207 Edgecombe Avenue

Number 207 went up in 1901, one of the rowhouses that filled the Edgecombe Avenue ridge during the building boom that ran from roughly 1886 to 1910. Three stories of masonry on a narrow lot, it was built as a two-family house and remains one today.

The architect or builder who drew it has not surfaced in the accessible record, which is its own kind of honesty. This is a street where the speculative houses came up in runs, block by block, as the grid climbed the bluff, and many went up without a name attached to the drawings.

The address sits between West 141st and 142nd Streets, which places it in Hamilton Heights proper, south of West 145th. That line matters. The designated Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill historic districts begin at 145th and run north to 155th, so 207 falls just outside them.

The famous Edgecombe addresses, the apartment houses that drew a generation of Harlem's writers and leaders, sit blocks north and above the cut. They are a different street and a different history. What 207 shares with them is the ridge, not the lore.

The house reads as two homes. The main residence runs four bedrooms and two and a half baths across the upper floors, laid out for a single household over more than one level.

Below it, a garden apartment, a studio or one-bedroom, opens to the garden at the back and keeps its own entrance. Together the two units measure 3,452 square feet, the kind of footprint that lets an owner take the house whole or let the garden floor carry part of the cost.

Edgecombe is a made word that maps the land beneath it: edge, a ridge, and combe, an old term for a valley or hollow. The avenue runs the escarpment above the Harlem River valley, the rim known as Coogan's Bluff, and the houses strung along it belong to the same turn-of-the-century push that raised 207.

It is listed at 2,100,000. The listing is held by Jennifer Breu and Kelly Cole of Compass.

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