To whites, the most notorious institutions in and around Little Africa were “black-and-tans,” low-class bars and clubs where blacks and whites mixed for drinking, dancing, and sexual assignations. The owner of the Slide ran one of the more notorious Bleecker Street black-and-tans. The threat of the “amalgamation” of the races through sexual union had terrorized white patricians since colonial days (John Quincy Adams thought Othello was about the evils of miscegenation), while poorer whites and blacks seem to have amalgamated with some abandon, judging from the plethora of laws the city fathers promulgated year after year to stem the practice. No image so titillated and horrified white New York in the 1800s as that of a white woman in a black man’s arms. Black women in white men’s arms were far less shocking, since it was considered common knowledge that black women were promiscuous and many were prostitutes. White women who frequented black-and-tans were presumed to have been turned to prostitution and other degradations by their black captor lovers.
Writing about Little Africa, Riis fulminated:
The border-land where the white and black races meet in common debauch, the aptly-named black-and-tan saloon, has never been debatable ground from a moral stand-point. It has always been the worst of the desperately bad. Than this commingling of the utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black, on such ground, there can be no greater abomination. Usually it is some foul cellar dive, perhaps run by the political “leader” of the district, who is “in with” the police. In any event it gathers to itself all the lawbreakers and all the human wrecks within reach.
The historian Jamila Shabazz Brathwaite, program director of the CEJJES Institute, a cultural foundation in Rockland County, New York, points out that had Riis, Crane, and other writers been interested in anything but sensational stories, they easily could have seen a very different side to black Greenwich Village. They might have noticed, for instance, the neighborhood’s thriving black churches. Zion AME Church, aka Mother Zion, had begun down in the city in 1796 and moved to Bleecker Street in the 1850s. The Abyssinian Baptist Church went back to 1808, when black worshippers at the white First Baptist Church in the city withdrew in protest over being segregated in the balcony. This congregation also moved up to Greenwich Village in the 1850s. The black Catholic St. Benedict the Moor church was founded on Bleecker Street in 1883.
Brathwaite notes that Little Africa was home to several figures at least as notable as Black Cat and No-Toes, but for very different reasons. Bostin Crummell was captured as a child in West Africa and brought to New York, where he served in the household of Peter Schermerhorn, one of the richest men in the city. It’s said that Crummell simply walked off the job one day—he “self-emancipated,” as Brathwaite puts it—and, instead of running away, he remained in Manhattan and opened a successful oyster house. He and the freeborn Charity Hicks lived on Amity Lane (which became Amity Street, then West Third Street). Their son Alexander, born there in 1819, became an Episcopal priest in spite of opposition from white clergy. Alexander traveled extensively, earning a bachelor’s degree from Queens College, Cambridge, living for a time in Liberia and lecturing around the United States, before founding the American Negro Academy in Washington, D.C.
Samuel Eli Cornish was a free black man from Philadelphia who moved to Little Africa in 1821, living on Wooster Street at West Fourth. He founded the first black Presbyterian church in the neighborhood, New Demeter Street Presbyterian. In 1827, apparently after a meeting at the Crummells’ home, he and John Brown Russwurm started Freedom’s Journal, the first black-owned and -run newspaper in the country. Henry Highland Garnet escaped slavery in Maryland and came to Little Africa in 1825. A Presbyterian minister and ardent abolitionist, he wrote often for the Colored American, the successor to Freedom’s Journal, and delivered fiery speeches calling on slaves to free themselves by any means necessary. He later founded the African Civilization Society, which encouraged blacks in America to return to Africa. In 1865 he was the first black American invited to address Congress; in 1881 he attained a diplomatic posting to Liberia, where he died of a fever within three months. Garnet’s second wife, Sarah, was the first black principal of African Free School No. 3 on Amity Street near MacDougal. African Free Schools were started by the Manumission Society in the late 1780s to educate the growing population of free black children. The intent was not just to teach reading and writing but to instill virtues such as industry and sobriety, diverting black youth from what was thought to be a natural inclination to vice. African Free School No. 3 was originally sited on Nineteenth Street in 1831, but after white neighbors complained it was moved to Little Africa.
Brathwaite has researched one Little Africa couple in particular who seem in every way the opposite of Crane’s poor but happy-go-lucky Negroes. Edward Hesdra was born of mixed-race parents and was a practicing Jew. Cynthia was a slave who bought her freedom. According to an article in the June 8, 1890, New York Times, “Cynthia was an industrious, saving, and money-getting woman. She established a laundry and soon secured a large and profitable trade.” She loaned money to neighbors to be repaid with interest. She bought the house she and Edward lived in on Amity Street and, eventually, as many as a dozen others in Little Africa. Cynthia and Edward left the city for Nyack, New York, where she died in 1879, leaving an estate valued at a hundred thousand dollars, more than $2 million in today’s value. Childless, she apparently left a will dividing the estate among several charities, including the Jewish hospital where she died. Her widowed husband produced another version, in which she had left the money to him. Then there was a claim from Edward’s adopted niece, who was white and, Brathwaite says, insane. The newspapers followed the story of “an ex-slave’s fortune” with great interest as it wended its way through the courts for years and years. “It plays out like a soap opera,” Brathwaite says. “The story just gets stranger and stranger.” Not surprisingly, the attorneys ended up with much of Cynthia’s money.
Greenwich Village remained the population center of black New York through the 1800s, though with changes. In the later decades of the century black Villagers of some means began moving up to the midtown-west area then known as the Tenderloin (or, in the case of the wealthy Hesdras, out of town altogether). They would subsequently move farther uptown from there to San Juan Hill, in today’s Lincoln Center area, and eventually to Harlem. In the Village they were replaced by blacks newly arrived from the South, mostly very poor and unskilled. At the same time, people of other ethnicities moved in, so that black Villagers shared the streets, buildings, and sometimes households with Irish, Italians, and other nonblacks. By the turn of the century the old “vile rookeries” were being torn down and replaced by new tenements that filled up with more Italian immigrants, until what had been Little Africa was considered part of Little Italy. In the 1910s, all that was left of the Little Africa Riis and Crane had visited were the Minettas, and they were still a sore point. Even the neighborhood’s progressive social welfare volunteers threw up their hands. In 1912 Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, a founder of the Greenwich House settlement, recorded that there were still “three disorderly houses, two tough saloons . . . and prostitution” in the Minettas, and she suggested that the houses simply be razed. When the city proposed driving Sixth Avenue through the area, obliterating Minetta Place at least, she supported the plan.
Other Village streets apart from Little Africa were known for their black residents, Cornelia, Jones, and Gay Streets among them. The one-block Gay Street, connecting Christopher Street and Waverly Place, was just an alley lined with stables in the early 1800s. In the 1830s the stables were replaced by modest brick houses for black servants who worked in the wealthy homes that were then beginning to line Washington Square Park. Unlike Little Africa, Gay Street drew no attention to itself. After the Civil War, the wealthy families on Washington Square began replacing black servants with immigrant Irish, English, and German workers. Gay Street’s black residents moved out and various artisans and workmen moved in, followed by artist
s, writers, and bohemians.
Gay Street is best remembered today for the basement studio at number 14 taken in 1935 by two sisters from Columbus, Ohio, Ruth and Eileen McKenney, who’d come to New York to start careers in journalism and acting, respectively. Ruth’s series of articles for The New Yorker about their colorful Village neighbors were collected in the book My Sister Eileen, adapted for Broadway in 1940. Eileen had moved to Hollywood by then, where she’d married Nathanael West. The two of them were killed in a car accident on December 22, 1940, four days before the Broadway show opened. The film version starring Rosalind Russell appeared in 1942, and in 1953 a new musical adaptation called Wonderful Town, written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (to whom we’ll return), with music by Leonard Bernstein, was a big Broadway hit.
Among the black families who moved out of the Village around the turn of the century were the Wallers. The baby of the family, Thomas, would become famous as the pianist Fats Waller. In his book Black Manhattan, published in 1930, the poet and memoirist James Weldon Johnson writes of his surprise to find a few “nests” of black residents still in the Village. “Scattered through Greenwich Village and ‘Little Italy,’ small groups of Negroes may be found who have never lived in any other part of the city. Negro New York has passed on and left them stranded and isolated. They are vestiges of a generation long gone by.”
Nevertheless, for several decades following the publication of Johnson’s book, the Village, with its jazz clubs and its bohemian and progressive residents, would continue to have a reputation as a small zone where blacks and whites met and mingled more freely than in most of the rest of the country—not a paradise of racial equality, maybe, but certainly ahead of the national curve on matters of race.
ONE OF THE SADDEST EVENTS IN NEW YORK CITY HISTORY OCCURRED in 1911. It happened a short block east of Washington Square, next door to where Henry James was born. Visiting New York in 1904–5 after many years abroad, James was dismayed to find how built-up the area around his Washington Place birthplace had become in his absence. He deplored the marble Washington Square Arch, erected during his absence in 1892 (replacing a wood and plaster one constructed in 1889 for the centennial of Washington’s inauguration). He called it a “melancholy monument” and “the lamentable little Arch of Triumph . . . lamentable because of its poor and lonely and unsupported and unaffiliated state.” He was even more saddened to discover his birthplace home had been torn down (“rudely . . . ruthlessly suppressed”) to make way for NYU’s Kimball Hall, “a high, square, impersonal structure, proclaiming its lack of interest with a crudity all its own.” The shock he felt was like “having been amputated of half my history.”
Across narrow Greene Street from Kimball Hall stood another new structure, the Asch Building, erected in 1901. The Asch was one of the “loft buildings” that started to rise all over lower and midtown Manhattan in the second half of the nineteenth century. Frames of steel up to twenty stories tall were curtained with facades of stone, brick, or cast iron, often with much larger and wider windows than older construction methods allowed. Inside, thinner columns meant open, sunlit loft floors eminently adaptable for a variety of uses. Lower floors might be warehouse space or house retail or wholesale commercial businesses. Floors above them, served by electric elevators, could be divided into offices. They would later prove equally eminently adaptable for loft apartments and condominiums. Because of their materials, these new buildings were said to be fireproof. Any building taller than seven stories had better be, because the fire department’s ladders and hoses couldn’t reach higher.
Around the turn of the century the top few floors of many of these buildings were taken over by the city’s huge garment industry, the largest manufacturing business in the city, producing more than half the country’s ready-made clothing. In 1910 it was estimated that there were 450 garment factories in the city, employing some forty thousand workers, the great majority of them Jewish and Italian women and girls as young as twelve. This made New York City the largest “factory town” in the country, though a visitor looking around the city’s streets wouldn’t even know they were there. In the 1800s, women and girls had done much of this work in their tenement homes on the Lower East Side and in Little Italy. New laws at the turn of the century forbade manufacturing work in residential spaces and prompted the industry’s move. Loft buildings were never intended for this kind of manufacturing use, but neither landlords nor lawmakers made any fuss.
The Triangle Waist Company occupied the top three floors, eight through ten, of the Asch Building. The company’s founders, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had come to America as two poor immigrants among millions of others; now they were known as the Shirtwaist Kings, self-made men in the classic American mode. They’d built Triangle into the largest shirtwaist factory in the city, with five hundred to seven hundred employees, depending on the season. Workers cut and sewed on the eighth and ninth floors, with the bosses’ offices on the tenth. The shirtwaist, a loose, simple blouse that had released women from the prison of stiff Victorian dress, had been all the rage at the turn of the century. As 1910 approached, however, the shirtwaist was looking old-fashioned, and sales and prices dropped. Manufacturers’ attempts to attract shoppers by embroidering the garments with lace, much of it produced in the mills of nearby Paterson, New Jersey, were faltering. Competition for a dwindling market turned cutthroat, pushing wholesale prices lower and narrowing profit margins. A stock market crash in 1906 followed by a bank panic in 1907 had added to the pressures, prompting manufacturers of all kinds to tighten their belts, which often meant layoffs, pay cuts, and increased demands on workers to work longer and produce more. For the women and girls in New York’s garment industry, conditions that were already barely tolerable worsened. At Triangle they worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, seven at peak production times; in slack months they were apt to be laid off until business picked up again. They were paid by the piece, which amounted to two dollars a day at best, from which the bosses deducted the cost of the needles, thread, and even the power for the new electric sewing machines. Foremen patrolled the rows of workers, hollering at them, sexually harassing them, and docked their already pittance pay for the slightest mistake or perceived infraction. Blanck obsessed over the fear that workers were stealing needles and thread from him. At the end of every day, foremen searched their handbags as they filed out a single exit, the other exit door locked.
Twenty years of Progressive reformers urging more government intervention in the workplace had produced little regulation. The large labor unions, meanwhile, had concentrated their organizing efforts on skilled, “American” workers. That left the immigrant women of the garment industry to organize themselves, forming the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in 1900. In September 1909 one hundred Triangle workers met with ILGWU organizers. Blanck and Harris fired them all the next day. The entire Triangle workforce went on strike. Over the next six weeks as they picketed on the sidewalks below, Blanck and Harris allegedly hired thugs and prostitutes to assault them and paid the police to haul the strikers to jail for causing the commotion. In November, union organizers staged a huge rally at the Cooper Union a few blocks up Broadway from the Asch Building. Over the objections of the union leaders, the workers agreed to stage an industrywide walkout. The next day, in what came to be known as the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, all the garment workers in the city walked off the job. The strike paralyzed the industry. Smaller manufacturers gave in quickly but Triangle held out. Ironically, the strike provided a unique opportunity for black women, who’d been kept out of the garment industry by both employers, who assumed them to be poor workers, and the white women workers themselves, who refused to work with blacks. As thousands of white women walked out, black women rushed into the lofts as scabs. Fearing they would derail the strike, union leaders invited black women to join but many refused. As the strike dragged on into the Christmas season, the workers gained important new allies: reform-
minded society ladies, including Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and J. Pierpont Morgan’s daughter Anne, who saw the garment workers’ strike as part of the larger women’s movement. The strike ended in February 1910, with most businesses coming to arrangements with the ILGWU. Triangle still held out, but the women went back to work anyway.
A year later, on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1911, as the workers were lining up for their weekly pay envelopes, fire broke out on the eighth floor, possibly caused by a carelessly dropped cigarette. It quickly spread out of control, feasting on all the cloth and paper in the place. The 180 panicked workers on that floor raced for an interior stairwell or out to the fire escape. Up on the tenth floor the bosses and about fifty workers got word of the fire. Two of Blanck’s daughters and their governess happened to be visiting that afternoon before a planned shopping trip. Some escaped in the elevators, whose operators braved flame and smoke to save hundreds as long as the system operated. After the fire, the bodies of nineteen girls who’d fallen or jumped down the shaft were found on the elevators’ roofs.
Blanck, Harris, and others made their way to the roof, where an NYU law professor and his students in the adjacent building saw them. They threw a ladder across the gap and all but one person from the tenth floor was saved. The 250 workers on the ninth floor got the worst of it. They were uninformed of the fire below them until it was too late. One exit door, as usual, was locked. Fire engulfed the other stairwell and the elevator shafts. Helpless firemen and a horrified crowd who’d been out strolling Washington Square watched women and girls so crowd onto the one rickety fire escape that it pulled loose from the wall and collapsed. Other girls clambered out to narrow window ledges and jumped, some with hair and clothes flaming. Falling nine stories, they punched right through the firemen’s nets. In all, 146 women and girls died gruesomely. One of the Italian girls who died was a cousin of Jimmy Durante.
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