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Black Chelsea History Tour

Although it is often forgotten, Chelsea played a significant role in New York's African American community and its history, particularly in the second half of the 19th Century. As early as the 1840’s Pierre Toussaint a freed Haitian slave, now in the process of canonization, played a significant role in establishing St Vincent DePauls Roman Catholic on W 23 St for French speaking New Yorkers. This Church started an early school for African Americans in the city. On Lamartine Place, the block of West 29th St between 8th and 9th Aves, the Hopper-Gibbons a Quaker family that played a crucial role in Abolitionism and many progressive and charitable causes, used their house as a stop in the Underground Railroad. The house, still stands is to date the only verifiable Underground Railroad safe House in Manhattan.

Particularly from the 1880s to 1900's (and lingering onto WWI), New York's African American community having been displaced from southern Greenwich Village settled in the West 20s and 30s. Thus the areas “Negro Tenderloin” was to the citys largest African-American settlement by the 1890s until once again the community was forced to move because of a brutal race riot in 1900 and displacement due to the demolition of a core area to build Penn Station.

Faced with the prospects of bad living conditions, a violent and dangerous environment and displacement, St. Philips Episcopal Church, the city's oldest African American congregation which at the time was located on West 25th St played a central role in fomenting the move to Harlem by a significant portion of the cities African population.

Several other of the cities older and most prominent black churches and institutions were in the neighborhood in the latter 19th Century including Bethel AME Church on W25 St and Mt Oliver and Shiloh on West 26th Street and the Colored Mission and the Sons of New York Club on West 30th St.

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124 West 28th Street icon

124 West 28th Street

This former public school #48 was built in 1854 to a design by Thomas R. Jackson who also designed the building on West 13th St that is now the LGBTQ Community Center, as well as the landmarked former school on East 12th street (now police athletic league). These three buildings are the oldest public school buildings in Manhattan. Around the turn of the 20th Century, the school building at 120 W28 St became home to the Douglass Club, one of the top African-American nightspots of its era. Owned by an ex-prizefighter, Edmond Johnson, it was a formative site in the development of ragtime and jazz. Willie the Lion Smith mentions it in his memoir. It was known for the quality of musicians and supposedly talent scouts from Koster & Bial’s used to spend a lot of time there. After a nasty racial incident in 1910, Johnson moved to Harlem and opened a new club.
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Proctor's 23rd Street Theater icon

Proctor's 23rd Street Theater

In the 1880’s, 23rd street was dotted with music halls and theaters between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. Frederick Francis Proctor built the Proctors Theater in 1888 on the site of the former Tabernacle Theatre. Inside, the 1,550 seat theater had electric lighting, gilded railings, velvet draperies and a gray-blue ceiling above red-toned walls. According to James Weldon Johnson, jazz reached New York in 1905 at Proctor's Twenty-Third Street Theater. ( where Sellis Manor residence for the blind stands today) Johnson described the band there as "a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making dominant use of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and \[it] was called the Memphis Students—a very good name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were not from Memphis. There was also a violin, a couple of brass instruments, and a double-bass." Seven years later, composer and band leader James Reese Europe, one of the "Memphis Students," took his Clef Club Orchestra to Carnegie Hall. During World War I, while serving as an officer for a machine-gun company in the famed 369th U.S. Infantry Division, James Europe, fellow officer Noble Sissel, and the regimental band introduced the sounds of ragtime, jazz, and the blues to European audiences.
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Grand Opera House icon

Grand Opera House

Originally opened as Pike’s Opera House in 1868, the building became the Grand Opera House the next year when it was purchased by James Fisk and Jay Gould. The repertoire was expanded beyond classic opera to include plays and light opera. Fisk’s motivation for this was to create opportunity for his girlfriend, actress Josie Mansfield. He put her up in a nearby brownstone and gifted her cash and lavish jewels. The mansion also had a secret tunnel that led to the opera house and the upstairs offices of Fisk’s Erie Railway. Fisk became the silent partner in an oil business run by a man named Ned Stokes. Stokes would became Mansfield’s other lover and after much drama, including extortion, blackmail, libel lawsuits, and false charges of embezzlement, Stokes murdered Fisk, shooting him in 1872. Fisk lay in state at the opera house. It was the site of the Cole & Johnson "Shoo-Fly Regiment". The theatre became a venue for more popular, working class productions, as the changing audience on the west side enjoyed a cheaper and less cultured repertoire. The building became an RKO theatre in 1938 after a renovation by theatre architect Thomas Lamb. Finally closed in preparation for demolition in June of 1960, the building was gutted by a fire in July of the same year.
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