Thanks to an idea from the start of the 17th century, Americans got the notion of apartment buildings from European palaces. Divided into different units, some housed multiple family members and even unrelated households. A similar concept of separate houses — two, three, four, five — designed to appear as one structure is also nothing new.
Inspired by Rome’s Palazzo della Cancelleria, the five houses behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral built by publisher and railroad magnate Henry Villard are a great example. In New York, houses of this kind were unusual.
In Harlem, there were perhaps seven examples of a pair or small group of houses designed to seem like one building. The best of the two that survive comprise numbers 14 and 16 Saint Nicholas Place.
Why would someone do this? Sometimes, as at the now-lost 22 and 24 Saint Nicholas Place, the idea made sense because a father and son decided to live side by side. Another rationale is to be able to exhibit as much grandeur as adjacent houses. Because Harlem’s most flamboyant house, built for circus impresario James Anthony Bailey, was built in close proximity to these double houses, it’s a good thing they gained extra mass and importance by being combined.
Around 1882, James Montieth engaged local architect William Grinnell to design connected houses fashioned to appear as one. Designed in the Queen Anne style, these were composed from contrasting materials — Manhattan mica-schist salvaged from excavating the cellars on the ground floor, with imbricated cedar shingles and half-timbered gables above. The asymmetrical result was picturesque enough to illustrate a story book.
From Oct. 9, 1971, issue of the AmNews 
Numbers 14 and 16 St. Nicholas Terrace, north and left of the stone mansion of circus showman James A. Bailey. (Public domain photo) 
Francis Redhead, Harlem native who owns and is constantly at work on Numbers 16 and 14 St. Nicholas Place. (Michael Henry Adams photos) 
Numbers 16 and 14 St. Nicholas Place, designed to look like one house.(Michael Henry Adams photos)
Completed in 1884, both houses were inhabited for the next 53 years by various socially prominent white families. By 1925, Saint Nicholas Avenue and Place were already metamorphosing from the lower reaches of “Washington Heights” (the name invented by well-to-do whites for their West Harlem enclave once called Harlem Heights, to distinguish themselves from working class people in “the Valley”) into “Sugar Hill,” where life was sweet. However, it was not until 1937 that number 16 Saint Nicholas Place was acquired by African Americans, with number 14 divided into apartments around then.
Born in Newport News, Virginia, Dr. Alma Mary Haskins was the only Black woman practicing podiatry in New York. Educated at New York University, she twice served as president of the New York County Society of Podiatrists. Taking the negative side of a 1932 Grace Congregational Church debate, contending that “Birth control would improve the economic and social status of the Negro,” she argued, “The Negro is a minority group and his numbers should be increased rather than decreased or held at the present figure; also that wealth control with a more equable distribution of it — and not birth control — is needed to improve the economic and social status of the Negro.”
Dr. James Egert Allen, born in 1896 in Greenwood, South Carolina, was her husband. The son of a Presbyterian minister, his first teaching job after getting out of Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith University), in Charlotte, North Carolina, was at a Presbyterian academy in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. He moved on to become principal of the Okolona Normal School (built on a Civil War battlefield), in Okolona, Mississippi. Allen followed these teaching stints with graduate work at Boston University and Columbia University Teachers College. Subsequently, he received a doctorate in education from NYU.
In 1922, in the midst of this preparation, it was the AmNews that indicated the way that things were destined to go: “Professor James Egert Allen … is in the city at summer school at Columbia University where he will receive his master’s degree … He is the guest of Dr. Mary Haskins, 2371 Seventh Ave.”
As early as 1921, Harlem’s schools were so overcrowded that they only offered double sessions. Students were forced to attend classes just part of the day (that year, there were 26 double sessions). With budget cuts during the Great Depression, challenging circumstances that Allen faced while teaching at PS 139, Harlem’s Boys Junior High School, only worsened. (Built in 1924 at 120 W. 140th St., it stood on the site of the early 19th-century Watt-Pinkney residence, which became Harlem’s first deluxe nightclub, the Lybia.)
Here, James Baldwin learned creative writing, French, and English from Countee Cullen (who surreptitiously steered him to Walt Whitman and Verlaine). Also clandestinely, Allen taught Black History to the one-day great writer and his three years younger schoolmate, prospective actor Brock Peters, as well. Unlandmarked, the school building is senior housing today.
Allen complained that after he moved to Harlem in the mid 1920s, “you couldn’t get any interest in Negro history … Black schoolteachers, for the most part, wanted nothing to do with Africa or the study of Africans … saying, ‘We’re just Americans, just United States citizens.’”
Acting strategically, Allen joined with two other Harlem teachers, Willis Higgins and Harcourt Tynes, to interest school administrators to make Black history a part of the regular curriculum.
School chiefs deemed Black history “unimportant,” but allowed Allen and Tynes to conduct seminars for teachers. Their crusading colleague Huggins, refusing defeat, began teaching about Black people in the YMCA of Harlem.
Adjunct to these efforts was Allen’s 50-year quest to do for New York public schools what Carter G. Woodson did nationally, but unofficially, back in 1926. Allen was tireless as an advocate for a New York-school-based Negro History Week.
To this end and others, Allen became the first president of the New York City chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For a couple of decades, it began to look as if he might be the only one. Allen helped establish chapters of the association throughout the state. Allen’s advocacy, such as his NAACP activities, was only enhanced by and overlapped his leadership role in the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.
By lobbying for all the good causes he endorsed, “Jimmy” and his wife loved to entertain at receptions, Italian suppers, garden parties, bridge club tournaments, and more. Their venerable house might not to have been up-to-date, but spacious and appearing twice as large as it was, it was an unusually gracious home for a Black family to own. When the Allens lived there, it was invariably described in the Black press as “palatial.” Rather unusually, they even named the house they came to love so: “Villa Jalma,” a “portmanteau” or creative combination of the Allen’s first names.
A reporter said of one fête, “The garden in the backyard was artistically decorated with electric lights. A swing, beach and straight chairs, and card tables were there for the convenience of guests, all of whom enjoyed service from a bar in the garden. The collation consisted of ice cream in fruit molds, cake, old-fashioned lemonade, and rounds of Tom Collins and highballs.”
Writing extensively about Black history in journals, Allen was active in the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. His books include “The Negro in New York,” and “Black History: Past and Present.”
Never rich, Allen said, “Countee Cullen Harold Jackman and I once founded a literary magazine called Fire, but we could publish only one or two editions, because we ran out of money.”
In retirement, Allen relaxed by traveling and writing a weekly column on history for the AmNews. After his first wife’s death in 1957, he wed Ethel Starke Dopass in 1961. Her husband died in 1980.
Mrs. Allen was a charming lady when I met her. She did not even despair in 1995 when her house caught fire. Offering it for sale, she knew that due to the fire’s damage, it was impossible to sell for market value. This meant that the hard-working young man who had bought and was carefully renovating number 14 could now afford to buy her house too. She was certain that Francis Redhead would restore her house to its original glory. And he has.