A Colonial Oasis in Upper Manhattan

When Lucinda Martinez-Desir was a young girl growing up in Washington Heights, she’d often sit on the steps leading up to Sylvan Terrace and write poetry. Almost two decades later, she returned, moving into one of the cobblestone street’s famed Colonial row houses.A tucked-away, car-free block on 161st Street between St. Nicholas Avenue and Jumel Terrace, Sylvan Terrace is lined with street lamps and features a double row of three-story wooden houses. It is steps away from Manhattan’s oldest surviving house, the Georgian-style Morris-Jumel Mansion, the home of a former British officer named Roger Morris, where George Washington billeted his troops during the 1776 Battle of Harlem Heights.The block was once a carriage drive for the mansion, but in 1882, wooden row houses were built for working-class, primarily Dutch, residents.RELATED: Houses for Sale at Sylvan Terrace.Now it’s home mostly to families who relish the fact that their children can play on a street with no parking and very little traffic. “Every year we have a block party. This year we had ponies, ices, clowns, everything. It was a real carnival,” said Mrs. Martinez-Desir, 38, who lives with her husband, Fritz Desir, 37, a principal of a New York-based digital branding and promotions agency, fluency, and their 3-year-old son.“There used to be a lot of older people, but now a lot of families are moving in, and they’re from all over the world. We have a neighbor from Angola, and one from Argentina. There are so many different languages spoken here,” she said.Mrs. Martinez-Desir, a vice president of market development at HBO who describes herself as “having a gift for real estate” and “always seeing past the obvious,” said she knew the house was right for her as soon as she saw it. “I moved back to New York from Los Angeles in August 2001 and was looking to buy something,” she said. “I put an offer on it, but then it was right after September 11, and I had a hard time getting appraisers to even come in and look at it. It took seven months to close.”Today, houses on the block sell for between $1.1 million and $1.2 million; Mrs. Martinez-Desir bought hers for about a quarter of that price. She met her husband as the deal was closing.The low purchase price meant she didn’t have the stress of a large mortgage hanging over her head and that she had more money to put into renovations. While she says the house was in good shape structurally, cosmetic work had to be done on each of its three floors, in addition to new plumbing and electricity. Mrs. Martinez-Desir estimates that they put more than $150,000 into the home. “But I did it a little at a time,” she said.One of the most significant things the couple did was expand the living room and kitchen on the first floor, originally used as a basement, which was originally used as a basement. “We had to dig about 2 feet down to build the living room,” she said.Up a set of narrow wooden stairs is the “parlor floor,” which has its own separate — and more formal — entrance. The floor features an office and a family room. In keeping with the style of the home, Mrs. Martinez-Desir installed colorful Shaker-style stained glass, handmade by a Brooklyn artist, in the doors of the entranceway. She is aiming to put stained glass inside a skylight on the roof, too. “I’ll get to everything one day,” she said with a laugh. “My husband teases me that I’ll never be done working on this house. But that’s what makes it fun, isn’t it?”Mrs. Martinez-Desir proudly showed off some of her best finds: a pair of butler doors in the family room, which she found in a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant that was being gutted, and a set of sliding French doors she found at the same house. Above the windows are several antique-style cornices that she originally intended for above the house’s fireplaces. She found them in Vermont, brought them back to the city, and painted them. “You should have seen me driving home from Vermont with these huge things sticking out the window,” she said.“Some of these things cost more than new ones would, but I really wanted to keep that old look,” she said.She describes her taste as eclectic, and that’s apparent from the look of the parlor floor, with furniture and sculptures that came from all over the world. There’s a handcrafted chair from Haiti, where Mr. Desir’s father lives, and a rocking chair from the Dominican Republic, where Mrs. Martinez-Desir’s family is from, and where she spent summers as a child.“That’s the chair I used to rock my baby to sleep,” she said. The couple will be spending even more time in that chair in the coming months, as they’re expecting a baby girl any day.On the wall hangs an old map of Hispaniola, the island that is home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, representing a combination of the couple’s two cultures.Mrs. Martinez-Desir plans eventually to give her two children the second floor. But for now, the new baby will share a room with her brother on the third floor of the home, which also features the master bedroom.While each floor is only about 500 square feet, they feel wider than a brownstone. But unlike a brownstone, the house has no backyard, and the outdoor space is limited to a small deck off of the kitchen on the first floor. The house’s age is another challenge: Just a few weeks ago, a rainstorm did damage to some of the first floor’s ceilings.Because the homes on Sylvan Terrace are part of the Jumel Terrace Historic District and are landmarked, they can’t be touched on the outside. “We have to run around looking for the perfect shade of yellow for the shingles or brown for the steps. We all get excited when we’ve found the right paint colors,” Mrs. Martinez-Desir said with a laugh. “We’ll run around the block showing everyone.”Asked if she could imagine going back to traditional New York City apartment living, Mrs. Martinez-Desir said, “I don’t know how I could. Here it’s like a little oasis, you feel like you’re in a totally different world.”

A Colonial Oasis in Upper Manhattan

A Colonial Oasis in Upper Manhattan

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