Langston Hughes

📍20 East 127th Street, Harlem, New York, NY 10035, USA

“I grew up mostly with my grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, a proud, poor woman who told me stories of the fight against slavery; my parents had separated, and I moved between Kansas, Illinois, Ohio and Mexico as a boy, often lonely and always reading. The first time I came up out of the subway into Harlem as a young man, I felt I had come home. I became one of the voices of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. In 1947 my friends Emerson and Toy Harper bought a three-storey Italianate brownstone at 20 East 127th Street, built in 1869, and I moved in with them; they became my adopted family — I called her Aunt Toy. I lived and worked on the top floor for the last twenty years of my life, writing poems, plays, columns and the Simple stories at my typewriter late into the night, with neighbourhood children coming by and a small garden I tended out front. The house is a New York City landmark, and the block has been renamed Langston Hughes Place.”

Sources: savingplaces.org hdc.org nyclgbtsites.org