Several months ago I decided that the location of the office of “Equity” newspaper and the publishing headquarters for NEQUA should be closely looked at. My intuition paid off as I found that the demographics of the office location held some very interesting information. I drove to Topeka and easily found 115 east 5th Street, it was a big vacant lot. An example of the advantages of American Urban Renewal.  There isn’t any renewal only an unusable vacant lot.

A call to the Shawnee Public Library had gotten me connected with a man who knew all about buildings in Topeka and also about removed buildings. He said that he was sure that a photograph of the building existed because he remembered that the 115 location was the home of Langston Hughes when he was seven years old. The story was that Langston’s father had gone to Mexico and Langston and his mother were in Topeka where she worked for a Lawyer.  Incidentally Langston was his mothers surname and Hughes was his fathers surname.

When I expressed amazement  at the idea of Langston Hughes living in a commercial building, in the center of Topeka,  the gentleman supplying this information said it wasn’t unusual as the area for several blocks was a commercial district that was racially integrated, at that time.  By living one block off the main drag of Topeka, Langston’s mother had only a block to walk to work. 

I got a copy of the photograph and it was a concrete and brick two store building with rooms upstairs and a couple of commercial spaces downstairs. This  was “mixed-use”, an existent idea one hundred years ago, before the Urban Developers reinvented the idea in 1960. It allowed for Doctors and Dentists and lawyers to have “offices” in their living quarters.
Well I proceeded to check on the property owner and recheck the construction method, which was concrete meaning that it could have still been in use today if some bureaucrat somewhere had decided that Urban Renewal might include a minor makeover, instead of a scorched earth conclusion.

I went back to the census pages to look at who might inhabit the same building. In addition to Mary Lowe’s family, there was a Dr. Sunday, a black physician, an attorney and two “chinamen.” Obviously a highly integrated area one hundred and fourteen years ago in the middle of Topeka, Kansas.