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 and developed by Ray and LMXD, 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.
With Teer’s death, however, Lythcott slowly understood what she had the unique potential—or duty—to do. “I get the deep, incredible privilege of being able to do two things at once, which is to honor my mother and her wishes and also restructure the organization in a way where it could have permanence,” she says. “At the end of the day, I was standing at the crossroads of an organization that was almost half a century old but never got its shot.”
So she stayed on—and turned her attention almost immediately to redeveloping. “The property was underwater,” Lythcott says, matter-of-factly, “so a part of this second capital project wasn’t just vision-based, but also a necessity in order to hold on to the property and also to stabilize the organization.”
After a lengthy rezoning process that ultimately allowed the building to include retail space and mixed-income housing (25 percent of the units in Ray Harlem are below market rate) in addition to new performance spaces for the theater, Lythcott struggled to connect with developers until her brother, the chair of NBT’s board, suggested she meet with Dasha Zhukova. He was aware of Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, which Zhukova cofounded in 2008, and of her involvement with various cultural boards around New York City.
So in early 2019, Lythcott and Zhukova went out to dinner. “We go into this conversation about our mothers, and her mother’s journey to this country. Both of our mothers started out as biologists,” Lythcott says. “From that conversation I understood and appreciated the incredible legacy that Sade is carrying on,” adds Zhukova. “All she was looking for was a partner.”
At the time, Zhukova was just launching Ray, a real-estate venture with a pitch toward making art more present and accessible in people’s everyday lives. She’d noticed that at the Garage, housed in a slick, airy building designed by Rem Koolhaas, “even if people had seen all the shows we had on, they’d kind of linger.” We’re seated in her palatial, sunlit aerie above the East River, itself full of paintings and objets, where she’s dressed in a soft gray sweater and slacks, dark hair tucked discreetly behind her ears. It struck Zhukova that people just liked to be around art, and that they shouldn’t have to travel to a gallery or a museum for the privilege. Now, Ray’s stable of properties includes Ray Philly—which has six dedicated artist studios and site-specific installations by Rashid Johnson and Michelle Lopez—Ray Phoenix, coming in 2026, and Ray Nashville, slated for 2027.
With Zhukova onboard, the next big step for NBT’s new building was finding the right architect. Of Escobedo, a little-known name in New York at the time—it was only after she began working on Ray Harlem that The Met came calling—Zhukova says: “She really had the best ideas. I found her very thoughtful about community and about people. I think, especially nowadays, we see these grand gestures in architecture and the human experience is an afterthought. But I thought she really prioritized it.”
For Escobedo, whose practice has found a following for its emphasis on materiality and natural light, the feeling of Harlem’s stoops and storefronts sparked something. “I think you can see it throughout the neighborhood, particularly in the summer, this idea that the street is an extension of the collective space,” she tells me on a video call from her office in Manhattan. (Escobedo divides her time between New York and Mexico City.) “How can we extend that kind of energy upwards?”
It was an exciting moment, committing to each other as creative partners—but a risky proposition too. “Frida had never built anything in New York yet. Dasha had never built anything in New York yet. I had never built anything in New York yet,” Lythcott says. She had the funny impression that “people were waiting for us to fail.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic blew in and NBT’s old place came down—construction began on the new building in the summer of 2022—Lythcott, Zhukova, and Escobedo spoke animatedly and at length over Zoom, constantly sharing ideas and reference points. “We always had each other’s back,” Lythcott says. “When we didn’t know something, we always just raised our hand and asked the question.”
One point that came up early was the precise shade of pink Lythcott wanted for the building’s exterior: Teer had nurtured a deep connection to certain spiritual and cultural practices endemic to West Africa—the old NBT was home to several significant examples of New Sacred Art by Osogbo artists in southwestern Nigeria—and Lythcott wanted the new building to match the color of the clay that comes from the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, where some of Teer’s ashes were spread. Escobedo, who delights in working with clay and brick, was all too happy to oblige. (That said, in all fairness, from the street, the new National Black Theatre looks fairly similar in hue to some of the pinker brownstones scattered throughout central Harlem—but this, too, is a hallmark of Escobedo’s. As Zhukova puts it, “The building feels contextual to the neighboring buildings. It does not feel like a stark change or break.”)
Mexican muralism of the 1920s—which introduced art “as something that was incorporated into the space,” Escobedo explains, “not just applied”—was another inspiration; Los Angeles–born, New York City–based artist Sanford Biggers is creating work for NBT’s façade. So, too, were various examples of modernist architecture found throughout Latin America: “The idea of how housing can be multilayered, this is something that is very common in Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico,” Escobedo says. The thought to carve out coworking spaces within the building, meanwhile, emerged directly from dreaming up the project during lockdown.
For the moment, Lythcott and Zhukova are still ironing out how renters and theatergoers will interact. Will NBT’s community have access to Ray’s communal rooftop kitchen? What will a production’s opening night look like for residents? “The thing that we are very clear about is that we want to be in collaboration,” Lythcott says. Case in point: The ground floor of Ray Harlem will include a space called the Living Room—decorated with charming vintage furniture sourced in shops from Los Angeles to Germantown, New York—envisioned as a sort of hangout for tenants, patrons of the theater, and the general public alike.
NBT has been incredibly productive since vacating its old building, largely working out of Lythcott’s basement. A few years before the demolition, as the theater celebrated its 50th anniversary, it piloted NBT Beyond Walls, a program of partnerships with outside institutions such as Carnegie Hall, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Black Theatre of Sweden. “It really allowed us to dream differently and ask different questions,” Lythcott says. “It’s kind of like you miss the forest so often for the trees, and having your own facility is constantly being in the trees.” (That work is still ongoing—NBT’s 2024-2025 season, overseen by executive artistic director Jonathan McCrory, includes new productions at the Apollo, the Vineyard Theatre, and The Flea—as are the theater’s fund-raising efforts. “To ensure the success of our project and the future sustainability of the theater, NBT has a capital fund-raising goal of $80 million. The campaign includes construction, operating and capital reserves,” Lythcott says. They’re at $50 million so far.)
The chance to coproduce Fat Ham came along after director Saheem Ali was named associate artistic director of The Public Theater in 2020. Three years earlier, NBT had mounted James Ijames’s play Kill Move Paradise, also directed by Ali, and Ali wanted to bring the same team together for a new show. Moving the action of Hamlet to a cookout, Fat Ham was ultimately extended several times at The Public before transferring to Broadway last year—and its success, in time, led NBT to Purlie Victorious, a play that also had personal resonance for Lythcott: Playwright Ossie Davis and his wife, Ruby Dee, had been dear friends of her mother’s. (NBT’s 2027–2028 season will include new work from Ijames, as well as a musical from Tony-nominated director Whitney White.)
To be clear, producing Broadway hits was never in Teer’s blueprint for NBT—“My mother ran from Broadway so fast,” Lythcott says. “My mom would always say it triggers PTSD in all Black artists, which is ‘post-traumatic slave syndrome’; that the Western canon of theater performance is like the auction block”—but it has given NBT greater cultural cachet than it has possibly ever had before. “There’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle,” Lythcott says. Even after the new theater is finished, “I think we want to continue to do a lot more than what our space will allow us to do.”
To her mind, the greater purpose of NBT’s new building—official address: 2031 National Black Theatre Way—is to serve as both a home for and a kind of monument to Teer’s, and her own, sweeping vision for the organization. “If we can’t see it, we can’t be it,” Lythcott says. “I love my people and my community in New York City so fucking much that I want to leave something behind that creates platforms of possibilities, of imagination, of innovation—and a vehicle for our storytelling in a way that might heal seven generations back and seven forward.
“To be able,” she continues, “as my own legacy, to say, I did that—I left my community a little bit better off than before I was here—I think I’m really driven by that.”
In this story: makeup, Jaleesa Jaikaran at Forward Artists (for Lythcott) and Ernest Robinson (for Escobedo); produced by AL Studio.