LIFE
E S TAT E S
Even then, neighbors were incredulous. “They assumed that she was the maid coming to check on the property,” says A’Lelia Bundles, historian and Walker’s great-great-granddaughter. But Walker was determined to make her presence known. “The property originally went all the way back to the river, but she built the house close to the street so that everyone on their way to Albany would see it,” says Bundles. “She wanted to make a statement.” In 1918, the 35-room home was complete. Designed by Vertner Tandy, New York’s first black architect, the 16,000-square-foot Italianate-style main house boasted four floors, gold interior columns, a grand dining room with high, curved ceilings and murals reflecting the wealth and power of its owner. But from almost the outset, Villa Lewaro’s survival was uncertain: a year after her home was completed, Walker died of kidney failure. Under A’Lelia Walker’s care, the house initially served as a lively clubhouse for the Harlem Renaissance. Black elites like Paul Robeson and Alberta Hunter rippled in from Manhattan for A’Lelia’s parties, which were “filled with guests whose names would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy,” according to Langston Hughes’s autobiography. While Madam Walker left the home to A’Lelia, and intended it to be party-friendly (The organ room, solarium and outdoor terrace were specifically designed to entertain), she stipulated that upon A’Lelia’s death, the house would be bequeathed to the NAACP. However, when A’Lelia died at 46 in 1931 amid the Great Depression, the NAACP liquidated the home to ease its own financial woes. “The proceeds were very small because it was hard to find a buyer in that economy,” says A’Lelia Bundles. The buyers, an archaic women’s society called Companions of the Forest, would use the home for five decades as an assisted living facility for their small, aging population. By 1980, when Bund les, who g rew up in India napolis, f irst saw inside her great-great-grandmother’s home, the grand estate’s pulse was faint. “I was in Westchester for a conference, so I walked over and knocked on the door. They were very reluctant to let me in,” Bundles says. “When I walked in, there were a couple older ladies sitting in chairs in the entertaining space. It almost had the feeling of one of those residences for women like the Barbizon Hotel; not very fancy and not very bright.” By this time, locals knew the property as an old age home rather than a bustling hub of black virtuosity. “From the ’30s to the ’80s, Madam Walker’s legacy was pretty much invisible to the local community,” says Brent Leggs, project manager for the National Trust. While its cultural significance may have been obscured, the property’s decades-long stasis under the Companions of the Forest served to save much of Madam Walker’s original construction. “They covered some of the f loor with linoleum, which is really horrible,” Bundles laughs. “But it meant that it preserved the beautiful hardwood floors. They left the original crystal chandeliers there. The beauty was that [the ladies] didn’t have a lot of money to make changes.” If it weren’t for such sedentary tenants, the changes that could have been made to the home were virtually limitless. While it received National Historic Landmark status in 1976 as part of the American Bicentennial celebration, the home still lacked protection against demolition or adverse alterations to the property. In the ‘80s, when the house hit the market for the first time in 50 years, one developer planned to pave over it with condominiums, but was thwarted by two 250-year-old trees protected by city ordinances. The property’s next owners, the Appel family, hoped to start an eating disorder clinic there, but in 1993, sold the home
to Helena and Harold Doley – Villa Lewaro’s current owners and the architects of its future. Harold Doley, a Louisiana-born retired investment banker and former United States ambassador, long aspired to call Villa Lewaro home. While training to become a broker on the New York Stock Exchange, Doley would travel north to visit the grounds, quietly dreaming of acquiring it. After negotiating with the Appels for three years, the Doleys bought Villa Lewaro for an estimated $7 million. “There’s only been one home that I’ve ever wanted to own and this is it,” Doley told Jet magazine in 1995. Originally, Helena Doley resisted the purchase. “The property was in terrible condition, and that’s putting it mildly,” she recalls. “The kitchen was in its original state. No cable, no telephone service. When it rained, we were literally a bucket brigade.” Over the next two decades, the Doleys would restore the home to its golden age splendor, tearing up the linoleum and reinstating the original Italian tile roof, which had been sold off. But the upkeep wasn’t easy. “We put it on the market a few years ago,” says Helena. “Our son has a young family and isn’t interested in spending so much time on it.” Ultimately, no buyer stuck. But this past May, after joining forces with the National Trust, the Doleys took measures to protect the house in case one ever does. “The first step was to establish an easement, which is a somewhat underutilized tool for properties that are rich in African American history like Villa Lewaro,” says National Trusts’s Germonique Ulmer. “We all know that Harpo Studios were demolished in Chicago – that’s a place that could’ve been protected by a preservation easement. It wasn’t until we established this relationship with [the Doleys] that they were aware that this could be done.” Once a site of hard-won revelry and glamour, the home’s sweeping scale signifies a collective struggle of equal proportions. With the easement for Villa Lewaro finalized earlier this year, and a television show about Madam Walker’s life starring Octavia Spencer announced in August, it appears that struggle won’t soon be forgotten. But for now, the Doleys say, the next generation of Villa Lewaro stewards is still to be determined. “It’s very difficult for [my husband] to part with the house,” says Helena. “But he knows that it is time for us to move on, and to entrust it to someone who loves the house as much as we do.” Until then, she, Harold and the house will, just like Madam Walker, persevere.
THEY ASSUMED THAT [MADAM WALKER] WAS THE MAID COMING TO CHECK ON THE PROPERTY.
From its completion, the fate of the house of haircare mogul Madam C.J. Walker was uncertain. Here’s how it survived and stayed true to its roots BY SAMUEL ANDERSON
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M A DA M WA L K E R FA M I LY A R C H I V E S / A ’ L E L I A B U N D L E S
The Wonder of Villa Lewaro
ne night, Sarah Breedlove, a young widow and single mother working as a washwoman in Louisiana, saw in her dreams a secret formula for hair oil. The child of freed slaves, Breedlove had hopes of escaping hard manual labor. Her husband, whom she married at 14, died in a race riot when she was 20. Her hair had been a relatively minor source of pain—she had lost much of it in the 1890s, an age in which most African-Americans had little access to haircare, due to a chronic scalp condition—but one she resolved to conquer. In 1905, Sarah moved to Denver, married a newspaperman named Charles Joseph Walker, and developed Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, a sulfuric remedy to dandruff and other skin infections. Before long, Madam C.J. Walker, as she came to be known, was a national presence. She trained women to be ambassadors to market her brand of tonics, opening the Walker College of Hair Culture in 1908 (Mary Kay Ash, who used similar marketing techniques to built the Mary Kay cosmetics empire, wouldn’t be born for another decade). By 1910, Walker and her team of predominantly female executives were manufacturing and distributing her products on an industrial scale. After establishing her corporate headquarters in Indianapolis, Madam Walker and her daughter A’Lelia moved to New York in 1913 during the nascent Harlem Renaissance. It was there that Walker decided to build a monument to her success—a mansion in the exclusive village of Irvington, New York, which at one time was the most expensive zip code in the United States. “Perseverance is my motto,” said Madame Walker in a 1917 New York Times Magazine interview entitled “Wealthiest Negro Woman’s Suburban Mansion.” “It laid the Atlantic cable; it gave us the telegraph, telephone, and wireless. It gave to the world an Abraham Lincoln, and to a race, freedom.” The construction of her Babylon on the Hudson was an illustration of that perseverance; despite discriminatory realtors who charged double the price of the land in an effort to dissuade her purchase—a tactic called “black dollar”— Walker secured a prime four acres down the way from Jay Gould’s Lyndhurst estate.
P O R T R A I T : M A DA M WA L K E R FA M I LY A R C H I V E S / A ’ L E L I A B U N D L E S . C A R : G E T T Y I M AG E S
Villa Lewaro’s terrace Below: Madam Walker’s agents attend a sales conference at her home
Below, left: A’Lelia Walker, Madam Walker’s daughter, in Villa Lewaro’s music room. Below, right: Madam C.J. Walker at the wheel during a business trip
DUJOUR 53