Harlem's Langston Hughes House Wins Preservation Grant

HARLEM, NY — The home where one of the most famous poets of the Harlem Renaissance lived and worked for more than two decades is one of 22 sites to be awarded grant money for historic preservation.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation announced this month that the Langston Hughes House on East 127th Street between Madison and Fifth avenues will earn a share of $1.6 million in grant money provided by the organization in 2019. The grants go toward preservation projects that fall under four categories: Capacity building, project planning, capital and programming and interpretation.

Grants are awarded through the National Trust's African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which was founded to "draw attention to the remarkable stories that evoke centuries of African American activism and achievement, and to tell our nation’s full history." The action fund is the largest preservation campaign dedicated so African American history.

"The recipients of this funding shine a light on once lived stories and Black culture, some familiar and some yet untold, that weave together the complex story of American history in the United States," Brent Leggs, executive director of the Action Fund, said in a statement.

Langston Hughes lived in the Italianate-style brownstone on East 127th Street for the last two decades of his life. It was in the top-floor room of the home where Hughes wrote poems such as "Montage of a Dream Deferred" and "I Wonder as I Wander."

The home is now the site of the I, Too, Arts Collective — an organization that runs programs for emerging writers and artists from underrepresented communities. The group launched a successful crowdfunding effort to rent out the building after the home was listed on the real estate market with the listing encouraging buyers to "bring your architect and contractors!"

Other sites awarded grant money from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund this year include: the Harriet Tubman House in Auburn, New York, The Forum in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, Morris Brown College's Fountain Hall in Atlanta and endangered black cemeteries and settlements in Texas.