A Harlem Cultural Hub Is Threatened by Debt
Theirs was a partnership built on vision and pride and rooted in a building at the very heart of black America.
In 2002 the National Black Theater, a cultural anchor of Harlem, invited the owners of Nubian Heritage, a growing beauty-care company with an African pedigree, to invest in its sprawling building at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street.
The theater, created in the turmoil of the civil rights movement, had owned the building for 19 years. But now it faced foreclosure, as large construction loans remained unpaid.
For the theater, its new partners held the promise of revenue and revival. For the businessmen, two former street vendors from Liberia, the building provided a flagship store in a historic neighborhood.
Nine years later, though, the store is closed; the partnership owes nearly $1.8 million in unpaid property taxes; and the theater is facing foreclosure yet again, a plight it blames on its partners, men it once embraced as kindred spirits and now in court accuses of mismanagement and fraud.
“This debt has placed the theater’s home at risk like nothing else ever has,” said Raymond N. Hannigan, the theater’s lawyer.
Founded in 1968 by Barbara Ann Teer, the theater was created to showcase productions by, and about, black Americans at a time when such stories rarely appeared on the mainstream stage. It has evolved into a cultural spawning ground, one that presents shows and workshops intended to foster respect for African ancestry and for black self-expression, and one graced over the years by artists like Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou.
But the theater’s story is also a cautionary tale about what can happen when arts groups extend beyond their comfort zone to find revenue, as is increasingly popular in the poorly financed arts world. Ms. Teer was a pathfinder in such efforts. From the day in 1983 when she bought the building, a former jewelry factory, she hoped to finance her work with rent from the other tenants. “The real estate subsidizes the art,” she liked to say.
The men Ms. Teer later picked to be her lead partners in that effort, Richelieu Dennis and Nyema Tubman, began their careers on 125th Street, peddling organic shea-butter soaps, much like the ones Mr. Dennis’s grandmother once sold at village markets in Africa. Today they operate several companies on Long Island that make skin and hair care products derived from African ingredients, which they market online and through major retailers like Target. Dun & Bradstreet estimated that the primary company has $6 million in annual gross sales.
“My whole life has been about building community, building business in our community, empowering people in our community,” Mr. Dennis said.
But Ms. Teer’s two children, who have run the theater since their mother died nearly three years ago, accuse their partners of leveraging the value of the theater’s building to secure funds for their other businesses and saddling it with debt.
And when the Harlem store closed, the children say their partners ignored the property taxes in an effort to force a sale of the building.
“There are too many things happening at the same time to be a mistake,” said Ms. Teer’s son, Michael Lythcott, a business consultant who said the theater’s very existence was threatened.
Mr. Dennis denied the charges. As the manager of the building, the partnership led by Mr. Dennis and Mr. Tubman was responsible for its business affairs. But Mr. Dennis said he assumed the bank was paying the taxes.
“I’ve never one day tried to do anything that would any way, shape or form jeopardize the theater,” he said.
In 1968, a year when the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ignited the tinder that was American race relations, Ms. Teer issued something of a cultural manifesto.
In The New York Times, she wrote of the need to build cultural centers “where we can find out how talented we really are, where we can be what we were born to be, and not what we were brainwashed to be, where we can literally ‘blow our minds’ with blackness.”
Her theater in Harlem was the end product of that effort. At first she carved out space where she could find it: an Elks Lodge on West 127th Street, a loft on East 125th Street where she shared space with the Last Poets.
Harlem Before the Boom
It was a Harlem before gentrification, one where brownstones were often not coveted but abandoned.
The theater was not just a place to see a show but also a forge where Ms. Teer worked to shape cultural identity. Art was supposed to uplift. Tickets were free or inexpensive. Ms. Teer gave up her acting career and until the mid-1980s she wrote for and directed the theater’s repertory company, some of whose productions were broadcast on PBS and staged at national and international halls like Lincoln Center.
“She felt that the arts were a key part of saving the soul of Harlem,” said Geoffrey Canada, the educator whose Harlem Children’s Zone rents space there.
Ms. Teer could afford to buy the 64-000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue because it had been damaged in a fire. She secured a state loan and other money to convert it partially into a theater, offices and stores. At the 1989 groundbreaking, presided over by Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, she compared her complex to the Tuskegee Institute, the Alabama college that Booker T. Washington helped found.
It was the kind of grand, exuberant statement Ms. Teer was known for, and when she died years later in 2008, at 71, her family and friends gave her a grand, exuberant send-off: a march through Harlem with drummers to a packed funeral at Riverside Church. Her family placed a live elephant, her favorite animal, along the route; fireworks by Grucci burst in the sky that night.
But financial problems were never far away, and they had become critical in 2002, when construction loans from the renovations came due. Mr. Lythcott said the theater expected government loans to settle the debt. When loans did not materialize, the theater began searching for a possible partner.
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