This month in real estate history

1961: UN African delegates complain of housing bias

United Nations delegates from Africa formally complained they had been discriminated against in their search for housing in Manhattan, 52 years ago this month.

The delegates wrote a letter to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold outlining a range of bias that they had encountered. A traffic stop is what prompted the members to send the dispatch, but apartment hunting was one of the biggest injustices they cited.

Discrimination against Africans surged because of the record number of African countries that joined the international body in 1960 — a total of 16 nations.

The UN had anticipated the discrimination; in a secret meeting in June 1960, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge notified the Real Estate Board of New York of the incoming delegates. Despite that outreach, though, about a third of the 80 or so new African members had trouble finding homes, the New York Times reported.

Two of the obstacles that the delegates encountered were landlords wary of their diplomatic immunity and location. A landlord had no recourse against a member, because of his diplomatic immunity, if he damaged an apartment or left without paying rent. As for location, the delegates wanted to live near the UN in Midtown — not in Harlem, a historically black neighborhood that they considered “degrading” and “unsafe,” according to news reports at the time.

1940: NYCHA files plans for first garden-style homes

The New York City Housing Authority filed building plans for its first low-rise, garden-style apartment homes — and its first project in the Bronx — 73 years ago this month.

Officials with the city’s public housing agency proposed spending $2.2 million to build Clason Point Gardens, a development of mostly two-story row houses for more than 400 families in the Soundview section of the South Bronx. The plans called for the complex to sit on 17 acres bounded by Story, Seward, Noble and Metcalf avenues.

Before Clason Point Gardens, NYCHA had the practice of putting up large apartment buildings that each housed hundreds of residents.

The first tenants, low-income families headed by military veterans, moved into their homes in September 1941. A photograph from the project’s dedication in 1942 shows an all-white crowd, the New York Times reported.

NYCHA still owns and manages the 401 apartment units in the 46 cinder block buildings, which by the early 1990s had mostly black and Latino residents.

Five Points Mission at 63 Worth Street in Manhattan

1915: Five Points Mission demolished for courthouse

Demolition of the historic Five Points Mission House, just north of City Hall on a site with an infamous past, began 98 years ago this month.

The six-story building, at 63 Worth Street, was home to a charity operated by the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

It was the location, though, not the use, that made the house notorious.

Across the street from a triangular patch of land called Paradise Park, the building was in the middle of Five Points, an area that left less than a favorable impression on British author Charles Dickens.

“This is the place [Five Points], these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” Dickens wrote in an account of his American travels.

The building rose on the site where a decrepit tenement building known as the Old Brewery, famous for being a center of vice, once stood.

In 1913, a state Courthouse Board picked a design for the new Courthouse building as part of a sweeping cleanup of the crime- and gang-ridden neighborhood.

By the next year, demolition of the area was underway. Construction started in 1919, and the neoclassical building was completed in 1927 at a cost of $30 million.