Alexander Gumby's Salon & Book Studio | 2144 5th Ave.

Return to the corner of E. 127th St. and 5th Ave. Cross the street to the west side of 5th Ave. Walk north on 5th Ave., passing W. 131st St., to the brownstone with rainbow bricks. This building once housed Gumby’s Salon and Book Studio (2144 5th Ave.).

By R. Ertug Altinay and Nicole Gervasio

Levi Sandy Alexander Gumby, beloved by friends as “the Great God Gumby,” was the openly gay African American proprietor of the artists’ salon once housed within these rainbow bricks. Originally from Maryland, Gumby moved to New York City and worked as a butler, a bellhop, a postal worker, and a waiter at Columbia University.

In the early 1920s, with the support of Charles W. Newman, a wealthy stockbroker who was his friend and sometimes lover, he opened the Gumby Book Studio. The studio became a hub for artists, intellectuals and the queer community. Gumby called his studio “the first unpremeditated interracial movement in Harlem.”

Gumby meticulously created 300 scrapbooks that were at once both cosmopolitan and quotidian. His scrapbooks reflected his diverse interests, which ranged from lynching to baseball to Josephine Baker. Like other African American archivists and historians of the period, he did not aim to uncover a distinct African American history. Rather, he desired to reveal an American and world history that included people of African descent.

The constellation of stories assembled in his Harlem scrapbook refuses to give up on a utopian possibility of interracial community in Harlem. The scrapbook opens with a 1922 New York Times article about plans for a new subway system that would connect Harlem to downtown Manhattan. The news clipping is implicitly racist; it suggests that a subway line to “the Black belt of Harlem” would be a waste of time. Gumby challenges this racism by juxtaposing it against a poem by Robert Schlick, which sees Harlem as a transformative intersection where, in his words, “East and Hudson sift their waters.”

In subsequent clippings about civil rights marches, community-building groups like the Elks Lodge, and social organizing, Gumby continues counteracting bigoted news coverage with local reports about Harlem’s thriving community. By 1929 in this scrapbook, Harlem transforms into a mixed-race site of play in which, according to one reporter “those who formerly patronized midtown resorts are now spending their nights mingling with colored folks.” Here is a lengthier excerpt from Frank Dolan’s clipping:

Here occurs, indeed, a singular intermingling of the races.

Men of the mysterious lands of the Far East—Hindus, Japanese, Chinese, Malays—rub elbows on the dance floor with West Indian and colored folk from all parts of America.

The Bamboo is the most Democratic club of the lot, in that a man of any color may walk in accompanied by a woman of any other color—or no woman at all.

[…] Such are the nine night clubs of the colored colony, the magnets that have stolen the suckers away from Broadway.

The image of the dance floor manifests the multicultural dream of the melting pot. The dance itself is intimate—flesh touches, elbows rub. The fact that a man might walk in with “no woman at all” suggests that a gay man might not need to affirm his heterosexuality at the door. “The colored colony,” sequestered as it is, holds a “magnetic” allure for Black and white men alike who might prefer to remain in the shadows of Broadway's bright lights. Through his scrapbooks, Gumby was thus able to play with innuendos and social codes in the media to assert a new narrative for Harlem.

With the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Newman lost his wealth, and Gumby had to give up the studio. In 1950, Gumby donated his scrapbook collection to Columbia University, where they are still housed. Although his archive is protected, the gathering place he provided in this building has long been lost to the gentrification that threatens many informal memory sites in this neighborhood.

Click here to view an online exhibition of Gumby's scrapbooks hosted by Columbia University's Butler Library.