15 rue Nollet

The place, briefly

Number 15 stands on rue Nollet in the Batignolles quarter, a narrow residential street north of place de Clichy. The building survives, but it is private and the inexpensive rooming house recorded here is gone. There is no museum, public interior or verified period plaque: a visit means seeing the façade from the pavement and understanding the address in relation to the nearby Montmartre and Pigalle places where its tenant worked.

In April 1924, Langston Hughes—then a twenty-two-year-old American poet, years before he became one of the leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance—moved into the top of this tall house near the place de Clichy. In his autobiography The Big Sea, he could not remember the lodging having any name beyond the word HOTEL. An elderly French couple ran it for working people, and the rent was cheap.

The room had slanting roofs, old furniture, a large bed with a feather tick and a view over the chimney pots. Hughes recognized it at once as the Paris garret from a book: the poor young poet under the eaves, writing poems. The joke in his version was breakfast. He brought home half-finished bottles from his dishwashing shift at Le Grand Duc, so the garret poet sometimes began the morning with leftover champagne.

For a time he shared the room with Bob, the dishwasher whose job at the Grand Duc Hughes had taken. Bob's dependence on drugs grew frightening, and Hughes eventually left the rent paid a month ahead and moved farther up the Montmartre hill to the rue des Trois Frères. Before that move, the philosopher and editor Alain Locke visited this room to ask Hughes for new poems. Their conversation helped feed the 1925 anthology The New Negro, a defining publication of the Harlem Renaissance.