Free Excursion to Metropolitan Park Rahway, N.J. ... Homes Built on Easy Terms.
[New York?]: [ca. 1908].
Price: $2,500.00
About the item
Broadside, printed in red and blue, with a map and photographic illustrations, on coated card stock. Foxing and toning, creased, a few tape repairs.
Item #378911
An unrecorded broadside promoting a large residential development in suburban New Jersey marketed by the Black-owned Metropolitan Mercantile & Realty Company for the African American community. The broadside includes images of several houses built by the company, and a map showing hundreds of house lots in Rahway north of Milton Lake, with easy railroad access to Manhattan to begin soon with the opening of the North River Tunnel.
The Metropolitan Mercantile & Realty Company was founded in 1900 largely as a department store for African Americans, opening in New York, Plainfield and elsewhere. The company, led by P. Sheridan Ball, sold stock at $5 a share to raise capital and expanded to banking and insurance ventures, as well as the real estate market and education/training. "Its worth in shaping race pride and confidence is incalculable ... In making its operations in real estate, the principal object of the Company, not only was the most substantial and permanent asset chosen, but it at once came in toouch with the thousands of home seekers and investors ... In pushing this feature, the Cpmpany has acquired some valuable property in teh different states, and has placed scores of families in their own homes ... One of its latest acquisitions is more than a thousand lots in the thriving city of Rahway" (The Colored American Magazine, November 1907).
By 1910, however, the company was defunct. We find no other recorded example of this broadside and can find no other similar promotional material for Metropolitan Park.
