A Story of Love and Obsession

At home with James Fenton, the English poet, journalist and critic, and Darryl Pinckney, the African American novelist and playwright, in their obsessively, deliriously embellished house in Harlem.

The Harlem house had been empty for eight years when in 2010 James Fenton, the British poet, and Darryl Pinckney, the African American cultural critic and author, decided to rescue it. They had seen the place mainly by flashlight, because the windows (there are more than 50) were covered in plywood and sheets of plastic. Inside, there were 17 closet toilets and an indeterminate number of one-room apartments. There were dead pigeons and crack vials. The basement was under water. Someone had been systematically breaking in to steal the lead pipes and had opened the water main.

It was, as Mr. Fenton said, totally disgusting and horrible.

But it was also beautiful, at least on the outside. Built in 1890 as a family home for John Dwight, a founder of Arm & Hammer, the house was a fanciful shape, with a stack of four oval rooms, one on each of four floors, that ballooned out onto 123rd Street, and an imposing Neo-Renaissance style entry, with an arch and pillars. More recently, it had been a single-room occupancy building and a place of worship for a religious organization (which had sliced off half an interior oval wall and boarded up the stairs). It had also served as a medical facility and, for one year, in 1937, the home of the Harlem Community Art Center, a Works Progress Administration effort headed by Augusta Savage, the African American sculptor.