Rubble is about all that is left of St. Nick’s Jazz Pub, the venerable Harlem hangout whose blood-red facade once beckoned jazz greats like Lena Horne and Miles Davis during the Harlem Renaissance.

The basement pub had been closed for seven years before a fire on March 22 engulfed the landmark townhouse on St. Nicholas Avenue at West 149th Street, killing a firefighter. Afterward, contractors chiseled away what remained.

Fire marshals continue to search for the cause of the fire in what’s left of the building in Sugar Hill, a celebrated neighborhood where prominent African-Americans like W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar and activist, and George Schuyler, a journalist, once lived. Neighbors, musicians and historians have begun asking what will rise in its place.