A Street of Bright Colors, Mixed With Natural Brick

NEW YORK'S

Nearly a quarter century ago, a state agency splashed a rainbow palette of bright colors across the old brownstones on East 101st Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. Much of that palette remains, and, occasionally, new bright colors have been added. But, amid a swell of interest in historic preservation, the polychromatic tide on some of the buildings is slowly receding.

In 1886, the developer Edward Daly, working with the architect Andrew Spence, built the unassuming brick row houses at 101-115 East 101st, on the north side of the street, with low stoops and lovely scrolled iron railings on the front steps. Then, in 1894, the developer James Duffy spent $250,000 to build 26 row houses on the south side of the block, wrapping around the corner onto Lexington.

It appears that Duffy, perhaps because of this project, gave his name to Duffy's Hill, the alarmingly steep slope of Lexington one block north. Duffy also hired Spence, who this time developed a more varied but less charming neo-Romanesque design, with rock-faced brick and carved brownstone trim, also with low stoops. Duffy quickly sold 15 of the houses to an investor for almost $18,000 each.

The early residents of the block were small businessmen, like Samuel Glatner, 55, a tailor, who was listed at 101 East 101st Street in the 1900 census, with his family of five and one servant. Born in Austria, he had emigrated in 1864. Other head-of-household occupations listed involved buttons, publishing, dentistry and liquor. Most residents were of German or Russian birth or descent.

Black and white photographs from the 1940's show that a few of the brick houses on the north side were obviously painted - but a walk down the street now can strain even a Roget of pigmentation: mocha, cream, café au lait, cocoa, buff, red, maroon, red-orange, brick-red, baby blue, light blue, royal blue, forest green, bright green, hunter green, and on and on.

Among the most startling is the old Glatner house at No. 101, the brick freshly painted in soft blue, with cream-colored trim and just a hint of pink. The owner, Sonia Sirol, said that she and her mother, Esther, who has a similarly painted house at No. 106, were just "trying to create a warm environment for our tenants - it's a bed-and-breakfast without the breakfast."

"My favorite color is blue," she said. "I even stained the floors blue." She said she thinks of it in terms of "Miami, happy, sunny, kind of Caribbean; before, it was just red and looked very dreary." A visitor can see the previous paint job on the Park Avenue side of the building - maroon on the bricks, coppery brown on the trim and green on the cornice. Ms. Sirol has the house on the market for $4 million.

Across the street, Clement Poussaint's house at 112 East 101st has one of the most interesting color assortments on the block. He said that his father, Christopher, put the current Permastone (imitation stone) facade on the first two floors in the 1950's and picked out the irregular brick shapes in bright colors, a tradition the younger Mr. Poussaint has kept up in pink, aqua, yellow, rust and other colors. "He did things like that, so they wouldn't look dull," Mr. Poussaint said. One string of the bricks is in red, white and blue.

The paint on many of the houses, however, is quite faded. Among those is the house of Damiano Maruca, an architect, who has lived at 100 East 101st Street since the 1960's. Mr. Maruca said that in 1982, the Harlem Urban Development Corporation, a state agency, promoted a spruce-up program for area blocks and approached the owners on East 101st Street with the offer of a free paint job.

Mr. Maruca said that he tried to make his building "look like it had the original colors," using yellow for the brick (which is yellow underneath) with brown trim.

Not everyone was sold on the idea of painting the brick - an idea even then considered unwise by preservationists, since it tends to trap water behind the masonry. At the time of the spruce-up project, Donald and Uli Monaco owned 103 East 101st Street, and Mr. Monaco said they specifically refused to give permission for the painting.

"I don't think paint is good on brick," said Mr. Monaco, who now lives in Nyack, N.Y. "But I arrived home one day and the house was half painted. I said, 'Stop!' "

After much delay, he said, the contractor that did the work admitted its mistake and removed the paint. Gov. George E. Pataki shut down the Harlem agency in 1995, replacing it with a new entity, the Harlem Community Development Corporation.

Mr. Monaco's vision seems to be right for the age of historic preservation, when people are stripping paint off oak, brick, stone and other materials. One longtime resident, Karen Lamberti of 107 East 101st, along with the owners of Nos. 105 and 109, stripped the paint off the warm red brick of their houses three summers ago, giving the houses a charming Greenwich Village look.

At No. 114, Anna Pacheco has stripped the brick, although she laments that it was burned by too much acid. And other owners say they are interested in returning the brick to its original color. So, notwithstanding the Sirols' bright, fresh paint job, 101st Street seems poised to move in a different direction from the vision of the early 1980's.

"I've always liked the natural brick," Ms. Lamberti said.