435 Convent Avenue
Designed and built by architects Neville & Bagge for owner E. M. Krulewitch in 1909–1910, the apartment building at 435 Convent Avenue was originally named Emsworth Hall.
[4] They were active in New York City between 1892 and 1917 and became one of the most prolific designers of multiple dwellings in Manhattan, especially in the uptown neighborhoods of Harlem, Morningside Heights, and the Upper West Side where residential construction was booming.
[20] It was a story that ran on the cover of the Black newspaper The New York Age on October 2, 1926:FINE NEW APARTMENT HOUSE ON CONVENT AVE.
[21]Between 1926 and 1929, Mr. Cottman regularly advertised apartments at 435 Convent Avenue for sale on the cooperative plan in the Black newspaper New York Amsterdam News.
By the summer of 1929, a significant number of shareholder-residents were in place at 435 Convent Avenue, and they took steps to form a corporation and purchase the building.
The 9 directors of the corporation were Jules Bledsoe, Charles A. Butler, Peter B. Codrington, Helen M. Cottman, Edward David, Lily B. Dyett, Thomas C. Hall, Clyde Jammott, and Henry McNichols.
[3] And the Dunbar Apartments, which are named for the Black poet, novelist, and short story writer Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) and are located east of Sugar Hill at West 149th and 150th Streets between Seventh Avenue and Eighth Avenue, had opened as the first large co-op for African-Americans in 1928 but, by the end of 1936, its cooperative plan was abandoned.
[27] It may be said that The Garrison is today the oldest continuously operated Black founded, owned, and managed co-op in New York City.
The Board immediately assumed all of Mr. Cottman's previous duties in the management of the building, which included selling apartments, collecting rents, paying bills, and making repairs.
[28] In the 1930s, when more than 3 out of 4 cooperative apartment buildings in New York and Chicago went bankrupt,[31][32] Mr. Codrington successfully led the young corporation through the Great Depression.
In his 9-page "History of The Garrison Apartments" (1979), he wrote:The economic situation of the day made the problems of meeting our obligations extremely difficult.
[28]Starting in 1930, for the remaining unsold apartments at The Garrison, the Board of Directors ran display ads in the New York Amsterdam News that featured the co-op's new name.
[28] Adam Clayton Powell Sr., civil rights leader, a founder of the National Urban League, and the longtime pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, which he built into the largest Protestant congregation in the country with more than 10,000 members.
[34] Powell later organized and chaired the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment which, in 1938, won agreement from Woolworth's, S. H. Kress & Co, A. S. Beck Shoe Corporation, and other major businesses not to discriminate against Blacks in hiring for professional roles.
She was the stenographer for Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston when they collaboratively wrote the controversial folk-comedy play Mule Bone.
[41][42][43][44] An ill-fated project, Mule Bone led to one of the most infamous quarrels in American literature—and the end of Hughes and Hurston's friendship—with Thompson Patterson at its center.
[25][65][66][67] In 1941, along with A. Philip Randolf, Walter White, Lester Granger, Frank Crosswaith, Layle Lane, and Rayford Logan, Mr.
[68][69] A week before the march, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited ethnic or racial discrimination in the nation's defense industry (including in companies, unions, and federal agencies engaged in war-related work) and created the Fair Employment Practice Committee.
