18 March 2015 NJMONTHLY.COM
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[ P L A C E S ] BY SHARON HAZARD
Red Bank Group Strives
To Save Historic Home
WHEN T. THOMAS FORTUNE came to Red
Bank in 1901, a local newspaper headline
read: “Well-Known Colored Man Moving
to Town.” As a journalist and founder of
the National Afro-American League, Fortune was a highly regarded voice for racial
equality. His newspaper, the New York Age,
was a platform for his militant agenda.
Today, Fortune is overshadowed in
history by contemporaries such as Booker
T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois, but the
12-room Red Bank home in
which he lived and worked
is still making headlines.
Since June 2007, when the
boarded-up home was listed
by Preservation New Jersey
as one of the 10 most endangered sites in New Jersey,
area residents began working
to buy and preserve it.
“The preservation of the house
resonates with me,” says Gilda Rogers, a
local author and committee member of
the T. Thomas Fortune House Project, a
preservation movement. “It represents
what I believe is the duty of the writer—
to give a voice to the voiceless, and that
is what Thomas Fortune did. He was
pivotal in local and national history.”
Saving the Fortune house is no simple
task. Last September, the Vaccarelli Family, which has owned the home for three
generations and once operated a bakery
on the premises, applied to the borough
of Red Bank for a demolition permit. The
preservation committee appealed for a stay
of the demolition and is attempting to raise
money to purchase the home. It has been
on the market since July 2011 for about
$1 million. Plainfield-based preservation
consultant Peter Primavera estimates that
another $2 million will be required to preserve the house and convert it for future
use as a cultural and learning
center. To date, the preservation effort has raised $10,000.
Mark Fitzsimmons, a
preservationist architect,
calls the Second Empire-style home “the sole such
landmark in New Jersey
associated with African-American history.” The house
was added to the list of National Historic
Landmarks in 1976 and to the Register of
Historic Places in 1979. Key supporters of
preservation include area African-Amer-ican churches; the Red Bank Men’s Club
Foundation; state Senator Jennifer Beck;
and local government officials.
Fortune, born a slave in Florida, lived
in the home from 1901-1908. He died
in Philadelphia in 1928 at the age of 71.
Among other achievements, he is credited
with coining the term Afro-American. ■
ON SHAKY
GROUND: The
one-time home
of Thomas
Fortune (inset)
is in danger of
demolition.
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