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

HARLEM, NY — Years after a startling discovery put their demolition on hold, a set of Harlem rowhouses may finally be torn down, according to city records.

The three-story rowhouses at 164-168 West 136th St. were built in 1910. Until recently, they were 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 the new owner moved to demolish it in 2018. When city inspectors stopped by for a pre-demolition inspection, however, 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 the owner, Steven Neuman, to reunite the remains with surviving relatives — or else give them a proper burial. In the three years that followed, there was little word about how that effort was proceeding.

This week, a new application appeared on a city database, seeking once again to demolish the old funeral home.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Buildings told Patch that the building owner had never managed to reunite the cremated remains with their families.

"Working with a local funeral home and the Department, the owners had the remains interred at a cemetery," spokesperson Andrew Rudansky said. "DOB was informed that efforts by the owners to reach out to the families of the deceased were unsuccessful, in part because many of the human remains were either not labeled or had labels with insufficient information."

Once the remains were buried, the city had allowed the demolition to proceed during the summer of 2018, Rudansky said. But the owner never moved forward with the teardown, and the buildings sat empty until this year.

The new demolition application was filed Thursday, with a new person listed as owner: Josef Goodman, a real estate developer who is also constructing a building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. It was unclear when the 136th Street buildings had changed hands.

Rudansky, the DOB spokesperson, said the demolition application is incomplete, and the buildings had not yet undergone an inspection.

Have a Harlem news tip? Contact reporter Nick Garber at nick.garber@patch.com.