Chapter 9
The People’s Artist

One hundred years after Ira Aldridge fled New York a Black American arts scene outside of the hugely popular minstrel format was finally starting to build in the city. In the upper west area of Manhattan, a property development boom of the 1880s that went bust in the 1890s opened up the rental market to African Americans as smart, newly built brownstone houses stood vacant. Thanks to the stealthy efforts of the real estate businessman Phil Payton Jnr and his alliance with Jewish landlords, the Owners’ Protective Association of Harlem established with the single aim of keeping their neighbourhood white, was outmaneuvered. Black New Yorkers finally had access to decent housing and were able to move out of the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, and the area became a natural gravitational point for ambitious artists, politicians and intellectuals who manifested a phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance.