Real-estate editors, the forgotten men of all newspapers, made the front pages of Manhattan dailies last week with news of the most notable lease of the year. It was taken by John Davison Rockefeller Jr., on an apartment at No. 740 Park Avenue. It meant the removal, next spring, of the Rockefeller home from the eight-story grey mansion on West 54th Street, reputedly the tallest private house in New York City when "Mr. Junior" built it next door to his father's home in 1912. In moving to the first apartment he has ever lived in (two floors, 16 rooms), Mr. Rockefeller passed up two new apartment buildings he is completing on 54th and 55th Streets for executives who, like himself, have offices in his monumental Rockefeller Center.
Meanwhile Mr. Rockefeller was tacitly admitting failure in another and more famed apartment project, the Paul Lawrence Dunbar Apartments for Negroes. Built by Mr. Rockefeller in 1927 as a low-cost, co-operative housing venture to provide decent living quarters for a small fraction of Harlem's black population, the handsomely-gardened buildings occupy a full block, bounded by Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 149th and 150th Streets. They contain 511 apartments, largely units of four and five rooms. Adhering to the Rockefeller tradition of philanthropy with a purpose, Mr. Junior planned not only to house disadvantaged Negroes but also to prove that it could be done on a sound business basis and thus to stimulate housing improvements in Harlem far beyond the scope of private philanthropy or public subsidy. He took a $2,000,000 mortgage on the Dunbar Apartments, receiving a 5% return on his investment. Fortnight ago Mr. Rockefeller started to foreclose his mortgage.
Harlem sages shook their heads dolefully last week over what they regarded as one more failure of private capital to cope with the social and economic problems of Negroes. From the beginning the Dunbar Apartments rocked precariously on deep tremors of Negro sensitiveness. Rentals were planned at $9 per room per month, to enable Negro workers to support their families without doubling up in the usual Harlem manner of two or three families to an apartment. The rooms were small, the construction poor. To meet maintenance and amortization charges the rents were finally set at $11.50 to $17.50 per month per room. Consequence was that Dunbar residents came primarily from the higher income brackets, which led to charges that the management was discriminating in favor of blackamoor socialites. Nor were feelings improved by the management of Roscoe Conkling Bruce, a scholarly Negro Harvardman whose previous training had been gained in Washington as assistant superintendent of public schools.