News

Barack H. Obama Lived Here
339 East 94th Street

Posted June 5, 2013

The six-story walk-up at 339 East 94th Street has seen much over the decades: generations of mostly white and Hispanic immigrants, nests of mice, drug deals, a police bust, at least one stabbing, a recent influx of young professionals, and a future presidential candidate: Barack Obama.

In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father” (Three Rivers Press, 1995), Mr. Obama described his Yorkville apartment, on East 94th Street between First and Second Avenues, as “part of the shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.” He described a scene that will sound familiar to undergraduates and others who scraped by in the seedy and dangerous New York of the 1980s:

It was an uninviting block, treeless and barren, lined with soot-colored walk-ups that cast heavy shadows for the rest of the day. The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

He said that he would chat with Puerto Rican neighbors and stop to talk to the boys on the stoop about the Knicks or the gunshots heard the night before. An old neighbor died on the third floor landing with $1,000 in small bills rolled up in his refrigerator. Mr. Obama was living in the building when he received a phone call about his father’s death from a car accident in 1982.

While no residents, current or past, who were contacted by The Times remembered Mr. Obama, they shared tales of a building with low rents and dicey circumstances during the early 1980s, when Mr. Obama apparently lived there, before and after he graduated from Columbia University in 1983. (“B. Obama” was listed in telephone directories at 339 East 94th Street in the early 1980s. Mr. Obama did not specify the building number in his memoir, and his campaign has said that he has forgotten specifics of his youth.)

Frank Neubauer, 73, who has lived all his life in the building except for two years in Brooklyn, confirmed Mr. Obama’s account that it was a rough place back then. “They had a lot of drug users in the building, everybody knew it,” he said. (Three generations of his family have lived in the building, including his son, who now lives on the same floor.) “Nobody paid any attention. People knew it was going on and that was it, and eventually the cops came and cleaned up the building.”

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