Eye-Catching Harlem Building To Replace Old Funeral Home

HARLEM, NY — An eye-catching apartment building will soon rise on a block of Harlem brownstones — replacing a funeral home where a grisly discovery was made years ago.

The new building at 164-168 West 136th St., near Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard, will stand eight stories tall and contain 27 apartments, developer Josef Goodman said. Renderings shared with Patch show that the building will be cantilevered over a next-door brownstone, with large windows and a rooftop deck.

From 1910 until recently, the site was home to the Marion A. Daniels and Son Funeral Home, an establishment founded more than a century ago by some of the first Black residents of Harlem.

Once the funeral home closed around 2015, the building was sold, and new owner Steven Neuman moved to demolish it in 2018. But when city inspectors stopped by for a pre-demolition inspection, they were stunned by what they found in the rowhouses' basement: boxes and bags containing cremated human remains.

The city said at the time that it would halt the demolition and work with Neuman to reunite the remains with surviving relatives — or else give them a proper burial. Last fall, however, Patch reported that demolition was set to proceed after the city failed to identify the remains, and ultimately interred them in a cemetery.

That outreach was unsuccessful "in part because many of the human remains were either not labeled or had labels with insufficient information," a spokesperson for the Department of Buildings told Patch at the time.

With that unsettling history in the rearview mirror, the old funeral home building has since been demolished, said Goodman, whose company Haussmann Development is teaming up with Neuman's firm, Coltown Properties, on the project.

The cantilevered top was essential to making the project feasible, explained Goodman, adding that the development team had paid about $300,000 to acquire air rights from the adjacent townhouse.

Despite the striking design, Goodman said the team strove to make the building contextual with the surrounding blocks — it sits within a historic area of Harlem, just down the street from the famed Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

"I wanted to do something that blended in with the street," Goodman said.

The new building will cover 21,885 square feet and feature in-unit washer-dryers, lounge space, a rear yard and a gym. Construction will begin within weeks and wrap up by the end of 2023, Goodman said.

Goodman's company is also at work on an eight-story building on West 134th Street that will replace a beloved community garden.

Related coverage: Years After Human Remains Found, Harlem Rowhouses To Be Torn Down