Harlem brownstones with stoop
— — the front step the block keeps watch from.
Not only on a wall.
“A row of brownstones in central Harlem, stoops set close to the sidewalk, ironwork still on the parlour-floor windows. The Mount Morris Park district holds the densest stretch, blocks of late-nineteenth-century rowhouses built when the elevated trains first reached uptown. The stoop is the public room of the block: coffee in the morning, conversation in the evening.
Harlem brownstones with stoop, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Harlem covers central Manhattan above 110th Street, settled as a Dutch village in 1658 and rebuilt as a streetcar suburb after the elevated trains arrived in the 1880s. The brownstone rows along 119th to 124th Streets and around Mount Morris Park, now Marcus Garvey Park, form the Mount Morris Park Historic District, designated by New York City in 1971 and listed on the National Register in 1996. The stone itself is Triassic sandstone quarried from the Connecticut and New Jersey brownstone belt.
The brown stone that names the houses is Portland Brownstone, a fine-grained sandstone laid down in the Triassic and quarried from Portland, Connecticut, and Belleville, New Jersey. New York builders applied it as a four-inch facade veneer over brick from the 1840s onward. Carved stoops, lintels, and parlour-floor cornices were standard. The stone weathers softly, which gives Harlem rows their warm uniform glow at the hour the sun turns the avenue.
Mount Morris Park Historic District runs roughly from 119th to 124th Street between Mount Morris Park West and Lenox Avenue. The 2, 3, B, and C subway lines reach 125th Street; the Apollo Theater stands two blocks west on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture occupies 135th and Lenox. Self-guided walking maps from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission cover the district in about an hour on foot.