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Chapter 3 To Check the Menacing Black Hordes Of all forms of prejudice evident in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, few proved more enduring than the color line imposed on the housing market. Until real estate agent Philip Payton opened Harlem to black residents, most black people living in New York City faced near-squalor living conditions. "Hedged in by prejudice," wrote the New York Times in 1889, blacks occupied the "meanest tenement districts" that had "outgrown their availability for any other class" of tenants.1 Until the early twentieth century, black people lived within integrated Manhattan neighborhoods. With the passing of each decade, black New Yorkers of all classes became progressively more segregated from whites and concentrated into fewer neighborhoods as the city's police officers, white reformers and landlords, and white ethnic inhabitants slowly compelled blacks to seek refuge from constant harassment. To black people's dismay, once Harlem had been transformed into ;;t virtually all-black district, white people permitted (and encouraged) vice to follow and thrive there, though jobs did not. Blacks found themselves isolated from the rest of the city, distant from prospective workplaces, and virtually forgotten by municipal authorities or urban reformers. Throughout the nineteenth century, as they searched for better, more affordable housing, the black population of New York inexorably pushed uptown from the lowest tip of Manhattan and eventually into Harlem. For a time, a variety of residential options remained open to black people. In 1889, the Reverend Hutchens C. Bishop, rector of St. Philip's Protestant Episcopal Church, tried to rent a home in a quiet residential neighborhood. When the landlord discovered that the lightskinned pastor was in fact black, he refused to lease the building to the clergyman. To his profound relief, Bishop finally convinced the landlord that he and his wife would be exemplary tenants. "If I had not succeeded thus I would have been compelled to go into a noisy tenement house among a class of people that I do not care to be particularly identified with," Bishop commented.2 But Bishop's victory in 1889 proved increasingly difficult to replicate with the passing years, as white New Yorkers became more strident in their refusal to live in proximity with To Check the Menacing Black Hordes 73 black people. They pressured landlords to rent exclusively to white tenants , leaving only the dregs of the housing market available to the growing black population. "Before a neighborhood is opened up for colored settlement in New-York," explained Reverend H. A. Monroe, the pastor of St. Mark's Methodist Episcopal Church, "it must have been made untenantable for white people." His own housing situation on West 47th Street illustrated the difficulty. All of the buildings on Monroe's block had been "disorderly houses" until a series of police raids finally ousted the prostitutes. The proprietor advertised the buildings for nine hundred dollars apiece, but "respectable white people would not live in them, and the landlord refused to rent them to colored occupants." Eventually, the persistent vacancies convinced the owner to "throw open" the apartments to the black population, though he first raised the rent to one thousand dollars. Restricted in their options, black residents quickly moved into the buildings, though the landlord compelled the new tenants to sign waivers against any potential damages. "The annoyances to which we were subjected for months after we moved in were something terrible," complained the pastor, "and yet it is to such houses and such neighborhoods that we are limited in our choice of homes."3 During midcentury, the black population was centered in a "red hot" portion of Greenwich Village that included the "Minettas" (Minetta Lane, Minetta Street, and Minetta Place), along with Thompson and Sullivan streets. The police referred to this neighborhood as "Coontown ," though more sympathetic observers dubbed it "Little Mrica." Black people had lived there since the seventeenth century, when freed slaves created a small agricultural community in this northern outpost of the Manhattan settlement. By the second half of the nineteenth century , it had developed a reputation as an area rife with "immoral resorts ... vicious negroes, and resorts for sporting men and politicians." The squalor there made it a haven only for the most impoverished in the city. According to a report on sanitary conditions, the "filth ... and the effluvia arising there from are extremely offensive. The privies are generally full nearly to overflowing," and refuse accumulated in empty yards. Some of the alleys had...

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