When completed in 1916, this brick beaux-arts giant was Washington Heights’ first luxury apartment complex, with a concierge, a separate workers' entrance and no fewer than three elevators. It was initially available only to whites, but the neighborhood's transformation from predominantly Irish and Jewish to African American saw the building's residents become mostly 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 to her apartment, inviting anyone and everyone into her living room for one of the city’s most enchanting jazz jams.
