since 1991, Villa Lewaro is ever so slowly gaining recognition as a singular monument to the American dream. When my story appeared, even after Stanley Nelson's titanic Walker documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream appeared, this was not so.
Designed by Ventner Woodson Tandy, New York State's second registered black architect after his partner George Washinton Foster, the neo-Palladian-style structure was built at Irvington-on-Hudson between 1916 and 1918. Close at hand are other larger historic houses on more ample acreage, that were built for famed whites. Several of these, writer Washington Irving's "Sunnyside", feared robber-baron Jay Gould's "Lyndhurst," and John D. Rockefeller's "Kykuit", are all operated as house museums and opened to the public. 'Why ought not this to be the case at Madame Walker's house?', I mused after my first visit to Villa Lewaro in 1988.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, America's bicentennial anniversary year, Villa Lewaro's then-owners, Ingo and Darlene Appel, greeted me warmly and welcomed my interest. They had actually started exploring ways to make Madame Walker's house into a museum. As a result they'd engaged with several groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Madame C. J. Walker Committee of Westchester County.
"I think the time is right now," they were told by Steve Pruitt. A government relations adviser, he was speaking on behalf of Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois, who would introduce a bill calling for Federal funds to purchase and safeguard Villa Lewaro. Historian Alex Haley of Roots fame, Oprah Winfrey and many others concurred.
Statesman Frederic Douglas lived in this respectable dwelling with his family from 1878 until his death in 1895. It's hardly a surprise learning that the largest contributor to save "Cedar Hill" prior to it being opened to the public, came from Madame Walker
I agreed too with this splendid idea. So I was elated when a new 'Diversity Scholars' fund initiated by the Trust, picked up the tab for my airfare and hotel, enabling me to attend the nation's premiere preservation organization's annual conference at Miami Beach that autumn. This opportunity would give me a chance to ask Richard Moe, the Trust's new director, what he thought about the amorphous and tentative plans to make Madame Walker's house into a museum.
Alonzo Herndon residence, 587 University Pl., NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 1910
A former slave raised in a sharecropping family, after the Civil War Herndon owned and managed a string of barbershops. Investing profits into real estate, becoming the largest black property owner in Atlanta by 1900, Herndon next founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, to become Atlanta's first black millionaire. Maintained as a museum, W. E. B. Dubois praised Herndon’s Georgian Revival house as, ‘the finest residence in America owned by a Negro.’ At the time of this statement, naturally, Villa Lewaro had not yet been built.
"Cultural Diversity" was the conference's theme. So why had it opened on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement? The seductive local ought to have further given me pause. Why meet at Miami Beach? After local white politicians ignored recently freed Nelson Mandela durring his seven-city tour of America, black civil rights activists instituted a 1,000-day boycott against the local convention and tourism business. African American groups refusing to hold meetings or to book group tours in the region, meant an eventual loss of more than $50 million.
Still I stayed, undeterred, and had my chance to question Mr. Moe. Perfectly pleasant, he answered politely,
"Under my tenure, I intend to lead the trust out of the business of collecting and opening the houses of the rich. We're past that..."
Protests that it might be a fine idea, once the Trust saved and showed at least one rich person's house that had not been built by a white Christian man, were to no avail.
Number 1048 Simpson Road, (now Joseph E. Boone Boulevard ), Atlanta, Georgia, erected 1926 by the African American Aiken & Faulkner Construction Co. located on Auburn Avenue: demolished 1962
In 1926, the year he built this house, Theodore "Tiger" Flowers, famed as the "Fighting Georgia Deacon" became the first black boxer to win the world middleweight championship. Less than a year later, cheated out of his title in a rigged bout, in November 1927, at thirty-two, Flowers died. He died in Harlem, undergoing surgery to remove scar tissue above his eye. His magnificent house, featuring a plaster bas relief of a tiger's head above the drawing room door, was demolished in 1962
I'm in agreement with the stellar biographer Jean Strouse; no fabricated story can ever match history for drama, the unexpected, or valuable instruction. So I'm still convinced that Richard Moe's response to being cornered and confronted with a proposal that the Trust find some way to acquire Villa Lewaro, was shortsighted, a missed opportunity. For what an inspirational and encouraging tale can be told, examining the house that Madame Walker built.
Stylishly of its time, even the house architect-to-the-stars, Paul Revere Williams built for himself in Los Angeles, in 1951, fails to approach the opulence of Villa Lewaro
"Villa Lewaro was", A'Lelia Bundles reiterates, "a symbol of what my great-great-grandmother termed 'the wealth of business possibilities within the race to point to young Negroes what a lone woman can accomplish and to inspire them to do big things.' "
Ms. Bundles's portrait of her ancestor is titled On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker. Published by Scribner's in 2001, it quickly became a national bestseller. How superbly A'Lelia Bundles un-spools the saga. How affectingly it resonates, as part primer, part cautionary tale. What is it that makes it so moving and so timeless? This is a question that's answered easily enough. For all the nuanced specificity of Madame Walker's distinctly American life, an incessant journey seeking truth and meaning, bravely facing defeat and boldly tracking down triumph: her story is universal, too.
Adamantly a 'race woman', Madam Walker was hardly deterred by condescension; neither from whites who disdained her very presence, nor from elitist blacks who felt past poverty and deficient education made her unacceptable. In America, wealth seldom hurts. But Madame Walker's assets exceeded wealth alone. This was why Booker T. Washington, who initially tried to thwart her ambitions as a civil rights activist, had ended by becoming her friend.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Especially impressed by two nearly identical country houses near New York, Tandy adopted their design with only slight modifications. At Villa Lewaro, for instance, he used the simpler Ionic order in place of Composite columns with fluted shafts
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut. Mr. Bedford was president of Corn Products Refining Co. and a director of the Standard Oil Co.
Villa Rosa Terrace, S. Z. Puli residence by Brown & Von Beren, 1914, Woodmont, Conneticut
Italian immigrant Sylvester Zefferino Poli a theater magnate associated with William Fox in the Lowe’s-Poli theater chain, started out sculpting wax figures for sensational and historic displays. Named for his wife, their waterfront estate consisted of the main house, and ten cottages deeded to five children
How slightly Vertner Tandy seems to have bothered to differentiate Villa Lewaro from the two nearby sources of inspiration he found illustraited in architectural journals
Circa 1928: Villa Lewaro, the Irvington, New York 20,000 square feet country house of Madam C. J. Walker, from 1918 to 1919. Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire, through the manufacture and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks.
Circa 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
Were one Jewish a century ago, chances are that attempting to move into a neighborhood that was not already substantially Jewish, would meet with resistance. Blacks were more fortunate, in one tiny paticular. For Negros, there was little fear of restrictive deed covenants, that prohibited the sell, or even a future sell, sometimes into perpetuity, to a 'Colored person'. The common supposition was that Negros could not afford to buy property in nice neighborhoods. For all practical purposes, this was all too true.
Unlike most mansions on the Hudson, which sit like castles on the Rhine, Villa Lewaro is best seen from Broadway, the main street of Irvington. A two-storey semicircular portico dominates the street facade.
Circa 1949
In the 1980's the huge trees that first attracted Mme. Walker saved the house from a developer who wanted to erect condominiums. A tree ordinance protected the property.
The Villa Lewaro mansion Vertner Tandy designed for Madame Walker in exclusive Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, started to be restored in the 1980s by Ingo Appel. In the following decade this comendable undertaking was completed by Harold Doley, shown here with his wife Alma and their son. A native of New Orleans, Mr. Doley was the first black to buy an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
After establishing a foothold in the 'Negro promised land' at Harlem, building a combination town house-beauty college-salon, the Walkes set their sights on a hose in the country. Madame C. J. Walker's bid to live in Irvington-On-Hudson, near Livingstons, Goulds and Rockefellers, was in fact her second try at locating where the action was, in the very midst of the country's most affluent whites. In the New York Times, March 25, 1916, it was announced that Mrs. C. J. Walker, through Samuel A. Singerman, her lawyer, had acquired "Bishop's Court". The price was given as around $40,000. Vertner Tandy filed plans for a house not so different from Villa Lewaro, but missing the graceful semi-elliptical portico. Madame Walker's entre into sacred precincts had commenced. Or had it?
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
2011: Villa Lewaro, the porte cochere. Tandy's triumphal arch-like shelter for protection from the weather when alighting from or entering an automobile, is topped off by a sleeping porch and balcony
Like the would-be buyer, the seller of the "old English design, brick and timber house", set on a plot, 200 X 300 feet, was also black. Most unusual! His house was located at the North East corner of State and North Pine Streets, in an exclusive section of Flushing. Born in Antigua, in 1843, the Right Rev. William B. Derrick had a white Scottish father and a black Caribbean-born mother. According to his Times obituary, in 1913, educated in England, this African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion prelate's jurisdiction included the West Indies, South America and the Islands Beyond the Seas. For this reason the renowned preacher was much involved outside the US, in setting up churches in Panama for blacks working to dig the canal, for instance. Having rushed back from Britain to enlist in the Civil War, becoming sought after as a king-maker, able to reliably rally Negros to vote for Republicans, he was rather busy at home as well. "Bishop's Court" was his reward for a well-lived, sober life. White residents had certainly not welcomed his arrival around 1896. They had felt powerless indeed to prevent it. Over the years his sedate style of living had caused them to thank providence that it had not been worse. They were however, not about to take the same risk to property and propriety twice. All were determined, the Negro, former wash woman, from the west, was not to be admitted to their community. A reprise almost occurred at Irvington. But this time, Tandy did not produce drawing until after the deed was recorded.
Madame Walker's ambitious mansion was designed by Striver's Row resident,Vertner Woodson Tandy. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Tandy studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He finished his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was one of seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black college fraternity. He was also the first black to pass the military commissioning exam, and eventually became a major in the New York National Guard.
Following his partner George W. Foster, Tandy would become New York’s second black registered architect, and the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. Apart from Madame Walker's two houses, among many alterations to existing buildings, he designed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Sadly, among his oeuvre, he only planned about ten additional houses, most of which have been greatly changed or destroyed.
Vertner Tandy died in 1949 at age 64.
Villa Lewaro, which Madame Walker built as a country house, was Tandy's "masterpiece," said Roberta Washington, a Harlem architect, who discusses his career in depth in her forthcoming history of African American architects who practiced in New York State over the past century. "Yes, his work is derivative. He copied other people. Most designers did and do. But, just look at that novel way he introduced a light well, for the basement kitchen. The big terrace completely obscures the servants' area downstairs, giving them lots of light and air and privacy at the same time. That's good design in my book."
Circa 1924: Durring the blaze of a 1920's summer, from Villa Lewaro's palm decked terrace, the Hudson might as well to have flowed into the Mederterainian.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
From Villa Lewaro's garden elevation, where an elevator bulkhead seems to have been added to the roof-line, three terraces step down to the swimming pool. Very few houses had swimming pools as early as Villa Lewaro.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
Set at the center of a hedge-enclosed sunken garden, that swimming pool at the Walker estate originally was lined with black masonry, enabling it to effectively act as a decorative reflecting pool too. Taken in the midst of a festive house party, this photograph shows brightly colored paper lanterns strung down the center of the garden.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
In addition to having a dark interior, the pool boasted a setting resplendent with perennials planted in herbaceous borders in raised beds, retained by bolder walls, that embowered guests with blooms and fragrance
Today the pool's raised borders at Villa Lewaro only have grass
A pergola, with a curving center bay once framing the river view, has been restored. As to the dramatic prospect of shimmering water that the Walkers were so justly proud of , that has long ago vanished behind the dense foliage of untended trees
The Window punched into the side of Villa Lewaro's upper terrace, indicates Madame Walker's gymnasium, while an archway led into the kitchen light well and a service entrance. Surmounted by a colonnaded pergola, the lowest terrace at Villa Lewaro was economically and beautifully constructed from rubble stones excavated on the property. Nearby, Madame Walker's ample garage at the edge of the property, provided extra accomodation for staff outside of the main house's top floor and basment.
Manufactured by Grand Rapids' Berkey & Gay Furniture Co., the center table seen in Villa Lewaro's living room below, was based on 16th-century originals, like this example owned by great architect Stanford White
1918: The Living Hall, or living room. Vertner Tandy's trabeated ceiling, as much as Righter & Kolb's custom-designed furniture, combined to give Villa Lewaro an authentic Renaissance atmosphere
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
Even as a 19th century copy, this masterful Mannerist painting, reproducing a grand fresco with its vivid disonant color harmony, never failed to make an impact on Villa Lewaro visitors
Skillfully devised by Tandy to facilitate flexibility when entertaining, the reception rooms grouped on the first floor of Villa Lewaro easily flow one into the next. Alternately offering a relatively open combined envelope, or more compartmentalized spaces, it is the ultimate gala party setting
Entry into Villa Lewaro was carefully orchestrated to best dramatize festivities held here with a maximum sense of pomp and pageantry. From the very instant one came inside everything was calculated to express that here was a realm apart. Leaving the entrance hall, two steps down, access into the Villa Lewaro living room was planned so that the arrival of each new guest, could be clearly observed by those assembled. Tandy was at pains to have a marble staircase, with all the splendor this implies. But aware of his client's oopposition to extravagance, making reductions whever possible, he cut corners for Madame Walker, by providing a machine-forged metal balustrade, as opposed to a more expensive one, hand wrought from iron.
Provided a needlework-covered Louis XIV-style rocking chair, Villa Lewaro's welcoming fireside, was immediately adjacent to a pierced grill of the Estey organ's sounding chamber. The table lamp has a pierced brass Middle Eastern-style shade, glittering with glass jewels and beaded fring. Lighted, it must have added as much ambiance, with its pattern of colored shadows, as the sonorous music
Flower-form Arts and Crafts andirons gracing the living room's Renaissance-style hooded mantelpiece, made of 'cast stone.' On the mantle shelf, Booker T. Washington's bust holds pride-of-place with two vases, formed from World War I German shell canisters, made of copper and silver loving cups, which attested to Madame Walker's generous philanthropy.
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured on the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
The eclectic decor of Villa Lewaro was devised by Frank R. Smith, who apearently was employed by Righter & Kolb, the decorators of the Walker town house. The formal reception rooms, which open into one another along a straight line, form a series of contrasting areas. Neo-Renaissance in style, the great hall-living room and the barrel-vaulted dining room originally had furniture custom-made by Brekey & Gay. The Louis XV-style music room still retains an Estey player-pipe organ with speaker ducts, which let music be heard throughout the house.
Villa Lewaro's decorator, Frank R. Smith of Righter & Kolb, had previously appointed Walker's Harlem townhouse. As the rendering above shows, his ideas for decorating Villa Lewaro, sometimes were more lavish than Madame Walker was willing to pay for
Beyond formal entertaing spaces, the living room, dining room, library, music room and solarium, thirty additional rooms included accommodations for eight servants and as many guests, a nursery, billiard room, gymnasium and laundry.
As for so many other builders of pleasure domes, it was all over rather quickly. Madame Walker died in 1919. Her daughter found the role of Lady Bountiful somewhat confining. Villa Lewaro was for her a less stimulating environment than Harlem.
But when duty beckoned, the house was the backdrop for a party: Lady Mountbatten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker beauty-parlor girls and Pullman porters were all welcomed. In the 1920's A'Lelia Walker also let the house be used as a location for the black silent-movie classic "Secret Sorrow."
Even prior to A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy's death in 1931, an effort had been made to 'unload' costly-to-maintain Villa Lewaro. Two much-discussed auctions of its contents were staged. In December of 1930, veteran dealer Benjamin Wise, with his force of black salesmen, conducted the first. It lasted three days. "White Buyers Strip Villa", screamed Harlem's Amsterdam New, newspaper, expressing something of the loss and heartache ordinary blacks felt, learning the news. A'Lelia's ormolu-mounted grand piano, Persian carpets, a French tapestry, a large spinach jade table lamp, beautifully bound sets of books, from a deluxe bible to the multi-volume memoirs of Casanova----all went under the hammer and were knocked down for a paltry $58,500! In light of prices payed to obtain these precious objects, just a little more than a decade earlier, this indeed represented pennies on the dollar. But, all things considered, this was not such a bad result. Things went to hell in America after the debacle of November, 1929. Art and antique collectors once worth hundreds of millions, men like William Randolph Hearst or Clarence McKay, were forced to dispose of their treasures at department stores, for what really amounted to bargain basement prices, as well. In Newport, the ultra exclusive seaside summer resort, things were no better than at Irvington. "Marble House"was the palatial 'cottage' of Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who as Mrs. Willie K. Vanderbilt had been the first social leader to divorce and remarry without sanction. Her 'cottage' is said to have cost $11,000,000.00 at the start of the 1890's! This is unlikely inasmuch as, well before the crash Mrs. Belmont challenged a property tax assessment based on a nearly $700,000.00 valuation. Indignant, she countered that around $400,000.00 was closer to the true value. Naturally, making this claim, she did not include the sumptuous contents of Marble House. Yet when she sold the four acre property in 1932, the house, lock, stock and barrel went for just a little over $100,000.00.
Courtesy of Half Pudding, Half Sause
1932
Even so, at Villa Lewaro, sufficient unsold remnants from six china dinner service, several sets of glassware, and other furnishings remained unsold to form the basis of a collection of Walker heirlooms that bring these figures to life, more vividly than anything that one could write.
Once A'Lelia passed away, Villa Lewaro was bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sold it in 1932 to the Annie E. Poth home for aged members of the Companions of the Forest in America, a fraternal organization. Under their care it remained largely intact for the next 50 years.
The Annie Poth Home was a refuge for the widows and orphans of the Frinds of the Forest Fraternal Society for over fifty years.
1918: The vaulted dining room. Tablets among the ceiling's arabesque include the coupling of what appear to be a pair of same-sex lovers?
Robust cast plaster cornucopia fittingly ornament Villa Lewaro's dining room
A trumpet-shaped "brilliant cut' glass vase of the type seen on the Villa Lewaro sideboard, in the view above.
Breaking with tradition, this silver flatware once owned by Madame Walker, was engraved with her second husband's initails
Table linen, owned by A'Lelia Walker, 'corectly' bears the monogram, AWR, for A'Lelia Walker Robinson
1904: The East Room at the White House offered inspiration for Villa Lewaro's music room and many other ballrooms, private and public: earning for its designers the new name of "McKim, White & Gold"
Circa1920: The Music Room
Terpsichore
After her mother died A'Lelia Walker replaced the music rooms conventional Steinway piano for one with an 'art case' in the Louis XV mode, mounted in ormolu. These gilded ornamental articulations caused her Peck-Hardman & Co. instrument to be named 'the gold piano'. In the 1930 sale it fetched only $450.00
A gilded harp of the type found at Villa Lewaro
Circa 1920: Righter & Kolb were so exacting, that in Villa Lewaro's music room even the Victrola phonograph had its cabinet customised. It was painted with pastoral scenes in keeping with the rooms Watteauesque Lunettes and Louis XV sensibility. In 1930 it brought around $46.00
WHAT WAS A NEF?
A nef was an extravagant ship-shaped table ornament centerpiece and container used in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Quite rarely made of glass, usually they were elaborately fashioned from silver, silver-gilt, or gold and often enameled and jewel-encrusted, Nefs were placed in front of the most important person at table as a mark of their status. When not just used for decoration, it might hold salt, spices, napkins, cutlery or even wine. For this reason some nefs had wheels to allow them to be rolled from one end of the table to the other, but most had legs or stood on pedestals.
Posed, poised and privileged alongside a graceful bureau plat, raffinée A’Lelia Walker, gowned in dark lace, looks every bit the pampered heiress. Most extraordinary among the accoutrements lending this scene such élan, is her repousse silver nef, a fantastic object with billowing sails and a large crew of minute hands, each exquisitely differentiated from the next. Most likely a late 19th-century copy of a late 16th-century example made in Augsburg, even these command $20,000.00 and more nowadays
Circa 1930: A'Lelia Walker sits in a Louis XV-style bergere beside a porcelain kater on a porcelain pedestal. Behind her is a Louis XIV-style clock of great presence. Like the clocks above and below, it was made to seem to be a timepiece in a nebulous of clouds amidst which puti play, resting on a terminal plinth, overlain with gilt bronze arabesque and festoons. Instead, it is a tall case or grandfather's clock, the ormolu-mounted center panel, opening to reveal the pendulum and weights.
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Villa Lewaro's $25,000 Estey Pipe organ
As with many others who gain great riches, the Walkers set great store by quality. The best, the brightest, the biggest, ever held great appeal for them. Universally, the millionaire of 100 years ago esteemed the ultimate status symbol of a hone pipe organ. Largest and most complex of musical instruments, organs traditionally had only been found in churches and royal palaces. Then, in the mid-19th century, organs started to be installed in houses of the well-to-do. Certainly the music was soothing, but so too must have been knowledge that home organs cost as much as, and sometimes more than, an ordinary houses!
The Estey Organ Company, founded in 1852, went on to become the largest manufacturer of organs in the nation, with customers besides Madame Walker, including Henry Ford. Automatic player devices provided those who could afford them with a self-playing organ identified an elite among the elite.
The Greek Slave 1848, Parian ware figutine by England's Minton's Pottery works. Parian, Minton's name for 'statuary porcelain', alludes to the white marble from the Greek isle, Paros.
The Greek Slave is a marble in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Ostensibly it is merely a Grecian maiden, enslaved by Turks. But a cross and locket, amid the drapery, make it clear that she is a Christian, and betrothed.
Powers intention was that one see her suffering, as transcendent, raised above outward degradation. Innate purity and force of character bestow on her an uncompromising virtue that cannot be shamed. Many viewers on the eve of civil war, drew parallels between The Greek Slave and African American slaves in the South, with some abolitionists adopting the work, which was widely reproduced in ceramic reductions like Madame Walker's, as symbol. Compared with "the Virginian Slave", it was the subject of a John Greeleaf Whittier poem, inspiring as well a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lucy Stone, stopping to admire the statue broke into tears. For her it was emblematic of male misogyny. Thereafter, Stone included women's rights issues in her speeches.
A bust of Beethoven like the one atop Madame Walker's organ console
Circa 1935
1919: A Villa Lewaro bedroom
Madame Walker initiated a dynasty, ambitious, socially conscious, bright, black and proud. A'Lelia Bundles part in the ensuing line of succession has been varied; filled with recognition and rewards for a groundbreaking career as a TV journalist, and that's quite wonderful. Work for which she will most be remembered is quite different. One rarely grows rich writing history. But doing what A'Lelia has done and continues to do, with unstinting care and craft, one is granted the consolation of immortality!
Receiving such a warm reception with On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker, A'Lelia Bundles is continuing as she started. She is in the final stages of rewriting, polishing her manuscript, well beyond the the superficial degree that others might. She is a perfectionist, like Walker women before her, and so will not be satisfied until her dulcet prose shines forth like a diamond.
Once she has finished, we will learn about all sorts of things long the cause of wonder. Was A'Lelia Walker's first husband, John Robinson, the hotel waiter, really the love of her life? Or, notwithstanding three tries tying the knot, was she also gay, like a score of her best friends, like several of her set who also married persons with a different gender than theirs?
We already know, that due to her industry, networking skills and keen instincts, that much of the success of the Walker Company was due to A'Lelia Walker. But far more awaits us, because once A'Lelia Bundles has completed her task, metaphorically, but still most magically, she will take us by the hand to the much changed world and times of her namesake. Guiding us into our recent history , like Dicken's spirit in A Christmas Carol, with but a touch of her gown, we'll be transported. Revealed will be a world familiar and foreign. Most surprisingly, we'll discover, that like our epoch, like our lives, it was hardly all bad, that many things were quite wonderful in fact. More amazing still, going back in time, communing with her people, our people, proud, prepared, purposeful and black, we will discover in them, those who have gone before us, our own wonderful selves.
Circa 1912: Madame C. J. Walker by Addison Scurlock
Like remarkable historians who have come before, whether Stephen Birmingham, who wrote Certain People, David Levering Lewis, the author of When Harlem was in Vogue, or Gerrie Major, who penned Black Society, A'Lelia Bundles is engaged in establishing a legacy too.
2013
Ca. 1913: Incomparable A'Lelia Walker
Circa 1919: A'Lelia Walker by Addison Scurlock
1911: Turban with Egret aigrette and turquoise jewel by Paul Poiret
Circa 1911: A'Lelia Walker wearing brocade turban with egret aigrette by Paul Poiret. The innovative Paris couturier, who banished corsets, was a friend who A'Lelia Walker entertained.
That late great trailblazing historian from San Francisco, Eric Garber, wrote of A'Lelia's penchant for parties and gay people:
"Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambiance. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities..."
Much earlier, novelist Marjorie Worthington remembered:
"We went several times that winter to Madame Allelia [sic] Walker's Thursday "at-homes" on a beautiful street in Harlem known as, Sugar Hill...." [Madame Walker's] lavishly furnished house was a gathering place not only for artists and authors and theatrical stars of her own race, but for celebrities from all over the world. Drinks and food were served, and there was always music, generously performed enthusiastically received."
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. Madame Walker's initial gala, a luncheon party for nearly 100, blacks and whites, was hosted in honor of the Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War in September of 1918. President wilson, after first objecting, at last allowed blacks to fight in the World War, and Mr, Scott is the closest African Americans have to a cabinet officer. Madame Walker's guests lunched out on the terrace before entering the music room for musical entertainment. J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", "The African American National Anthem", eminent organist Melville Charlton and other musicians played and sang. It was a lovely afternoon, but not without purpose. Determined that like official entertaining at the White House, that her social gatherings contributed to political action, Madame Walker used this occasion to implore blacks to set aside differences, and support the war-effort. She also asked that Washington take note of black participation in the defence of democracy and outlaw lynching.
The Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War
As for A'Lelia Walker, she was more easy. Many recollections confirm her generous nature, her delight in enjoyment, and in providing pleasure as well. By all accounts, everyone from chorus girls to artists to socialites to visiting royalty would come at least once to enjoy her engaging hospitality. Whether at the Dark Tower, 80 Edgecombe, or Villa Lewaro, wherever she was, though not named 'Laeticia', A'Lelia was the "joy goddess."
They say that whatever one's race, class, condition or sexuality today, that people are, on the whole, rather impatient. If then you are an intrepid exception, and have made it this far: through over one hundred pages, numerous pictures and 12,275 words or so, besides offering my congratulations, I ought perhaps to summarize of my intent. Originalist ideologues, nostalgic for paternalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy notwithstanding, ever-changing America, has not changed enough. Justice delayed is, justice denied.
Still beckoning and golden, the American Dream must not be allowed to become irrelevant. It is still so rich and real and robust, but for fewer and fewer, seems within reach. As America evolves to grow ever more diverse, opportunity and reward, ought to expand and not retract to enrich just some at the top.
Madame C. J. Walker, her daughter A'Lelia Walker, both strove towards such an empowering and beneficial end. An outstanding relic of their faith in our country, Villa Lewaro, as much as Mount Vernon or Monticello, is a shrine that deserves to be on public view, as a museum dedicated to determination and the humanitarian impulse to help others.
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. They included not only eminent blacks like the poet William Stanley Braithwaite and the composer and concert singer Harry T. Burleigh, but Walker beauty-shop operators. One guest, Enrico Caruso, coined the villa's name, using two letters from each name of Mme. Walker's only child, A'lelia Walker Robinson.
Lloyd and Edna Thomas
Edna was a great actress. She started out as Madame Walker's social secretary. One of her jobs was to look up words Walker did not understand reading the newspaper. Regretting having only a scant education, in this way she could learn and expand her vocabulary.
Lloyd Thomas managed their 136th street beauty salon for the Walkers. In 1929, at a party given by A'Lelia, Lloyd introduced Edna to English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham. For the rest of their lives the women were a devoted couple
A manservant for Mrs. and Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Edward Perry studied painting with Winold Reiss, before moving on to acting and stage management. Esteemed as Harlem's Elsa Maxwell, late in life he had a career as a party consultant
1929: Harold Jackman by Richmond Barthe
Designated the "handsomest man in Harlem," London-born Harold Jackman, who had an unknown white English father and a black West Indian mother, was a high school teacher, model, actor, writer, and patron, with a life-long interest theater and in documenting African American cultural life. Gay in most every way, he nonetheless managed to have a daughter, with a white friend, to whom he left half his estate
Spirited off as a young boy to England by an aristocrat who lived on London's Lilac Sweep, Bonds grew to become a music coach, with attractive protegees of uneven talent. A particular friend of A'Lelia's he gained the lease of her apartment when she died. He lived there with a youth named Embry Bonner
Cocaine-addict and Harlem lover Princess Violette Murat, was born Violette Jacqueline Charlotte Ney d'Elchingen. Writer Zora Neal Husrton called her "Princess Muskrat". Fortunately, as she was a lesbian, her husband, Bonaparte Prince Eugene Louis Michel Joachim Napoleon Murat, pre-deceased her by almost 40 years
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was a once-renowned, but now forgotten baritone, the first 'Joe' in "Showboat" and the first African American artist to gain regular employment on Broadway. None the less, finding legitimate operatic roles scare in the States, he concertized to acclaim and profit in Europe. Here he met his well-to-do Dutch lover, sometime-diplomatic cultural attache, Adriain Frederick Huygens
Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, playwright, matanee and film star became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his operatic-coach-mother Clara Davies, was the teacher of Caska Bonds. Norvello's first big success was as a songwriter was the World War I favorite "Keep the Home Fires Burning"
Geraldyn Hodges Dismond, Harlem's 'Lady Nicotine', a inveterate journalist from Chicago, who in time, ditched her philandering husband, to become Gerrie Major of Jet Magazine
The 'Night Hawk', Gerrie's husband, the college football star, World War I hero, Dr. Binga Dismond, a man said to have too much, of everything!
Jimmy Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmy is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
How adroit, for Vertner Tandy, Madame C. J. Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia Walker Robinson, to do just what whites would have maintained they were incapable of. Employing what a century ago was regarded as the epitome of "good taste", exercising disciplined restraint, they used Charlston's renowned Nathaniel Russell house and Boston buildings built from the 1790's through the early 1800's as the model for their hybrid Walker townhouse-salon, that combined home and business long before it was ever considered at Bergdorf-Goodman or Elizabeth Arden.
Ambition and opportunity were half of what had moved her. Her only child, Lelia was the other part of the equation. The woman who became famous as A'Lelia Walker always came first where her mother was concerned. Frequently she was cross about her extravagance, yet, repeatedly, Madame Walker indulged her child. She was also ambitious for Lelia, for whom she desired to provide all that she had missed, including Paris hats, travel abroad and an education. That rarest of rarities, a Negro heiress, her mother was right to fear that some would attempt to take advantage of her daughter. However, her daughter also made Madame Walker proud. Neither possessing the requisite fragility, fair skin, or delicate features to be regarded as a beauty in her day, tall and statuesquely handsome Lelia always made an impressive, even a striking appearance. Moreover, true intelligence and common sense underlay Lelia's impulsiveness and occasional self-indulgence. Always, not unlike Sportin Life in Porgey n' Bess, the bright lights and good times of the big city beckoned alluringly to Madame Walker's child. In 1913 she had bade her mother to relocate with her to the new Negro 'promised land' of Harlem, a quarter with as many dance halls, cabarets and salons as churches, hundreds! The women attending church and bars mightn't be the same women, but Lelia pointed out, that all hundred thousand wanted to get their hair done before they went there.
So off to Harlem they ventured. According to historian Christopher Gray, in 1913 and 1915 Madam Walker bought two old-style brownstones at 108 and 110 West 136th Street. In 1915 she filed plans to completely rebuild the two houses as one and give them a new front, in the same way that many midtown and East Side rowhouses were being reconstructed
Window in blind arch at the Nathaniel Russell house
On the second floor, the main level of Madame Walker's residence. drawings show a double-size drawing room stretching the full width of the building. Three "chambres" occupied the remainder of the second floor. A billiard room and other additional bedrooms were found on the third floor.
When the Walkers next decided to build a country house, neighbors were horrified, first seeing 'the dressed up Negresses with their comically aloof airs in a chauffeur-driven automobile' pull up. But her white lawyer had secured the deed for Villa Lewaro's acreage, fair and square!
Ultimately, devising a combination residence-spa-beauty salon-school for the Walkers, Vertner Tandy took his cue from the townhouse of Percy Rivington Pyne, II, Esquire. Bowing to the Federal style prevailing during the early republic, it is a picture of WASP decorum and rectitude. Planned by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1911, it stands on the north-west corner of Park Avenue, at 68th Street, serving as the Americas Society.
Madam C. J. Walker's business acumen was prodigious. Living large, projecting as fabulous an image and aura as she could afford, she appreciated that this was a shrewd advertising strategy. Her distinguished 108-110 West 136th Street beauty salon-residence was designed by black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy.
By combining her home and business in two converted brownstone houses, made into a single building, Tandy maximized the grandeur of both.
Madame C. J. Walker's residence, numbers 108-110 West 136th Street, with the Walker chauffeur-driven Lincoln touring car.
Once A'Lelia Walker moved to a one-bedroom apartment at 80 Edgecombe Avenue, she transformed her mother's grand abode into a deluxe catering hall, the storied Dark Tower, where the best parties were always the ones she gave.
The Reception Room of the Walker Beauty Parlor, College and Spa.
Two photographs staged to show styling, care and wig making techniques in the Walker'sLelia Beauty College manual.
In reality, the Walker's clients were groomed and styled in private, curtained booths. While awaiting an appointment, one could take tea or play a hand of cards.
Drawing room, Madame C. J. Walker residence
For bedrooms and other lesser interiors, architect Vertner Tandy economically retained the configuration and old-fashioned Victorian woodwork original to the two 1890's row houses combined to form the Walker townhouse-beauty salon. However, for this space and other formal reception rooms, every component was newly built.
A grand piano, an 18th-century French tapestry fragment and an allegorical statuette were among the elegant elements of decorators, Righter & Kolb's chic decor.
Madame Walker and her daughter so admired this depiction of Terpsichore, the muse of dance and chorus, that it was moved and given place of honor in Villa Lewaro's white and gold music room
Equipped with a Chickering piano, a phonograph and serviceable, comfortable tufted-leather seat-furniture, including a platform rocking chair, the Walker's living room was meant for relaxation.
Retaining Victorian mahogany wood work, complimented by richly colored walls, the Walker living room also prominently displayed a tapestry depicting a battle scene from African history
A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom
Although the old original mantelpiece and architraves were kept here, Righter & Kolb, much like Stanford White at the Ogden Mills' estate, made them 'modern', with cream colored paint, matching the painted Louis XVI-style furniture
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured in A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom, later moved to the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
Initially disdainful of Madame Walker, as he and many were, of all women seeking political influence, Washington's rebuffs provoked Walker's equivalent of Sojourner Truth's Ain't I A Woman? speech. Learning in this way of Walker's wealth and charity, the most notable black man in America soon conceded that Madame Walker was surly the nation's foremost black woman.
Walker's retort on being discouraged from addressing the National Negro Business League Convention, over which Washington presided in 1912, might to have been etitled "And, Am I Not an Unqualified Success!?" It went in part,
“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations….I have built my own factory on my own ground...”
1928: The Dark Tower, by James Vanderzee
Already living at her 80 Edgecombe Avenue apartment by the mid-1920's, to better utilize the living space at 110 West 136th Street, A'Lelia Walker rented several rooms for private social and civic events, calling this enterprise, "The Walker Studio". At a dinner featuring spaghetti, for which she was acclaimed, Walker announced to assembled artists, who included Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurmon, and Richard Bruce Nugent, that she would inaugurate a gathering place for them, a club-tea shop. It was to be called the "Dark Tower", in reference to Countee Cullen's evocative poem. In due course a local sign painter emblazoned the drawing room walls with the Cullen poem, as well as Hughes' "The Weary Blues". Unfortunately, although a popular venue for parties hosted by the well-off, Harlem artists could neither afford the rent, nor, according to Nugent, even the price of refreshments.
Skyscraper bookcase, by Paul T. Frankl, first produced in 1924
A Viennese furniture designer and maker, an architect, painter, and writer, one of Walker's numerous acquaintances from Greenwich Village parties, Frankl contributed to the Dark Tower's decorative scheme. Both a variant of his well-known bookcase and the gold-stenciled light shade, represent his smart handiwork.
1926: A'Lelia Walker is shown in a cassock's uniform she purchased at Wanamaker's in New York, for a costume party at Webster Hall
Number 80 Edgecombe Avenue
Her mother ill, soon to die, A'Leia Walker had been about to remarry in 1919. She planned to move to a corner house she'd acquired for her new husband, Dr. Willey Wilson, at 138th Street on Strivers' Row. Even subsequent to her third failed marriage, A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy instead lived here, in a one bedroom walk-up apartment with her friend, driver and companion, Mayme White
Even Madame Walker's heiress daughter was adversely impacted by the Great Crash in 1929. Forthwith, 108-110 was leased to the city, for a much needed Harlem health clinic. A year later, it was sold outright. By 1947, the one-time home to the rollicking Dark Tower, was no more. It was replaced by a public library branch, ironically, named for A'Lelia Walker's friend, poet Countee Cullen.
How much, one dares to wonder, might it take to restore, on the outside, Vertner Tandy's elegant architecture of such rare refinement?
Masterful magnate, Madame C. J. Walker, the hair-care-beauty specialist who built the most spectacular residence ever owned by an African American in 1917: Villa Lewaro! Not for a moment was there ever the least doubt for her, as to why she was building such a showplace. Villa Lewaro was a testament as to the ability and value of African American faith and enterprize, and every black in America knew it!
Circa 1908
Circa 1910
Circa 1912
Near her life's end, Madame C. J. Walker averrrd that African Americans were a race that " has watered your soil with its tears and enriched your soil with its blood". She made an impassioned plea that lynching be outlawed, stating :
"I am asking that this government enact a law that will make mob violence and lynching a federal crime, so that our women will not be hanged from trees in Georgia while they give birth to their babes and that our sons, and our fathers, and our brothers may not be chained to the stake in Tennessee and made human torches of, and parts of their bodies dismembered and taken away as souvenirs, and their heads severed from their charred bodies and thrown into the midst of our august bodies while they are in convention assembled."
Racism, branding America's misbegotten black citizens as lazy, criminal and hedonistic, indifferent and willfully ignorant, is the height of irony. For what group, doing all the tasks no one else would do, has worked harder, or longer towards amassing our country's great wealth? Who has better undertaken and mastered all we pursue, with greater brio and originality? Which servants ever more faithfully enabled a sybaritic lifestyle for more exacting masters with discerning tastes for luxury?
Straight out of bondage some former slaves became doctors, teachers, artists and inventors. Others continued in essential, more menial tasks. Tilling the soil, refining ore, digging ditches, loading cargoes, cooking, nursing, cleaning---everything--- everywhere: We did that. Were we ever well treated or properly paid?
Today, still singled out, we disproportionately pay fines for minor infractions, and in this way and others continue to play a significant role economically. Brilliantly batting, bouncing, driving, slicing, and catching balls, blacks are the unsurpassed gladiators of today's circus. The plaintive songs of black youth, desperate to be loved and admired, exuding bravado and sensuality, wistfully expressing a yearning to be fabulous, to be free, are our national sound track. Yet who, among us, has benefited to the degree of recording studio or ball team owners?
Nothing is as unbearably frightening as blackness. So the controlling surveillance of black people, keeps employed mostly white forces of police and prison guards. From New Orleans to Detroit and beyond, blacks inhabit and give value to substandard, otherwise valueless housing. Then comes the time, when our tax dollars contribute to policies that subsidise gentrification and our dispatch. There is no more dependable TV audience than African Americans. Blacks also prodigiously consume quantities of unhealthily food and drink. Hindered, hobbled, held back, kept perpetually poor and uneducated, all we do makes others rich.
Yet for all we have done, for all we do, unrelentingly we are our nation's scapegoat. If blacks do not quite absolve the ineptitude of the man behind the curtain, reliably, African Americans are a wonderful distraction. Much as in Hitler's Germany, when Jews were systematically persecuted and denied participation in public life, ever-present ridicule and debasement in the media, literature, art, and texts, successfully served to dehumanize African Americas. Blacks were demonized to an extent that made oppression and unjustly punitive sanction accepted, as the distasteful, for some, but essential means of maintaining public order, as indeed, the means of preserving the norms of civilization.
Nowadays we face a subtler, more insidious sort of prejudice. But as the Doll Test shows, to be black in America, is to be dismissed as stupid, ugly and scary, is to be despised. My friend Adam Gopnik asserts further, that even in so enlightened a place as New York City, most comfortably-off, "Middle Class people are willing to dispense with a certain amount of civil liberty, in order to feel safe..."
In the past, political leaders such as William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and academicians like Alaine Locke, helped to stage-manage the "Negro Renaissance". A skillful propaganda campaign of the 1920's, featuring African American cultural accomplishment via dancers, painters, actors, singers, writers and musicians, it was meant to show that blacks merited equality too. 'Race women,' like Madam C. J. Walker and her daughter A'Lelia, who dubbed as the Joy Goddess of Harlem, became a great personality of this period, also worked and lived to affirm the worthiness of African Americans.
Because such efforts sadly remain necessary for black well-being and fulfilment, for black survival, it's fortunate that young intellectuals, film makers and others are at work now to challenge black defamation.
Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, is Thomas Allen Harris’s extraordinary new documentary. Produced in collaboration with pioneering photography historian Debora Willis, it is a unique examination of the way black photographers selected and represented their subjects in a way that let them use cameras as a powerful weapon to fight back against alienating stereotypes.
Thomas Allen Harris’s documentary, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, is a compelling examination of the way black photographers effected social change with prideful images
Blackbird, a new feature film made by Harlem's Patrik-Ian Polk, similarly explores how hate and alienation, particularly when internalized, can be terribly destructive. Polk's timely drama centers on a talented teenage singer troubled by adolescent conflict.
Even in a hip spot like Harlem, messages of intolerance and contempt for difference thrive. Uncontested they endanger our children, poisoning the psyche of kids who haven't even discovered who they are, with fear and self -loathing. Worse, they feed the insecurity of some and lead to harm, like the senseless murder of lovely Islan Nettles last year, that took place in broad daylight, in front of a police station.
His faith, family, and friends all dictate that he adhere to a conventional identity acceptable in the sleepy Southern Baptist hamlet where he lives. Like the rest of us, he has to learn to accept and love himself. Turmoil only comes to an end once he stops allowing others to determine who that is.
Begiling and beautiful newcomer Julian Walker, starring in Blackbird with Isaiah Washington and Mo'Nique, manifest the full diversity that enriches America.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time...James Baldwin 1963
May 25, 1911: Laura Nelson and her 15-year-old son L.D. Nelson were lynched in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. In their day, they were Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
Eager to have lynching outlawed, just prior to her death, Madame C. J. Walker pledged $5,000, then the cost of a Cadillac touring car, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's anti-lynching fund. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968
Ever-present danger of degradation, humiliation and physical harm, has long constrained the black condition. Much as in Hitler's Germany, when Jews and others were systematically persecuted and denied participation in public life, ridicule and debasement; in the media, literature, art and texts, successfully served to dehumanize African Americas to an extent that made oppression and unjust punishment, accepted as the distasteful, to some, but essential means of maintaining public order, and indeed, the norms of civilization.
A century ago Madame Walker and others faced a world in which black advancment was threatening to many. African American aspiration and assimilation were caricatured as unknowing impudence.
Today, some contend that racism has evolved, that social strife is based merely on class instead of the color of one's skin. However, as always, with a majority of African Americans experiencing disparate and inferior outcomes compared to whites, class-based biases are a distracting distinction, without difference. Too many examples of discrimination and ill-treatment toward blacks, irrespective of their education, income or attainment, exist to suggest that even now, class trumps race. Indeed, much as with charter schools, where the chosen few are better educated at the expense of the most poorly prepared-many, black success is in fact, often transformed into an indictment. Based on the evidence of the few who beat the odds, those who fail, are frequently condemned as indolent.
1902: AidaOvweton Walker's anthem of upward mobility was savagely parodied as, "A Colored Declaration of Blue Blood"
As exemplified by Madame C. J Walker, or the trendsetting Broadway artist, Aida Overton Walker, (no relation), who preformed before white socialites, British royalty and aristocrats as well as large and appreciative black audiences, Negro High Society, has always constituted a meritocracy. Ancestry per-se, apart from white ancestry, was never accorded the same importance attached to education and enterprise.
Why is it that a man, just as soon as he gets enough money, builds a house much bigger than he needs? I built a house at Akron many times larger than I have the least use for; I have another house at Miami Beach, which is also much larger than I need. I suppose that before I die I shall buy or build other houses which also will be larger than I need. I do not know why I do it – the houses are only a burden.…all my friends who have acquired wealth have big houses…Even so unostentatious a man as Henry Ford has a much bigger house at Dearborn than he really cares about. I wonder why it is …In a few cases, a big house is built just as an advertisement that one is rich; sometimes a big house is built so great entertainments may be given. But in most cases, and especially with men who have earned their own money, the house is just built and when it is done, no one quite knows why it was started…Henry Ford 1926, Men and Rubber; The Story of Business
One can usually get a pretty good result approaching history as one might an over-sized portrait by Pearlstein or a pointillist painting by Seurat. Only finding the proper perspective does apparent chaos coalesce into discernible order. This is how two observations, from different eras, written by two quite different men, converge to perfectly explain a most improbable house.
Circa 1789: West Front of Mount Vernon, by Edward Savage.
Distinguishing historical substance from symbolism is imperative. Taught that Washigton was incapable of telling a lie, that he valued liberty above all else, the life of slaves at his vast plantation, with meager rations, communal accomodation and twelve hour workdays, reveals a harsher truth.
For those who are un-knowledgeable, a cursory glance mightn't leave much of a lasting impression. For many examining the surface of things, the constituent elements, making an aesthetic evaluation, their final conclusion might be that they'd seen a conventionally 'nice' mansion, in well-kept, but not extensive grounds. They might determine that the house Sara Breedlove McWilliams Walker built at Irvington, New York, "Villa Lewaro", as nice as it is, is hardly exceptional.
But from a better-informed vantage point, the Villa Lewaro, named a National Treasure this year by the National Trust, the grandest house ever built by an African American before 1960, is something else again. Howsoever 'modest' it might appear materially, in relation to grandiose abodes built by whites; placed in context, contrasted with the isolated and unequal conditions characteristic of African American life, it is as magical as the Summer Palace of China's dowager empress, as incomparable as the court of the Sun King at Versailles.
1858: Mount Vernon by Ferdinand Richardt
By repeatedly expanding his father's existing one-and-a-half-storey farmhouse, over several decades, Washington created a structure with 11,028 square feet ! Mount Vernon dwarfed most dwellings in late 18th-century Virginia, which typically comprised one to two rooms, ranging in size from roughly 200 to 1200 square feet.
Following George Washington's death, on the eve of a new century in 1799, his beloved Mount Vernon Plantation passed on to a succession of less capable heirs overwhelmed by its costly upkeep. Martha Washington's awareness had caused her to free slaves, otherwise freed by provision of her husband's will, upon her death.
Increasingly Mount Vernon fell into disrepair after a failed attempt by Washington’s great-great nephew John A. Washington to sell it to the United States or the Virginia Commonwealth in 1853.
This prompted Ann Pamela Cunningham to establish the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which began an unprecedented national campaign to purchase Mount Vernon and preserve it as a talisman of American history. This collaborative effort of patriotic and patrician white women from the north and the south alike, formed the nexus of the United State's historic preservation movement.
Every attempt was made to sanitize the memory of our foremost founding father. Acting to transform a bastion of white America's self-entitled wealth-through-oppression, into an icon of liberty, destroying the old slave quarters became the first imperative item of business before Mount Vernon was opened to the public as a shrine.
Building one of the largest houses in Virginia, among the most commodious in the new nation, Washington had hardly sought to outdo the Dukes of Marlborough, whose house was one of the largest and grandiose in England. The Baroque masterpiece boast 175,000 square feet!
Monticello, 1769-1809 by Thomas Jefferson
Introducing the first dome on an American house, counting the cellars, Monticello has around 11,000 square feet of living space.
Ickworth, 1795-1830 designed by Mario Aspurcci, executed by Francis and Joseph Sandy, laocated at Horringer, Burry St. Edmunds. Suffolk, England
Not completed until well after the death of its builder, connoisseur collector Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol, in 1803, Ickworth, with its central rotunda and curving wings, was truly a temple of art. Monticello, by contrast, is not even as large as the servants' quarters here.
As an historian and a preservationist, one learns a good deal about where people stand, by looking at where, and how they live. A visit to historic Addisleigh Park, in Saint Albans, Queens, is a revelation. Billed as the 'suburban Sugar Hill,' in reference to black Harlem's elite address of the 1930's and 1940's, the spic-and-span community offers neat mock-Tudor and Colonial Revival houses surrounded by supremely manicured lawns. Initially met by restrictive deed covenants that prohibited the sale of property to blacks, after 1945 the enclave rapidly became home to a score of celebrities, from Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald, to Jackie Robinson, Count Basie and Joe Louis. A few houses boast double lots. Four or five even had swimming pools and tennis courts. But at best, the biggest houses here had about two-thousand square feet of space for living large.
"Hyde Park", 1895, by McKim, Mead & White
Just as America's founding fathers wasted little time attempting to emulate far richer nobles in England, neither did Madame Walker seek to 'compete' with the splendor of the nearby Frederick William Vanderbilt estate, or the even closer and equally palatial Rockefeller place, at Tarrytown. With fifty rooms comprising 44,000 square feet and two hundred acres, "Hyde Park" was one of the Hudson Valley's most notable showplaces.
Meanwhile, out in Beverly Hills, California, the largest houses of the most celebrated white stars, averaged around ten-thousand square feet. Accessing the extent of success accorded the United State's most acclaimed African Americans, it's useful to keep such observations of dramatic inequality in mind.
Despised and rejected enough, assailed by sorrows and grief, a little more than a century ago, Madame C. J. Walker surly appreciated the notion of "black rage". But as with some other subjects of outstanding success stories, she determined early on to subdue and submerge fury, translating any inner anger into a passion to succeed.
Whether with architecture or through prodigious philanthropy to black causes, paying as much attention to projecting as regal an image as any sovereign, Madam Walker utilized a saga as poignant and compelling as Lincoln's trek from a back-woods cabin to the White House. This was how she distinguished her brand from every other similar product on the market. As this ad shows, for Walker, the concept that beauty and success were synonymous was espoused as an alluring doctrine of faith.
Twenty-three years ago, Thursday, August 29, 1991, expertly edited by Yanick Rice Lamb, my article, A Mansion With Room for the Great and Humble, was published in the Home section of the New York Times. "MY great-great-grandmother meant for her four-acre estate to be a showplace for black Americans that would motivate them to realize their own dreams," related A'lelia Perry Bundles. Then a producer with ABC World News Tonight in Washington, Ms. Bundles was unknown to me. Now retired, as a philanthropist serving on the board of trustees of both Columbia University and the National Archives, my esteemed dear friend is more active and occupied than ever before.
Lincoln Family log cabin, Sinking Spring Farm, Hodgenville, Kentucky
This is reported to be the place where Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809. Seven US presidents were born in log cabins, including Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and James Buchanan. Ironically, Whig contender William Henry Harrison, the son of a Virginia planter, hardly born in a log cabin, nonetheless cynically appropriated this meager type of habitation as a symbol that he was a man of the people. Other candidates followed Harrison's example, making the idea of a log cabin, a background of modest means, a childhood spent overcoming the adversity of hard times, a recurring and classic campaign theme.
Restored and featured in innumerable pieces since 1991, Villa Lewaro is ever so slowly gaining recognition as a singular monument to the American dream. When my story appeared, even after Stanley Nelson's titanic Walker documentary, Two Dollars and a Dream appeared, this was not so.
Designed by Ventner Woodson Tandy, New York State's second registered black architect after his partner George Washinton Foster, the neo-Palladian-style structure was built at Irvington-on-Hudson between 1916 and 1918. Close at hand are other larger historic houses on more ample acreage, that were built for famed whites. Several of these, writer Washington Irving's "Sunnyside", feared robber-baron Jay Gould's "Lyndhurst," and John D. Rockefeller's "Kykuit", are all operated as house museums and opened to the public. 'Why ought not this to be the case at Madame Walker's house?', I mused after my first visit to Villa Lewaro in 1988.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, America's bicentennial anniversary year, Villa Lewaro's then-owners, Ingo and Darlene Appel, greeted me warmly and welcomed my interest. They had actually started exploring ways to make Madame Walker's house into a museum. As a result they'd engaged with several groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Madame C. J. Walker Committee of Westchester County.
A lowly log cabin has been a potent symbol of heroically-humble origins in US literature and politics since the early 19th century.
"I think the time is right now," they were told by Steve Pruitt. A government relations adviser, he was speaking on behalf of Representative Cardiss Collins of Illinois, who would introduce a bill calling for Federal funds to purchase and safeguard Villa Lewaro. Historian Alex Haley of Roots fame, Oprah Winfrey and many others concurred.
Statesman Frederic Douglas lived in this respectable dwelling with his family from 1878 until his death in 1895. It's hardly a surprise learning that the largest contributor to save "Cedar Hill" prior to it being opened to the public, came from Madame Walker
I agreed too with this splendid idea. So I was elated when a new 'Diversity Scholars' fund initiated by the Trust, picked up the tab for my airfare and hotel, enabling me to attend the nation's premiere preservation organization's annual conference at Miami Beach that autumn. This opportunity would give me a chance to ask Richard Moe, the Trust's new director, what he thought about the amorphous and tentative plans to make Madame Walker's house into a museum.
Alonzo Herndon residence, 587 University Pl., NW, Atlanta, Georgia, 1910
A former slave raised in a sharecropping family, after the Civil War Herndon owned and managed a string of barbershops. Investing profits into real estate, becoming the largest black property owner in Atlanta by 1900, Herndon next founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, to become Atlanta's first black millionaire. Maintained as a museum, W. E. B. Dubois praised Herndon’s Georgian Revival house as, ‘the finest residence in America owned by a Negro.’ At the time of this statement, naturally, Villa Lewaro had not yet been built.
"Cultural Diversity" was the conference's theme. So why had it opened on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement? The seductive local ought to have further given me pause. Why meet at Miami Beach? After local white politicians ignored recently freed Nelson Mandela durring his seven-city tour of America, black civil rights activists instituted a 1,000-day boycott against the local convention and tourism business. African American groups refusing to hold meetings or to book group tours in the region, meant an eventual loss of more than $50 million.
Still I stayed, undeterred, and had my chance to question Mr. Moe. Perfectly pleasant, he answered politely,
"Under my tenure, I intend to lead the trust out of the business of collecting and opening the houses of the rich. We're past that..."
Protests that it might be a fine idea, once the Trust saved and showed at least one rich person's house that had not been built by a white Christian man, were to no avail.
Number 1048 Simpson Road, (now Joseph E. Boone Boulevard ), Atlanta, Georgia, erected 1926 by the African American Aiken & Faulkner Construction Co. located on Auburn Avenue: demolished 1962
In 1926, the year he built this house, Theodore "Tiger" Flowers, famed as the "Fighting Georgia Deacon" became the first black boxer to win the world middleweight championship. Less than a year later, cheated out of his title in a rigged bout, in November 1927, at thirty-two, Flowers died. He died in Harlem, undergoing surgery to remove scar tissue above his eye. His magnificent house, featuring a plaster bas relief of a tiger's head above the drawing room door, was demolished in 1962
I'm in agreement with the stellar biographer Jean Strouse; no fabricated story can ever match history for drama, the unexpected, or valuable instruction. So I'm still convinced that Richard Moe's response to being cornered and confronted with a proposal that the Trust find some way to acquire Villa Lewaro, was shortsighted, a missed opportunity. For what an inspirational and encouraging tale can be told, examining the house that Madame Walker built.
Stylishly of its time, even the house architect-to-the-stars, Paul Revere Williams built for himself in Los Angeles, in 1951, fails to approach the opulence of Villa Lewaro
"Villa Lewaro was", A'Lelia Bundles says, "a symbol of what my great-great-grandmother termed 'the wealth of business possibilities within the race to point to young Negroes what a lone woman can accomplish and to inspire them to do big things.' "
Ms. Bundles's portrait of her ancestor is titled On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker. Published by Scribner's in 2001, it quickly became a national bestseller. How superbly A'Lelia Bundles un-spools the saga. How affectingly it resonates, as part primer, part cautionary tale. What is it that makes it so moving and so timeless? This is a question that's answered easily enough. For all the nuanced specificity of Madame Walker's distinctly American life, an incessant journey seeking truth and meaning, bravely facing defeat and boldly tracking down triumph: her story is universal, too.
Adamantly a 'race woman', Madam Walker was hardly deterred by condescension; neither from whites who disdained her very presence, nor from elitist blacks who felt past poverty and deficient education made her unacceptable. In America, wealth seldom hurts. But Madame Walker's assets exceeded wealth alone. This was why Booker T. Washington, who initially tried to thwart her ambitions as a civil rights activist, had ended by becoming her friend.
Supporting the burgeoning National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's agenda of empowerment, eager to benefit from the growing circulation of Du Bois' The Crisis, Walker signed on as one of the magazine's earliest advertisers, advising potential customers in a half-page ad: "Your hair will not be beautiful unless it is healthy."
In 1917, following yet another unwarranted assault of blacks by whites, this time in East St. Louis, Walker and James Weldon Johnson were in a small delegation sent to the White House, pleading with President Woodrow Wilson to make lynching a federal crime.
"We should protest until the American sense of justice is so aroused that such affairs as the East St. Louis riot be forever impossible,"
Walker said.
On July 28, heeding Walker's exhortation, the N.A.A.C.P. staged a "Silent Protest" parade in New York that attracted 8,000 participants marching in silence to the staccato tattoo of drums up Fifth Avenue, arm-in-arm, dressed in white, they did then, what people in Freguson, Missouri are still doing today.
The protest was organized by the Rev. Dr. Hutchens Chew Bishop; the rector of St. Philip's Episcopal Church. In the same year the NAACP was founded, St. Philip's vestry, made up of some of the city's most distinguished African American residents, had sold their church building on West 25th Street.
By 1911 they completed a new Neo-Gothic-style church, at 214 West 134th Street, also designed by architect Vertner Woodson Tandy, in partnership with Cooper Union-trained, George Washington Foster the first African American architect lisenced in New York State . At the same time, eager to participate in the creation of a black Mecca at Harlem, St. Philip's acquired ten six-storey new-law tenement buildings at
107-145 West 135th Street. Costing $640,000, these apartments where filled with white occupants, who were evicted to make way for blacks. This action was envisioned as an investment that would generously endow the 'nation's richest colored church' for generations to come. By far the transaction was the most extensive, involving black capital, up until that date. Currently valued at 20 times their appraisal in 1910, these structures now belong to the Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund, which plans to make them both environmentally friendly and affordable.
Confined to her bed due to failing health, on May 5, 1919, a critically-ill Madame Walker sent word to the NAACP's Anti-Lynching Conference at Carnegie Hall:
She would pledge $5,000 to the group's efforts to combat mob violence. This largest pledge the Association had ever received created a sensation. Madame Walker's announcement electrified 2,500 assembled delegates, inspiring over the course of the convention, primarily from black delegates, $4,400 in additional pledges. Three weeks later, on May 25, says her great-great-granddaughter and biographer A'Lelia Bundles, Walker died at her imposing estate at Irvington-on-Hudson, Villa Lewaro.
Reading of her earlier travels as a sales person, to Cuba, the Caribbean, and in Central America, one marvels at Madame Walker's stamina. Attempting to follow her cross-country progress from Mississippi to St. Louis, to Denver, to Pittsburgh, before settling and building her factory in Indianapolis, Indiana, all in the space of less than a decade, is downright exhausting. Walker's Vegetable Shampoo, Wonderful Hair Grower, Temple Grower, Glossine and a prepairation called Tan-Off, the inevitable skin bleach, were produced at the Mme. C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company factory in Indianapolis. In response to orders cases were shipped for distribution by a wide network of sales agents and beauticians. The arrangement worked wonderfully for Madame Walker. Reportedly, she was happy living in Indianapolis as well. Why then, did she leave?
How adroit, for Vertner Tandy, Madame C. J. Walker and her daughter, A'Lelia Walker Robinson, to do just what whites would have maintained they were incapable of. Employing what a century ago was regarded as the epitome of "good taste", exercising disciplined restraint, they used Charlston's renowned Nathaniel Russell house and Boston buildings built from the 1790's through the early 1800's as the model for their hybrid Walker townhouse-salon, that combined home and business long before it was ever considered at Bergdorf-Goodman or Elizabeth Arden.
Ambition and opportunity were half of what had moved her. Her only child, Lelia was the other part of the equation. The woman who became famous as A'Lelia Walker always came first where her mother was concerned. Frequently she was cross about her extravagance, yet, repeatedly, Madame Walker indulged her child. She was also ambitious for Lelia, for whom she desired to provide all that she had missed, including Paris hats, travel abroad and an education. That rarest of rarities, a Negro heiress, her mother was right to fear that some would attempt to take advantage of her daughter. However, her daughter also made Madame Walker proud. Neither possessing the requisite fragility, fair skin, or delicate features to be regarded as a beauty in her day, tall and statuesquely handsome Lelia always made an impressive, even a striking appearance. Moreover, true intelligence and common sense underlay Lelia's impulsiveness and occasional self-indulgence. Always, not unlike Sportin Life in Porgey n' Bess, the bright lights and good times of the big city beckoned alluringly to Madame Walker's child. In 1913 she had bade her mother to relocate with her to the new Negro 'promised land' of Harlem, a quarter with as many dance halls, cabarets and salons as churches, hundreds! The women attending church and bars mightn't be the same women, but Lelia pointed out, that all hundred thousand wanted to get their hair done before they went there.
So off to Harlem they ventured. According to historian Christopher Gray, in 1913 and 1915 Madam Walker bought two old-style brownstones at 108 and 110 West 136th Street. In 1915 she filed plans to completely rebuild the two houses as one and give them a new front, in the same way that many midtown and East Side rowhouses were being reconstructed
Window in blind arch at the Nathaniel Russell house
On the second floor, the main level of Madame Walker's residence. drawings show a double-size drawing room stretching the full width of the building. Three "chambres" occupied the remainder of the second floor. A billiard room and other additional bedrooms were found on the third floor.
When the Walkers next decided to build a country house, neighbors were horrified, first seeing 'the dressed up Negresses with their comically aloof airs in a chauffeur-driven automobile' pull up. But her white lawyer had secured the deed for Villa Lewaro's acreage, fair and square!
Ultimately, devising a combination residence-spa-beauty salon-school for the Walkers, Vertner Tandy took his cue from the townhouse of Percy Rivington Pyne, II, Esquire. Bowing to the Federal style prevailing during the early republic, it is a picture of WASP decorum and rectitude. Planned by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1911, it stands on the north-west corner of Park Avenue, at 68th Street, serving as the Americas Society.
Madam C. J. Walker's business acumen was prodigious. Living large, projecting as fabulous an image and aura as she could afford, she appreciated that this was a shrewd advertising strategy. Her distinguished 108-110 West 136th Street beauty salon-residence was designed by black architect Vertner Woodson Tandy.
By combining her home and business in two converted brownstone houses, made into a single building, Tandy maximized the grandeur of both.
Madame C. J. Walker's residence, numbers 108-110 West 136th Street, with the Walker chauffeur-driven Lincoln touring car.
Once A'Lelia Walker moved to a one-bedroom apartment at 80 Edgecombe Avenue, she transformed her mother's grand abode into a deluxe catering hall, the storied Dark Tower, where the best parties were always the ones she gave.
The Reception Room of the Walker Beauty Parlor, College and Spa.
Two photographs staged to show styling, care and wig making techniques in the Walker'sLelia Beauty College manual.
In reality, the Walker's clients were groomed and styled in private, curtained booths. While awaiting an appointment, one could take tea or play a hand of cards.
Drawing room, Madame C. J. Walker residence
For bedrooms and other lesser interiors, architect Vertner Tandy economically retained the configuration and old-fashioned Victorian woodwork original to the two 1890's row houses combined to form the Walker townhouse-beauty salon. However, for this space and other formal reception rooms, every component was newly built.
A grand piano, an 18th-century French tapestry fragment and an allegorical statuette were among the elegant elements of decorators, Righter & Kolb's chic decor.
Madame Walker and her daughter so admired this depiction of Terpsichore, the muse of dance and chorus, that it was moved and given place of honor in Villa Lewaro's white and gold music room
Equipped with a Chickering piano, a phonograph and serviceable, comfortable tufted-leather seat-furniture, including a platform rocking chair, the Walker's living room was meant for relaxation.
Retaining Victorian mahogany wood work, complimented by richly colored walls, the Walker living room also prominently displayed a tapestry depicting a battle scene from African history
A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom
Although the old original mantelpiece and architraves were kept here, Righter & Kolb, much like Stanford White at the Ogden Mills' estate, made them 'modern', with cream colored paint, matching the painted Louis XVI-style furniture
A bust of educator Booker T. Washington of the type pictured in A'Lelia Walker's 136th Street bedroom, later moved to the Villa Lewaro living room mantelpiece
Initially disdainful of Madame Walker, as he and many were, of all women seeking political influence, Washington's rebuffs provoked Walker's equivalent of Sojourner Truth's Ain't I A Woman? speech. Learning in this way of Walker's wealth and charity, the most notable black man in America soon conceded that Madame Walker was surly the nation's foremost black woman.
Walker's retort on being discouraged from addressing the National Negro Business League Convention, over which Washington presided in 1912, might to have been etitled "And, Am I Not an Unqualified Success!?" It went in part,
“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations….I have built my own factory on my own ground...”
1928: The Dark Tower, by James Vanderzee
Already living at her 80 Edgecombe Avenue apartment by the mid-1920's, to better utilize the living space at 110 West 136th Street, A'Lelia Walker rented several rooms for private social and civic events, calling this enterprise, "The Walker Studio". At a dinner featuring spaghetti, for which she was acclaimed, Walker announced to assembled artists, who included Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurmon, and Richard Bruce Nugent, that she would inaugurate a gathering place for them, a club-tea shop. It was to be called the "Dark Tower", in reference to Countee Cullen's evocative poem. In due course a local sign painter emblazoned the drawing room walls with the Cullen poem, as well as Hughes' "The Weary Blues". Unfortunately, although a popular venue for parties hosted by the well-off, Harlem artists could neither afford the rent, nor, according to Nugent, even the price of refreshments.
Skyscraper bookcase, by Paul T. Frankl, first produced in 1924
A Viennese furniture designer and maker, an architect, painter, and writer, one of Walker's numerous acquaintances from Greenwich Village parties, Frankl contributed to the Dark Tower's decorative scheme. Both a variant of his well-known bookcase and the gold-stenciled light shade, represent his smart handiwork.
1926: A'Lelia Walker is shown in a cassock's uniform she purchased at Wanamaker's in New York, for a costume party at Webster Hall
Number 80 Edgecombe Avenue
Her mother ill, soon to die, A'Leia Walker had been about to remarry in 1919. She planned to move to a corner house she'd acquired for her new husband, Dr. Willey Wilson, at 138th Street on Strivers' Row. Even subsequent to her third failed marriage, A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy instead lived here, in a one bedroom walk-up apartment with her friend, driver and companion, Mayme White
Even Madame Walker's heiress daughter was adversely impacted by the Great Crash in 1929. Forthwith, 108-110 was leased to the city, for a much needed Harlem health clinic. A year later, it was sold outright. By 1947, the one-time home to the rollicking Dark Tower, was no more. It was replaced by a public library branch, ironically, named for A'Lelia Walker's friend, poet Countee Cullen.
How much, one dares to wonder, might it take to restore, on the outside, Vertner Tandy's elegant architecture of such rare refinement?
The trek from Reconstruction, to the dawning of the "The New Negro" and the "Negro Renaissance," had been one long sojourn, from far away. One sometimes wonders, having been treated as bestial, or as child-like property, just how did former slaves and their young, learn to live and think and thrive in the world; to be human again, like our ancestors? Most of all one is filled with wonderment, that so many who started as field hands, accomplished so much.
Sara Breedlove, born December 23, 1867, to sharecroppers, Owen and Minerva Breedlove, had a youth filled with hardship. Her girlhood home, a ramshackle cabin at Delta, Louisiana, lay just across the Mississippi from the bustling port of Vicksburg. Her parents and siblings were slaves on Madison Parish Plantation owned by Robert W. Burney. Alone among them, her parents, sister and five brothers, Sara was born 'free'. Orphaned at the age of six, her sister and her sister's husband, Willie Powell, had taken her in. At age fourteen, she married a much older Moses McWilliams, a move motivated in part, out of eagerness to escape the cruelty of her wicked brother-in-law. Her daughter Lelia McWilliams (A'Lelia Walker) was born three years later. Only twenty, Mrs. McWilliams' husband died, prompting a move to St. Louis where three of her brothers lived, working as barbers. What limitations women endured. Black women, like black gay men, constituted a 'double negative.' The Widow McWilliams' brothers were barbers, but she could only manage to obtain employment as a lowly washer woman. Yet it was in this capacity, as a laundress, that she was exposed to luxury at an early age: her arduous work took her inside some of the South's most stately houses.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Mr. Bedford was president of Corn Products Refining Co. and a director of the Standard Oil Co.
Long after her escape from poverty, Madame Walker enthralled audiences with her recollections of perseverance and faith. She would recall how she had asked herself while laboring over a washtub: "What are you going to do when your back gets stiff and you are old? Who is going to look after your little girl?"
She said the answer came in a dream in which a secret hair-conditioning formula was revealed to her. This had all occurred with the World's Fair as a backdrop, circa 1905. Not long after she became a sales agent, offering products on commission for African American hair care entrepreneur Annie Malone, she also remarried. Charles Joseph Walker was a Denver newspaper advertising salesman.
Walker wasted no time in persuading his wife to go into business for herself. Paralleling Helena Rubinstein, as Madam C. J. Walker, she trained other women, working for her, to become "beauty culturists" and as she had done, and to master the art of selling. Traveling throughout the southern and eastern United States with her husband, Madame Walker rapidly expanded her business. Once Walker became complacent and self-satisfied, his wife reluctantly left him behind.
Retaining the name her hard work had made into a brand, Madame Walker was inspired by the model of the National Association of Colored Women, to organize her sales agents into local and state clubs. By 1917 she convened her first annual conference of the Madam Walker Beauty Culturists in Philadelphia.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Especially impressed by two nearly identical country houses near New York, Tandy adopted their design with only slight modifications. At Villa Lewaro, for instance, he used the simpler Ionic order in place of Composite columns with fluted shafts
Already providing black women with something difficult to imagine, interesting work with good pay, that allowed creativity, and an alternative to the limited options of nursing, prostitution, teaching or domestic service, she now gave more. Prizes were awarded, but not only to the women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new sales agents. Those who had contributed the most to charity and to their communities, were rewarded as well.
Walker's business instincts were brilliant: she realized that black women, while welcoming a way to adapt their hair to the prevailing fashion, were nevertheless proud of their racial identity. She always advertised her hair straightener as a "hair grower." Through Walker College, she offered opportunities that not only increased company profits but trained hundreds of women to take control of their destinies.
Edward T. Bedford estate, by Montrose Morris, 1910, Green's Farms, Connecticut.
Villa Rosa Terrace, S. Z. Puli residence by Brown & Von Beren, 1914, Woodmont, Conneticut
Italian immigrant Sylvester Zefferino Poli a theater magnate associated with William Fox in the Lowe’s-Poli theater chain, started out sculpting wax figures for sensational and historic displays. Named for his wife, their waterfront estate consisted of the main house, and ten cottages deeded to five children
How slightly Vertner Tandy seems to have bothered to differentiate Villa Lewaro from the two nearby sources of inspiration he found illustraited in architectural journals
Circa 1928: Villa Lewaro, the Irvington, New York 20,000 square feet country house of Madam C. J. Walker, from 1918 to 1919. Walker is believed to be the first African American woman self-made millionaire, through the manufacture and sale of hair care and beauty products, made expressly for blacks.
Circa 1923: Villa Lewaro.
Constructed just after the Walker townhouse, between 1916 and 1918, Madam Walker's country retreat cost an estimated $250,000, a vast fortune at a time when the average wage for a black New Yorker was only $800 yearly. The name Villa Lewaro was coined by a visitor and friend, Enrico Caruso. It was derived from the first two letters of each word in Lelia Walker Robinson's name.
Were one Jewish a century ago, chances are that attempting to move into a neighborhood that was not already substantially Jewish, would meet with resistance. Blacks were more fortunate, in one tiny paticular. For Negros, there was little fear of restrictive deed covenants, that prohibited the sell, or even a future sell, sometimes into perpetuity, to a Colored person. The common supposition was that Negros could not afford to buy property in nice neighborhoods. For all practical purposes, this was all too true.
Unlike most mansions on the Hudson, which sit like castles on the Rhine, Villa Lewaro is best seen from Broadway, the main street of Irvington. A two-storey semicircular portico dominates the street facade.
Circa 1949
In the 1980's the huge trees that first attracted Mme. Walker saved the house from a developer who wanted to erect condominiums. A tree ordinance protected the property.
The Villa Lewaro mansion Vertner Tandy designed for Madame Walker in exclusive Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, started to be restored in the 1980s by Ingo Appel. In the following decade this comendable undertaking was completed by Harold Doley, shown here with his wife Alma and their son. A native of New Orleans, Mr. Doley was the first black to buy an individual seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
Madame C. J. Walker's bid to live in Irvington-On-Hudson, near Livingstons, Goulds and Rockefellers, was in fact her second try at locating where the action was, in the very midst of the country's most affluent whites. In the New York Times, March 25, 1916, it was announced that Mrs. C. J. Walker, through Samuel A. Singerman, her lawyer, had acquired "Bishop's Court". The price was given as around $40,000. Vertner Tandy filed plans for a house not so different from Villa Lewaro, but missing the graceful semi-elliptical portico. Madame Walker's entre into sacred precincts had commenced. Or had it?
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
2011: Villa Lewaro, the porte cochere. Tandy's triumphal arch-like shelter for protection from the weather when alighting from or entering an automobile, is topped off by a sleeping porch and balcony
Like the would-be buyer, the seller of the "old English design, brick and timber house", set on a plot, 200 X 300 feet, was also black. Most unusual! His house was located at the North East corner of State and North Pine Streets, in an exclusive section of Flushing. Born in Antigua, in 1843, the Right Rev. William B. Derrick had a white Scottish father and a black Caribbean-born mother. According to his Times obituary, in 1913, educated in England, this African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion prelate's jurisdiction included the West Indies, South America and the Islands Beyond the Seas. For this reason the renowned preacher was much involved outside the US, in setting up churches in Panama for blacks working to dig the canal, for instance. Having rushed back from Britain to enlist in the Civil War, becoming sought after as a king-maker, able to reliably rally Negros to vote for Republicans, he was rather busy at home as well. "Bishop's Court" was his reward for a well-lived, sober life. White residents had certainly not welcomed his arrival around 1896. They had felt powerless indeed to prevent it. Over the years his sedate style of living had caused them to thank providence that it had not been worse. They were however, not about to take the same risk to property and propriety twice. All were determined, the Negro, former wash woman, from the west, was not to be admitted to their community. A reprise almost occurred at Irvington. But this time, Tandy did not produce drawing until after the deed was recorded.
Madame Walker's ambitious mansion was designed by Striver's Row resident,Vertner Woodson Tandy. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Tandy studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He finished his studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., where he was one of seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first black college fraternity. He was also the first black to pass the military commissioning exam, and eventually became a major in the New York National Guard.
Following his partner George W. Foster, Tandy would become New York’s second black registered architect, and the first black member of the American Institute of Architects. Apart from Madame Walker's two houses, among many alterations to existing buildings, he designed St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Sadly, among his oeuvre, he only planned about ten additional houses, most of which have been greatly changed or destroyed.
Vertner Tandy died in 1949 at age 64.
Villa Lewaro, which Madame Walker built as a country house, was Tandy's "masterpiece," said Roberta Washington, a Harlem architect, who discusses his career in depth in her forthcoming history of African American architects who practiced in New York State over the past century. "Yes, his work is derivative. He copied other people. Most designers did and do. But, just look at that novel way he introduced a light well, for the basement kitchen. The big terrace completely obscures the servants' area downstairs, giving them lots of light and air and privacy at the same time. That's good design in my book."
Circa 1924: Durring the blaze of a 1920's summer, from Villa Lewaro's palm decked terrace, the Hudson might as well to have flowed into the Mederterainian.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
From Villa Lewaro's garden elevation, where an elevator bulkhead seems to have been added to the roof-line, three terraces step down to the swimming pool. Very few houses had swimming pools as early as Villa Lewaro.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
Set at the center of a hedge-enclosed sunken garden, that swimming pool at the Walker estate originally was lined with black masonry, enabling it to effectively act as a decorative reflecting pool too. Taken in the midst of a festive house party, this photograph shows brightly colored paper lanterns strung down the center of the garden.
Circa 1926: Villa Lewaro, the sunken garden and pool.
In addition to having a dark interior, the pool boasted a setting resplendent with perennials planted in herbaceous borders in raised beds, retained by bolder walls, that embowered guests with blooms and fragrance
Today the pool's raised borders at Villa Lewaro only have grass
A pergola, with a curving center bay once framing the river view, has been restored. As to the dramatic prospect of shimmering water that the Walkers were so justly proud of , that has long ago vanished behind the dense foliage of untended trees
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Boh
The Window punched into the side of Villa Lewaro's upper terrace, indicates Madame Walker's gymnasium, while the archway leads into the kitchen light well and a service entrance.
Surmounted by a colonnaded pergola, the lowest terrace at Villa Lewaro was economically and beautifully constructed from rubble stones excavated on the property.
Courtesy Historic New England/ Photo by David Bol
Madame Walker's ample garage at the edge of the property, provided extra accomodation for staff outside of the main house's top floor and basment.
1918: The Living Hall, or living room. Vertner Tandy's trabeated ceiling, as much as Righter & Kolb's custom-designed furniture, combined to give Villa Lewaro an authentic Renaissance atmosphere
Aurora: Apollo in his chariot proceeded by Dawn, after Guido Reni, 1613-1614.
Even as a 19th century copy, this masterful Mannerist painting, reproducing a grand fresco with its vivid disonant color harmony, never failed to make an impact on Villa Lewaro visitors
Skillfully devised by Tandy to facilitate flexibility when entertaining, the reception rooms grouped on the first floor of Villa Lewaro easily flow one into the next. Alternately offering a relatively open combined envelope, or more compartmentalized spaces, it is the ultimate gala party setting
Manufactured by Grand Rapids' Berkey & Gay Furniture Co., the center table in Villa Lewaro's living room was based on 16th-century originals, like this example owned by great architect Stanford White
Two steps down, entry into the living room from the entrance hall was planned so that the arrival of each new guest joining a group, could be clearly observed.
At pains to have a marble staircase, with all the splendor this implies, Tandy cut corners for Madame Walker, by providing a machine-forged metal balustrade, as opposed to a more expensive one, hand wrought from iron
Provided a needlework-covered Louis XIV-style rocking chair, Villa Lewaro's welcoming fireside, was immediately adjacent to a pierced grill of the Estey organ's sounding chamber. The table lamp has a pierced brass Middle Eastern-style shade, glittering with glass jewels and beaded fring. Lighted, it must have added as much ambiance, with its pattern of colored shadows, as the sonorous music
Flower-form Arts and Crafts andirons gracing the living room's Renaissance-style hooded mantelpiece, made of 'cast stone.' On the mantle shelf, Booker T. Washington's bust holds pride-of-place with two vases, formed from World War I German shell canisters, made of copper and silver loving cups, which attested to Madame Walker's generous philanthropy.
The eclectic decor of Villa Lewaro was devised by Frank R. Smith, who apearently was employed by Righter & Kolb. The formal reception rooms, which open into one another along a straight line, form a series of contrasting areas. Neo-Renaissance in style, the great hall-living room and the barrel-vaulted dining room originally had furniture custom-made by Brekey & Gay. The Louis XV-style music room still retains an Estey player-pipe organ with speaker ducts, which let music be heard throughout the house.
Villa Lewaro's decorator, Frank R. Smith of Righter & Kolb, had previously appointed Walker's Harlem townhouse. As the rendering above shows, his ideas for decorating Villa Lewaro, sometimes were more lavish than Madame Walker was willing to pay for
Thirty other rooms included accommodations for eight servants and as many guests, a nursery, billiard room, gymnasium and laundry.
As for so many other builders of pleasure domes, it was all over rather quickly. Madame Walker died in 1919. Her daughter found the role of Lady Bountiful somewhat confining. Villa Lewaro was for her a less stimulating environment than Harlem.
But when duty beckoned, the house was the backdrop for a party: Lady Mountbatten, Richard Bruce Nugent, Walker beauty-parlor girls and Pullman porters were all welcomed. In the 1920's A'Lelia Walker also let the house be used as a location for the black silent-movie classic "Secret Sorrow."
Even prior to A'Lelia Walker-Robinson-Wilson-Kennedy's death in 1931, an effort had been made to 'unload' costly-to-maintain Villa Lewaro. Two much-discussed auctions of its contents were staged. In December of 1930, veteran dealer Benjamin Wise, with his force of black salesmen, conducted the first. It lasted three days. "White Buyers Strip Villa", screamed Harlem's Amsterdam New, newspaper, expressing something of the loss and heartache ordinary blacks felt, learning the news. A'Lelia's ormolu-mounted grand piano, Persian carpets, a French tapestry, a large spinach jade table lamp, beautifully bound sets of books, from a deluxe bible to the multi-volume memoirs of Casanova----all went under the hammer and were knocked down for a paltry $58,500! In light of prices payed to obtain these precious objects, just a little more than a decade earlier, this indeed represented pennies on the dollar. But, all things considered, this was not such a bad result. Things went to hell in America after the debacle of November, 1929. Art and antique collectors once worth hundreds of millions, men like William Randolph Hearst or Clarence McKay, were forced to dispose of their treasures at department stores, for what really amounted to bargain basement prices, as well. In Newport, the ultra exclusive seaside summer resort, things were no better than at Irvington. "Marble House"was the palatial 'cottage' of Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who as Mrs. Willie K. Vanderbilt had been the first social leader to divorce and remarry without sanction. Her 'cottage' is said to have cost $11,000,000.00 at the start of the 1890's! This is unlikely inasmuch as, well before the crash Mrs. Belmont challenged a property tax assessment based on a nearly $700,000.00 valuation. Indignant, she countered that around $400,000.00 was closer to the true value. Naturally, making this claim, she did not include the sumptuous contents of Marble House. Yet when she sold the four acre property in 1932, the house, lock, stock and barrel went for just a little over $100,000.00.
Courtesy of Half Pudding, Half Sause
1932
Even so, at Villa Lewaro, sufficient unsold remnants from six china dinner service, several sets of glassware, and other furnishings remained unsold to form the basis of a collection of Walker heirlooms that bring these figures to life, more vividly than anything that one could write.
Once A'Lelia passed away, Villa Lewaro was bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which sold it in 1932 to the Annie E. Poth home for aged members of the Companions of the Forest in America, a fraternal organization. Under their care it remained largely intact for the next 50 years.
The Annie Poth Home was a refuge for the widows and orphans of the Frinds of the Forest Fraternal Society for over fifty years.
Villa Lewaro, the living room in recent years
1918: The vaulted dining room. Tablets among the ceiling's arabesque include the coupling of what appear to be a pair of same-sex lovers?
A trumpet-shaped "brilliant cut' glass vase of the type seen on the Villa Lewaro sideboard, in the view above.
Breaking with tradition, this silver flatware once owned by Madame Walker, was engraved with her second husband's initails
Table linen, owned by A'Lelia Walker, 'corectly' bears the monogram, AWR, for A'Lelia Walker Robinson
Robust cast plaster cornucopia fittingly ornament Villa Lewaro's dining room
Villa Lewaro, dinning room in recent years
Villa Lewaro, the library
1904: The East Room at the White House offerd inspiration for Villa Lewaro's music room and many other ballrooms, private and publi: earning for its designers the new name of "McKim, White & Gold"
Circa1920: The Music Room
After her mother died A'Lelia Walker replaced the music rooms conventional Steinway piano for one with an 'art case' in the Louis XV mode, mounted in ormolu. These gilded ornamental articulations caused her Peck-Hardman & Co. instrument to be named 'the gold piano'. In the 1930 sale it fetched only $450.00
A gilded harp of the type found at Villa Lewaro
Circa 1920: Righter & Kolb were so exacting, that in Villa Lewaro's music room even the Victrola phonograph had its cabinet customised. It was painted with pastoral scenes in keeping with the rooms Watteauesque Lunettes and Louis XV sensibility. In 1930 it brought around $46.00
WHAT WAS A NEF?
A nef was an extravagant ship-shaped table ornament centerpiece and container used in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance. Quite rarely made of glass, usually they were elaborately fashioned from silver, silver-gilt, or gold and often enameled and jewel-encrusted, Nefs were placed in front of the most important person at table as a mark of their status. When not just used for decoration, it might hold salt, spices, napkins, cutlery or even wine. For this reason some nefs had wheels to allow them to be rolled from one end of the table to the other, but most had legs or stood on pedestals.
Posed, poised and privileged alongside a graceful bureau plat, raffinée A’Lelia Walker, gowned in dark lace, looks every bit the pampered heiress. Most extraordinary among the accoutrements lending this scene such élan, is her repousse silver nef, a fantastic object with billowing sails and a large crew of minute hands, each exquisitely differentiated from the next. Most likely a late 19th-century copy of a late 16th-century example made in Augsburg, even these command $20,000.00 and more nowadays
Circa 1930: A'Lelia Walker sits in a Louis XV-style bergere beside a porcelain kater on a porcelain pedestal. Behind her is a Louis XIV-style clock of great presence. Like the clocks above and below, it was made to seem to be a timepiece in a nebulous of clouds amidst which puti play, resting on a terminal plinth, overlain with gilt bronze arabesque and festoons. Instead, it is a tall case or grandfather's clock, the ormolu-mounted center panel, opening to reveal the pendulum and weights.
Villa Lewaro's grand clock was a copy of the celebrated model made circa 1785 and attributed to Jean-Henri Riesener, now in the Louvre
Villa Lewaro's $25,000 Estey Pipe organ
As with many others who gain great riches, the Walkers set great store by quality. The best, the brightest, the biggest, ever held great appeal for them. Universally, the millionaire of 100 years ago esteemed the ultimate status symbol of a hone pipe organ. Largest and most complex of musical instruments, organs traditionally had only been found in churches and royal palaces. Then, in the mid-19th century, organs started to be installed in houses of the well-to-do. Certainly the music was soothing, but so too must have been knowledge that home organs cost as much as, and sometimes more than, an ordinary houses!
The Estey Organ Company, founded in 1852, went on to become the largest manufacturer of organs in the nation, with customers besides Madame Walker, including Henry Ford. Automatic player devices provided those who could afford them with a self-playing organ identified an elite among the elite.
The Greek Slave 1848, Parian ware figutine by England's Minton's Pottery works. Parian, Minton's name for 'statuary porcelain', alludes to the white marble from the Greek isle, Paros.
The Greek Slave is a marble in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Ostensibly it is merely a Grecian maiden, enslaved by Turks. But a cross and locket, amid the drapery, make it clear that she is a Christian, and betrothed. Powers intention was that one see her suffering, as transcendent, raised above outward degradation. Innate purity and force of character bestow on her an uncompromising virtue that cannot be shamed. Many viewers on the eve of civil war, drew parallels between The Greek Slave and African American slaves in the South, with some abolitionists adopting the work, which was widely reproduced in ceramic reductions like Madame Walker's, as symbol. Compared with "the Virginian Slave", it was the subject of a John Greeleaf Whittier poem, inspiring as well a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Lucy Stone, stopping to admire the statue broke into tears. For her it was emblematic of male misogyny. Thereafter, Stone included women's rights issues in her speeches.
A bust of Beethoven like the one atop Madame Walker's organ console
Circa 1935
2012
1995
From the music room, through the door into the Villa Lewaro solarium, can be glimpsed stained glass windows added to make the demilune space into a chapel
Circa 1935
1919: A Villa Lewaro bedroom
Villa Lewaro's master bedroom today
Madame Walker initiated a dynasty, ambitious, socially conscious, bright, black and proud. A'Lelia Bundles part in the ensuing line of succession has been varied; filled with recognition and rewards for a groundbreaking career as a TV journalist, and that's quite wonderful. Work for which she will most be remembered is quite different. One rarely grows rich writing history. But doing what A'Lelia has done and continues to do, with unstinting care and craft, one is granted the consolation of immortality!
Receiving such a warm reception with On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madame C. J. Walker, A'Lelia Bundles is continuing as she started. She is in the final stages of rewriting, polishing her manuscript, well beyond the the superficial degree that others might. She is a perfectionist, like Walker women before her, and so will not be satisfied until her dulcet prose shines forth like a diamond.
Once she has finished, we will learn about all sorts of things long the cause of wonder. Was A'Lelia Walker's first husband, John Robinson, the hotel waiter, really the love of her life? Or, notwithstanding three tries tying the knot, was she also gay, like a score of her best friends, like several of her set who also married persons with a different gender than theirs?
We already know, that due to her industry, networking skills and keen instincts, that much of the success of the Walker Company was due to A'Lelia Walker. But far more awaits us, because once A'Lelia Bundles has completed her task, metaphorically, but still most magically, she will take us by the hand to the much changed world and times of her namesake. Guiding us into our recent history , like Dicken's spirit in A Christmas Carol, with but a touch of her gown, we'll be transported. Revealed will be a world familiar and foreign. Most surprisingly, we'll discover, that like our epoch, like our lives, it was hardly all bad, that many things were quite wonderful in fact. More amazing still, going back in time, communing with her people, our people, proud, prepared, purposeful and black, we will discover in them, those who have gone before us, our own wonderful selves.
Circa 1912: Madame C. J. Walker by Addison Scurlock
Like remarkable historians who have come before, whether Stephen Birmingham, who wrote Certain People, David Levering Lewis, the author of When Harlem was in Vogue, or Gerrie Major, who penned Black Society, A'Lelia Bundles is engaged in establishing a legacy too.
2013
It is all like the birthday party a minor royal prince staged for his beloved daughter and only child, a century or so ago.The widespread gardens where the event was celebrated were strewn with an endless, but tangled length of silken ribbon. The beginning was placed in the girl's expectant hand and she followed it, until she came upon a pile of rose petals. Hidden at the bottom she discovered a diamond ring. Uphill and down, the ribbon continued. Intermittently it led to new hiding spots, each revealing its bijoux; from necklace to bracelets, from rubies, to emeralds, the connection continued, with each new discovery, more precious than the last.
After A'Lelia Bundles, perhaps Nichelle Gainer is our most recent precious prize? For her wonderful blog posts have already let us know just how marvelous her soon-to-be delivered book, Vintage Black Glamour is certain to be.
Ca. 1913: Incomparable A'Lelia Walker
Circa 1919: A'Lelia Walker by Addison Scurlock
1911: Turban with Egret aigrette and turquoise jewel by Paul Poiret
Circa 1911: A'Lelia Walker wearing brocade turban with egret aigrette by Paul Poiret. The innovative Paris couturier, who banished corsets, was a friend who A'Lelia Walker entertained.
That late great trailblazing historian from San Francisco, Eric Garber, wrote of A'Lelia's penchant for parties and gay people:
"Because A'Lelia adored the company of lesbians and gay men, her parties had a distinctly gay ambiance. Elegant homosexuals such as Edward Perry, Edna Thomas. Harold Jackman, and Caska Bonds were her closest friends. So were scores of white celebrities..."
Much earlier, novelist Marjorie Worthington remembered:
"We went several times that winter to Madame Allelia [sic] Walker's Thursday "at-homes" on a beautiful street in Harlem known as, Sugar Hill...." [Madame Walker's] lavishly furnished house was a gathering place not only for artists and authors and theatrical stars of her own race, but for celebrities from all over the world. Drinks and food were served, and there was always music, generously performed enthusiastically received."
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. Madame Walker's initial gala, a luncheon party for nearly 100, blacks and whites, was hosted in honor of the Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War in September of 1918. President wilson, after first objecting, at last allowed blacks to fight in the World War, and Mr, Scott is the closest African Americans have to a cabinet officer. Madame Walker's guests lunched out on the terrace before entering the music room for musical entertainment. J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", "The African American National Anthem", eminent organist Melville Charlton and other musicians played and sang. It was a lovely afternoon, but not without purpose. Determined that like official entertaining at the White House, that her social gatherings contributed to political action, Madame Walker used this occasion to implore blacks to set aside differences, and support the war-effort. She also asked that Washington take note of black participation in the defence of democracy and outlaw lynching.
The Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Special Assistant to the Secretary of War
As for A'Lelia Walker, she was more easy. Many recollections confirm her generous nature, her delight in enjoyment, and in providing pleasure as well. By all accounts, everyone from chorus girls to artists to socialites to visiting royalty would come at least once to enjoy her engaging hospitality. Whether at the Dark Tower, 80 Edgecombe, or Villa Lewaro, wherever she was, though not named 'Laeticia', A'Lelia was the "joy goddess."
They say that whatever one's race, class, condition or sexuality today, that people are, on the whole, rather impatient. If then you are an intrepid exception, and have made it this far: through over one hundred pages, numerous pictures and 12,275 words or so, besides offering my congratulations, I ought perhaps to summarize of my intent. Originalist ideologues, nostalgic for paternalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy notwithstanding, ever-changing America, has not changed enough. Justice delayed is, justice denied.
Still beckoning and golden, the American Dream must not be allowed to become irrelevant. It is still so rich and real and robust, but for fewer and fewer, seems within reach. As America evolves to grow ever more diverse, opportunity and reward, ought to expand and not retract to enrich just some at the top.
Madame C. J. Walker, her daughter A'Lelia Walker, both strove towards such an empowering and beneficial end. An outstanding relic of their faith in our country, Villa Lewaro, as much as Mount Vernon or Monticello, is a shrine that deserves to be on public view, as a museum dedicated to determination and the humanitarian impulse to help others.
Madame Walker, and especially her daughter A'Lelia, loved to fill their home with friends. They included not only eminent blacks like the poet William Stanley Braithwaite and the composer and concert singer Harry T. Burleigh, but Walker beauty-shop operators. One guest, Enrico Caruso, coined the villa's name, using two letters from each name of Mme. Walker's only child, A'lelia Walker Robinson.
Lloyd and Edna Thomas
Edna was a great actress. She started out as Madame Walker's social secretary. One of her jobs was to look up words Walker did not understand reading the newspaper. Regretting having only a scant education, in this way she could learn and expand her vocabulary.
Lloyd Thomas managed their 136th street beauty salon for the Walkers. In 1929, at a party given by A'Lelia, Lloyd introduced Edna to English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham. For the rest of their lives the women were a devoted couple
A manservant for Mrs. and Mrs. Basil Rathbone, Edward Perry studied painting with Winold Reiss, before moving on to acting and stage management. Esteemed as Harlem's Elsa Maxwell, late in life he had a career as a party consultant
1929: Harold Jackman by Richmond Barthe
Designated the "handsomest man in Harlem," London-born Harold Jackman, who had an unknown white English father and a black West Indian mother, was a high school teacher, model, actor, writer, and patron, with a life-long interest theater and in documenting African American cultural life. Gay in most every way, he nonetheless managed to have a daughter, with a white friend, to whom he left half his estate
Spirited off as a young boy to England by an aristocrat who lived on London's Lilac Sweep, Bonds grew to become a music coach, with attractive protegees of uneven talent. A particular friend of A'Lelia's he gained the lease of her apartment when she died. He lived there with a youth named Embry Bonner
Cocaine-addict and Harlem lover Princess Violette Murat, was born Violette Jacqueline Charlotte Ney d'Elchingen. Writer Zora Neal Husrton called her "Princess Muskrat". Fortunately, as she was a lesbian, her husband, Bonaparte Prince Eugene Louis Michel Joachim Napoleon Murat, pre-deceased her by almost 40 years
Julius Lorenzo Cobb Bledsoe was a once-renowned, but now forgotten baritone, the first 'Joe' in "Showboat" and the first African American artist to gain regular employment on Broadway. None the less, finding legitimate operatic roles scare in the States, he concertized to acclaim and profit in Europe. Here he met his well-to-do Dutch lover, sometime-diplomatic cultural attache, Adriain Frederick Huygens
Ivor Novello, a Welsh composer, playwright, matanee and film star became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his operatic-coach-mother Clara Davies, was the teacher of Caska Bonds. Norvello's first big success was as a songwriter was the World War I favorite "Keep the Home Fires Burning"
Geraldyn Hodges Dismond, Harlem's 'Lady Nicotine', a inveterate journalist from Chicago, who in time, ditched her philandering husband, to become Gerrie Major of Jet Magazine
The 'Night Hawk', Gerrie's husband, the college football star, World War I hero, Dr. Binga Dismond, a man said to have too much, of everything!
Jimmy Daniels and Wallace Thurman shared a room as boarders at 1890 Seventh Avenue on the north-west corner of 115th Street, in a cooperative unit owned by Edna and Lloyd Thomas. Edna Thomas' white lesbian lover, English aristocrat Olivia Wyndham, who also lived here, is seen with in the picture above, with Edna, at the center. Jimmy is on the far left, while Lloyd sits on the right, with 'It Girl' Blanche Dunn on his lap.
Sometimes we're lucky and get exactly what we want. Yet there's a limit to good fortune, Norval White or not. No, I'm not expressing regret over a duplex at the top of River House; I'm only lamenting a sad irony. For a century, tauted as the world's "African American Cultural Capital!", Harlem, ever more rapidly, is slipping through the fingers of black New Yorkers.
For many, it's been much like a bad, but long tolerated, marriage to someone additcted to crack. Forever, it seems, one has endured every privation and heaps of abuse. But for the sake of the kids, for the sake of love, remembering what once was, good times proceeding protracted deterioration, one has remained true.
Finnaly, slowly, but surely, they start to get it together. Only it's as fidelity means nothing as one's guilty spouse, who you always proped up and kept afloat, who ask you to leave and kicks you out. With little warning, a relationship one had imagined capable of limping along forever, instead ends abruptly. Yor ex cleverly manages to charm the court and keeps every asset, to produce for some new, an untested, less faithful partner, luxury beyond all you'd ever dreamed of. Your kids show you pictures on face book. You shake your head in disbelief, almost unable to recognize your old place, filled with potential but so shabby, done up with a marble mosaic shower stall and granite counter tops.
This is the breakup awaiting many. For the longest time, it bothered me terribly, my apprehension concerning the userpers. The palpable unease I feel seeing more and more whites venturing homeward in the hood, pushing space-age perambulators and heavily laden with Fairway bags, troubled me greatly. After all, am I not, Mr. Diversity, extolling the many charms Harlem boast to offer to any discerning lover? Are not half of my best friends white? Yes. So it took me a while to get over my guilt at wanting to preserve Harlem for myself and others who have suffered unspeakable trials through the bad days and now hope to enjoy the good at last.
Ridiculously cheap, my upper-Manhattan aerie is still unaffordable for this busy but poorly compensated writer-historian-activist. Unfortunately, unemployed for a year after I moved in, I fell deeply in debt. Begging and browing, last year I paid off half. Five grand reamain.
"You might want to try a roommate?" suggested my building's diligent attorney at Housing Court. She wore the most amazingly clear and brilliant emerald-cut diamond ring, weighing roughly ten carats, I'd estimate. Genuinely sympathetic, notwithstanding unwavering professionalism, she readily trumped protest that I'd only one bedroom with, "I understand about having just one bedroom, but better a roommate than becoming homeless?"
Who among us is in a position to argue with such indisputable logic? And how poignant too, that lonely and longing for the company of someone so nice to come home to: the elusive boyfriend, Mr. Right, shacking-up is now offered as the answer to my problems. Only it's impossible? Those few dear friends, friends fond enough to successfully happily coexist within a limited space, mostly felled by Aids, are already long dead.
In any case if my building's lawyer was perfectly fair, though without great empathy.
the lady judge was, by contrast, a holdover from the epoch of the divine right of kings and landlords. Unlike my case, for what insignificantly trivial sums are people thrown into the streets with nowhere to go. What is the good of a city with more billionaires and multi-million dollar bonuses than any other, if every day people can lose everything for no substantive reason and often due to circumstances utterly beyond their control?
I love my tiny lower Convent Avenue hideaway. I've been quite happy here for the past two years. Built in 1909, the St. Agnes Apartments was designed by the prolific, mostly commercial architect, Henri Fouchaux. The Madams of the Sacred Heart, whose convent school between 129th and 135th Streets, gave the avenue its name, selling the lots for a full block of apartments named for different saints, stipulated that they could not be owned or occupied by "Negros." Uniquely the St. Agnes Apartments boasts a mammoth double height, partly barrel-vaulted entrance and lobby. Embellished with refined gout-Grec ornament, it was an evocatively eerie setting for the hit film Single White Female.
If it lacks accommodation for guests, a terrace, a working fireplace or marble walls, inspired by drawings I've made of fanciful imaginary interiors it nevertheless possesses all there is that I truly require.
I'm surrounded by delightful images by special artists like Grace Williams, Arnold Rice, Michael Mc Collom, Marvin Smith and Ruben Roncallo. Architectural fragments, relics of lost landmarks are another notable element of the decoration. Some chairs were discovered in junk shops, while a steel desk and two tables were retrieved from the from the street.
Every wall, and even the doors, display views of old houses in Harlem, New York, Newport and Akron, Ohio, where I grew up. Colorful curtains made from sheets, quaint candlesticks in the form of fish, porcelain, silver, old mirrors and old furniture combine to create a stimulating atmosphere in a perpetually dark apartment that I hope is as welcoming to others as it is full of sparkle.
The bath
The kitchen
My room
Above all else what most contributes to my well-being here are photographs of family and my dearest, oldest friends. Old or new, books, housed mostly in the solitary bedroom with my indispensable computer, are perhaps the best and most faithful 'friends' to be had. Moreover, like everything else in my treasured home they form a likeness of who I really am better than any other representation ever could.
Certainly, there's nothing like soft candle light to make almost anything look more attractive.
