Lenox Terrace’s Last Stand
A celebrated Harlem apartment complex tries to hold on
Sharon Stacey remembers the first time she set foot in Lenox Terrace. It was 1958 and she was nine years old. Her teacher at PS 197 had decided that the ribbon-cutting of the apartment complex’s first building was worthy of a class field trip. First, Stacey and her classmates sat in chairs on the building’s circular driveway and watched as New York Mayor Robert Wagner, the project’s developer Robert Olnick, and other local luminaries spoke about how Lenox Terrace would set a new standard of living in Harlem. Then, she got to see some of the model apartments.
“There was wall to wall carpeting, drapes, a round bed, all of these things that you would see on television,” Stacey said. “I remember saying, ‘When I get big I’m gonna move into Lenox Terrace.’”
At the time, Stacey lived with her mother in a public housing development on Madison Ave. and 135th Street. Her father, a World War II veteran, died of tuberculosis when she was six years old, and her mother was an administrative assistant at Harlem Hospital.“ My mother struggled but we didn’t know it,” she said. “We had three hots and a cot” — three hot meals and a place to sleep. “Christmas time the tree was filled up.” To her, Harlem felt like a village. Everybody knew everybody. “It was wonderful, magical,” she said.
A good student, Stacey enrolled at Julia Richman all-girls high school in Harlem and at 18 went to study sociology at Wilberforce University, a historically black college in Ohio. She returned to Harlem in 1969 and worked as a court assistant while living in an apartment building on West 140th Street, just a few blocks from Lenox Terrace. Her childhood dream of living at the luxury complex remained alive.
Soon Stacey started dating a man named Clarence who owned a bar in the Bronx. They were thinking of getting married and moving in together. One night in 1973, Stacey was robbed at knife point inside her own building. Crime rates in Harlem were on the rise and the heroin epidemic was in full force. The mugging was the last straw for Stacey, who decided she needed to move to a safer building. A year later she married Clarence. Together, their two incomes were enough to qualify for a one bedroom apartment in Lenox Terrace. On July 10, 1974, they moved into The Devonshire, one of the complex’s six buildings. Stacey would never move again. During the course of the next 45 years, she would witness the character of Harlem, and of Lenox Terrace itself, change around her.
The idea of luxury apartments in Harlem seemed unthinkable to many in the 1950s. Red-lining, a chronic lack of investment, and an escalating heroin crisis meant the neighborhood was a far cry from the one where African-American intellectual and artistic life had flourished just 30 years prior. A policy of “slum clearance,” led by City Planning Commissioner Robert Moses, had destroyed many black enclaves across New York. The displaced poor flocked to Harlem, choking the neighborhood and exacerbating its downward trend. By mid-century, Harlem itself was a slum. “The immediate impulse of people who were well-to-do enough to be able to leave Harlem was to do just that,” said Michael Henry Adams, a Harlem historian and conservationist. “Everything that was being built was being built for poor people.”
One prominent Harlemite who stayed was Godfrey Nurse. He had immigrated to the United States from British Guiana in the early 20th century and earned a medical degree from Long Island Medical College. One of Harlem Hospital’s first black physicians, he played an important role in integrating the hospital in the 1930s. Nurse amassed significant wealth during his life and returned much of it to the neighborhood. Throughout his life, he had seen Harlem transform from a vibrant community where African Americans thrived to the neglected neighborhood it had become by mid-century. He began buying property in Central Harlem with the goal of revitalizing the area. One of those properties was described by the Amsterdam News as “an area of rat-infested slums,” 15 acres on Lenox Ave. between 132nd and 135th Streets.
Nurse had a vision for the place, a new home for Harlem’s middle class he would call the Godfrey Nurse Houses. He began the hard work of relocating those who lived in the tenement apartments that occupied the property, but soon ran into trouble. He struggled to find new homes for the tenants, and could not secure funding to develop the project that would be subsequently built on the land. “Robert Moses contended to Dr. Nurse: ‘You aren’t experienced enough in real estate to be able to successfully complete such a project. We think you should sell your property and your idea to Mr. Olnick,’” Adams said. Robert Olnick was at this time a lawyer who worked for the city but, according to Adams, he had no real-estate experience. Nonetheless, the city acquired the land from Nurse and sold it Olnick in 1952 at a subsidized rate under Title I of the 1949 Housing Act, which allocated public funds for slum clearance.
Olnick quickly ran into the same problems as Nurse. By 1955, no construction had taken place and 1,200 people were still living on the site, paying rent. They complained of rat infestations, falling plaster, faulty electrical wiring and no heat in the winter, conditions they argued were purposely imposed by Olnick in order to encourage them to leave. The city almost repossessed the land in 1956 due to Olnick’s failure to relocate tenants and build within the four-year deadline stipulated for Title I projects. Eventually, though, all the tenants were relocated, and Olnick managed to raised $6M in FHA-insured loans to build Lenox Terrace. After much drama, construction began in June 1957.
Lenox Terrace was the first property ever developed by the Olnick Organization, now a major New York City developer. Within Harlem, it was the lynchpin of a new revitalization movement. “Lenox Terrace Development Shows Harlem Building Boom” read a headline in the Amsterdam News in 1958.
By December 1960, all six 17-story buildings of Lenox Terrace — The Fontainebleau, The Buckingham, The Eden Rock, The Americana, The Continental, and The Devonshire — were completed and at full occupancy. “African Americans who were prosperous flocked to Lenox Terrace because it represented something which heretofore had not existed,” said Adams: “modern, semi-luxurious housing that was new and well-designed with lots of light and air.”
The complex represented a lot of firsts for Harlem — the first residential buildings with 24-hour uniformed doormen, the first with ample green space, and the first with expansive views of Manhattan. “The people with a view downtown see Central Park, all of Harlem alight, the Radio City Complex,” one tenant, a dentist, told the New York Times in 1968. “It’s spectacular. Where else can you get that at the price?” Another tenant, a lawyer, was quoted in the same article: “To me, Lenox Terrace is an oasis in Harlem, with all the East side luxuries. And when I give my address to a client, he says ´Oh, Lenox Terrace!´ It’s more than just another building in the area.”
The six architecturally unremarkable buildings of Lenox Terrace dominate the blocks from 132th to 135th Streets and between Lenox and Fifth Aves. A network of pathways and parking lots connect them, making the space feel a bit like a college campus. If it weren’t for the noise, one could forget they are in the middle of Manhattan. The buildings’ red-brick exteriors and large rectangular shapes are not dissimilar to those of public housing projects, and indeed that comparison was made by prominent architecture critics of the time. What has always been remarkable about Lenox Terrace, however, are the people who live there.
Among the development’s early tenants were musicians like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, politicians like Basil Patterson (father of former New York Governor David Patterson) and Congressman Charles Rangel, and even a prominent Harlem gangster by the name of Bumpy Johnson.
The 1968 profile of the complex that ran in the New York Times Magazine, “The View from Lenox Terrace,” described tenants of the building in the following manner: “The affluent and the marginal, celebrities and cliff-hangers, custom-tailored and off the rack types, PhD’s and blue collar workers — all mingle in the elevators of the Terrace in a potpourri of color, class and lifestyle.”
When the first building began receiving tenants in 1958, rentals began at $104 a month, including gas. By 1968, rent for a one-bedroom apartment at Lenox Terrace had increased to $168; two-bedroom apartments with a balcony went for $219 a month. Because Lenox Terrace was a new development, it was exempt from rent-control laws.
At the time, Lenox Terrace was still in its glory days. Stacey remembers the municipal limousine that would pull up to the driveway of The Devonshire every morning to pick up Percy Sutton, the Manhattan Borough President. She also remembers cordial conversations in the elevator with the gangster Bumpy Johnson, who, according to Stacey, was a true gentleman. When James Brown passed out during a performance at the Apollo, Stacey says they brought him to Lenox Terrace because a prominent Harlem doctor was a tenant.
Most of all she remembers the sense of community. It was as if the tight-knit Harlem of her childhood had been remade inside Lenox Terrace. During Christmas and New Year’s, tenants would have an open door policy and neighbors would do the rounds, visiting each other’s apartments with bottles of champagne.
The social dynamic of the buildings remained mostly unchanged for the next two decades, but so did the buildings themselves, which meant that eventually they began to show their age. In 1969, the city had passed new rent-stabilization laws, which extended controls to developments built after 1947. This meant owners had less incentive to maintain their buildings, since they could not increase rents as they pleased and tenants were unlikely to abandon rent-stabilized apartments. This became the dynamic in Lenox Terrace.
Old kitchen appliances were rarely substituted by the owners. Signs and wear and tear went unaddressed. Structural problems with the plumbing and electrical systems began appearing, and in the mid-1990s, a major rat infestation at Lenox Terrace made the local papers. “Health officials have reported that Lenox Terrace, one of Harlem’s showcase apartment complexes, which is home to political officials such as Charles B. Rangel, is also home for scores of big, fat Norwegian rats,” read an article in the New Amsterdam Times.
Then, in the early 2000s, something else began to change in the buildings. As New York experienced a demographic boom and people were priced out of Manhattan south of 125th Street, they began moving uptown. This was soon visible on the grounds of Lenox Terrace. Many of the tenants who had been there since its opening had passed on. The Olnick Organization would refurbish the empty apartments and then rent them out at market rate, bringing in a wave of new, mostly white, tenants. The owners also began to zealously enforce rent-stabilization rules, sometimes evicting tenants for minor infractions. One 90-year-old tenant, Edward Torrence, faced eviction proceedings in 2004 when his daughter began signing his checks on account of his going blind, the New York Times reported. Torrence died before the case was resolved, but a year after his death developers sent his family a $19,000 bill for the months when they refused to accept the checks signed by the daughter. Another tenant had his wife and daughter evicted when he had to move out of his rent-stabilized apartment for health reasons.
Soon, the open houses during the holidays at Lenox Terrace fizzled out. “I don’t know my neighbors anymore,” Stacey said. “No ‘good mornings.’ Tenants just look at me in the elevator like I’m not supposed to be here. I’ve always been here. You invaded my space.”
Stacey estimates that about a third of The Devonshire is now made up of market rate apartments. Meanwhile, the rent-stabilized units have been left behind. Stacey still has the same stove that came with her apartment in 1974; it has likely been there since 1958. Many of the old bathroom tiles in the apartments are cracking, exposing residents to asbestos. Some residents have reported black particles in their water, which sometime backs up in sinks and bathtubs, leaving behind a dark sludge.
But the most noticeable difference is not aesthetic or structural. When I asked one of Lenox Terrace’s veteran doormen what was the single biggest change he observed during his time there, he did not hesitate. “Integration,” he said, right as he opened the door of The Devonshire to a small blonde girl.
What has been a slow burn of demographic change in Lenox Terrace, however, might soon be greatly accelerated. In September of this year, the Olnick Organization unveiled a plan to expand the complex. It had been years in the making, but only recently entered the “public review process.” Because the plan asks for rezoning of the property, it requires approval form the City Council and the Mayor. To gain this approval, developers present their proposal to the local community in a series of meetings and hearings. The community board then votes to approve or reject. Their decision is non-binding, but will play an important role in informing the City Council on how to act.
One evening in September, tenants filled an auditorium at Harlem’s Touro College to hear what the Olnick Organization had in mind. Members of Community Board 10 and City Councilman Bill Perkins, whose district includes Lenox Terrace, were also present.
Ethan Goodman, an Olnick representative from the law firm Fox Rothschild, stood behind a podium in front of a projector screen. Tall, thin, and in his early forties, Goodman wore a navy-blue suit and had the demeanor of someone who is comfortable talking to crowds, even potentially hostile ones.
“What was once a state of the art and groundbreaking new development is now almost close to retirement at 60 years old,” he began. “We need to start to think about how to bring this site into the 21st century.”
Goodman went on to propose a project that would double the size of Lenox Terrace, erecting five 28-floor towers with 1,600 new apartments, 400 of them reserved for affordable housing. Perhaps most contentious, the expansion called for a type of rezoning that would turn Lenox Terrace into a commercial hub, with two floors of retail space in each of the new buildings. The presentation was illustrated by renderings showing the streets around Lenox Terrace revitalized by modern stores and fashionable shoppers, and of slick looking lobbies adorned with modern art on the walls. If the project were to be approved, construction would last a decade.
Knowing that this amount of construction and change would not be popular with tenants, the developers were proposing a sweetener: in exchange for approval of the rezoning, they offered to renovate kitchens and bathrooms in many of the original apartments, along with lobbies and hallways. “We’ve developed a plan that builds new so that we can substantially upgrade the existing at no cost to existing residents,” said Goodman. Tenants would also have access to the amenities of the new buildings, like yoga studios and gyms. “The existing and the new rise together here,” Goodman concluded.
After Goodman’s presentation, it was the tenants’ turn to speak. “I am against this project not because I am anti-growth, but because these are neighborhood-altering megastructures,” Len Shebar, the president of the Lenox Terrace tenants’ association, told the crowd. “People actually still say hello to each other at Lenox Terrace. In a city like New York it is a pleasure to come home to our oasis. Rezoning would kill this joy.”
As other tenants took to the podium, it became clear that the vast majority were not swayed by Goodman’s presentation or promised renovations. “What they are proposing as upgrades are basic building maintenance issues,” said Misa Dason, another member of the tenants’ association. “These are cosmetic features that don’t address systemic issues with the buildings.”
The few who spoke in favor of the project were booed by the crowd. “Snakes in the grass!” someone shouted when a member of the local Service Employees Union took to the podium to show support for the expansion. The union member was not a tenant, but argued that the development would eventually net 35 new service jobs for their union once it was completed, a number the crowd audibly scoffed at. Only one tenant, a young woman named Stephanie Altman, broke ranks with the others, saying she welcomed a revitalization of the area. She was heckled. “How long have you lived here?” the older tenants asked.
Property values in Harlem have been rising since the 1980s. “Before 1980, you could buy any house in Harlem for $20,000,” said Michael Henry Adams, the historian. “By 1985 a house in Harlem sold for half a million dollars.” But gentrification began in earnest during the Giuliani administration, when police raids on the street vendors of 125th Street became commonplace, and a huge infusion of taxpayer dollars stemming from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, a federal bill signed by Bill Clinton and authored by Lenox Terrace tenant Congressman Charlie Rangel, sped up development along the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare. According to the Wall Street Journal, only 17 percent of the money went to small-business owners. The rest went to developers and big corporate stores. Harlem soon had chain supermarkets and a strip mall with a Gap and a Disney store. The year 2000 was when the first house in Harlem sold for $1M. Only a year later a house sold for $2M, and then $3M the year after that.
Under Mayor Bloomberg, massive rezoning accelerated the trend. In his book Vanishing New York, Jeremiah Moss describes the moment that Amanda Burke, Bloomberg’s city planning commissioner, first had the idea to rezone 125th Street. She had just left a concert at the Apollo, and was stumped at the lack of dining options available to her. Rezoning, in her mind, would change this. Moss then goes on to list the long list of local traditional eateries that were within walking distance from the Apollo at the time of Burke’s fateful concert: Sylvia’s, Manna’s, Bayou, Miss Maude, Miss Mamie, and many others. The city’s own Environmental Impact Assessment of 125th Street rezoning stated that it would likely displace much of the existing population and add “a substantial new population with different socioeconomic characteristics.” The Bloomberg administration went ahead anyway.
As predicted, rezoning sent gentrification into overdrive. The increase in property values resisted even the 2008 recession. Commercial rents on 125th Street soared to the point where only corporate retailers could afford them. By 2012, housing prices around 110th Street had jumped 39 percent compared to 2007, the highest increase in all of Manhattan. Luxury condos started going up all across Harlem at an unprecedented pace.
Seeing the writing on the wall, the tenants of Lenox Terrace came up with a plan to preserve their oasis in the face of the surrounding development. Earlier this year, they applied to the city for landmark status. Any changes to buildings considered landmarks must be approved by the Landmark Preservation Committee. According to the New York Landmarks Law (first created in 1965 in response to public outcry over the old Penn Station being demolished to make way for Madison Square Garden), a landmark can be any building with “a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage, or cultural characteristics of the City, state, or nation.” Only one of those features is necessary to deem a building a landmark, meaning cultural significance alone is enough. Indeed, perfectly innocuous constructions have become landmarks simply because notable people once lived in them. Unremarkable houses in Addisleigh Park, Queens, for example, are now landmarks because prominent Africans Americans like Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Campanela, and Jackie Robinson lived there. Banking on this precedent, the letter of application submitted by Lenox Terrace Tenants’ Association noted: “Many of the most notable African Americans of the mid to late twentieth century lived here.”
Adams, the historian, helped the Lenox Terrace tenants draft the landmark proposal. He argued that the lack of architectural significance was in fact a marker of the development’s historical significance. “What is so extraordinary about the ordinariness of Addisleigh Park and Lenox Terrace,” he said, “when contrasted with places where comparable white people lived, is that of course there is no more dramatic indicator of the disparity that existed and still exists between blacks and whites. When you compare these places to where Frank Sinatra lived, or Judy Garland lived, it’s shocking! Of course for African Americans there was no aspiration for living in some place that was as deluxe as the places where the richest, most successful white people lived. But compared to where most black people lived, Lenox Terrace was as incredible as if it were River House or 740 Park Avenue. There was no hope for African Americans to live in such places, but they could live at Lenox Terrace.”
Ultimately, however, the proposal was rejected, specifically on architectural grounds. “While the complex is culturally significant as the home to many African-American leaders in the fields of politics, business, and the arts,” the rejection letter read, “architecturally the buildings do not rise to the level needed for designation as an individual landmark.” The decision left tenants with few legal recourses to fight the expansion they knew was in the works.
Throughout the fall, Olnick kept presenting their case — to the Community Board 10 Land Use Committee, then to the Community Board itself — and kept getting turned down. The Land Use Committee recommended that the Board not approve the rezoning, and on November 6th the Board rejected Olnick’s proposal. Since all of these votes were advisory rather than binding, Olnick could keep trying.
On a cool evening in November, Olnick representatives came to a large auditorium at the Kennedy Community Center next door to Lenox Terrace at an event organized by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer. This was the last step before the proposal would be put to the City Planning Commission and ultimately to the City Council. The Borough President plays a crucial role in informing these two bodies on their vote.
Tenants greeted each other as they filed into the auditorium. Some of those in attendance had been at a Community Board 10 meeting a week prior, holding signs that read “SAVE LENOX TERRACE” and “DIVERSITY OVER LUXURY.”
Stacey took her seat alone in one of the front rows and waited. She had come to listen and had no plans to testify. She been to many meetings like this over the years — Olnick has been trying to sell the expansion to tenants for a decade — although she had not attended any meetings this fall. This one, however, was close to Lenox Terrace and could be decisive. By the time the hearing began, the room was filled to standing room only.
Ethan Goodman, the Olnick representative, was the first speaker called on by Brewer’s staff. He rose from the only agglomerate of white attendants in the auditorium, all executives working for Olnick, and made his way to the podium.
The presentation was almost the same as the one he gave when the project was unveiled months earlier. One slide with a rendering of what the parking lot at Lenox would look like after it had been converted to lush green space drew a few approving “oohs” from the crowd. Referring to the 400 units of affordable housing that would be included in the new buildings, he said, “This project represents the largest construction of affordable housing by a private owner on private land in Harlem. We believe it’s a significant opportunity to provide housing for a wide range of incomes.”
But there was one new component to the presentation, one which tenants interpreted as a veiled threat. Goodman spoke about what he claimed developers are allowed to build right now, without the rezoning, what in construction jargon is called “as of right”: four towers instead of five, with at least seven years of construction (instead of ten). “Without the proposed rezoning there are still similar impacts to views with regards to existing apartments,” he said, adding that the incomes of new tenants would also be much higher since no units would be reserved for affordable housing. In addition, he explained, there would be no renovations to the old buildings, and the original tenants wouldn’t have access to the amenities in the new towers.
The tenants’ association disputes Olnick’s claims that they can still build at such a scale without rezoning. They’ve hired their own urban planner to evaluate these claims, which they suspect are significantly overstated.
After Goodman, a slew of tenants gave their testimony, the youngest a 14-year-old girl, the oldest a 77-year-old man who had been a tenant for 32 years. “I don’t want to live my retirement years in a construction site,” he said. One speaker compared Goodman’s comments about building without the rezoning as “landlord-tenant extortion.”
It was getting late, and the hearing had gone on for more than two hours. Stacey had watched it all with rapt attention, joining the animated crowd with boos, applause, and the occasional “that’s right!” But she felt there was more to be said. She got up and added her name to the speaker’s list. When her name was called, she spoke in a firm, solemn voice, with a tinge of controlled but palpable anger.
“When Lenox Terrace was being built, I remember my mother reading about it in the New York Times,” she said. “She was talking about this new place that was going to be built for middle-class African Americans to live because we were not wanted downtown. No matter how much money we had — doctors, lawyers, actors, actresses, it didn’t matter — our money was not wanted. We wanted to live well, so they built this community, they built these buildings.
“I like where I live, I like my neighbors, I love my neighborhood. And they want to destroy us. They want to profit off of us. They don’t care about us. You didn’t want us downtown, now downtown is coming uptown, displacing us and it’s not right. I’m not going anywhere. When I leave here, I’ll be leaving in a body bag.”
The crowd cheered, revived by Stacey’s testimony after a long night of speeches. When the hearing finally ended, several tenants came up to congratulate her. “Some of the people speaking tonight, I remember when their mothers were pregnant,” she said.
She stepped out into the cold night and began making her way back to the one-bedroom apartment where she had lived for 45 years. Her husband, Clarence, had died of a rare disease just a few years after they’d moved in together. Her son had also died at a young age. She had lost her family but still had her friends and neighbors, many of whom live in Lenox Terrace.
At 72 years old, she walked firmly and calmly in her bright purple Sunday suit, seemingly unbothered by the light rain and biting wind. Occasionally she would pause to remark on how the neighborhood had changed since her childhood. She still remembered everything. “These used to be tenement buildings,” she said, gesturing broadly to the new buildings on 135th Street.
It was a short walk back to her apartment, but she kept pointing things out.
