 To celebrate the Private Library's Twentieth Season in New York, 'providing services to bibliophiles,' we are pleased to announce the opening of Jumel Terrace Books at 426 West 160th Street (between St. Nicholas and Edgecombe Avenues).
At the pinnacle of Sugar Hill, Uptown's only antiquarian bookshop specializes in local history, African and American: Colonialist and Revolutionary books, art, and ephemera relating to the Morris/Jumel Mansion and its community: Harlem, Washington Heights, African America, Africa, and the Black Atlantic are our specialties. Housed on the garden floor of an 1891 brownstone, the stock draws on private librarian Kurt Thometz's collections on these subjects. Open Friday through Sunday from 11 to 6 - by appointment, serendipity, and invitation - the shop hosts book signings, exhibitions, and special events. The first of these shows features our collection of Africa's incunabula, the Onitsha Market Literature familiar to readers of his Life Turns Man Up and Down (Pantheon, $26.95). Please send your vital statistics, including your email address, to be put on our mailing list. Otherwise, check this site for listings. We open in conjunction with George Preston's Museum of Art and Origins, an exemplary collection of African Art, two cobble-stoned blocks away - just past Paul Robeson's house - at the other end of Jumel Terrace and open by appointment. MUSEUM OF ART AND ORIGINS 430 WEST 162nd STREET NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10032 (212) 740-2001 mamfemuse@yahoo.com SUGAR HILL The bookshop faces the Morris/Jumel Mansion, Manhattan's oldest residence. Comparable to Monticello and Mt. Vernon in historic importance - built by Roger Morris in 1765 - and in 1776 the headquarters of George Washington during the Battle of Harlem Heights - the Georgian Colonial house is maintained as a museum by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the City of New York. The presences of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr in the house are nearly overwhelmed by that of Madame Jumel. Had Defoe wholly set Moll Flanders in the New World he might have titled it Eliza Jumel. While less competent hands have embraced the popular history she's inspired - a grand horizontal story involving several of the founding fathers and a good deal of bodice ripping - such literature tells us as much of the place of women in Revolutionary America as Gone With the Wind does of the Civil War. Madame Jumel's dozen fictional biographies, all out-of-print, are always be on hand but the only record of substance is the museum's former curator's, William Henry Shelton's, The Jumel Mansion: Being a full History of the House on Harlem Heights built by Roger Morris before the Revolution. (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916). Harlem's historic Sugar Hill District provides another local history and our primary audience. Approaching the Jumel Mansion, visitors pass houses and apartment buildings that were once homes to W.E.B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Carl Van Vechten, Ralph Ellison, Ethel Waters, and Walter White. The Mansion itself looks at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, an Afro-American landmark. One of Paul Robeson's two addresses adjacent the "White House", the "Triple Nickel," has been home to Count Basie, Joe Louis, Thurgood Marshall, Coleman Hawkins, Teddy Wilson, Andy Kirk, Johnny Hodges, Lena Horne and Canada Lee. Equally prestigious, 409 Edgecombe "attracted so many members of the nation's black elite that in 1947 Ebony commented "that legend, only slightly exaggerated, says bombing 409 would wipe out Negro leadership for the next 20 years." Sugar Hill has retained its landmark status as "Harlem's smartest residential area" and its reputation as the intellectual and artistic home of Black America for a century. Locally, it means not so much a neighborhood as certain addresses in the Jumel and Hamilton Heights historic districts synonymous with a degree of sophistication. A considerable literature signifying Harlem's Renaissance, and pointing to its Enlightenment, was nourished here by the likes of DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X (ALL IN STOCK). Its jazz became the soundtrack of American cities at night. Romaire Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and James Van der Zee made Uptown's streets and people represent the Black capital of the world and its rich history serves as a magnet to the diaspora. As we represent that literature, located in an unmarked brownstone on quiet, near-by, well-to-do Convent Avenue, Essie Green Gallery represents those artists' work. The gallery is one of Harlem's oldest and represents black artists for mainly black clients from all over the world. ESSIE GREEN GALLERY 419 CONVENT AVENUE NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10032 (212) 368-9635 essie.green.galleries@att.net When you enter the door of apartment 3F at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, you are walking on to hallowed ground. It's not just that Count Basie, Paul Robeson, and Charles Buchanan, who owned the Savoy Ballroom, all lived in this building, a true New York City jazz landmark. It's that the building is home to one of New York City's living treasures. Every Sunday for the past eleven years, rain or shine, with no vacations, a jazz concert with some of the City's best musicians takes place in this parlor, the living room of Marjorie Eliot's home in Sugar Hill. Parlor Entertainment is held every Sunday rain or shine. 4:00 - 6:30 pm 555 EDGECOMBE AVENUE APARTMENT 3F NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10032 (212) 781-6595 |