For Lena Horne, a Home at Last
She was one of the most famous performers in the country, a recording star, a Hollywood actress and a nightclub sensation.
But in the late 1950s, Lena Horne still
struggled to find property owners in Manhattan who were willing to sell
co-ops or condominiums to African-Americans, even very wealthy ones.
So how exactly did she snare the
penthouse apartment, featured in this photograph, at 300 West End Avenue
on Manhattan’s Upper West Side? With the help of a good friend, Harry
Belafonte.
Back in 1958, Mr. Belafonte, who was the
first recording artist to sell more than a million LPs, was turned away
from one Manhattan apartment after another. And he was furious. So he
sent his publicist, who was white, to rent a four-bedroom apartment in
the building at 300 West End Avenue. His publicist passed on the
paperwork, and Mr. Belafonte signed the one-year lease in his own name.
Within hours of moving in, Mr. Belafonte
said, the building’s manager “became aware that he had a Negro as a
tenant.” The building’s owner asked him to leave. Mr. Belafonte refused.
Instead, he bought the building, using
dummy real estate companies to cloak his identity. Some tenants who had
been renting there bought their apartments and some of Mr. Belafonte’s
friends moved in, too. “Lena Horne got the penthouse,” said Mr.
Belafonte, who described the real estate deal in his memoir, “My Song: A
Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance.”
By Dec. 17, 1964, when this photograph
was taken by our photographer, Sam Falk, Ms. Horne and her husband,
Lennie Hayton, a white composer and conductor, were comfortably settled
in. She was hanging Christmas decorations that day as she prepared for
the debut of her television show, “Lena.”
In the article that ran 10 days later,
accompanied by a different photograph, a close-up, she mentioned her
difficulties in finding an apartment, but not the back story to where
she had landed.
“Lennie and I lived in hotels for years
while we were on the road,” said Ms. Horne, who was 47 then. “And then
we went through the hysteria of trying to find an apartment – all those
stupid problems – and when we finally found a place that would admit
both me and Lennie, we put our roots down.”
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