Harlem’s ‘Amsterdam News’ To Become Museum, Community Space
Written by djfrosty on February 24, 2025
Source: Sylvain Gaboury / Getty
The Harlem home of the iconic New York Amsterdam News will soon become a museum as well as a community space.
For over a century, the New York Amsterdam News has been one of the staunchest voices of the Black community.
A new project will take its Harlem newsroom into a new phase, converting it and other floors in the 115-year-old location on Frederick Douglass Boulevard into a historic museum and community space. The paper is still in operation, in a digital format that reaches 135,000 monthly visitors on average, and runs a print edition of 40 pages that’s released on Thursdays and available for $1.
The project was conceived and is being carried out by the Amsterdam News Educational Foundation, the nonprofit organization that currently owns the building. The first floor is set to be a community cafe and lounge, and the newsroom would move to the second floor, being leased out to the publication. The third and fourth floors of the building will compose the museum and gallery space, with part of the fourth floor to be renovated to look like a newsroom in the 1930s. There will also be an archival room set up for visitors and researchers. The foundation currently has raised $450,000 to plan and design the museum project.
“We want to celebrate the pivotal role both The New York Amsterdam News, and the Black press writ large, have played in advancing civil rights in our country,” Editor-In-Chief and publisher Elinor Tatum said in an interview from the newsroom space where she still works from on the second floor. She took over the reins from her father, Wilbert Tatum in the 1990s. The newspaper’s nine editors and reporters are currently spread out in different cities, having worked remotely since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The publication is still beloved in the community, particularly due to Blacklight, the first investigative unit at a Black legacy newspaper. Blacklight is overseen by executive editor Damaso Reyes with two grant-funded reporters assigned to it. For Reyes, it’s a platform to build on a legacy that includes Malcolm X’s first published opinions and its claim of coining the phrase “Hip-Hop” in the 1980s. “I want to give opportunities to young journalists of color that I didn’t have,” he said of the unit.