By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
A nonprofit group wants to the renovate the more than 150-year-old home on Witherspoon Street where social activist and entertainer Paul Robeson was born and turn it into a community space and short-term lodging place.
The “The Paul Robeson House,” a group made up of residents, including local historian Shirley Satterfield, former Borough Councilman Kevin Wilkes and others, filed plans with the town Oct. 16.
The proposal calls for a 500-square-foot meeting room, a Robeson memorial gallery to contain Robeson and other memorabilia and two offices and support spaces, all on the first floor. “Short-term lodging” of three bedrooms and a common room would be on the second floor, plans showed.
The project has been a goal of community members for years, in a building restoration expected to cost a little less than $1 million.
“The overall goal has always been to restore the house and then use it as a permanent memorial to Mr. Robeson,” said Ben Colbert, president of the Paul Robeson House board of directors, by phone Friday.
The house originally was owned by the historically black Witherspoon Presbyterian Church, where Robeson’s father, William Drew Robeson, was the pastor starting in 1880. The Robeson family lived in there, in a home where Paul Robeson was born in April 1898.
The church subsequently sold the property and then reacquired it in 2005.
With a house as old as this one, there are “structural matters that must be taken into account,” Colbert said. He cited, as an example how some “retaining walls have begun to buckle or deteriorate.”
“And now, we have the task of bringing it up to code for permanent use in today’s times,” he said. “And we’re very proud of the fact that we’re going to be able to rehabilitate a house, which reverses the trend in the neighborhood where people have been tearing down the older structures and putting up rather horrid new ones.”
There is no opening date of the home, which is not occupied.
Colbert said his organization plans to start fundraising, with a goal of $1 million, once the town approves the plans. The municipal zoning board will hear the proposal, but a hearing has not been scheduled yet.
“This is an ambitious fundraising initiative,” Colbert said. “We’re not wanting to create an eyesore in the community with construction fences until we are certain we have enough funds to keep the project going. And hopefully, if all goes well, we will have enough funding to begin the project in the fall of (2018).”
Robeson was the son of a former slave. He attended Rutgers University, where he also played football, and earned a law degree from Columbia University. He would gain celebrity as an entertainer and social activist. But his embrace of the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin led him to be blacklisted, with Robeson later living in Philadelphia, where he died Jan. 23, 1976, at age 77.
