The Gothic Revival rowhouse at 151 Avenue B is where Charlie Parker lived at the height of his fame.
Photo: Stile Real Estate
For most of the 15 or so years that jazz legend Charlie “Bird” Parker lived in New York, he didn’t live anywhere for more than a few months at a time, bouncing between residential hotels in Harlem and Midtown East — temporary lodgings close to the clubs where he played alto saxophone and pioneered bebop. But for the last four years of his life, Parker stayed in one place — the garden apartment of 151 Avenue B, on Tompkins Square Park, where he lived with his partner, Chan Richardson, and their children. The apartment was, by all accounts, a rare domestic refuge in the musician’s hard-living existence.
The five-unit Gothic Revival rowhouse, which was landmarked by the city in 1999 and is known as the Charlie Parker residence, has been owned by jazz producer Judith Rhodes since 1979. She had been living on East 11th Street for a little over a decade by that time and was moved to buy the house after she learned of the building’s history. The real-estate agent who toured her through the space showed her the closet where Parker had practiced and, as she told the New York Times in 2010, “I went into the closet and closed the door and I said to myself, ‘I have to have this house.’” She paid $90,000 for it, according to a 2016 interview with the National Historic Trust about the property. Rhodes raised her four children in a duplex on the garden and parlor floors and rented out the three upper floors; after her children moved out, she rented the parlor floor as well. She died in February and her children have decided to put the house on the market, asking $7.2 million.
The home’s parlor floor. The space has been renovated over the years but still retains original details.
Photo: Stile Real Estate, LLC.
The rowhouse had only recently been converted to apartments when Parker and Richardson moved into the garden unit in 1950. As Richardson, a dancer, wrote in her biography, My Life in E-Flat, that area of the Lower East Side was Ukrainian and impoverished at the time, and the house had five families living in it, one per floor. The couple moved into the garden level with Richardson’s daughter Kim, which “opened onto a large courtyard in back for all the children and animals we would eventually accumulate” — they had a daughter, Pree, and a son, Baird, while living there. And they made it a comfortable home: “We bought blonde wood furniture, put up Steinberg birdcage wallpaper from Sloans and painted the living room charcoal grey.” She described the family’s existence there as very middle class with big Sunday dinners, which they’d eat at a table they had made in the shape of a treble clef. Parker told his friend drummer Ed Shaughnessy that he enjoyed the neighborhood and its restaurants, bars, and clubs where the Romanian folk musicians “swing more than we do!”
Parker lived in the garden unit, shown here, with Chan Richardson and their children.
Photo: Stile Real Estate, LLC.
Parker lived in the apartment during the height of his fame, though he spent a lot of time on the road drinking heavily after losing his cabaret card in 1951, which meant he could no longer play in New York City clubs. (He was never arrested for drug possession, but that’s thought to be the reason.) He was on the road when his toddler daughter, Pree, died of congestive heart failure in 1954, and he attempted suicide twice afterward. In October of that year, Parker and his family moved to Pennsylvania, but he separated from Richardson in December, and in March of the following year died in a fan’s hotel room.
The couple painted the living room charcoal gray, put up bird wallpaper, and brought in a dining table in the shape of a treble clef.
Photo: Stile Real Estate, LLC.
Elizabeth Stile, of Stile Real Estate, who has the listing, says that over the decades, Rhodes renovated the apartments, preserving original details while updating kitchens and baths and adding washers and dryers. The garden unit still has the cast-iron bathtub dating back to Parker’s era. (StreetEasy shows that units in the building rented for $4,500 to $6,500 over the past few years. About ten years ago Rhodes also tried listing the house, but it didn’t find a buyer; the asking price was significantly more.) The house, built around 1849, is 23 feet wide and about 5,600 square feet with original details like pocket doors, crown moldings, fireplace mantles, and hardwood floors. There’s a large backyard, a roof deck, and views of Tompkins Square Park, which hosts jazz performances every August in Parker’s honor. Stile says there are still traces of Parker in the house, including a remnant of the bird wallpaper he and Richardson put up with an outline of a birdcage — a witty nod to his nickname.
The rowhouse was landmarked in 1999.
Photo: Stile Real Estate, LLC.