A block of Harlem row houses, and inside one of them the parlour floor: pocket doors, a piano, the census in gilt on the walls.
The developer David H. King Jr. built these four rows of houses on West 138th and 139th Streets from 1891 to 1893. Three firms designed them: James Brown Lord, Bruce Price with Clarence Luce, and McKim, Mead and White. They were built for white buyers and stood half empty until they were sold to Black New Yorkers around 1919. The doctors, musicians and lawyers who moved in gave the block its name. It became the St. Nicholas Historic District in 1967.
Source · NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission ↗
The unbroken row of brownstones and buff brick with high stoops, the tree lined block, the parlour with its bay window, marble mantel, pocket doors and pressed tin ceiling. Mood: sunday in harlem. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.