Renaissance Ballroom | 2351 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.

Upon leaving the museum, turn left onto Lenox/Malcolm X and head north, past the Schomburg. Make a left onto W. 138th St. and then another left onto Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. Stop at the new luxury condominium complex called The Rennie (2351 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.). This was where the remains of the Renaissance Ballroom stood until April 2015.

By Henry Castillo

Many people, even locals, are not aware that the old Renaissance Ballroom complex began as just a "theatre." This event was an important breakthrough. Prior to the Renaissance Theatre, nicknamed “the Rennie,” Black people weren’t permitted to sit in the orchestra of most movie houses, even home in Harlem. While whites sat below, Black patrons had to use the balcony. This elevated seating area became known as "heaven" for Black Americans.

That historic structure ushered in a decade-long period of African American cultural and artistic flourishing. At the time, it was known as the New Negro Movement. Now, we know it as the Harlem Renaissance. While many mistakenly believe that the building, the Renaissance Theater, was named after the era, it was in fact the other way around.

African Americans moved to Harlem in droves but had few opportunities to erect new buildings. A partnership of African American businessmen in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which urged African Americans to support Black-owned businesses, collaborated in building the Rennie. Architect Harry Creighton Ingalls completed the theater in 1922 and the ballroom atop a billiard parlor, shops, and a Chinese restaurant two years later. The Rennie’s builders were Caribbean immigrants. William H. Roach, an Antiguan, ran a real estate business. His partners-- Cleophus Charity, the president of the Rennie, and Joseph H. Sweeney, the treasurer-- were from Montserrat.

By the time Harlem became regarded as a Black Mecca in the 1920s, the Rennie fulfilled demand for mass meetings, sporting events and organized dances. As similar low-rise entertainment complexes arose all over America, the Rennie made Harlem famous. It also hosted innumerable dances sponsored by local groups that played an ubiquitous role in African American social life into the 1950s. America’s first African American professional basketball team, the Renns, were virtually undefeated for 40 years in matches against other famous African American teams as well as much rarer contests with white teams.

How disillusioning must it have been for the Black creators of this wonderful building to see the Rennie foreclosed during the Great Depression and their dream taken over by whites? With the onset of the Depression in the early 1930s, the new owners replaced Black workers, projectionists and ticket-takers with an all-white staff. Although the Rennie continued to be a venue for jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, something definitely had been lost. For Joseph H. Sweeney, the Rennie’s treasurer, this loss was so great that within weeks of losing control of the Rennie, he locked himself into his home and turned on his gas stove. His funeral, presided over by the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., was held at the Abyssinian Baptist Church nearby.

By the 1990s, the Rennie had so deteriorated that it was used as a setting for Spike Lee’s crack den from hell in the movie Jungle Fever. But just before this occurred, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission had identified it as one of only 25 buildings that should represent their “opening salvo” in ensuring Harlem landmarks protection equal to that of the rest of Manhattan.

Although the commission agreed to landmark the complex in 1991, the process never finished. Until very recently, the abandoned complex sat across from the historic Strivers Row, where townhouses now sell for upwards of $2 million. The Abyssinian Development Corporation ultimately won the fight over the Rennie. They felt that landmarking it would create delays in their plans for a 13-story steel and glass luxury apartment tower complex above the casino. In April 2015, during the making of this memory walk, they demolished the Rennie’s last remains. *In its place has been erected a luxury condominium complex of the same name; purchase prices for its 134 units range from $588,000 (for a studio) to $1.5 million (for three bedrooms) in a neighborhood where the poverty rate was 23.5% in 2017 and the median household income was $49,995, about 19% less than citywide median household income ($62,040).

Click here to watch the official trailer for Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, possibly the only remaining footage of the Rennie.

*Editorial addition made by Nicole Marie Gervasio in August 2019.