The Rent Was Too High So They Threw a Party
During the Harlem Renaissance, some Black people hosted rent parties, celebrations with an undercurrent of desperation in the face of racism and discrimination.
Minnie Pindar was at home in Harlem on a Saturday in 1929, and she had a party to throw.
She and her sister, Lucibelle Pindar, had passed out invitations, printed on cheap, white card stock, promising a good time in their ground floor apartment at 149 West 117th Street. “Refreshments Just It” and “Music Won’t Quit,” the invitation read. Their invitation, one of dozens of similar party invitations tucked into the Langston Hughes papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, hints at the rich but difficult lives of Black people living in New York at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.
On that Saturday, Nov. 2, the Pindar sisters likely readied their home to welcome guests. Maybe they moved the furniture to make room for dancing. Maybe Ms. Pindar wore her best dress. There would likely be revelry and laughter that night, but throwing the party was a necessity. Every guest was expected to give them a quarter. The rent was due.
Minnie Pindar was 23, had two young sons and worked as a housekeeper, a job that made about $50 a month in 1929, the start of the Great Depression. Lucibelle, who went by Lucille, was 19. The rent for the apartment that the four of them shared with their mother, 45-year-old Sylvia Walker, and two of Sylvia’s other grandchildren, was $55 a month.
It was the steep price to pay for the promise of Harlem, a siren for Black Southerners who were rewriting the story of their lives in the midst of the Great Migration. Escaping the terror of lynchings, Black migrants were flowing from south to north in a movement of millions.
By 1920, 75,000 Black people had made Harlem their permanent stop, shaping it into the largest Black community in the country, a place for Black public life in America to be resurrected on their own terms. Its streets crackled with the energy of renewal, and in its cafes and clubs, an electric revival of Black literature, scholarship, poetry, music and politics was playing out in real time and kept reverberating well into the 1930s.
Inside Harlem’s packed tenements, however, the picture was grimmer. Black people in 1920s Harlem were underpaid for their work and exploited for their rent, often charged 30 percent more per room than white working-class New Yorkers.
I don’t know how many rent parties Minnie threw. I do know that her younger son, Cleveland Gilmore, never liked to talk to his son about his childhood and the poverty he experienced as a boy. I know this because nearly 100 years after she and her sister passed out invitations and opened their home, I called her grandson, Amir Gilmore, and asked him about his family’s past.
I had come prepared with questions. But what I actually gave Amir was answers.
Dr. Gilmore, 33, never knew his grandmother’s name. He grew up with a father who wouldn’t answer questions about his past. Today he is an assistant professor and associate dean at Washington State University. He has spent his academic career focused on dissecting the meaning of Black joy and perseverance, always digging, he said, toward some unknown corner of Black history. Turns out it was his own.
Ms. Pindar could probably never have dreamed of such a future for her grandchild. The present was enough to navigate.
In 1929, a quart of milk cost 16 cents; a dozen eggs, 47 cents.
That Saturday, the mercury kept climbing, all the way to an unseasonable high of 72 degrees. Thousands of New Yorkers sought respite at Coney Island where some in bathing suits ventured into the water.
But for Ms. Pindar, that day was all about the rent.
Rent parties were playing out behind thousands of other closed doors in run-down Harlem buildings. Tenants would use the proceeds to pay their landlord on the first of the month, and then hopefully make it another 30 days before scrimping again.
The Red Box
Because of Langston Hughes, there’s an extensive record of Harlem’s rent parties.
Hughes saved dozens of invitations, squirreling them away in a red box that once housed his checkbooks. He held on to them even as he traveled as a newspaper correspondent in the Soviet Union, Haiti and Japan, and a series of rented American rowhouses until he finally settled into his own permanent home in Harlem, on East 127th Street, in 1947.
He would later donate them as part of a much larger collection of his papers housed at Yale’s Beinecke Library, where they have a permanent home in the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters. He had worked as a personal assistant to Carter G. Woodson, known as the father of Black History Month.
“He was doing this for posterity, to let people know that these things were happening,” said Melissa Barton, a curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature.
Hughes moved to New York in the early 1920s as a student at Columbia University, feeling more at home in the community of Harlem than at the Ivy League school.
Harlem was the ideal muse. In his autobiography, “The Big Sea,” he describes how as the Harlem Renaissance gained steam, “white people began to come to Harlem in droves,” prompting Black dancers, musicians and singers to shift their acts to please their visiting audiences. It was a phenomenon of economy that obscured the historical record. “The gay and sparkling life of the so-called Negro Renaissance of the ’20s was not so gay and sparkling beneath the surface as it looked,” he wrote. “Nontheatrical, nonintellectual Harlem was an unwilling victim of its own vogue. It didn’t like to be stared at by white folks.”
Rent parties like Ms. Pindar’s were bawdy, booze-soaked and offered an escape from the white gaze. Outside, there was prohibition and gawkers from Lower Manhattan. Inside, there was beer and bathtub gin. There was live music, including appearances by Duke Ellington and Fats Waller.
At rent parties, Hughes wrote, he met truckers, seamstresses and shoeshine boys.
Rug-Cutters
A 1929 play by Wallace Thurman, staged at the Billy Rose Theatre, included a scene with a rent party.
At rent parties, Harlemites experimented with new dances. None were as much of a phenomenon as the Lindy Hop, which emerged in dance halls like the Savoy Ballroom and married moves from other dances including the Charleston, the Texas Tommy and the Breakaway with individual styling and flips, all set to the soaring tempos of swing jazz.
Nearly all of the invitations followed the same format: a clever rhyming couplet at the top offered a snippet of homespun poetry, …
… followed by a euphemism advertising the main event. Most hosts, including Minnie and Lucille, announced their gatherings as a “Social Whist Party,” …
… but some opted for “A midsummer frolic,” …
… “A beer brawl” …
… or even a “Chitterling Strut.” Hosts promised drinks, food and tunes, then listed the date and time as well as the apartment.
The sisters promised a room full of lively Black people, announcing “lots of Browns with plenty of pep” would be on hand at the Saturday night affair.
Hughes wasn’t the only great Black writer chronicling the moment in Harlem.
Black literature and music found its voice in those moments. The pulse of rent parties appears as percussion beneath much of the art of the time. Duke Ellington and his Jungle Band released the swinging, sizzling “Rent Party Blues” in 1929. Countee Cullen penned “Heritage,” a meditation on the ancestors, in 1925. Billie Holiday made her debut on a Harlem nightclub stage in 1931, while Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong were blending ragtime and blues into the fever dream through which jazz music emerged. And on any given night, Harlem residents were as likely to hear a live rendition of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Perdido” in a living room at a rent party as they were at the Alhambra or the Apollo.
Zora Neale Hurston, who moved to Harlem in the 1920s and sometimes sat in the bedroom of her small apartment at 108 West 131st Street while parties raged in her living room, compiled a dictionary of “Harlem Slanguage” that includes the term “rug-cutter” — a dancer at a Harlem rent party whose moves are so sharp that their feet could cut the host’s rug.
But while much of the historic canon about rent parties focuses on their raucous joy, it was a stalking inequity that prompted them.
“When you think about real estate in the context of rent parties, rent parties were held by people who were in very precarious circumstances,” Ms. Barton said. “They were acts of desperation.”
For many Black Americans migrating from the South to northern cities, like New York, Chicago and Detroit, rent parties were the ultimate act of desperation.
It is unclear when Minnie, Lucille and their mother, Sylvia Walker, moved to the West 117th Street tenement. A 1930 census record shows Minnie Pindar was born “about 1907,” was Negro, single, and had not attended school but was able to read and write. The census also lists her occupation as a servant for a private family and details her mother’s birthplace as Georgia; her father’s was Florida. In that same census, Sylvia Walker, Minnie’s mother, is listed as the head of household for their rented apartment; the value is listed as $55 per month.
Rent parties reached their peak during the years of the Great Depression, but some were still being thrown after World War II. Billie Holiday continued to perform “Strange Fruit,” a meditation on lynchings. For hundreds of thousands of Black people, rent parties were much more than an exuberant pastime well into the 1950s. They were a gasp of freedom in a country that doubled as a chokehold.
The neighborhood evolved. An elevated train that ran along Second Avenue, likely a train Ms. Pindar took, and the tenement that she tried to hold onto in 1929, are long gone.
‘Passive Observers’
The tenement where Minnie threw her rent party is long gone. In its place, a new multi-family building stands, and inside, a different rent dispute is now playing out.
By 2000, Minnie’s tenement had been replaced by an empty lot. Nachum Turetzky, a philosophy professor who is originally from Israel, bought it. He was a graduate student at CUNY at the time with a wife and 3-year-old son. He watched the new townhouse go up, and today lives alone on the top floor and rents out the unit below for $4,300.
“Harlem has been my home for the last 25 years,” he said.
As is the story across New York City, crime peaked in Harlem in the late 1980s and 1990s, and gentrification continues to rewrite the neighborhood’s story, block by block. Mr. Turetzky said he felt like he was playing a part in the neighborhood’s revival. “Harlem was devastated but it was also beautiful. We had the sense that something was happening here, and we wanted to buy a place and not pay somebody else’s mortgage,” he said. “This block was a shining star in the darkness.”
James and Natalie Fine, who moved into one of the rental units in September 2022, admit they’re outsiders but say they’ve received a warm welcome.
“When we first moved here, you could just see this was a community. People have been here for generations,” said Mr. Fine, 34. They chose their unit, a two-bedroom with a basement, for a common reason — it was affordable.
He is a lawyer and Ms. Fine, also 34, is a nurse who works in medical device sales. The couple, who married last May, are expecting their first child and don’t plan to stay long — they’re looking to move to Washington, D.C., closer to Mr. Fine's family, this summer after their baby is born.
“We’re sort of passive observers in this place of living history,” Mr. Fine said.
But some 95 years later, a landlord-tenant relationship remains fraught: The Fines are currently in a dispute over maintenance issues with Mr. Turetzky, and have withheld their rent for the last five months.
The Housekeeper’s Grandson
A handwritten page from a 1950 census log shows Minnie Gilmore’s name.
Minnie Pindar’s name reappears as Minnie Gilmore in a 1952 marriage license to Scotty Eckford, a union organizer of Black hotel employees in New York City. Mr. Eckford was also the uncle of Elizabeth Eckford, the American civil rights activist who made history in 1957 when she enrolled in the all-white Little Rock Central High School and attended class.
Ms. Pindar died in the Bronx in 1997. Her younger son, Cleveland Gilmore, was 2 on that unseasonably warm November night in 1929. As an adult, he never talked about rent parties, or life in Harlem at all.
When I contacted Amir about his family’s history, he said he was stunned to learn that his grandmother was at the epicenter of the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance.
“My dad was all about bits and pieces,” said Dr. Gilmore. “He grew up poor. He didn’t like to talk about his life. He would tell us little things, like how he would buy watermelon for a nickel, but I never knew about his family.”
The elder Mr. Gilmore died of a brain aneurysm in 2004, when Amir was 14. Despite the silence between them, Cleveland and Amir did have one language to communicate: jazz.
In 1929, maybe Cleveland and his mother watched excitedly as the Alhambra Ballroom opened its doors on 126th Street, with an upstairs stage that would be graced by Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. Maybe they walked past the Cotton Club on 142nd Street and scorned its ban on Black patrons, even while it welcomed Black performers like Ethel Waters and Cab Calloway to its stage. Or maybe, on early morning walks with his mother near 134th street, the elder Mr. Gilmore heard strains from Fats Waller, Harry Dial and Herman Autrey at Smalls Paradise, where 6 a.m. breakfast dances were led by a full jazz band.
“I started my Ph.D. because of my dad, and because we had such a tough relationship,” he said. “He found his joy in jazz. And so that’s what we did. He would put on music, and the walls would come down. He would open up and it was like talking to a different man. He would be vulnerable. And then the music would end and the walls would come back up.”
In his dissertation for his doctorate, Dr. Gilmore set out to answer the questions his father left open, dissecting the roots of Black joy and pulling the thread on what Black aesthetics mean without the presence of a white patron. Without realizing it, he was circling close to that Harlem ground-floor apartment and to all the reasons his grandmother gave a party, with jazz and dancing filling the air and with Langston Hughes quietly taking note of the date and time.
“I was always so curious about my origins and who I am. I’ve always thought there has to be more. I talk about history, Black life and the things Black people had to do to make it,” he said. “So to learn my grandmother was doing those things, living through these times in abject poverty and finding not just a way to survive but also to have fun and find joy, that’s so badass.”