W.E.B. DuBOIS HOME NOT LANDMARKED

House where civil-rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois lived not landmarked
BY NICHOLAS HIRSHON daily news writer
Tuesday, March 25th 2008, 4:00 AM
Shailesh Saigal
W.E.B. Du Bois weds Shirley Graham in 1951. They lived in southeast Queens home (below, shot in the late '40s).

Dressed in a tuxedo, civil-rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois married an activist nearly three decades his junior on Feb. 27, 1951, in a posh house in southeast Queens.
The exterior of the Addisleigh Park home where Du Bois, 83, wed Shirley Graham, 54, is remarkably unchanged from what the couple's friends would recall. But it also remains unlandmarked at a time when a building boom is sweeping across the borough.
"It's a site that needs some recognition by the Landmarks Commission," said NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, heaping praise upon Du Bois, the organization's co-founder.
"They certainly ought to take note of it," Bond added. "I'd advise them at least that a plaque be placed nearby."

Jane Cowan, a research consultant for the Historic Districts Council, said she was combing through city finance records a few months ago when she found a deed connecting Graham Du Bois to 173-19 113th Ave.
Queens News matched the address to a photo taken of the home in the late 1940s. The photo was given by Graham Du Bois' son, David Du Bois, to author Gerald Horne as he researched his 2000 book "Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois."
The home's current owner, Helen Baldwin, said her family moved there in the 1970s and has made only minor changes, like fixing the roof and adding a layer of stucco.

Baldwin said she wants to stay in the house, but developers keep calling unprompted to ask if she's selling it. She also said she wouldn't alter its look, adding, "I like it the way it is."
Even if it's sold, high-rise developers need not apply. Recent zoning changes restrict the area to one-family homes, said Yvonne Reddick, district manager of Community Board 12.
But only landmarking would prevent someone from knocking down the historic house.
"It deserves landmark status," said Horne, an African-American studies professor at the University of Houston. "It's not only redolent with black American history, but U.S. history."
Guidelines require landmarks to be at least 30 years old and possess a "special historical or aesthetic interest or value" to the "heritage or cultural characteristics of the city, state or nation."

The commission declined to provide its recent survey of 12,495 Queens structures to Queens News, so it's unclear if the home is under consideration.
Historian Jeff Gottlieb said the commission is more likely to designate it if the state and national historic registers do so first.

Graham, a noted playwright and biographer, moved into the house in 1947, shortly after locals canceled a covenant that forbade blacks from living on the block, Cowan said.
At the 1951 wedding, guests dined on toasted sandwiches, canapes, ice cream and sparkling punch, as a news reel crew captured every move, David Du Bois told Horne.

In a letter to a friend, Graham Du Bois wrote she would sell the home because "it's too far out from the center of our activities - takes too long to get back and forth," specifically to and from Harlem.
The powerful pair soon moved to Brooklyn. He died in 1963; she died in 1977.