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Philip A. Payton Jr. & The Afro-American Realty Company
“The Father of Harlem” - A real estate magnate who turned Harlem into a black mecca.
The Harlem Neighborhood Block Association
February 26, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Born on Feb. 27, 1876, in Westfield, Mass., Phillip A. Payton Jr. dropped out of college and went to work in his father’s barber shop, along with his two brothers. While Payton’s two brothers graduated from Yale and their sister earned a college degree at what would become Westfield State University, his ambitions took him in 1899 to New York City, where he worked as a barber before getting a job as a janitor in a Manhattan real estate office.
Philip A. Payton Jr., who is now known as the “father of Harlem.” He steered black residents uptown, making it the nexus of a community whose cultural output helped shape 20th-century America. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library
Shortly after he married, Payton opened a Midtown real estate office with a partner in the fall of 1900. When the business flopped after a few months, he struck out on his own, sustained by the sewing work of his wife, Maggie. The couple moved to Harlem, where there was a high vacancy rate in the many new brownstone buildings. White landlords found an answer to their financial woes in black tenants.
With ads that read, “COLORED TENEMENTS WANTED/Colored man makes a specialty of managing colored tenements,” Payton positioned himself to guide black tenants from Midtown to new homes.
Soon Payton became a building owner himself. And by 1904, the year the subway reached Harlem, he incorporated the Afro-American Realty Company to help remake Harlem as a home for black citizens who faced discrimination in housing.
Afro-American Realty Company Board of Directors
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