Harlem Brownstone Hits the Housing Market

By Bailey Hosfelt

New York City’s Mount Morris Park neighborhood is home to a myriad of historic brownstones that stand tall on tree-lined streets. With the likes of actor Neil Patrick Harris and chef Marcus Samuelsson flocking to properties in the gentrified Central Harlem locale, it is no surprise that the asking price for 58 West 120th Street is five million dollars. The former owner of this property is what has added quite the curb appeal.

Maya Angelou, acclaimed author, poet and civil rights activist, occupied the spacious Harlem home for just over a decade. Although her primary residence was located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina near Wake Forest University, the institution where she taught, Angelou often returned to the city of her literary roots. As longtime friend and director of the Howard University libraries, Howard Dodson said, “She’s got big footsteps in New York.”

The Pulitzer Prize winner first moved to New York in 1959 and joined the Harlem Writers Guild, an organization where African-American writers could hone their craft. While gaining name recognition in the literary realm, Angelou simultaneously climbed the real estate ladder moving from a modest Brooklyn apartment to the Upper West Side before relocating to North Carolina.

It was not until the early 2000s that she became weary of staying in hotels while back in town for her frequent lecture circuits and decided to invest in a New York home. During her real estate hunt, Motown songwriting couple and close friends of Angelou, Valerie Simpson and Nick Ashford, discovered the 120th Street location.

The vandalized brownstone, complete with missing front stairs and rotting floorboards, was the true definition of a fixer-upper, but Angelou saw something special in the dilapidated space. She purchased it in 2002 and hired architect Marc Anderson to perform the gut renovation. In just under a year it was transformed into an impressive four-story home with five bedrooms, five bathrooms, high ceilings, a spacious kitchen and a backyard garden that sprawled about 5,500 square feet.

Angelou and Anderson kept many of the original architectural flairs but also incorporated contemporary elements. The pair preserved the oak front door, detailed wainscoting, decorative fireplaces and carved staircase banister. However, they added skylights, central air and an elevator to the space.

Angelou’s master suite took up the entire third floor and contained her floor to ceiling library of titles that she had collected over the years. She painted the dining room ceiling to display a blue sky and clouds and put a birdcage lamp on the piano, perhaps a reference to her autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The parlor level served as the canvas where Angelou could display her eye-popping decor and colorful artwork. When asked about her stylistic choice of brightly upholstered furniture in shades of yellow, lime green, grape and tangerine, she said, “I wanted the [living] room to look like a bowl of summer fruit.”

The walls of her century-old Harlem home heard the laughs of editor Marcia A. Gillespie after a heated game of Boggle, actress Cicely Tyson during a spontaneous dance party and novelist Louise Meriwether with a glass of wine in one hand and a pen in the other. She was notorious for hosting her New Year’s Day parties here — celebrations that brought musicians, activists and writers from all over the world together for a grandiose gathering, complete with home-cooked cuisine and conversation.

Because Angelou once described the home as her refuge, “not only from the world, but a refuge from my worries, my troubles my concerns,” one may find it hard to believe that the Harlem home was not intended to stay in the family. Her grandson Colin Johnson spoke to the press at the Sundance Film Festival premiere of Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise and explained the reasoning.

He recalled spending many holidays at the brownstone and was sad to see it leave the family, but said that, ultimately, his grandmother “would have liked us to chart our own course” regarding real estate.

It is impossible to predict who Valon Nikci, the Angelou family broker, will hand the keys over to in the future, but it is no question of whether the former owner will remain a part of this historic home. She always will.