Decrepit historic landmark an Alexandria embarrassment
A few weeks ago, I wrote how Alexandria was looking “tired.” This was based on many faded or torn or dilapidated signs and buildings a friend and I spotted on some of the major thoroughfares through Alexandria, but we didn’t hit the downtown area.
Since then, I have found in downtown Alexandria a landmark – a place that is in on the National Register of Historic Places – that doesn’t look tired. That would be too kind a description. It’s a place that is in disrepair and looks decrepit. It looks as if it is ready to be bulldozed any day now.
I’m talking about the Arna Bontemps Home that was made into a museum more than three decades ago. It is located on the river side of Third Street between Manchac Technologies and the Children’s Museum. If you didn’t know where it was and drove by, you’d miss it. It is virtually hidden by overgrown trees and shrubs. The paint is peeling, and some boards near the entrance are missing, exposing what appears to be some insulation. It’s hard to read the memorial plaque in the front yard through all the overgrowth of greenery surrounding it. The same applies for a picture board of Bontemps on the other side of the yard.
This is a disgrace.
Why is Alexandria ignoring what once was a shrine to “the greatest living Negro author to be born in Louisiana?” It’s as if we don’t care.
Arna Wendell Bontemps (pronounced bahn-TAHM) died at age 70 in June of 1973 in Nashville. He was a writer-in-residence at that time at Fisk University. His obituary in the Nashville Tennessean described him as “one of America’s distinguished men of letters” as well as a nationally known author and critic of American literature. In a book review in The Town Talk in 1973 on Bontemps’ book, Young Booker: Early Days of Booker T. Washington, Irving Ward-Steinman referred to Bontemps as “the greatest living Negro author to be born in Louisiana.”
Bontemps was born in Alexandria on Oct. 13, 1902, the son of Paul Bismarck Bontemps and Marie Carolina Pembroke Bontemps. His father was a musician, brick mason and lay minister and his mother was a teacher. The family left Alexandria when he was 3 years old to move to Los Angeles, reportedly to escape the racial tension that existed here at the time. His mother died when he was 12, and he then lived with a grandmother and her younger brother.
Bontemps left a post office job in Los Angeles to move to New York in the 1920s, where he became a noted poet, married a schoolteacher, Alberta Johnson, and got to know famous figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He then went on to write novels, his first being God Sends Sunday about the life of a black jockey in the 1880s.
His career took him to Alabama and Chicago, where he earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago in 1943, the year he began his tenure as a writer-in-residence at Fisk. His was an illustrious career that also included writing numerous children’s books.
When you think about the Bontemps Museum, which was buzzing with activities just 20 years ago, it’s a gut-punch to see it become a vacated eyesore. It once was a “point of light” and now it’s relegated to darkness, its history forlorn and forgotten.
If you wonder what Bontemps might say about this situation, it might relate to what he said in 1966 while speaking at UCLA’s first American Negro History Week. According to this obituary in the Tennessean, he complained of myths that have “plagued the Negro since his arrival on these shores. The myth that I suspect has hurt us most in the present (20th) century was the allegation that the Negro had no background, no achievement worth mentioning.”
Granted, Bontemps’ history in Alexandria was quite brief, but heretofore we have been quick to claim him as our own. In fact, when his original house – then located on Ninth and Winn Streets – needed repair in 1988 and was threatened with demolition, folks around here came to the rescue. The first step to renovating the house, said realtor Rod Noles at the time, was to move it. And it was decided to move it to its current location near River Oaks Square Arts and Crafts Center. Noles donated $1,000 to get the renovation project started.
I reached out multiple times to two people familiar with the plight of the Bontemps Home, City Council President Cynthia Perry, and Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Michael Caffery, and they have not returned messages. Jim Villard, City Councilman At-Large, said the museum has been closed several years. He said the property belongs to the Bontemps family, but the land it is on belongs to the city.
The Arna Bontemps Foundation, Inc., which was organized to run the museum and raise funds for it, hasn’t done its job.
If that board no longer gives a hoot about it, why not ask the family to donate the building to the City of Alexandria? The city, I’m guessing, could then maintain it just as it does the Genealogical Library, the Zoo and the parks.
If the City owns the land around the property, can it at least get a crew to do some trimming, mowing and landscaping around it so it can at least be visible again? Villard said he would make that request.
Maybe the sight of the blight will be just what’s needed to instigate life support.
(To find out about the refresh Alexandria Central Louisiana Community Initiative, go to: https://bit.ly/signsofnewlife)