The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street is set in a historic neighborhood in Harlem inside a brownstone, an iconic New York architectural feature that has become a symbol of the city’s history and character, as the chronicle of brownstone structures reveals the changing landscape of New York throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Author Karina Yan Glaser fell in love with the charm of New York early in life, and after attending college in the city, decided to stay and make it her home. She currently resides in a Harlem brownstone with her family and pets and chose this historic piece of New York architecture as the setting of her first novel. Incorporating her sketches of the rowhouses into the text, Glaser adds a visual element to the story giving her reader a mental picture of the iconic buildings. Using her thriving community as her muse, Glaser creates a warm story of family and community where most of the action takes place in a creaky, leaky brownstone that lives and breathes just like the characters. Glaser’s novel is a love letter to these historic buildings and the generations of New Yorkers they have housed.

The term brownstone comes from the buildings’ material components, a type of sandstone known as brownstone, which first gained popularity as a building material in New York during the 1830s when the stone was quarried from the sandstone deposits in the Connecticut River.