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The Lit Ladies of "Dream Haven"
+ Apply to the Harlem Meer Performance Festival
The Harlem Neighborhood Block Association
March 24, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Guests at a breakfast for Langston Hughes hosted by Regina Anderson, Ethel Ray and Luella Tucker at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue in May 1925. Left to right: Helen Lanning, Esther Popel, Pearl Fisher, Luella Tucker, Clarissa Scott Delany, Jessie Fauset, Regina Anderson, Marie Antoinette Burgette Johnson and Ethel Ray (Photo: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library)
Good Times and Good Conversation at 580 St. Nick
Women’s History Month is a perfect time to celebrate this trio of literary women who, at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, made the most of their large apartment on the fifth floor of 580 St. Nicholas Avenue. Ethel Ray and Louella Tucker were journalists at Opportunity magazine, a publication of the National Urban League; Regina Anderson was a librarian at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library.
The three young women were at the center of literary Harlem, hosting parties for the likes of Langston Hughes and Jessie Fauset; letting a new-to-Harlem Zora Neale Hurston crash on their couch and inviting across-the-hall neighbor, Ethel Waters, inside for merry-making. They called it “Dream Haven,” but it was also known as the “Harlem West Side Literary Salon or simply, the “580.”
In 1926, Regina Anderson married; in 1929, Ethel Ray married. By the end of the decade “Dream Haven” was no longer the exciting home to three dynamic literary women making the most of being young, Black and single in Harlem. But the creative endeavors produced by the people they hosted and nurtured are still with us. (KD)
Harlem Meer Festival: You Could Perform!
Good times at the Harlem Meer Performance Festival
Apply to perform at this annual Harlem Meer summer series. Applications close March 31 at 11:59 pm.
The Harlem Meer Performance Festival is coming this summer! Since the Charles A. Dana Discovery Center opened in 1993, each summer, the festival brings local talent to Central Park with a variety of family-friendly music, dance, and entertainment.
In 2025, the performances will be Sundays, July 13–August 17, from 2:00 pm–4:00 pm
Local performers are invited to apply for this year’s festival lineup. Find out more and submit applications before midnight on March 31 here. (KD)
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