As far as Upper Manhattan is concerned, 125th Street receives the lion’s share of attention: Harlem is the heart of the African-American experience and this thoroughfare is the heart of Harlem. But 116th Street has a far more ambiguous identity: because nearly half of the street, which extends from the East River to Morningside Park, passes through what is known as Spanish Harlem, its character is less clearly defined than that of 125th. Within a block of one another on 116th, you find both the Malcolm Shabazz Bazaar and the botanicas that cater to the acolytes of Santeria. Let it also be said that, in terms of cultural consequence, nothing here compares with such fabled theaters as the Apollo on 125th Street or cultural institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem. Now, however, big changes are coming to this street no less than its uptown neighbor, and mostly in the form of condominium developments.

The largest and most ambitious of these is surely the Kalahari, a sprawling 12-story palace that stretches in punctiliously bilateral symmetry along the middle of the block between Fifth and Lenox Avenues. It is the work of Frederic Schwartz Architects, known in these parts for the recently completed Staten Island Ferry Terminal in Lower Manhattan, and for the much-discussed plan — never to be realized, it would seem — to submerge West Street as it passes beside the World Trade Center site.

Neither the massing nor the form of the new building is in any way exceptional: it could have gone up in any year since 1950, and its plain brick exterior recalls nothing more distinguished than the mid-century monsters Manhattan House and Imperial House on the Upper East Side. More than anything else, the beige brick interior courtyard, as glimpsed from 115th Street, betrays this fact. The way the façade is qualified at the sides by two hesitant setbacks, receding from the street-line in three tiers, does little to qualify this impression.

No, this building’s one claim to fame is that it is probably the first structure in New York, and surely the first significant one, to attempt an African theme along its exterior. It does this through the use of jagged, two-tone brick patterns intended to recall the jazz and dazzle of the kente cloth of West Africa. These cover much of the façade in the form of light patterns on a dark ground in the center, and dark patterns on a light ground along the wings, with some lighter bays mingling amid the darker zones.

The effect is surely unusual in the context of New York architecture, but it fails to achieve that electric, kinetic spikiness that the architectural firm promised in its rendering. It is hard to pinpoint exactly why its fails to deliver in this respect, but the result is that the whole thing looks rather tamer than it did on the drawing board. It is some consolation, perhaps, that the architect did not attempt to invoke an African idiom structurally , as Robert A. M. Stern appears to be doing in his plans for the Museum for African Art, which will soon be built on Fifth Avenue at 110th Street.

Just one block west, a development called the Graceline Court is rising so close to the Malcolm Shabazz mosque that it actually overhangs that corner building in one of the boldest and oddest cantilevers ever seen in the city. Designed by the firm of Feder & Stia, this project is otherwise rather undistinguished, like most of the new construction in Harlem over the last five years. Several of these new structures, including the nearby Madison Plaza Houses and the Madison Park Houses, were designed by the same firm in a half hearted stab at the classical idiom. Their new project is in a somewhat more modern idiom, though it still bears traces of vernacular detailing in its gray, brown, and white stone facings, and in the treatment of the roof, thus recalling the firm’s earlier Harlem projects.

As for that cantilever, it is so audacious in its intent and so preposterous in its result as almost to justify its existence simply as a stunt. The mosque which it overhangs is the headquarters of the Nation of Islam and was designed in 1965 by the architect Sabbath Brown. It is not an especially good building, with its flimsy onion domes made of green metal and its garish yellow and brown cladding. But at the very least it stands out and succeeds in serving as a true landmark, in the sense that it marks the land and is instantly identifiable from some distance away. For that reason, if for no other, it is a shame that the building’s effect is now so drastically neutralized by its new neighbor. Robbed of its autonomy, it lingers in a state of uneasy subservience.

More than anything else, the construction of the Kalahari and Graceline Court reminds us that, despite the volume of architecture going up in Harlem, most of it is woefully undistinguished, particularly when compared to the area’s compelling older building stock.

jgardner@nysun.com