Philip A. Payton, Jr. was a real estate mogul who directed Black residents in Manhattan to move to the newly built Harlem area, away from the overcrowding and discrimination rampant in the older Black neighborhoods. Payton used white flight to his advantage, getting landlords to turn over buildings to his use to get revenge on neighboring landlords, as they knew white residents would be unhappy with Black neighbors

Philip A. Payton Jr. is known for providing Black Americans in New York City with housing in the northern Manhattan community of Harlem. Payton was a real estate broker, property manager, and owner. He gained a national reputation among Black business leaders during the first decade of the 2oth century.

Payton was born February 27, 1876, in Westfield, Massachusetts. Both his parents Philip A. Payton and Annie Ryans Payton were entrepreneurs his father owned a barbershop and his mother operated a hairdressing business. However, Payton Jr. didn’t seem destined for a career in business in Booker T. Washington’s 1907 work The Negro in Business, Payton talked about  his 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 become a barber.

In 1899 Payton moved to New York City where he had a several of jobs and would eventually found work as a porter in a real estate office. Being exposed to the real estate industry, 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, would later be able to get contracts to manage houses.

Then a real estate boom occurred in the northern Manhattan community of Harlem after 1900. The predominantly white community of Harlem, first settled in the 1600s, had initially been a Dutch farming community. At the time it became a residential community as transportation links with the lower Manhattan business districts improved in the second half of the 1800s.

According to Encyclopedia:

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.

Source:

Read more:

U.S. Government compensated slave owners for their ‘loyalty to the Union’ and for the loss of income incurred by freeing slaves

10 Historical Photos From The Civil Rights Movement