His Gilded Age

The large cut-out photograph is of Adams’s father during his basketball days at Akron University in the early ’50s. The abstract paintings on the right are by Larry Bentley and Maurice Anderson; the framed paper construction on the left is by Kevin Bright. Photo: Annie Schlechter

One imperative of my decorating is candlelight,” says author and architectural historian Michael Henry Adams of his Harlem apartment, dense with objects, layered with meaning and, since it’s at the back of the building, lacking in much natural light. And so he lights candles, even during the day.

He has been that lone figure shining a light, voicing his rage, at times getting arrested protesting the demolition of Harlem and New York City history, church by church, building by building. He’s been at it since 1985, when he arrived from his hometown of Akron, Ohio, with the intention of attending the historic-preservation program at Columbia University, “which I eventually did,” Adams says, after stints as a messenger on Wall Street and a bookseller at Scribner’s and working for designer Thomas Britt. Over the decades, he has been an advocate for the preservation of the Audubon Ballroom and the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom, among many significant markers of Harlem history.

Adams has been in his one-bedroom rental near St. Nicholas Park since 2007. It’s filled to the brim, as his other apartments have been, with family and neighborhood history. It’s decked out with sumptuous fabrics, a throwback to a genteel and slower-paced era more than a century ago, when tea was served in the afternoon — as he served me when I visited — and everyone’s phones were not constantly, urgently pinging. Adams’s instinctual feel for those previous times, and his encyclopedic knowledge of furniture styles and architectural eras, has led him to write two books: Harlem: Lost and Found (2002) and Style and Grace: African Americans at Home (2003).

Ask about anything in his apartment, and you will not only learn its detailed provenance. “The plum-colored valence is from the Park Avenue apartment of a friend’s mother,” Adams says. “My friend Mario Buatta was her decorator, and Mario gave me the cloth and fringe to redo them.” He describes himself as, among other things, “an inveterate collector of treasures found in the trash.” The mantel over his fake fireplace, he recalls, “was spied as I awaited the bus one night on Madison Avenue near the Carlyle Hotel.” Nearby, there’s a fragment of a silvered garland of fruit and flowers from the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated. And then there is a piece of “egg-and-dart molding from the Lafayette Theater, where Orson Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth opened in 1936.” There are also many family photographs, including a life-size one of his father when he was a college basketball star.

His rococo console (upon which he has placed an Empire Cupid clock) rests on “marvelous” washable woven plastic mats that he describes as “one of my happiest finds, sourced in shops on 116th Street, the main artery of Harlem’s Little West Africa.” Adams also points out a machinemade tapestry in one corner of the room “that once hung in the studio of twin photographers Morgan and Marvin Smith.” He continues: “They were next to the Apollo Theater. Billie Holiday, Harry Belafonte, and Lena Horne stood next to this.”

The mantel was found near the Carlyle Hotel. It’s flanked by century-old Directoire-style chairs made by Chamberlayne Co.“I scored them for $80 at a Harlem Salvation Army in 1986,” says Adams. The Pharaonic mask came with a Halloween costume from Woolworth’s. The conceptual portrait of Adams on the right is by Arnold Rice. Family photographs are framed on the left wall. Photo: Annie Schlechter

Framed on the door to his bedroom are two of Adams’s drawings and two 1920s photos by Cleveland’s Clifford Norton. The mother-of-pearl inlaid rosewood oval from an old Chinese tray hangs above the door. “The 1930s shell-backed chair by Fratelli Boffi was found in a Harlem junk shop,” Adams says. Photo: Annie Schlechter

The enterance hall is hung with framed insurance maps, over a century old, documents of Harlem as it was. His vintage photographs also include extant masterworks he fights to have protected as landmarks. He wears straw boaters in the summer and felt bowler hats in the winter. A fence from a destroyed Harlem tenement is used as his hat rack. Photo: Annie Schlechter

Adams’s console came from the Harlem townhouse of poet Melvin Dixon. It was originally grained and gilded, and he painted it, and the mended frame he found, white. “It’s the ideal setting for my Empire Cupid clock,” he says. Photo: Annie Schlechter

“The bathroom walls are the color of the sunrise,” Adams says. “The yellow-orange paint job was supposed to have two coats, but seeing this brighter tint, I thought, why bother?” A short length of iron fence adds interest to the tiled wainscoting. “The chandelier came courtesy of Akbar, who ran my favorite junk shop, a victim of gentrification.” Photo: Annie Schlechter

Michael Henry Adams. Photo: Annie Schlechter