NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- It’s a refuge and magnet, storied crucible and cradle, a cultural capital, shaped by waves of migration, a recent tsunami of gentrification and the ongoing struggles for racial justice.

Harlem is the American saga packed into one neighborhood, its architecture a palimpsest of African American and Latino experience in the city and of much else that has defined New York over the centuries.

The Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, the lead designer for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, began to explore the area while working on a mixed-usehousing development at 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue called Sugar Hill, which opened in 2015.

That same year he won the commission to do a new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem and moved to Harlem with his family.

This is the latest in a series of (edited and condensed) walks around the city. Harlem is vast — way too big, too deep rooted, with far too many different parts, too many cultural and architectural points of interest, for anybody to cover in a single walk. Adjaye suggested a stroll east to west that he sometimes takes, not quite 3 miles, passing landmarks like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Greater Refuge Temple and the former Hotel Theresa, and ending near the Riverside Drive Viaduct at the Hudson River.

We did the walk virtually, via Zoom, since Adjaye has been in Accra, Ghana, during the pandemic, working from his office there. We “met” on 120th Street, on the south side of Marcus Garvey Park, another city landmark designed around a spectacular eruption of Manhattan schist — with a 47-foot-high watchtower from the 1850s poised on top.

Michael Kimmelman: You live nearby?

David Adjaye: Around the corner. On my usual walk, I pass these brownstones along 120th, typical of Harlem architecture in its incredible variety of styles: Queen Anne, Romanesque, neo-Classical. Maya Angelou lived at 58 W. 120th, facing the park, which feels very European to me — at the same time the schist is this sudden explosion of raw nature. I remember the first time I saw there was a tower on top. I thought, oh my god! I learned that towers like this used to be everywhere, to warn people when there was a fire or some other problem.

Kimmelman: This is the last one left in the city, renovated recently, including the bronze bell. Julius Kroehl was the engineer.

Adjaye: It’s romantic and beautiful infrastructure. You can imagine the bell resonating over the rooftops, everybody coming out of their houses, onto their stoops. Stoops were designed to lift houses above the horse manure — and make them look grander, which they do. But they’re also places to hang out, play music. It’s one of the wonderful things about New York.

Kimmelman: Can you think of equivalents in other cities? Porches in the American South, maybe?

Adjaye: You have stoops in Holland, too, but they are usually very low, two or three steps. You can’t sit on them and watch the street in the same way. There’s something about the way stoops like these spill down, creating this diagonal form.

Kimmelman: They turn the street into a kind of stage and also make the sidewalks seem wider, lighter.

Adjaye: This is something special to New York. In London, you have terrace houses, and you might have a front garden with a wall and a gate and then a path to some steps that take you to a very minimal porch.

Kimmelman: You live in London and Accra as well.

Adjaye: We have offices in all three cities. About 15 years ago, after I was hired to design the project in Sugar Hill, I got a studio apartment in Chelsea — this was before the High Line opened. That’s when I started coming to Harlem all the time, wanting to understand it better. I fell in love with the neighborhood. So when I won the commission to design the Studio Museum, I moved with my family to 119th Street.

Kimmelman: You were born in Tanzania?

Adjaye: My parents are from Ghana. My father was a career diplomat, so every three years until I was 13 we moved. Then we settled in the north of London, into an area with very diverse communities — Indian, African, Caribbean, Southeast Asia — all these diasporas, living on the periphery of the city. I idealized New York and its architecture growing up. When I moved here I wanted to live in the middle of things, which is how I landed in Chelsea.

Kimmelman: I grew up near Chelsea — I went to middle school there — when the area was mostly decrepit piers, old warehouses and taxi garages. It was great, but the opposite of central. It’s almost unrecognizable now.

Adjaye: It felt increasingly transient when I lived there. Of course, Harlem has also changed a lot but it remains a neighborhood of old communities. Architecturally, you see the layers of history. If we walk north, through Marcus Garvey Park, along 127th Street, you see what I mean — there’s a stretch of houses from the 1850s to the early 1920s, which go from Romantic Classicism to art deco, brownstone to stucco. The street wall becomes plainer and plainer and finally sheer. Typical of Harlem, the window frames change, too. I don’t mean this as a plug or anything, but these windows were an inspiration for my design at the Studio Museum.

Kimmelman: Which looks like it will feature a facade of stacked, variously shaped volumes.

Adjaye: Right. A wall of different apertures. It doesn’t copy 127th Street. But I was struck by houses like 20 E. 127th, where Langston Hughes lived.

Kimmelman: That’s an Italianate brownstone from the 1860s with arched window frames.

Adjaye: They look to me like vaulted eyebrows. I also love the front door, with its wooden half-circles, like tree branches. That one little architectural gesture elevates the entire house.

Kimmelman: Amazing what a difference just a nice door makes.

Adjaye: Let’s walk farther north to 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard.

Kimmelman: Or Lenox Avenue, as it’s also known. There’s that great Hughes poem about the street musician, “down on Lenox Avenue the other night, by the pale dull pallor of an old gas light.”

Adjaye: The site is a void now, but I sometimes shut my eyes and imagine all these incredible people coming to that corner to talk about the difficulties of being Black and living in America. Speakers’ Corners were crucial for immigrant and African American communities whose views weren’t being represented by the mainstream. If you’re invisible, you need an outlet. People came to corners like this one to find out what was going on.

It makes sense to me that on this same corner is the Schomburg Center, one of the most amazing institutions in Harlem and one of the most important in the world for understanding the history of African American and diaspora cultures.

Kimmelman: Which started out in the public library building on 135th, a limestone 1905 Italian Renaissance-style palazzo by Charles McKim, now a landmark.

Adjaye: I suspect it looked too imposing, too much like a private residence, so the modern addition they built for the Schomburg at the corner couldn’t be more different: a big brick-and-glass building, transparent at the base — with a garden separating it from McKim’s library and with trees and benches along the front.

Kimmelman: That’s a makeover by the architects Marble Fairbanks and SCAPE of what was, frankly, a not very memorable 1970s expansion.




Adjaye: What’s terrific about this spot, in general is the nexus of Schomburg, Speakers’ Corner, the YMCA, the hospital murals ...

Kimmelman: You’re talking about the Works Progress Administration murals from the 1930s at Harlem Hospital just next door to Schomburg. They’re like giant billboards — images of Black life, painted by different artists, reproduced, backlit and blown up several stories high on the outside of a hospital wing.

Adjaye: The WPA was so important, especially for artists of color. I think about this today. The WPA was all about beautification as a strategy for employment. It was a response to a public crisis. It was about edification and care, which are also goals of architecture. Architecture is about more than shelter, after all. It’s about doing something that gives people dignity, hope, a belief in the future.

Kimmelman: You mentioned the Harlem YMCA, which is near the same corner, also from the ’30s — designed by architect James Cameron Mackenzie Jr., with setbacks, a tower and old neon YMCA signs.

Adjaye: A classic, 1930s-era New York sort of building, sculpted with setbacks in a way you don’t really see with many buildings in this part of the city. The form is carved and muscular. I’m blown away by the fact that it was built to accommodate 4,000 Black men at a time when hotels downtown wouldn’t let Blacks in.

Kimmelman: The Y was a real cultural and intellectual mecca, too. I came across a list of luminaries who spoke, stayed, taught, passed through it — Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Claude McKay, Eartha Kitt, George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King Jr., Duke Ellington, Willie Mays, Cicely Tyson, Sugar Ray Robinson ...

Adjaye: There’s a postcard of the Y that I have seen stuck to different walls all over the world. I think the Y represents Harlem as an intellectual and artistic hub.

Let’s head from 135th Street down Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard because I also want to show you a couple of churches. All communities have their churches, of course, but in Harlem they’ve sustained an intellectual infrastructure, with empowerment and dignity and all these other issues disseminated through Christianity. For me, St. Philip’s is particularly significant.

Kimmelman: Thurgood Marshall’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’ church. Founded during the early 1800s by free African Americans in lower Manhattan. It moved to Harlem a little over a century ago. Two African American architects, Vertner Woodson Tandy and George Washington Foster, designed the building, in salmon-colored brick.

Adjaye: Tandy was the first registered African American architect in New York state. The architecture of St. Philip’s is the opposite of radical — it’s a solid, plain neo-Gothic building. But for architects of color at the turn of the century, I suspect the radicality was simply proving that Black architects were just as good as their white counterparts at delivering a neo-Gothic church. Tandy and Foster did it all perfectly. The base. The central window and pointed arch. The pediments over the doorways. The roof timbers. All symmetrical. It’s like they said: “Here you go, done.” The beauty and radicality were in the design’s faultlessness.

The other church we ought to see is Greater Refuge Temple.

Kimmelman: Formerly the Harlem Casino, revamped during the ’60s with swooping white curves and domes and a multicolored facade by Costas Machlouzarides, who also did the TV-shaped Calhoun School on West End Avenue.

Adjaye: He plays with the idea of arches, which are part of the vernacular of temples. The colored facade resembles a flag, with a bold modernist cross — and the canopy is an extrusion of ellipses, so, so beautiful. If you think about how evangelical sermons on television have become a form of theater, it seems prescient to me that the temple should have taken over a former casino.

And then just across the street is the former Hotel Theresa, from 1913.

Kimmelman: Like the Y, a storied site, whites-only during its earliest decades. Fidel Castro famously stayed there and met with Malcolm X. I believe my lefty physician dad tended to somebody at the hotel who was with the Cuban delegation.

Adjaye: A century ago, constructing a huge white building in a neighborhood of brownstones was clearly meant to set the hotel apart. For me, it has a special significance because the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, before he became president, spent summers in Harlem and stayed at the Theresa. He spoke on the street outside with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm X. It was another Speakers’ Corner.

Kimmelman: David, we’ve made our way to 125th Street. You wanted to get to the river, which is still a hike.

Adjaye: Let’s walk west along 125th. There’s so much to talk about, but I’ll just point out how the street vendors turn the sidewalk into a kind of people’s arcade. The street is too wide and has too many cars.

Kimmelman: There are proposals floating around to reconfigure 125th for pedestrians, bikes, buses and green space.

Adjaye: That would be wonderful. It could become like La Rambla in Barcelona or Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv.

I wanted to end at the viaducts on the far West Side.

Kimmelman: You mean the elevated subway tracks for the 1 train at Broadway and 125th, from 1904, engineered by William Barclay Parsons. And the Riverside Drive Viaduct from 1901. F. Stewart Williamson was the engineer in that case.

Adjaye: The subway viaduct is like a kit of parts — everything in compression and tension, every part doing exactly what you see, what it needs to do, creating the spanning for the structure. It’s steel, weblike, so there is a lightness and transparency. From below, you can watch trains pass, which you wouldn’t be able to do if the viaduct were built now. We would have to use concrete and make it opaque. And I love how the tracks run past Columbia’s Manhattanville campus. Renzo must have been inspired by all the tectonics and audacity of it.

Kimmelman: Renzo Piano, the architect for several of the new Columbia University buildings next to the tracks, including the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, which he clad in a double-skin curtain wall to muffle the rumble of the passing trains. It might be worth noting here that the extension of the subway lines into Harlem set off a real estate boom in the early 1900s that ended up providing homes for African Americans forced out of downtown areas like the Tenderloin. So the subways laid crucial groundwork for the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance.

And, yes, Renzo said he loved the viaduct.

Adjaye: Then comes what I think is one of the most beautiful pieces of infrastructure in the world, the north-south axis of vaults under the Riverside Drive viaduct — a cathedral of steel just before you reach the Hudson River. The people who built it didn’t have to do those vaults. They could have just made straight faceted pieces; but money was spent to do something profound, which creates a fantastic space for an open-air market underneath.

Kimmelman: Underpasses aren’t usually called profound.

Adjaye: Most of them are massive, concrete, monolithic forms. Here the lightness and openness of the steel gives you a feeling of X-ray vision. You see through the structure, north, south, to the water. The design reminds me a little of art nouveau metalwork — not as ornate, but with the same sort of picturesque quality.

And for me, the climax of the whole walk comes when you pass under the viaduct and get to the water, look north and see the George Washington Bridge, majestically crossing the river on its two pylons.

Kimmelman: Another steel structure — Le Corbusier called it the most beautiful bridge in the world — very definitely profound.

Adjaye: That’s how I get to and from the airport. It’s my gateway to the city. Every time I see it I think the same thing.

Isn’t New York incredible?

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