At a glance, the west side of Fifth Avenue between 125th and 126th streets teems with information about what Harlem is, what it was, and what it’s still becoming. There are the area’s mainstays—an African hair-braiding place, an all-important corner store—with a big Baptist church just north, between 126th and 127th. There’s a sense of history by proximity—the Apollo Theater is a few blocks west, Maya Angelou’s old town house sits a few blocks south—but the markers of “modern” Harlem are apparent too. On 125th and Fifth, what was once a large, rather dark Applebee’s is now a slightly hipper Shake Shack, and for years Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka lived with their twins in the late-19th-century brownstone three doors up.
Towering over all of this to the east—and, in a way, helping to tie it all together—is Ray Harlem, opening this December. The 21-story pink-brick building, designed by Frida Escobedo in partnership with Handel Architects, houses more than 200 apartments (ranging from studios to two-bedrooms), with all the modern amenities and conveniences you’d expect. It is also home to something quite singular: the National Black Theatre (NBT), an institution first established in Harlem in 1968. Due to stage its first performances in late 2027, the theater, designed by Marvel Architects, will command some 27,000 square feet of the complex and feature both a 250-seat flexible space—imagine the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall in miniature—and a 99-seat studio theater. Studio & Projects, a firm run by Brooklyn-based designer Little Wing Lee, is overseeing the interiors throughout with Escobedo’s studio and Ray’s in-house team. The vision, Lee says, is “a lot of texture” and “a lot of really beautiful colors and materials,” including custom stained glass for the residents entrance.
The story of how this densely layered, hugely ambitious project came to be is the story of a sprawling conversation about space, art, and community between Escobedo; art collector, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Dasha Zhukova; and Sade Lythcott, chief executive officer of NBT. For Escobedo, the architect behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new modern and contemporary wing, expected to open in 2029, Ray Harlem represented her biggest residential commission in the United States to date; for Zhukova, it realized a philosophy for living that had formed alongside her arts patronage; and for Lythcott, the daughter of NBT’s founder, Barbara Ann Teer, it was, well, everything—both continuing one essential legacy and helping to forge a new one.
In 1968, Teer, a dancer, actor, and director, started the National Black Theatre in a former jewelry factory at 2033 Fifth Avenue, just above 125th Street. “We were on the third floor, the Studio Museum of Harlem was on the second floor, founded the same year—almost the same month,” Lythcott says of NBT’s earliest days. We’re having a late-afternoon snack at Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster, a block away from NBT and roughly a mile from Lythcott’s home—the same town house she was raised in. She is bright-eyed and disarmingly warm, her hair in long, honey-colored locs. Lythcott’s mother dreamed of a theatrical tradition in which Black people authored and performed their own stories, ultimately hosting artists such as Angelou, Nina Simone, and Nikki Giovanni. (With the likes of Zoë Kravitz, Leslie Odom Jr., and Cleo Wade now sitting on its board, in more recent years NBT has coproduced buzzy Broadway shows like James Ijames’s Fat Ham and last year’s Tony-winning revival of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious.) “Up to now, the Negro artist has been totally concerned with integration, with finding a place for his creative talents in the existing theatre,” Teer wrote in an op-ed published by The New York Times the year NBT opened. “We must begin building cultural centers where we can enjoy being free, open and black, where we can find out how talented we really are, where we can be what we were born to be, and not what we were brainwashed to be.”
The theater, which later came to occupy its own building on 125th and Fifth, was also where Lythcott and her older brother, Michael, received their early education. “When my mother and the actors in her company started having kids, it was all around the same time in the ’70s, and she founded a school,” Lythcott says. As children, she and her classmates at the theater wrote and mounted their own plays, both at NBT and at churches, schools, and community theaters across the country. Traveling by bus, their little troupe “would go from New York to Seattle and perform along the way.”
The National Black Theatre embarked on its first capital project after part of it burned down in 1986, effectively ending the school. But even then, the building’s age circumscribed what NBT could do with it—and, by extension, its possibilities as a company. “The old building had stories in its walls. You could feel it when you walked in,” Lythcott says. “But we had been limiting our artistic ambition based on this space our whole tenure.” Its problems were as basic and unignorable as the beautiful, old wood floors being way too squeaky for a professional performance venue.
When Teer died suddenly in 2008, at 71, Lythcott—who had, by then, worked both as a producer for MTV and in fashion, styling Lenny Kravitz on his Baptism tour and starting a swimwear line—was asked to join NBT’s board for six months as the theater determined its next steps. She had never dreamed of taking the institution over; her mother had made it all seem much too hard, especially after the fire. “She was very honest about how stressful the work was,” Lythcott says. “And so it would be nothing I would ever choose.” All the same, it also felt important to stay close. After Lythcott stopped attending school at the theater, she explains, “I only went to private schools, and the private schools were majority white. So there was this need for the theater to stay in my life, to keep the connectivity to my own community.” As a teenager, that mainly meant hanging around for opening night parties, but in adulthood, she came back to design costumes, or, at her mother’s urging, occasionally appear in a show.
