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Harlem Housing Relic From the 1800s Is Set for a Long-Promised Overhaul

From left, the tenants Lydia Gadsden, Sarah Gregory, Robertus Coleman, Elizabeth Williams and Karen Hendrickson outside the A. Philip Randolph Houses.Credit...Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

The tenement buildings known as A. Philip Randolph Houses take up a block along West 114th Street in Harlem and stand as a relic from the 1800s, clashing with the condos, yoga studios and cookie shops encroaching all around.

But inside some of those buildings, residents have been anxiously waiting for modern day New York to reach them.

Told almost a decade ago that a rebuilding was planned by the New York City Housing Authority, some tenants relocated to public housing projects elsewhere in the city while other residents were told to sit tight in their apartments and wait for the first rebuilt units.

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The buildings have decayed and many residents have been relocated to other public housing as they await renovations. Credit...Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

Then years passed.

“We were like stuck,” one of the neighbors who stayed, Elizabeth Williams, 57, said of the wait. “We felt like nothing was working out for us.”

But a rebirth is now on the way, officials said.

The city plans to announce on Monday the start of the construction project that will transform Randolph Houses into a mixed-income development of public and private housing. The work is to be financed with a combination of federal, city and private money, officials said, though the housing authority said it could not provide an estimate for the total cost. The renovations are expected to be completed in two phases over the next four years.

And last week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that the New York State Board for Historic Preservation has recommended adding the 36 buildings of Randolph Houses to the State and National Registers of Historic Places in light of their significance to the evolution of Harlem and of working-class New York. It is welcome news, but the long delay and the partnership with a private developer also reflect a difficult reality for public housing. With far less federal funding coming in, the Housing Authority has struggled to maintain its 334 developments, which collectively house more than 400,000 people.

Randolph Houses is one of the most distinctive properties in the authority’s portfolio.

The five-story, Renaissance Revival style structures along both the north and south sides of West 114th Street, between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, were built in the 1890s to attract workers willing to commute on the new elevated trains along what was a stretch of Eighth Avenue and is now Frederick Douglass, state officials said. The first residents were white, they said, but black families began moving into the buildings in the 1920s, reflecting Harlem’s emergence as a center of black culture.

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The buildings on West 114th Street, as they looked in 1928.Credit...Percy Sperr/The New York Public Library

The buildings were rehabilitated in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Housing Authority acquired the properties in the 1970s, adding more than 450 apartments to the city’s public housing stock. But by the 2000s, the buildings’ state of disrepair led to plans to demolish and rebuild. By 2006, the city emptied 22 of the buildings on the south side of the street and moved 159 families to other public housing. Another 130 households remained across the street in Randolph buildings on the north side.

But state preservation officials objected and forced the city back to the drawing board. In 2011, housing officials came up with a new design for a gut renovation that preserved the exteriors.

Under the plan, the buildings’ 452 apartments will be reconfigured into 314 apartments. Of those, 147 will remain public housing while 167 will be private apartments available to households at different income levels no higher than $68,700 for a family of four.

The units designated to remain public housing will be the first to be renovated.

Kenan Bigby, vice president of Trinity Financial in Boston, the developer chosen for the project, said the interiors of the buildings would be transformed to bring apartments up to current building standards and to add connecting corridors and common entrances. The interiors of the walk-up buildings, Mr. Bigby said, will have more spacious apartments and amenities like elevators, laundry rooms on each floor and a basement with community space, including a gym.

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A detail from the exterior of the Randolph Houses on the north side of West 114th Street.Credit...Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

The renovation will preserve stoops and facades, maintaining the 19th-century New York streetscape.

The Housing Authority is contributing $40 million in federal capital funding to the $95.5 million cost of the first phase of the project. The rest of the money comes mostly from tax credits, including state and federal historic rehabilitation tax credits. (The historic district designation also includes the city’s first public girls’ high school, Wadleigh High School for Girls, built in 1902 next to today’s Randolph Houses.) The Housing Authority chairwoman, Shola Olatoye, said this was an example of a development project that mixed federal capital dollars with other resources to help preserve public housing and create privately-owned affordable units.

“What’s so exciting about this development is the opportunity to rebuild public housing for low-income New Yorkers and contribute to a dynamic and diverse Harlem,” she said.

After so many years of waiting, some Randolph Houses tenants have died and apartments continue to deteriorate. That point was driven home last week when a leak from the ceiling sent a torrent of water down to the first floor, flooding the area where a group of tenants monitoring the renovation plans was meeting with the developer.

The tenants said water leaks were common throughout the housing project. One of the residents, Lydia Gadsden, a 66-year-old retired bank receptionist, said she just prays she lives long enough to leave the second-floor apartment where she raised three children, cross the street and step into the future.

“To put one foot in and say, ‘Thank God,’ ” she said. “If I only live to see that day, it will be a rejoicing day for me.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Harlem Housing Relic From the 1800s Is Set for a Long-Promised Overhaul. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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