When completed in 1916, this brick, beaux arts giant was Washington Heights’ very first luxury apartment complex and had a concierge, separate tradesmen entrance and no fewer than three elevators. Initially only available to white tenants, the area’s transformation from a predominantly Irish and Jewish neighborhood to an African American one saw the building become predominately black by the 1940s. Its tenants would include some of New York’s most prominent African Americans, among them boxer Joe Louis and music heavyweights Lena Horne, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.
Today the building’s cultural legacy lives on every Sunday afternoon, when veteran musician Marjorie Eliot throws open the doors of her apartment, inviting anyone and everyone into her living room for one of the city’s most enchanting jazz jams.
