Northattan

Projected image for the 2013 Sugar Hill housing development. Photo by Broadway Housing Communities.

On the northern boundary of West Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood, scaffolding envelops a old garage building covering the block between Edgecombe and St. Nicholas Avenue. The garage is set to give way by 2013 to a spanking new apartment house, providing homes for 124 families, many of them among New York City’s poorest.

As city developments go, this one sounds like a win-win project: An urban eyesore will be removed, a new structure will replace it, and homes will go to those most in need.

But where some see progress, others see a charcoal zigzag structure with asymmetrical windows, cutting a modernist, high-rise gash in a neighborhood of elegant and historic low-rise brownstones.

“The building design has absolutely nothing in line with the historic nature of most every building in the vicinity,” griped a letter addressed a year ago by the Sugar Hill Block Association, a coalition of the neighborhood’s homeowners and residents, to the City of New York Department of Housing Preservation & Development.

For more than a year, the association has complained about the design, to no avail. In fact, the first complaints came only after Community Board 9 unanimously approved the project -– avant-garde exterior and all –- in early 2010.

Walter South, head of the Community Board 9 landmark and preservation committee, said the board saw the high-rise primarily as a means to provide better living conditions to many people in West Harlem. And the modern design was accepted as a compromise because “preservationists should not be locked into having to reproduce everything, and should be open to new ideas,” he said.

But the Sugar Hill high-rise is still a topic of protest, often raised at community board meetings.

“When you walk out of the subway, you don’t see gigantic 13-story buildings,” said Patricia Ju, resident of the area and chair of the Sugar Hill Block Association, in an interview with Northattan. “ The buildings are usually three-four story row houses or one-story commercial.”

Brownstones facing the upcoming project. Photo by Dalal Mawad/Northattan.

The architecture complaints are an unusual setback for Broadway Housing Communities, the nonprofit organization behind the new building. Over 25 years, Broadway Housing has built a reputation for providing innovative shelter for some of the neediest families in West Harlem and Washington Heights. In addition to low-income rentals, the projects house services such as medical and vocational training facilities.

Broadway Housing’s projects are usually restorations of older buildings. But at Sugar Hill,  “this is not what we had here. We had a garage; there was nothing to restore,” said Broadway Housing Communities’ executive director Ellen Baxter. Trying to build a new structure that replicates the century-old surroundings wouldn’t work, she said, because “it will look like a fake reproduction.” The modern high-rise design was pursued, she said,  “to reflect the history and show it in 21st century form.”

The Sugar Hill Project will be Broadway Housing Communities’ seventh project to offer even more innovations, including having tenants participate in the management of their own building.

Like its much-praised Dorothy Day Project in Hamilton Heights, the Sugar Hill building would provide rent-stabilized apartments, reserved for families and individuals currently living in “seriously substandard conditions” as well as homeless families from the city’s emergency shelters, according to Baxter. Families would also have access to educational programs a child-care center and a children’s museum for art and storytelling.

the scaffolded garage to be replaced by the housing project. Photo by Dalal Mawad/Northattan.

The neo-classical brownstones of Sugar Hill were built between 1905 and 1916.  With their detailed facades and ornate windows, most of the buildings provided wealthy African-American families with getaways from bustling Lower Manhattan. In addition to its architectural grandeur, the area was the epicenter of Harlem’s renaissance, roaring with music and art.

The Sugar Hill Block Association acknowledges that, despite its protests, the 13-story building will definitely be built. It’s still lobbying community leaders for one change, though: It wants to change the structure’s exterior color, from charcoal to terracotta, in keeping with the nearby brownstones.

This article was modified on 12/04/2011 to correct that the garage structure was not abandoned or empty; it was in use for parking until Broadway Housing Communities bought it.

Working in the garden has helped Jennifer Benitez come to terms with the death of her son. Photo by Dalal Mawad/Northattan.

If you happen to walk by the community garden on 138^th Street and Riverside Park, you might hear a woman’s voice call out to you, “Do you want some tomatoes, peppers, basil?” That’s Jenny Benitez, who has transformed a former garbage dump and drug haven into an urban oasis of flowers, vegetables and fruit.

At 78, Benitez, who was born in Puerto Rico, has the feisty spirit and physical vigor of a young soul. “Nature gives me energy,” she says while getting her hands dirty in the garden. “I watch life grow in here and it gives me years of life in return.” For 30 years now, April through November, Benitez has planted and harvested vegetables, trimmed plants and raked the two blocks of the Riverside Valley community garden.

“It all started with my children wanting to come down here to play,” she says, looking through her circular spectacles, “but it was dirty, full of homeless people and drugs.”

Benitez’s friend Steve Gallagher started cleaning the area and planting shrubs in the once-abandoned soil. Riverside Park did not allow plants around the park, “so they gave us this spot as a parcel of land for a garden,” she says. Benitez and Gallagher cleaned, planted and harvested through the years what has become a thriving community garden.

“I saved the garden,” she says proudly. “I talked the homeless people out,” pointing to a spot where shacks once rested. “Drug users like their privacy, they bring garbage with them, they like to keep it here,” she adds. “So when they see that you clean it up, you are displacing them and they never come back.”

Benitez says the community garden has also helped changed the neighborhood. “There are people that were in jail for drugs and remember this area and come back after all these years, and they don’t stay, because it has changed so much.”

Benitez has transformed the rundown public space into a fertile plot for growing fresh produce. Photo by Dalal Mawad/Northattan.

Today, Benitez’s flowers, tomatoes, strawberries, broccoli and potatoes have replaced the drugs and trash. “I love planting vegetables because I know I’m going to be harvesting them, giving them away for people to eat them.”

Vincent Stanley, a resident of the area, is among the passers-by that have benefited from Benitez’s gardening, even after he has visited a local produce market. “On our way back from Fairway she often calls to ask us if we’d like some vegetables,” he says. “She’s a wealth of gardening knowledge and is always eager to give advice or share some seedlings.”

But the garden is also Benitez’s daily sanctuary from pain and grief. “Gardening for Jenny is a blessing,” says her husband, Victor. “She doesn’t have the time to think about her son.”

Benitez lost her son, Victor Alvarez, 57, to a sudden heart attack a month ago. “I forget, I leave all my troubles away and I am not thinking, I’m raking, then I’m planting, I just don’t think…” Last week, she planted a magnolia tree in memory of her son. “A tree is life, so when I look at that tree I see him alive.”

Every year, Benitez trains groups of young people to take care of the garden. “They are the new generation, and you have to let them come up with their own ideas,” she says. Groups from around the city volunteer on a weekly basis. “I feel the years already beating me, and though I am confident many volunteers will take care of the garden, no one will love it like I do. It is my life.”

In November, Benitez, with the help of her husband and volunteers, starts preparing the garden for the winter. She adds soil and covers it with seeds in anticipation of the next harvest. While the garden is at rest, Benitez and her husband go back to Puerto Rico: “I leave it behind,” she says. “I don’t have to worry. It goes to sleep really nice and when I’m back, it’s back to life and I feel like I’m back to life as well.”

At the corner of a bustling hub of Hamilton Heights, one square block beckons schoolchildren and passersby with green lawns and shady trees. The problem is you can’t get in. Two advocates want to make it a place where people can stay instead of just walk through.

Hamilton Grange reopened its doors after 5 years of renovation. Photo by Dalal Mawad/Northattan.

After five years of restoration, the 19th century house of one of America’s Founding Fathers has finally reopened its doors to the public. Tourists who’ve been used to going to midtown to see Times Square, or farther south to see the Statue of Liberty, now have a site further north to add to their itineraries: Alexander Hamilton’s former home, in Hamilton Heights. Dalal Mawad reports.

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