Urban League Kicks Off Construction on New National Headquarters in Harlem

The National Urban League (NUL) and local officials kicked off construction on the civil rights organization’s $242 million, 414,000-square-foot Urban League Empowerment Center on Thursday, June 17 at the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. State Office Building in Harlem.

The building will be located on 125th Street and will house NUL’s national headquarters, the Urban Civil Rights Museum Experience and the NUL Institute for Race, Equity and Justice along with offices for community groups including One Hundred Black Men of New York, United Negro College Fund New York and Jazzmobile Inc. 

Retail space will feature Target and Trader Joe’s and 170 units of affordable housing will be built. The project is scheduled to be completed by January 2025.

NUL was founded in Harlem in 1910 in response to the Great Migrations that brought millions of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North. The organization’s headquarters are currently in lower Manhattan and they are facing the end of their lease there.

NUL President and CEO Marc Morial told the AmNews that the organization received offers from other cities to relocate its headquarters. “We began to evaluate the best option for us,” he said. “We made a decision that if we were going to stay in New York, we had to own our own space and we had to do something that was spectacular and innovative.”

The space, located Malcolm X Boulevard, was owned by the city and state who asked for proposals, which NUL responded to. The organization won the space in 2012 and for the last nine years has been preparing to begin construction.

“This project is the most significant project built in Harlem in 50 years,” Morial said. “It will be Black-owned. We are not a tenant. We wanted to demonstrate to people that you could do a project with African American professionals and African American ownership.”

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