An Architect In Harlem

When Percy Charles Griffin was growing up in Mississippi, he was always painting pictures. So much so that his mother told him he was a born architect. She knew, says Griffin, 39, that "I couldn't make any money at painting , so the next thing to that was be an architect." Although at the time Griffin "didn't know what the word 'architecture' meant. When I came up here [New York], I wanted to be an engineer." But math--a subject he was good in during his high school days--became a stumbling block when he got to City College because he had lost interest. He told one of his professors this and he was told to switch his major from engineering to architecture. "There too," recalls Griffin, "I was pathetic."

During his second year at  the college he began to perk up and the attitude of those professors who thought he was wasting his time went from "sympathy to admiration." His scholastic improvement took him to the top of his class.

Griffin, the first in his family to go to college, eventually won an architectural award at City College for his thesis design--a cardboard model of a four-story, block-long , multi-service cultural center that included a 300-seat theatre, art gallery, and restaurant.

Griffin's decision to attend college came after landing a job in the office of the famed architect Philip Johnson, who is responsible for the AT&T Building in Midtown Manhattan. "I went to school because everyone [in Johnson's office] was a college graduate. Princeton, Harvard, all over. I really wanted to complete my education." Johnson, knowing this, made it possible for Griffin to attend school by allowing him to have a flexible work schedule where he could take off "one, three days every week" without deducting "any money from my salary. I was doing regular architectural development, drafting, design development. Same as anyone else. Griffin gives Johnson credit for evaluating his school projects. After graduation in 1972, Griffin took the architecture licensing exam which he passed.

To Percy Griffin, who teaches at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), architecture is the best of two worlds: aesthetics (how a building will look) and technology (how the building will be built and how well it can stand up to stress from weather, aging, weight, etc.) "It's very artistic. You have to have imagination and then you turn right around with this imagination, understanding the technical part of [architecture], which is the engineering, the structure, the mechanical, the electrical, and energy conservation. It's a mixture of many different fields. Not only the design or the technical but sociology, philosophy, history. I feel that history is a major part of understanding architecture. Where it came from, the different periods it went through. Without the history, you would not have very much depth as an architect."

A majority of Griffin's clients--75 percent to be exact--are black. Most of his projects involve home renovation. He also does design work for churches (such as the cultural and community center at the Thessalonia Baptist Church in the Bronx). Some of his clients include Sylvia's Restaurant on Lenox Avenue and actor Irving Lee of the daytime soap opera The Edge of Night.

Griffin feels, however, that the black community--particularly its leaders--do not make adequate use of "the professionals that are available to them. How many projects that I see going up in Harlem, the Bronx, Chicago, all over and no black architect  [is involved]. [Black architects] could survive pretty well if we could get our ten percent or fifteen percent of the money for construction." He wonders how a black community leader can be a leader without knowing that "it's a hard struggle for black architects."

This excerpt is from an article that was originally published in the Harlem Weekly in 1984. A longer version of this article was posted on November 1, 2012.