Mary Dean, bought the five-story apartment house at the
corner of Seventh Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street at a price of $42,000. Later she sold it to the
Y. W. C. A. for dormitory purposes. The Y. W. C. A. sold
it recently to Adolph Howell, a leading colored undertaker,
the price given being $72,000. Often companies of a half
dozen men combined to buy a house these combinations were
and still are generally made up of West Indians—and would
produce five or ten thousand dollars to put through the deal.
When the buying activity began to make itself felt, the
lending companies that had been holding vacant the handsome
dwellings on and abutting Seventh Avenue decided to put them
on the market. The values on these houses had dropped to
the lowest mark possible and they were put up at astonishingly
low prices. Houses that had been bought at from $15,000
to $20,000 were sold at one-third those figures. They were
quickly gobbled up. The Equitable Life Assurance Company
held 106 model private houses that were designed by Stanford
White. They are built with courts running straight through
the block and closed off by wrought-iron gates. Every one
of these houses was sold within eleven months at an aggregate
price of about two million dollars. To-day they are probably
worth about 100 per cent more. And not only have private
dwellings and similar apartments been bought but big elevator
apartments have been taken over. Corporations have been
organized for this purpose. Two of these, The Antillian
Realty Company, composed West Indian Negroes, and the
Sphinx Securities Company, composed of American and West Indian Negroes, represent holdings amounting to approximately $750,000. Individual Negroes and companies in the South have invested in Harlem real estate. About two years ago a Negro institution of Savannah, Ga., bought a parcel for $115,000 which it sold a month or so ago at a profit of $110,000.
I am informed by John E. Nail, a successful colored real estate dealer of Harlem and a reliable authority, that the total value of property in Harlem owned and controlled by colored people would at a conservative estimate amount to more than
