THE bright glazed whiteness of the Hotel Theresa, built at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue in 1913, symbolized the new high-rise aspirations of 20th-century Harlem. Three decades later and newly integrated, it offered hope to black New Yorkers. In 1960, the press descended on the hotel when Fidel Castro checked in. Now crews are at work keeping its remarkable design intact.
The Theresa was built by Gustavus Sidenberg, who manufactured ladies’ collars and then took a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. It appears that the hotel was his only development project, for which he hired the three-year-old firm of George and Edward Blum. Apparently born well-to-do, both brothers went to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the training ground of the architectural elite.
But instead of returning to design country houses and private clubs, they did the unthinkable: They put their high-style training into the service of commercial architecture, where profits were calculated in square feet, even square inches.
In 1912 Mr. Sidenberg approved the Blums’ most ambitious design, a full-blockfront apartment hotel 13 stories high. This was from the architects’ boom year, which included the Dallieu, at 101st Street and West End Avenue; the Adlon, at 54th and Seventh Avenue; and their all-white 780 West End Avenue, at 98th. Like 780 West End, the Blums made the Hotel Theresa all white, with their characteristic sinuous ornament unlike anything ever seen in New York.
The spandrel panels — the rectangles below the windows — consist of diamond shapes made up of crisscross lines, something like the Islamic decoration of the 14th-century Alhambra. But looked at in another light, they could be the zigzag Art Deco of the 1920s. At the third-floor level runs a band of varying ornament, including projecting panels of glazed terra cotta surrounding roughened, sandpaperlike rectangles.
From the 10th floor up, the main facade is covered with diaper-patterned terra cotta, a sort of tapestry of diamond shapes. This section ends in superscaled square-topped pediments, another Blum trademark. The window arches of this upper section are great half-rounds of sinuous, Art Nouveau-type ornament surrounding bulging orbs like mushroom caps.
Nothing in the decorative scheme derives from classical architecture — indeed it could be said to be anticlassical, so thoroughly does it bypass traditional design. George and Edward Blum may have taken advantage of the orthodox training at the École, but they also took instruction from the streets of Paris, Vienna and other European cities where the Secession style had recently flowered.
The Theresa opened in 1913 with 300 rooms, and its modernity and size made it a center for Harlem civic affairs. In 1921, The New York Times held a business lunch celebrating its new Harlem office, at 111 West 125th Street. The Times quoted J. Gardner Smith, the president of the Harlem Chamber of Commerce, as saying that 125th would become the “greatest street in the city.”
Like its facade, the Theresa was all white, both staff and guests. But the African-American population of Harlem was expanding, and in 1937, The New York Amsterdam News reported a complaint by two black men that they had been refused rooms, which the hotel denied. But then in 1940 the Theresa opened for all races, with a black staff and management.
At some point it came to be known as the “Waldorf of Harlem,” a center for African-American events. In 1941, 10,000 fans gathered in front to see Joe Louis, fresh from a boxing victory at the Polo Grounds. After a fire in 1945, The Times noted that guests evacuated from the hotel included administrators from Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute and Wilberforce University.
For some whites the Theresa had an anti-establishment cachet; for example, the Communist Party of the United States held its convention there in 1959. Mr. Castro was a guest the next year, when he came to address the United Nations. He and his retinue stayed at the Hotel Shelburne, at 37th and Lexington Avenue, for one night. But the Cubans complained that the hotel, suspicious of the revolutionary purse, demanded $2,000 in advance. The hotel management disputed this claim.
The Cubans moved up to the Theresa, where Mr. Castro felt a responsive chord with the black community. Malcolm X; Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India; and Nikita S. Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, all visited him there, and the Theresa has an enduring place in cold war history.
In 1966 the architect Vito Tricarico proposed an entirely new, modern skin for the hotel, but it was instead simply converted to an office building.
Now, the firm Rand Engineering & Architecture has begun a $2 million program of repairs. There is some spalling on the high gables, window lintels have failed, and the fragile-looking 12th-floor balcony has to be replaced, but the building is in surprisingly good condition.
A designated landmark, the Theresa should emerge from the work looking as good as it does now, or better.
