page_title: Philip A. Payton Jr.
section_title: After the Afro-American
hierarchical_section_title: Philip A. Payton Jr. / After the Afro-American
caption_attribution_description: Maggie Payton, wife of Philip A. Payton Jr., the "father of Harlem", and 13 West 131st Street, the house where they lived starting in 1903.[1] Caption: Mrs. Philip A. Payton, Jr. Their home, New York City. Illustration from Chapter XIX, "Philip A. Payton, Jr., and the Afro-American Realty Company", between pages 200 and 201 of The Negro in Business, by Booker T. Washington, published 1907.
context_page_description: Philip A. Payton Jr. was an African-American real estate entrepreneur, known as the "Father of Harlem", due to his work renting properties in Harlem, New York City, to African Americans.
context_section_description: Payton continued to buy and manage Harlem real estate for black tenants, founding the Philip A. Payton Jr. Company, known for its PAP logo. He even ventured outside the city to Long Island. John E. Nail and Henry G. Parker, former directors of the Afro-American Realty Company, founded their own company, Nail & Parker Real Estate, in 1907; it eventually became one of the most successful in New York.
  By 1914, The Outlook wrote that three-quarters of the black population of New York City, including all blacks of prominence, lived in Harlem; it called Payton "the father of his Negro community". The success of Payton's enterprise could be seen in the neighborhood of 13 West 131st Street, the house he had bought for himself and his wife Maggie in 1903. The entire street was white in 1900; by the time of the 1915 New York State census, the block was almost completely inhabited by blacks.
  Payton closed his largest deal in July 1917, a sale of six apartment houses for about $1.5 million, the largest sale of housing for blacks to that time. The buildings were renamed after prominent blacks in the Americas: Crispus Attucks, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. The black population in Harlem had reached 50,000 or even 70,000.
  Payton died of liver cancer a month later at his country house in Allenhurst, New Jersey; he was 41. His younger brother Edward S. Payton, who had served as vice-president of Afro-American Realty, had passed even earlier, in 1912, at the age of 30. The Philip A. Payton Jr. Company survived after him, managing numerous African-American apartments at least until 1922.
  The Philip A. Payton Jr Company was co-managed by John E. Nail and Henry C. Parker, who went on to be known as the "little fathers" of Negro Harlem. They worked to fulfill Payton’s dream of making this Harlem neighborhood a political and cultural capital for African-Americans in the area.
caption: Maggie Payton and 13 West 131st Street, their home in Harlem
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