Can Artists Save Langston Hughes’s Harlem Home?

While 20 East 127th Street hasn’t changed much since writer Langston Hughes lived there in the 1950s and ’60s, the area around it certainly has. The 1869 Italianate brownstone has sat empty for years—certainly surprising given the competitive Harlem real-estate market. Rather than letting it continue to languish unoccupied or be sold, Renee Watson and the I, Too, Arts Collective have started a campaign to rent and use the home as a cultural center that will honor the Harlem Renaissance writer. “Change is happening in Harlem and I believe it is important that . . . the historical and cultural spaces where African American pioneers lived and created be preserved,” Watson writes on the Indiegogo fundraising page for the project, which has raised over $27,000 of its $150,000 goal.

Once the building is leased, the group plans to give it some much-needed sprucing-up and use it as a space where both young and established artists can connect and display their work. In doing so the I, Too, Arts Collective will protect the neighborhood’s cultural and architectural history and help develop Harlem’s next generations of artists.

Langston Hughes on his Harlem stoop in June 1958.