Designated: June 15, 1993
Considered Sugar Hill’s most prestigious address from the 1930s through the 1950s, the apartment building at 409 Edgecombe Avenue portrays through its illustrious roster of tenants the achievement of African-Americans “since the Harlem Renaissance. The building, known simply as “409,” was first open to African-Americans in the late 1920s and soon attracted numerous outstanding leaders in the fields of civil rights, politics, law, education, medicine, scholarship, music and the arts. These included W .E. B. DuBois, Walter White, William Stanley Braithwaite, Aaron Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins, among others. Constructed in 1916-17 to the designs of Schwartz & Gross, a prominent firm well-known for its apartment houses, 409 is an imposing thirteen-story structure with a curved, three-part facade, commanding a view of Jackie Robinson Park (originally Colonial Park) and the Harlem River from its
prominent hilltop site. The home of New York City’s African-American intellectual and cultural
elite, 409 was long a center of Sugar Hill society.