☞ DWELL: 517 West 158th Street Townhouse

When walking around the northern borders of Harlem at 155th Street, we ended up going a couple of blocks up (on 158th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam) and discovered a set of frame houses with front porches that had for sale signs up on their facades. The entire exterior of the houses had been covered up with vinyl siding so we did some research to see what they looked like back in the 1930's. Apparently there were white picket fences surrounding these houses and the front porches had contrast striped columns. House number 521 (at far right) was a tailor shop back in the day and number 517 was a boarding house.

Until 2002, there had been issues with number 517 since it was an SRO that the banks were trying to sell. A mysterious fire broke out in 2005 that had emptied the building of tenants and the townhouse was apparently in contract for $585K over a year ago. Since then, nothing has changed on the block so the new owners might be trying to hold on to the property until the market gets better. The middle building, number 219 is also up for sale. Archival photo courtesy of NYPL. Top photo by Ulysses.