Submitted by Kurt Thometz, Feb 16, 2007 20:31

Dear Francis Morrone Regards your Feb 16th piece, as the proprietor of Jumel Terrace Books, which is across the street from the Morris-Jumel Mansion, I'd just like to point out that the Mansion is not north of but at the very pinacle of Sugar Hill. This is where the founding fathers meet the founding brothers. Approaching the Jumel Mansion, visitors pass houses and apartment buildings that were once homes to W.E.B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Carl Van Vechten, Ralph Ellison, Ethel Waters, and Walter White. The Mansion itself looks at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, an Afro-American landmark. One of Paul Robeson's two addresses adjacent the "White House", the "Triple Nickel," was also home to entertainment legends Count Basie, Joe Louis, Thurgood Marshall, Teddy Wilson, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Lena Horne and Canada Lee. Equally prestigious, 409 Edgecombe "attracted so many members of the nation's black elite that in 1947 Ebony commented "that legend, only slightly exaggerated, says bombing 409 would wipe out Negro leadership for the next 20 years." Sometimes identified as part of Washington Heights, the neighborhood extending from Edgecombe Avenue to Amsterdam Avenue, and from 145th Street to 162th Street has been known as "Sugar Hill" since affluent African Americans started making it their home in the 1920s. Locally, it means not so much a neighborhood as certain addresses in the Jumel and Hamilton Heights historic districts synonymous with a degree of sophistication. A considerable literature signifying Harlem's Renaissance, and pointing to its Enlightenment, was nourished here by the likes of DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. Its jazz became the soundtrack of American cities at night. Romaire Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and James Van der Zee made Uptown's streets and people represent the Black capital of the world. "Sweet and expensive" Sugar Hill has retained its landmark status as "Harlem's smartest residential area" and its reputation as the intellectual and artistic home of Black America for a century. Like Ellington, take the A train and change to the C to 163rd Street and you'll come up in a "the neighborhood feels like a slice of Colonial Williamsburg airlifted into the city." Amities, Kurt Thometz Jumel Terrace Books Local History: African & American 426 West 160th Street New York, New York 10032 (212) 928-9525

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