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September 09, 2007
Most expensive Harlem brownstone ever?
The Harlem brownstone where I used to live until I bought the new condo has been listed for sale. It's about 4100 sf on four floors, with property taxes alone running $17,000/yr.
Here's a brief history of the neighborhood and the property, then the price. The property was built as the Harlem building boom was in full swing in the late 1880s. With crop yields in the area falling, the big Harlem farms like Alexander Hamilton's were auctioned off and the farmlands were taken-over by Irish squatters. The construction of the first train lines in 1880 opened the area as a convenient suburb of New York City. The wealthy came in droves, with famous residents including the Ochs family of New York Times fame. They even played polo at the original Polo Grounds at 110th & Lenox (now home to Harlem's most exclusive condo).
Built in 1888 as part of "Physicians Row", the place where I lived was presumably built for a wealthy family to be their mansion. A few years later, Harlem real estate prices collapsed. Another collapse around 1904 led to the first blacks moving into the neighborhood. As construction of Lincoln Center, Penn Station, the main Post Office, and Macy's forced blacks from those areas, and thanks to an entrepreneurial black real estate agent, Harlem became more and more attractive. By 1911, investment in the neighborhood had ceased, and the tipping point hit around 1920. That decade, 118,792 whites moved out and 87,417 blacks arrived. The Harlem Renaissance was soon in full swing. Langston Hughes wrote a few blocks away, and the greats of jazz were playing in the Big Apple clubs in the area.
But during the long stretch from 1929 until the late 1990s, Harlem gradually descended into being one of the city's most notorious neighborhoods. As building owners could find black tenants easily (they being unable to rent in other neighborhoods), maintenance wasn't a necessary expense. The Italian mob ran East Harlem, most notably from Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno's Palma Boys Social Club on 116th St. Five rounds of riots between 1935 and 1995 plus a drug rate 10X the Manhattan average further stigmatized the neighborhood. By the 1980s, fully 60% of Harlem real estate was owned by the City, presumably because it was abandoned.
Many buildings were converted to Single Room Occupancy, basically where a single room is rented without a kitchen or bathroom. The functional point of an SRO was to house the very poor or otherwise homeless, and SROs continue to exist in New York City. The 1956 Certificate of Occupancy of my former place shows that it was authorized as housing for 9 families in SRO conditions.
Against this backdrop, it's amazing that the house survived 119 years of this without being destroyed, as so many of the neighbors were. Dolores's late husband, whom I understand was head of the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (who included Malcom X), bought the place in the 1960s, though the title appeared to have been obtained in 1977 from the City of New York. Whether they bought in the 1960s or 1977, they probably paid a pittance, perhaps $20,000, though they were among the few Black/Hispanic property owners in Harlem. Dolores would live there until her death this spring.
The place is now one of the few in Harlem to have survived intact. Most Harlem homes by the 1990s were "shells"--literally empty buildings where the roof and floors had collapsed into the basement--or had been stripped of their original detail at some point. Perhaps this is what justified the astonishing price tag the estate has put on the house -- fully $3,087,000. This would set a new record for the most expensive Harlem brownstone ever. I was guessing it would be listed at around $1.6M, certainly not higher than $2M. I don't think that $3.1M will hold, but it will be interesting to watch. Here's the listing with pictures.
Posted by adrianjo at September 9, 2007 09:52 PM