Langston Hughes lamented his friend A’Lelia’s passing and the end of the Dark Tower she cultivated. In his memoir, he wrote, “That was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem, the period that had begun to reach its end when the crash came in 1929 and the white people had much less money to spend on themselves, and practically none to spend on Negroes, for the depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”