"Philip A. Payton Jr.(February 27,1876-August 29,1917)

Was an African American real estate entrepreneur,known as the "Father of "Harlem,due to his work renting properties in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City to African Americans.The successful real estate mogul brought up newly built properties in the area after a temporary downturn in New York City's housing market,and then actively promoted his housing stock as an idea neighborhood for the city's growing-and uneasy-African-American population."All of  my friends discouraged me,"All of them told me i couldn't make it,they tried to convince me that there was no show for a colored man in such a business in New York, he told Booker T. Washington for the 1907 book,The New Negro in Business.Philip was born in Westfield Massachusetts,he was the second of four children in the family,and both of his parents were hairdressers.His father had his own barbershop,and trained all three sons in the profession-over their mother's objections,she argued "it would make lazy men of them.She wanted all four of her children to earn a college degree;Philip would be the only one of the four who did not.In high school,he fell in with a group of local hooligans,his parents sent him off to Livingstone College,a historically black school in Salisbury,North Carolina,whose president was a friend of father.He spent a year there,then returned to Westfield to play football during his his senior year,but dropped out altogether after he was injured.As expected ,went to work with his father at the barbershop.His sister Susan graduated from the state normal school(later Westfield State College) and his brothers, James and Edward,both graduated from Yale.Unhappy in Westfield and with the barbering profession,Philip decided to move to New York in the spring of 1899.He initially found work as a barber,in February of 1900 was hired as a porter-a position akin to that of a janitor or custodian- at a Manhattan real estate office,and decided there was a small fortune to be made in that particular business.At the time,a slew of new apartment houses had been built in the upper reaches of the reaches of the island Manhattan.He married Maggie, in June of 1900.Philip earned $8 a week as a porter,Maggie took in sewing work.Philip and a partner opened the Brown and Payton real estate in October 1900,setting up shop in a rented space on West 32d Street near Eight Avenue.Philip and his business partner failed at this first attempt to become real estate titans and dissolved the partnership after a few months.He set up shop on his own soon afterward, taking out classified ad in newspapers that read,colored tenements wanted/Colored man makes a specialty of managing  colored tenements,"The ads listed a business address of 67 West 134th Street this was also the residence of the Paytons in Harlem,where they had recently moved.At this time,this part of Manhattan was full of lavishly built new brownstone buildings,most of which had worrisomely low occupancy rates.Because some of those Harlem apartments buildings sat empty,white landlords were willing to rent to black tenants, and Philip managed to secure a few contacts to manage apartment rental units.He soon rented office space in the Temple Court Building at the corner of Nassau and Beekman Streets in 1901.It was a time of tremendous financial hardship,there times when he and his wife ate cornmeal mush as their only meal of the day,and on other days he had to walk home all the way from Lower Manhattan to West 134th Street.The earnings he made from his apartment-leasing business eventually led to his first acquisition,which he then turned over in a short period of time.In 1902 Philip traveled to Richmond,Virginia,to attend a conference of the National Negro Business League.It was there that he seized upon the idea of starting a real estate company that would sell shares to potential investors.With a group of nine other backers,Philip incorporated the "Afro American Realty Company" on June 15,1904.By pooling their funds,he and his fellow entrepreneurs were able to acquire potentially lucrative five-year leases on some Harlem properties.In the company prospectus, he contended that settling blacks in Harlem was an ideal solution to the discrimination they faced elsewhere in the city's housing market.The Afro-American Realty Company's brochure asserted that "race prejudice is a luxury,and like all other luxuries,can be made very expensive in New York City," according to a New York Times article from 1906."The very prejudice which has heretofore worked against us can be turned and used to our profit."His business strategy earned a great deal of press attention for Afro-American Realty Company's promotion of Harlem as a safe,well-built enclave for blacks,and many of the first renters were middle-class immigrants from the Caribbean Diaspora,who earned relatively high wages as domestic servants,livery drivers,and service professionals. Some in Harlem bitterly opposed the Company's efforts,and there was even an "Anglo-Saxon Realty Corporation"formed by a group of defiant white landlords.On one occasion,a competing real estate firm,the Hudson Realty Company,offered Philip a great deal on three apartment properties on West 135th Street near Lenox Avenue; Hudson then evicted the black tenants.In response,Philip bought two next-door properties and evicted its white tenants. Finally,the Hudson Realty Company capitulated and sold the buildings back to Philip-at a financial loss.That incident occurred in the latter half of 1905.A year later, some of the shareholders in the Afro-American Realty company filed a lawsuit,which went to trial in 1908.The court agreed that Philip had misled investors and shareholders regarding some of the company's financial data.He let the company go out of business,but he transferred his holdings to a new company,the Philip A. Payton Jr. Company.It profited from a major influx of  Southern blacks who began leaving the South around 1910 in what became known as the Great Migration.Philip's company logo,"PAP" was a fixture on apartments-for-rent signs in Harlem windows for decades.Philip and Maggie lived in Harlem at 13 West 131 st Street, in an eleven-room brownstone.He closed his largest deal in 1917,a sale of six apartment houses,for over $1 million,the largest sale of housing for blacks at that time.The buildings were renamed after prominent blacks in America:Crispus Attucks,Tossaint L.'Ouventure,Phyllis Wheatley,Paul Lawrence Dunbar,Frederick Douglass,and Booker T.Washington.He died a month later of liver cancer at his country house in Allenhurst,New Jersey;he was 41.Philip sister Susan Payton Wortham and her husband William,took over the Philip A. Payton real estate company,which remained in business until the 1940s.