The History of Parkway Gardens, a Bucolic Haven for Middle-Class Black Families

After WWII, the sleepy hamlet became that rarest of places—but after generations of block parties and bridge tournaments, will its rich heritage be forgotten?

By Tanisha C. Ford, Oct 29, 2021, in Town and Country Magazine. 

An excerpt:

A fleet of limousines pulled into the cul-de-sac in front of photographer Gordon Parks’s bungalow at 15 Adams Place in the suburban enclave of Parkway Gardens, in Greenburgh, New York. Groups of African-Americans, dressed in their summer finery, emerged from the late model limos. It “looked like a car salesman’s paradise,” socialite Betty Granger wrote in her Amsterdam News column, “Conversation Piece.” It was September 12, 1954, and Parks, who was finding acclaim as a photo­journalist and a top-paid Vogue fashion photographer, had invited nearly 50 friends for a party around his new in-ground pool.

Few homeowners of any race had in-ground pools in the 1950s. And most African-Americans had for years been denied access to the nicer park and hotel pools on account of Jim Crow segregation laws. The temperature that day reached only 72 degrees, but many braved a chilly dip simply for novelty’s sake. According to Granger’s firsthand account, six uniformed servers weaved around the ­Parkses’ well-manicured lawn, serving lounging guests “100 pounds of barbecued chicken and ribs” and “12 cases” of vintage champagne.

The party raged until midnight, and not one of Parks’s mostly Black neighbors called the police to complain. This was the type of safety and community that Gordon and his wife Sally had sought when they decided to move their family of five from a cramped apartment in Harlem to Greenburgh nearly a decade earlier—when the area was still mostly white. “I desperately wanted the children to escape the hardships I had endured,” Parks wrote in his 2005 memoir, A Hungry Heart. “The bungalow I found was surrounded by space, trees, and a lawn.” He was not alone in this desire. Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans across the country braved the move to suburbs like Greenburgh in the 1940s and ’50s.

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