Resurrection of a Harlem Brownstone

by Mik Awake, Inquirer Editor

Harlem-resident and architect, Nicholas Bunning is as difficult to summarize as the neighborhood he lives in.

“I have, like, nine harpsichords. I just love Baroque music,” he said in a recent interview. “And tattoos. Those are my two passions.”

A lover of Baroque music (“It wasn’t like rap, which is, like, all over the place”) and collector of vintage harpsichords and clavichords, Bunning is also covered in tattoos, has a shaved head and his earlobes dangle with the holes of flesh plugs.

A British expatriate, he speaks with a gentle lilt, peppering his speech with the occasional “cool” and “like” and “you know what I’m saying?” Sitting in the drawing room of his brownstone on 5th Avenue and 128th Street before one of his most prized instruments, a Queen Elizabeth harpsichord––“Queen Mother” as Bunning calls it––he unleashed a beautiful jangling song, his compact and burly frame swaying gently with the inflections.

It has perhaps been over seventy years since the walls of his Harlem brownstone have heard music like this.

When Bunning, who is white, and his African-American partner, who passed away in June, bought their Harlem brownstone together more than two years ago, they found it in a wretched state. “I’m surprised it didn’t collapse,” Bunning said.

He pointed to a subtle line running across the middle of the drawing room: when he and his partner first bought the place, this was where the ceiling stopped. Water streamed through the roof, most of the flooring was absent, beams were exposed throughout, parts of the ceiling were missing, and it was beyond filthy.

One might not go so far as to call Bunning a preservationist, but he has meticulously reconfigured, stylized, and modernized many of the brownstone’s original period details. On the drawing room ceiling, for instance, a pattern in the molding has been recreated from trace evidence in the glue. Whereas, in the original, the pattern was repeated on every inch of space, Bunning chose to spread the tiles evenly, streamlining the extravagance and distilling the essence.

This kind of attention to detail came with a price tag. “It was $850,000 when we bought it,” he said. “And we spent a lot more than that on the work.”

Thanks to Bunning’s scrupulousness, and his professional connections to trusted contractors and craftsman (the floor designer of the Dakota on Central Park West built his floors), there are only vague remnants of the brownstone’s years as a run-down rooming house. The structure once had eighteen rooms; now it has eight.

“What makes these houses amazing,” according to Bunning, “is that they haven’t generally until this last four, five, six years really been touched because the neighborhood was so unlivable in the eyes of so many people. The houses just weren’t maintained, and they weren’t renovated. They just sat in a very deteriorated state with a lot of their original features. What’s tragic now is that so many people buy them and don’t really know what they’re buying.”

While many still associate Harlem with its latter-day role as an African-American utopia, and later, ghetto, many overlook the history of the affluent neighborhood written in brick and mortar. One may even be tempted to argue that the gentrification of Harlem is rewriting the neighborhood’s history from within––and in a sense returning it to its opulent roots.

“This house had fifty good years of elegant living,” he said. “And then it had about seventy years of awful existence, as a rooming house, and full of crack-heads and people having fires in their bedrooms.” Those “fifty good years” Bunning was referring to started some time before the turn of the 20th century, when developers were running wild in Uptown Manhattan. It was a construction craze of unmatched proportions; townhouses sprouted like weeds throughout the village of Harlem. In 1872, an undoubtedly wealthy family built the five-story townhouse on 5th Avenue that Bunning now calls home.

It is perhaps Bunning’s deep appreciation for the rationality, rigor, and perfection of bygone eras like the Baroque period––a profound but complicated nostalgia––that informs his distaste for things like rap, video games, and many of his neighbors’ shoddy gut renovations. “There’s a sophistication that these houses had,” says Bunning. “And that’s what I think is so sad. When people don’t understand that and they say, ‘Too much work. Dumpster.’”

When he speaks of brownstones and their historic place in Harlem’s lore, Bunning often sounds like the many neighborhood activists who might bristle (and, in at least one instance, actually have bristled) at the very idea of his presence in the predominantly black neighborhood. “There’s not a lot of respect for the old stuff,” says Bunning. “People want to make as many rental units as they can and that’s it.”

In Harlem, change comes slow. Political pressure, protests, and the like are quick to meet developers wherever the wrecking balls appear. Unlike neighborhoods like the East Village or Williamsburg, which have over the past decade experienced a scandalously rapid gentrification, uptown Manhattan resists.

In Bunning’s sumptuous dining room, lined with brass framed maps and mirrors, a police cap rests on a wrought-iron radiator. This is not a decoration. As if his passion for tattoos and Bach weren’t enough, Bunning is also a part-time patrolman with the NYPD, having joined after September 11th to “save” the neighborhood. (“A lot of this restoration work is a lot like detective work.”)

Bunning is one of many who would like to see Harlem become a place more like the East Village, a neighborhood that is safer and more inviting, but doesn’t lose its “gritty, urban feel.” He would like to have more dining options than the corner bodega.

“There was some rumor that Whole Foods was going to open up here,” says Bunning.

He thinks about this for a second. “But I doubt it.”

(Photographs by Andrew Bast.)

Comments

[Adrian Veidt]

Great article - very interesting read.

[Anne]

The Author doesn’t stint on public history in this short story, but he approaches it from an angle — his own hard, underdog trudge toward literary success. At the end, we ended as one. A breathless saga. Mike Awakes my inner being.