Real estate developer
In a career that spanned less than twenty years, Philip A. Payton Jr. became known for providing African Americans in New York City with an opportunity to live in quality housing in the northern Manhattan community of Harlem. As a real estate broker, property manager, and owner, Payton gained a national reputation among African American business leaders during the first decade of the twentieth century.
Philip A. Payton was born February 27, 1876, in Westfield, Massachusetts, the eldest of four children of Philip A. Payton and Annie Ryans Payton. Although both of Payton’s parents were entrepreneurs (his father owned a barbershop and his mother operated a hairdress-ing business), Payton Jr. did not seem destined for a career in business. He attended public schools in West-field but later noted that he had the least education of his siblings. In a profile in Booker T. Washington’s 1907 work The Negro in Business , Payton characterized his aimless teen years as highlighted by his dropping out of high school during his senior year due to a football injury. Thereafter he decided to follow his father’s trade and worked as a barber.
In 1899 Payton moved to New York City where he had a series of jobs and eventually found work as a porter in a real estate office. Exposed to the real estate profession, in less than a year he decided to start his own real estate business with a partner. The real estate partnership of Brown & Payton struggled, and Brown left during the first year. Payton, who had married in 1900, eventually began to get contracts to manage houses.
A real estate boom occurred in the northern Manhattan community of Harlem after 1900. The predominantly white community of Harlem, settled in the 1600s, had initially been a Dutch farming community. It became a residential community as transportation links with the lower Manhattan business districts improved in the second half of the 1800s. Merchants and other businessmen who worked in lower Manhattan were able to move their families to the developing community in upper Manhattan. By the 1880s and 1890s sections of the community were lined with four-story brownstone row houses and the area was known as a prosperous residential neighborhood. In 1900 construction began on the subway line extending from New York’s City Hall in lower Manhattan north to 145th Street in Harlem. The line had been discussed since the 1880s. Real estate developers responded to the construction start by building apartment houses in close proximity to the line. Philip Payton recognized an opportunity for African Americans in these developments.
Chronology
1876
Born in Westfield, Massachusetts on February 27
1899
Moves to New York City
1900
Marries Maggie (maiden name unknown); forms Brown and Payton real estate company
1903
Forms Afro-American Realty Company partnership
1904
Incorporates Afro-American Realty Company
1906
Afro-American stockholders file lawsuit against Payton
1907
Company issues first dividend
1908
Court finds company liable for prospectus misrepresentations; company ceases to do business; forms Philip A. Payton Jr. Company
1917
Dies in Allenhurst, New Jersey on August 29
After 1890, the African American community in New York had begun to grow substantially as migrants from southern states relocated in New York for better opportunities. By 1900 African Americans in Manhattan were primarily dispersed throughout midtown Manhattan in an area approximately from 23rd Street north to the numbered streets in the low 60s (a smaller number lived in Harlem). A race riot in the midtown area in 1900, sparked by the murder of a police officer by an African American man, made the area less than hospitable for African Americans. Compounding their problems was the demolition of the residential community at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue to make way for the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station. Payton recognized an opportunity to link African Americans seeking housing with the white Harlem property owners.
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