The Block: South Cove between First and Third Places (South Cove Park)

A port of call that’s off the grid.Our Town downtown

Our Town downtown
August 28, 2006

A man suns himself on the dock in South Cove Park. Behind him is the winding observation deck that dominates this corner of the Battery Park City esplanade. Its design, the design of the footbridge that leads to the dock, and the placement of the wooden moorings in the water suggest a Calatrava or Gehry influence to the novice observer.

The apartment buildings in this unusual spot hide behind a shaded path, where bike riders and children are a common sight.

Past the cobalt-colored lamps mounted at the edge of the water, and across the mild waves, which are interrupted periodically by boats, New Jersey is visible. A broad-faced Colgate clock stares out from a stretch of several large buildings. And from time to time, helicopters and planes coast by.

If you walk just south, towards the Museum of Jewish Heritage, or up to the opposite corner, in front of The Regatta building, you can look across the water at the Statue of Liberty.

The idea of using dirt from excavated sites like the World Trade Center to build Battery Park City – an idea that meant adding 92 acres to the island of Manhattan – gathered steam under Governor Rockefeller.

In 1979, Cooper, Eckstut Associates changed the discussion. Rather than drawing up “futuristic” space, separate from the rest of the grid, they envisioned Battery Park City as an extension of Lower Manhattan, according to the “AIA Guide to New York City.” They proposed specific guidelines for land use and the look that each part would have. The 1.2 mile, waterfront esplanade runs from Stuyvesant High School all the way down to Historic Battery Park, and the housing in this southern part were designed to resemble neighborhoods that predate the area – Tudor City, Gramercy Park, Riverside Drive.

Sculptor Mary Miss collaborated with Susan Child, a landscape architect, and others to create South Cove Park, beginning in the mid 80s. The team’s goal was to cut through the landfill and bring the water running underneath it to the surface.

Renting

South Cove Plaza and River Watch are rental buildings. According to Margaret Liu, principal broker at Battery Park Realty, rents at South Cove Plaza are in the low $2,000 to $3,000 range for one-bedrooms, and in the low $3,000 to $5,000 range for two bedrooms. Prices are slightly higher at River Watch.

Buying

The Regatta is a waterfront, condo building with units that sell for $800 to $1,100 per square foot. At Cove Club, sales range from $700 to $1,000 per square foot.

Availability

Liu says that “Renting in this area is always strong,” but at the moment both rentals and sales are “very tight.”

What Happened Here

Roughly ten years ago, the Dalai Lama appeared at the World Trade Center and created a mandala, the type of sand painting that Buddhists create to illustrate guiding principles to meditators, and then destroyed to demonstrate impermanence. After the painting was finished, he brought it to South Cove and dropped it in the water, Brian Kraph, a spokesperson for the Battery Park City Authority says.

And in May, as part of promotion for “Mission Impossible III,” in which fans were invited to follow Tom Cruise to premieres at theaters all over Manhattan, the actor boarded a small speedboat in South Cove, rode it out into the Hudson and boarded a larger vessel.

Amenities

Beauty

Cove Nails

Community

Battery Park City Conservancy
Museum of Jewish Heritage
Women’s Museum (planned)

Dance

New American Youth Ballet

Cleaners
Four Seasons Dry Cleaners
South Cove Cleaners

Food and Drink
The Cove restaurant
Wave Japanese Restaurant
Yangtze on Hudson Chinese Restaurant

Grocery

Gristede’s

Health

Battery Park Vision Associates
Steven D. Cohen, Chiropractor

Real Estate

Battery Park Realty
DJK Residential

Transportation

Rector Street Station – 1, R, W lines

Video Rental

Video Room

(Sources: “AIA Guide To New York City”; batteryparkcity.org; bbc.co.uk; calatrava.com; eekarchitects.com; marymiss.com; mta.nyc.ny.us; The New York Post.)

Q & A: Chris Sheehan, Head Brewer, Chelsea Brewing Company

Our Town downtown
August 28, 2006

Chelsea Brewing Company is New York City’s only brewpub and Manhattan’s only brewery. Brewer-in-Chief Chris Sheehan has been there for nine of its ten years.

Why aren’t there more breweries and micropubs in New York City?

It’s a difficult question in general, but there have been occasions where there [has] been as many as seven or eight different brewpubs in Manhattan alone. They all have gone belly up for various reasons, which can include exorbitant real estate tax back [then] … you know, that’s told a thousand times in Manhattan of course. But then there are problems. In some cases it’s quality control. In other cases it could just be maybe a poor location, insufficient clientele.

What are the costs associated with brewing beer?

All your overhead is for raw materials – the barley malt, the hops. Yeast is a negligible expense, but at the same time of course you have labor and utilities … And we do brew our beer by what they call the “Reinheitsgebot,” the German beer purity law, which dictates that you make beer using barley malt, yeast and water and nothing else. We don’t use any kind of additives or clarifying agents or anything like that.

What are the criteria for good beer?

Ideally what you’re looking for are complimentary flavors [as opposed to off flavors], like malt flavors and hop characteristics, as well as maybe some fruitiness that would be naturally-created by the yeast and … It is very subjective … Belgian brewers for example, they use special strains of yeast as well as cultures of bacteria that are designed these flavors, and they work well within the beer. But we don’t do that. We’re just much more, straight up at keeping it as pure and clean as possible.

How did you become a brewer?

I used to work at the 20 Tank Brewery in San Francisco. That’s really where I established my career. And that background is reflected in the beers that we brew here. We do have a little bit more of a West Coast approach to brewing beer here, as opposed to many of the other breweries in the region, which are much more East Coast. And by “East Coast,” I mean generally lots of East Coast brewers tend to brew beers that are more closely associated with the styles of Europe. Whereas in California, it’s much more focused on American styles of ales, in which case brewers in California have taken common European styles and just kind of put in American twists. I actually … started off with you know, being home brewing, reading a lot of books. But most of my experience comes from hands on, working in the trade.

Is there an apprenticeship system, or is it more informal?

Yeah, it’s very informal. Different breweries will allow people to come in. I do it here. I invite home brewers to come and spend some time in the brewery with us. Mark [Szmaida, who also works here] and I got into the career through different ways. Mark … went to school at the … [World Brewing Academy, at the Siebel Institute of Technology] in Chicago, and he completed a more comprehensive program there. I … just started off with you know, being home, brewing, reading a lot of books. But most of my experience comes from hands on, working in the trade. I did a one-week intensive course in sanitation and microbiology at University of California at Davis.

Is beer our national drink? Why is it so popular?

I guess you could say it is the blue collar drink. I mean … more white collar people tend to be drinking wines and … maybe fancy liquors and stuff, but I think … the factory worker, when he gets out of work, he’s drinking a beer in most cases …Maybe I’m painting with a very broad brush by saying that. But, beer is much more ingrained in the culture of Germany … or Czech Republic or Belgium for example … It is essentially the same here in the US, but it’s not as ingrained culturally and not to mention the fact that … the huge bulk of the beer consumed in the US is produced by the Big Three breweries, Anheiser Busch, Miller and Coors … they account for like 95 percent of the beer consumed in the United States. And these aren’t beers that are known for having character and flavor … in Germany they drink beer for breakfast and … nobody blinks an eye … whereas if you’re seen drinking beer for breakfast here, people give you a funny look. So it’s kind of a different mentality.

What are some under-recognized beers?

Anybody who hasn’t had Sierra Nevada Pale Ale should try it … The beer drinking public needs to be educated more about what good beer is. And a lot of people are ignorant to that and it’s not their fault. It’s just that the populace has been force-fed all this misinformation in Anheiser Busch ads and stuff … A lot of people think a beer gets skunky because it gets warm, but that’s not true. A beer gets skunky because of light exposure and that’s why Heineken always is skunky – because it comes in a green bottle.
Do you ever drink the cheap stuff on say… a hot day?

Yeah, once in awhile … After mowing the grass or something, I’ll drink a Yuengling … or any kind of light American lager that has a little more character than a Bud, Miller, Coors. I never drink anything from those big guys, but I’ll drink a Yuengling from time to time, or even a Pabst Blue Ribbon once in awhile … And there have been instances where I’ve gone to like a football game at Giants Stadium and I had no choice. If I wanted a beer probably the best choice I had was Miller Genuine Draft. So there I am drinking my MGD, and you know, I’m not happy about it, but I didn’t really have much of a choice to begin with, you know.

What’s next for Chelsea Brewing Company?

Well, in the immediate future we’re going to be heading back to the Great American Beer Festival next month, and that is what I consider our proving ground, you know as long as we come out of there with an award that justifies our existence.

Where do they hold that?

It’s in Denver every year. It’s a nationwide beer competition. It is the nation’s biggest beer festival, and it is the most high profile beer competition in the nation as well. That’s the immediate future. In the long term future, we’re looking at expanding our draft sales. In fact, we have [an] old bottling wine here … and at this point, we’re looking to sell it, get it out of here and install some more … beer tanks to enable us to produce more beer for off-premise sale. We do have plans to try to step it up, step up production and make ourselves more profitable and more productive.
Does the staff have an in-house favorite?

Yeah … I think as a general rule our Standard Ale tends to be the most popular beer among the staff. I mean I get, I know whenever I bring it out in the spring every year (we don’t serve it through the winter), but when we bring it out in the spring, I know I get a lot of comments back from the staff saying ‘oh I’m so glad it’s back on tap’ … I do see them drink all the other beers as well, but that seems to be the one that gets the most feedback.

How is it made? What does it taste like?

We brew it in the style of an English pale ale. And so we use English-imported malts in it and actually there’s some Belgian malts in there as well. But the main character that makes it an English style pale ale is the English hops that we use in there. And the English hops, in this case East Kent Goldings, impart a bit of that character … which is rather cheesy and a rather kind of floral characteristic

(Mark Szmaida: You can’t leave until you’ve had seven beers.)

-- Matt Elzweig

The Plot Thickens: The Moth and its offspring have stories to tell.

Our Town downtown
August 21, 2006

Unlike the others, the man in the cowboy hat pulls the microphone from the stand so he can roam the stage instead of allowing it to restrain his passion. Once again, he has had to change his position so he can be true to himself, so he can be free. As the audience at this Moth StorySLAM will soon learn, David was raised a fundamentalist Christian, and had still not consummated his relationship with his fiancé, years after they started dating. By the time David finishes telling his story, the audience learns that he is no longer with his fiancé, and he is no longer a fundamentalist Christian – and it’s obvious he’s done what everyone in the downtown storytelling scene wants to do: he has connected with the listeners packed tightly into the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the East Village. If he’s really done it right, the listeners have not only taken an interest in his tale of lost love and new beginnings, they have seen events from their own lives, and recognized emotions they too have experienced, reflected in it. They sound their approval in a loud wave of cheers and clapping.

David Dickerson’s story is one of the many weighty and deeply personal stories told on downtown stages, but storyteller and monologuist James Braly says there is “almost always some element of humor,” in the stories told at these events.
When The Moth opened its doors almost ten years ago, the New York storytelling community was born. Today the community is thriving and several other, independent groups, inspired by The Moth have formed.

Novelist and poet George Dawes Green created The Moth in 1997, holding the first meeting his living room, then expanding it to downtown venues as it grew in popularity. Green wanted to bring the spirit of backyard storytelling common in his native Georgia to New York. Today it is an institution with a full-time staff, and a board. It holds main stage events that feature well-known writers and other celebrities, the slams, and an outreach program that finds storytellers in homeless shelters, youth and rehabilitation centers. It is expanding the youth program, and kicking will be kicking off its first national tour in October. Special guests and main stage regulars will be featured, but so will a former pickpocket, Sherman “O.T.” Powell, who was found in the outreach program. One of his stories, about attending a pickpocket school, complete with bell-adorned mannequins, when he arrived in New York, appears on an Audience Favorites CD.

Participation in Moth events and in events hosted by groups like Hearsay, Speakeasy, Talking Stick and Mouthpiece are not mutually exclusive.

The image of a storyteller standing in street clothes, on a bare stage with a microphone, is easy to confuse with standup comedy, but the people in this crowd are more likely to look up to Spalding Gray or Garrison Keillor than “Chris Rock or an actor,” Catherine Burns, The Moth’s artistic director says.

Each group has a slightly different take on the form, and goes about acquiring storytellers for booked events (as opposed to open mike nights) in its own way.
Sometimes stories for The Moth’s main stage are selected in a special process using a “pre-curator” and a curator. The theme for January’s show is “Trash.” A board member (the pre-curator) has had lots of recent meetings with an NYU anthropologist (the curator) who studies garbage. In this case, the pre-curator’s goal is to get the curator to find someone, a garbage man probably, who has a good trash-related story to tell. The curator is “someone who has access to a specific world” Burns says.

The main stage is also fed by the slams, where anyone can put their name in a hat to be one of ten competitors.

Will Lee (a.k.a. Master Lee), who with Rick Patrick (a.k.a. Mr. Patrick), directs Talking Stick, finds storytellers for his booked shows at open mikes around the city and sometimes through the Talking Stick open forums.

Sherry Weaver holds auditions for Speakeasy, a group she conceived of as “that middle” between The Moth’s main stage and the slams. Weaver believes that everyone “has a story to tell,” and never gives up on people who audition for her. These auditions typically last two hours and during each one, she tells a story of her own, about being forgotten at a gas station by her parents, when she was eight years old. She does this to establish trust. She says that the length of the auditions allows this to occur, and that candor and storytelling go hand in hand. “You can’t be a storyteller and have secrets” … “You have to get to the point where you [say] ‘if you think that’s bad, wait’ – then you’re a storyteller.”
Everyone who auditions for her makes it to the stage, and she’ll work with them to improve their story if they’re having trouble with it. She auditioned David Dickerson (the cowboy hat-wearing, ex-fundamentalist Christian) shortly after he appeared at the Moth slam.

Each of the groups has its own specific rules, but for the vast majority of them, it is acceptable to alter parts of the story for the sake of the narrative. This often translates to condensing timelines, according to Weaver and Catherine Burns, The Moth’s artistic director. Burns says that “the vast majority of [each] story is true” at The Moth. ‘It doesn’t have to be factual, but it has to be true’ is “a motto,” for the stories Moth participants tell, she says. What this boils down to is that while certain facts can be tweaked to make the narrative more cohesive, the stories must be “emotionally true.”

James Frey, yes that James Frey, has told stories on The Moth’s main stage in the past. “[We] are not James Frey people,” she says, but adds that she doesn’t “think he’s evil.”

Talking Stick’s rules are much stricter, when it comes to factual accuracy.” Finding nine storytellers for the first Talking Stick show in 2005 wasn’t easy, Master Lee, one of the group’s directors says. He says that telling truthful stories was “not a genre” before then – that before, Richard Pryor and George Carlin told the truth, “but through a comedy filter.” “We created a genre,” he says. Lee and Patrick believe that absolute truth is crucial now, given the state of the world, and Lee says “the trend is going towards truthful storytelling.”

But what about editing to form a smoother narrative? Talking Stick storytellers are also instructed not to ‘embellish, pare it down.’

“If you take something you really care about, that is emotionally laden, you can talk about it in detail,” without having to make anything up. (Another of Talking Stick’s rules is to ‘mix the tribes,’ or get storytellers from as many different walks of life into a single show as possible – and to ‘go deeper.’)
One of the biggest storytellers on the scene, both figuratively and literally is Mike Daisey. Daisey is a monologuist and author, and his book “21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com,” is a memoir that grew out of a monologue he wrote and performed about his time as an employee at the company in its early days.

Daisey’s introduction to storytelling groups came when people familiar with his monologues connected him to The Moth in about, he estimates, 2002. He appeared on The Moth’s main stage the following year, and though he had formal training as an actor, he found that he felt more comfortable in the world of storytelling than in the world of traditional theater. “Theater, especially in New York, tends to draw driven people who are very young, especially if they’re traditional actors … [They’re] young, hungry people. And you know, they get older and they’re older, hungry people … Odds are they went to school for acting” … “Whereas, at The Moth, [it’s] more likely [for] people to get up and be like ‘So, when I was a cab driver…’ And you’re like, ‘You were a cab driver??’”

Since there’s no Broadway for storytelling, the community is not as career-driven as the theater community is, Daisey says. To illustrate this, he points out that he is one of the few people making a living as a monologuist. For stories, “the highest accolade you can get is people hear your shit and they think it’s good.”
He does say that a lot of networking goes on at events like the slams, and that literary agents are known to frequent them.

To Daisey, the difference between a monologue and a story, he says, is equivalent to the difference between a short story and a novel. (And he doesn’t use a microphone, a convention of storytelling events, when performing one of his monologues.)
Storytelling is “a natural human event,” Daisey says. “So it’s easy to incorporate people” into the storytelling community instead of making it exclusive. “[It] naturally brings people in.” To skeptics of the first-person/memoir genre, the storytelling circuit might seem ripe fodder for attacks – for accusations of self-indulgence – but to Daisey, stories might be ostensibly about the teller, but the real idea behind them is to “relate life events and make them illuminate things beyond” those life events.

He thinks most of the time people listen to stories in terms of their own experiences. “We hear the story as it’s unfolding in front of us, but really, internally, each of us is carrying our own narrative and the narrative is ‘where do I fit in relation to the story?’”

At Moth slams, it’s common to hear stories that are good, intriguing even, but that are undermined a little, by a clunky ‘and then I realized …’ tacked on to the ending a la The Wonder Years.

Daisey, who also teaches storytelling from time to time, says the tendency among beginners to tell a story that ends in a realization is a common mistake. To combat this, he had Colby College students come back with a fragment of a story about something they couldn’t explain – nothing paranormal, but ideally, something they did, but never stopped to examine why. “The things that are interesting in our lives tend to be the things we have not processed.”

James Braly says that to effectively tell a story, there must be a “third space” between the storyteller and the audience, that the story is what fills the space between the two. Otherwise, the storyteller risks bringing the audience too close and they’ll think it’s “A.A. or [the] psychiatrist’s office.”

Daisey calls storytelling a “nascent form,” because although he thinks people think and construct their lives using narratives to sort their lives out, it has rarely had the chance to exist in its native state. Rather it has been embedded within other forms – narrative songwriting, narrative filmmaking, narrative journalism, for example. It has “an incredible reach,” he says, because he believes “100 percent of people can tell a story … [whereas], not that many people can sculpt.”

A trend Daisey’s noticed is that more and more people – Andy Christie and James Braly, for example – are building their own shows, monologues, out of individual stories.

“People are getting more skilled, and more skilled people can hold [an] audience for longer stage time.”

He’s noticed more and more smaller venues providing space for storytelling events, which he says is important because in order for a burgeoning art scene to flourish you need places that are easier to fill up, that don’t require extended bookings in advance and that allow for the inevitable early failures that are part of the growing process. “You can’t have a good art scene in a place where there are only venues that have 200 seats.” This is one reason why downtown has provided fertile ground for the community to develop in.

James Braly is also seeing a lot more long shows “cobbled together” from five to ten minute stories. He says the form probably existed in its purest form before it was imbedded in books, films and other media.

He says the crowd that has gathered around The Moth and its offspring is a “New Yorker-reading, NPR-listening, David Sedaris [CD]-buying crowd for the most part,” but says it is not the “professorial, vaguely self-important” audience that can be found at KGB Bar readings.

He thinks the reason the scene has “maintained [its] innocence” could be the low stakes. There is no, or little, money to be made, so it can still fly “under the radar.”

There’s been “a metamorphosis,” Braly says. The stories were “rougher, less prepared” three to four years ago, but as the popularity of the events has grown so has the skill of the storytellers.

One thing he really appreciates about the storytelling scene is that “there’s no attitude … It’s this unique confluence of being very interesting on one hand, and [there’s] no attitude on the other.” And he doesn’t see the anger that he’s observed at poetry slams.

Like many other storytellers, Braly is a fan of Spalding Gray’s. “If you consider yourself neurotic … he gave a voice to that hidden person muddling with that [kind] of stuff and made it interesting.” And for a long time Spalding Gray was “the only game in town.” He’s not anymore.

-- Matt Elzweig

The Block:East 9th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues

Our Town downtown
August 14, 2006

Gentlemen, be forewarned. There are boutiques from corner to corner on this block, and oh yeah – two of them are bridal shops.

Then again, with the right kind of attitude adjustment, you could cast this shady street in just the right light, and let your lady of choice lead you by the arm from shop to shop, taking time to look at every - single - item - in every - single - shop, and to ask you if you think this pair of earrings goes with that piece of fabric.

If you’d just let yourself go with the flow, you’d find yourself on a Main Street USA stretch that could fit inside any cozy seaside hamlet where you pay for the rustica.

But don’t carried away.

Back in Reality, it’ll be obvious that you haven’t left the city. There are bicycles, large bags of trash on either side of the street at about five p.m. on a weekday.

The sound of a saxophone being played poorly drifts out of a cluttered apartment, the sliding glass doors are decorated with political rants and there’s a small gold-lettered sign on red paper, written in Chinese.

There’s a mural on the wall of the grocery on the 2nd Avenue side. In front of and behind its fake windows, a skating, b-balling, sax playing, Nuyoricanasianafrican-looking crowd gathers for no particular reason at all. There’s a man who could be a Sephardic Jew, and a few white kids thrown in for good measure.

On the other end there’s a Wiccan supply, store and in its front window there’s a cauldron with smoke rising out of it. Tarot cards hang overhead, and candles in glass cylinders sit below. One of the gates is closed and it also has a mural. What looks like a snake with two heads, one on either end of its body, is wrapped around itself like a figure eight, holding itself in this position with its teeth.

Availability

A 17-unit townhouse style building (#312) is listed for $5,000,0000, but otherwise there is no inventory on this block.

And with the exception of a small property that sold recently, there hasn’t been any inventory for years, Barry Silverman, a senior vice president at Halstead property says. Silverman thinks it’s pretty safe to assume that the majority of properties are rent-controlled or stabilized.

He says that demand is high, “especially if you like sushi,” and that “if you build it, they will come.” There is a lot of what he calls “modest dining,” in the area.

Buying

A few weeks ago, a “cute and small” (600 square foot) condo in #325, sold for just under $600,000, according to Silverman. It is a one bedroom and has wide plank floors, exposed brick, and sold for as much as it did because of its condo status, which people generally prefer to coops, and its condition. Silverman estimates that if there were free market properties for sale, a one bedroom would fall into the $590,000 range (about $1,000 per square foot).

Two bedroom, one baths would sell “up to $800,000, in deeper, floor-through buildings, depending on condition,” but the majority would likely fall into the $700,000 range.

Renting

For a studio, rent “could start as low as $1,200” and reach $2,000 if it “had any bells and whistles,” Silverman says. One bedrooms would start in the “high, high teens” to about $2,000, and could hit “about $2,400,” if they were large enough and in good condition.

What Happened Here

“The East Side Boys,” a group of young, inexperienced robbers, burst in on the Boulevard Restaurant, a.k.a “The Dutchman’s,” which was a gambling den and café located above what is now Veselka, the coffee shop. It was 3:20 a.m, they were armed, and were hoping to leave with lots of cash. What they didn’t plan on was that two plainclothes cops would be inside having coffee with the restaurant’s owner, none other than The Dutchman. One of those cops, Detective Michael Foley, who went for his gun, ended up dead. Four of the seven members charged in the debacle were executed.

The experimental Café La Mama theater was first located in the basement of #321.

Who Lived Here

Astor Piazzolla, the famous Argentine tango composer and bandoneon player. Jimi Hendrix. Nicholas Stuyvesant, a descendant of Peter lived in Mansion House on the corner of 1st and 9th.

Amenities (on or close to this block)

Food and Drink

9th Street Bakery
9th Street Market
Angelica’s Herbs
East Village Pizza & Kebabs
Veselka coffee shop
Village Farm Grocery
The MudSpot coffee shop

Clothing & Accesories

A.K. Shoe Repair
An Ren
Bakhor
Cobblestones
Eileen Fisher
Elaine Arsenault
Fabulous Fanny’s
Fialka Boutique
Gallery Vercon
Gregg Wold Bijoux Couture
Huminska
Jill Anderson
Katinka
Little King Ltd.
Louel Clothing
Maria
Meg
Paulina Quintana
Pinky Otto
Private Collection New York
Selia Yang
The Denim Hub
The Gown Company
Vui Vui Cho Viet Nam

Arts

Archangel Antiques
Clayworks
Mascot
Umbrella Arts

Hair

Powder RM
Uliana Hair & Makeup Studio

Toys

Dinosaur Hill

Dry Cleaners, Laundry, Tailoring

Sew Good

Other

Chinese Natural Therapy Center
Enchantments (Wiccan supplies)
Monique K Skin Care
St. Marks Veterinary Hospital
Taoist Arts Center
The Source Unltd (printing)

(Sources: “Infamous Manhattan”; Fighting 9th online; NY Songlines; Powell’s.com)
-- Matt Elzweig

Something's Not Kosher: Demolition of St. Brigid’s Church stopped tentatively so judge can review permit.

Our Town downtown
August 7, 2006

A Temporary Peace

She gave them the benefit of the doubt in January and upheld her decision in June. Now she has questions.

On July 28th, Judge Barbara R. Kapnick ordered the Archdiocese of New York to show her why it should not be prevented from demolishing St. Brigid’s Church, at a future hearing.

That hearing is scheduled for August 24th, and the archdiocese is not to resume the demolition until then.

Demolition began on July 27th. On the morning of the 28th, the same day as the hearing, the Buildings department stopped work after inspectors found problems with the sanitary conditions at the site, but they were corrected and work resumed.

The archdiocese has stated that its decision to demolish the church, which was closed in 2002, is because of extensive structural damage that would be prohibitively expensive to fix, and that it dissolved the parish in 2004 because of demographic shifts.

Opponents of the demolition, who include neighborhood residents, former parishioners and local elected officials, contend that the church, which dates back to 1848, can be repaired for much less than the 7 million dollars, which the archdiocese estimates it will cost.

St. Brigid’s is directly across the street from Tompkins Square Park, and knocking it down would create a very attractive vacant lot. Real estate is the real reason the archdiocese wants it gone, these opponents say.

In this and earlier hearings, the committee argued that the archdiocese is not the legal owner of the church because St. Brigid’s is a religious corporation under New York State law, and therefore the archdiocese does not have the authority to demolish it.

Judge Kapnick did not want to use this latest hearing to revisit the ownership issue, but did acknowledge that under the Religious Corporations Law, a proper board consisting of three archdiocese members and two lay trustees must be in place to vote on issues such as whether to demolish a church, and that this needs to have occurred for the archdiocese to rightfully receive its demolition permit.

On June 30th, after the committee presented the Department of Buildings with several discrepancies it noticed on the archdiocese’s permit application, the department gave the archdiocese ten days to clear up them up. Otherwise, Buildings would revoke its permit, the department warned.

Jennifer Givner, a buildings department spokesperson, confirms that during this ten-day waiting period, the archdiocese submitted documentation that Buildings deemed sufficient proof that the archdiocese owns St. Brigid’s. “This is private property. The owners of the building have the ability to take out a demolition permit and demolish the building.”

Our Town downtown is awaiting copies of the ownership documents, which are only available under a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request. They were not yet available at press time. They were not made available to the committee either.

Neil Merkl, who represented the archdiocese in court on July 28th, said that a proper board had in fact been formed, and that ten days earlier, it had voted to go ahead with the demolition. Those hoping to save the church, who were the majority of those seated in the full courtroom at 60 Centre Street, are not sure the board actually exists.

Harry Kresky, the committee’s lawyer, argued that the archdiocese has been operating under “a cloak of secrecy.”

When Judge Kapnick asked him, Merkl said that he had never provided copies documenting the board’s existence and activities to Kresky. Judge Kapnick then ordered him to.

Why the archdiocese never named the two lay trustees (the former parishioners) was another question that arose during the hearing. Merkl said he felt the trustees have the right to “not be bothered,” and he denied any “cloak of secrecy.”

The archdiocese wants to complete the demolition as soon as possible, he said, because it will be cheaper to do while St. Brigid Parish Elementary School, which is located on an adjacent lot, is still in summer recess.

Kresky brought up the whereabouts of $103,000 that former parishioners raised for repairs and donated to the archdiocese in 2003. The committee claims that the archdiocese never returned the money and still has it.

Judge Kapnick remembered that the archdiocese agreed to return the money, and asked Merkl if her recollection was correct.

Merkl acknowledged that the money was not the archdiocese’s to keep and said that the archdiocese was holding it for the donors. The audience’s disbelief was obvious.

“I think the [former] parishioners would be happy to have that money back,” Kresky said, turning to face the audience. “Am I correct?” They applauded.

Holland & Knight, the eleventh biggest law firm in the country, according to ALM Research Online, was present at the hearing and is now working with The Committee to Save St. Brigid’s, pro bono.

The committee, which has also acquired a publicist, met on August 3rd to select an additionally expanded legal team.

When demolition began on July 27th, Kresky also filed a motion asking the New York City Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA) to review the demolition permit.

By law, the reviewing board must include at least “one registered architect, one professional engineer and one planner” according to its Web site. The BSA has not yet set a date for the hearing.

The BSA does not have the power to grant a stay of demolition, so should Judge Kapnick rule in favor of the archdiocese on August 24th, the archdiocese could legally begin demolition.

Kresky is discussing legal issues with the BSA, which also has the power to decide which cases it hears.

Until the August 24th hearing at State Supreme Court regarding the order to show cause, and until the BSA reviews the demolition permit, nothing can be done, Kresky says.

Our Town downtown made repeated requests to interview Mr. Merkl, all of which were unsuccessful.

Joseph Zwilling, spokesperson for the archdiocese, would only describe the lay trustees as “two active former parishioners of St. Brigid’s who now attend a neighboring parish” in a telephone interview. He says after hearing all the facts in the case, they voted to demolish the church.

Zwilling will only provide the names of the lay trustees to the court if they ask him to, he says, because he does not want them to be harassed or bothered.” When asked how he thought they might be “harassed or bothered,” he had this to say: “people would call them. People would harass them. There have been protests … Come on, don’t be naïve.”

As for the $103,000 in question, Zwilling denies the archdiocese ever held on to parishioners’ money, and says that after it closed, the parish’s “remaining funds,” were put toward “parish expenses [such as] storing pews [and] preserving historical items.” He says that his organization has offered to provide the money to anyone who could document it ever existed, and that no one has done this so far.

He also thinks it’s wrong to refer to members of The Committee to Save St. Brigid’s as “former parishioners,” “The committee members really don’t have any standing in this matter,” he says.

Zwilling doesn’t think meeting publicly with them would do any good.

Days of Thunder

For neighborhood residents and committee members, there was a lot more to July 27th and 28th than court proceedings. Both days were filled with angry confrontations between committee members and demolition workers.

On the 27th, just eight days after its reportedly recently-formed board voted to demolish St. Brigid’s, and about two and half weeks after Buildings gave it the go ahead, the archdiocese began knocking St. Brigid’s down.

Elizabeth Ruf-Maldonado, who lives across the street from St. Brigid’s remembers seeing the demolition in progress as she started to head to the Hamilton Fish Recreation Center on Pitt Street for an early swim. “By 7:15 it was already well underway,” she says in a telephone interview.

She saw workers and a large hole in the back, east-facing wall of the church and says “the air was already filled with dust.”

Throughout the day, neighborhood residents, committee members, news media and police looked on as workers from A. Russo Wrecking, Inc. pulled debris through the hole they had made in the back wall earlier and workers from Perimeter Bridge & Scaffold Co., Inc. set up scaffolding in front of the street entrance to St. Brigid’s.

At about a quarter to one, firefighters arrived, and later Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) inspectors arrived to examine safety conditions inside the church and around the demolition site.

Robert Slaughter, a neighborhood resident present at the demolition site, thought it was odd that the crew had knocked a hole in the back wall, especially since the archdiocese’s original claims about structural instability were based on cracks in that same wall. It also just seemed dangerous to do it this way. “[It] could collapse at any minute” he said.

Earlier, Slaughter entered the back lot and climbed the ladder to yell at workers inside the church in an unsuccessful attempt to get them to stop working.

The demolition continued through the next morning, until the Department of Buildings temporarily stopped work citing concerns about sanitary conditions on the site.

On the morning of the 28th, demolition workers smashed windows on the 8th Street wall, which was especially hard for onlookers to watch.

B.G. Firmani, a committee member who arrived there at about five after seven, says in an email that at approximately 7:25, the workers began breaking them. “Within maybe 20 minutes ... the Russo demo crew senselessly [destroyed] seven stained glass windows,” she says in an e-mail. According to Firmani, who writes about architecture regularly, “the windows were made in Bavaria – probably Munich, which had the two top stained glass studios, Mayer and Zettler, at that time.” They were installed in St. Brigid’s in the late 1880s.

Patti Kelly is a committee member, who has been a professional stained-glass artist for over 25 years, according to her Web site. She does original and restoration work including churches. In a telephone interview, Kelly says each piece of glass of each of the windows that were smashed, were hand-painted in a special European style that involves firing the glass after it is painted. “…These windows were very valuable,” she says. Kelly estimates that to accurately reproduce them, each window would cost a “minimum of $85,000.”

Edwin Torres, also a committee member, says that the windows on the opposite side of the church, which were regular, not stained-glass, were removed carefully by the workers and taken away.

In a telephone interview, Joseph Zwilling, spokesperson for the archdiocese, says the windows that were destroyed were made of painted, not stained-glass, and had been “compromised over the years.” And they had been examined by “experts” he says.

Asked who these experts were, he would only say that he got this assessment from Kevin Shaughnessy, whose title as listed on NYC Department of Buildings documents as “Assistant Director” of the Archdiocesan Building Commission. (Zwilling referred to him as the “commissioner” and was not available to clarify this at press time.)

Firmani and Mary Gleason, also a committee member, both remember a man in a Russo Wrecking T-shirt, grinding a pile of debris with a backhoe behind the church. He stopped momentarily, and Firmani yelled at him through the fence, hoping she could convince him not to continue. She saw wainscoting, kneelers and other items in the pile and hoped they might be salvageable, but the man resumed his work, and ignored what was now a small crowd of people yelling through the fence. This crowd included “Elizabeth Ruf-Maldonado, Michael Rosen [of the East Village Community Coalition] … and several others I don’t know,” Firmani writes in an e-mail.

Talking at an East Village coffee shop, she describes the man’s expression as “spiteful” and says that shortly afterward he summoned two workers to the fence and had them cover most of it from the inside with mesh, which the group quickly pulled through the fence and discarded, and then wood.

After the hearing on the 28th, Edwin Torres went to St. Brigid’s to show the demolition crew the court order, “but they refused to stop the work,” his wife, Dolly says. Committee members tried to prevent the last of four trucks filled with debris from leaving the site, by standing in front of it, hoping that something, anything in the back of the Peterbilt, could be saved. Police closed it in behind the fence.

Jerome O’Connor, another committee member who was present, thinks the first three trucks took off mainly because the debris they held was evidence the workers continued demolition after Torres delivered the court order instructing them to stop.

He says the brusque way that the crew handled things at the site may have swayed certain committee members to be more assertive with the archdiocese in the future.

The Jitters

When St. Brigid’s comes up, city agencies grow quiet, especially the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Mayor’s Office. Mayor Bloomberg, himself, hasn’t made a peep on the issue.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission

The permit application that the archdiocese gave the Department of Buildings contains a required letter from the Landmarks Commission stating that the Landmarks Commission does not consider St. Brigid’s Church worthy of Landmark status.

Should knowledge of this letter become public, it could be potentially embarrassing for Landmarks, committee member Jerome O’Connor says, and O’Connor says this could explain why Lisi de Bourbon, a Landmarks Commission spokesperson would not comment on the commission’s reason for not granting St. Brigid’s landmark status.

St. Brigid’s was completed at the end of 1849 by Irish shipwrights, most of whom were displaced by the Great Famine, which devastated their country and left roughly a million dead. It is one of the oldest, if not the oldest standing church designed by architect Patrick Keely, an Irish immigrant who built over 600 churches and other religious structures.

Its most recent parishioners were predominantly Hispanic, and a recent encounter O’Connor had with the Landmarks Commission gave him the impression race was a factor in their decision not landmark it.

When Jerome O’Connor went to the commission to investigate the landmark issue about a month ago, he met with one of its legal staff.

He told the attorney that before Landmarks issued their letter of non-designation for St. Brigid’s, Councilwoman Rosie Mendez had brought over a petition with over 500 signatures, to landmark it, and produced a copy of an article that appeared in The Villager in October 2004 that mentioned it.

“It’s not a popularity contest,” O’Connor remembers the attorney saying, after O’Connor read the portion of the article about the petition to him.

O’Connor told him he thought that was “racist.” “Maybe it wasn’t the right [500] people,” O’Connor says in a telephone interview. The attorney threw him out.

(Through a spokesperson, Councilwoman Mendez says that she does not remember any petition, but that an application for landmark status was sent to the commission. The Villager article by Albert Amateau, reported that Mendez “said that a petition to designate St. Brigid’s as a city landmark had more than 500 signatures as of Oct. 10. ‘We’ve sent it to Robert Tierney at the Landmarks Preservation Commission and to Cardinal Egan,’ said Mendez.” Amateau did not return a call to confirm the petition’s existence.)

The Mayor’s Office

Mayor Bloomberg has received more than one letter from committee members arguing against the demolition of St. Brigid’s, and so far has not said a word about it. Silvia Alvarez, a Bloomberg spokesperson, said the administration was “declining comment” when asked for the mayor’s position on St. Brigid’s in a telephone interview.

O’Connor says that when Bloomberg supported landmark status for a 1915 warehouse designed by architect Cass Gilbert in Williamsburg, people in the area (O’Connor lives there) joked about it. They wondered why he would want to save what they considered to be a plain, ugly building.

The Cross Section

The reactions of neighborhood residents who stumbled upon the demolition on the 27th ranged from anger to indifference to contentedness.

“I’m glad …” a young woman pushing a stroller and walking her dog on Avenue B said, as demolition continued across the street. “I hope they put up fancy condos and raise my real estate value.” She would not give her name, she said, out of respect for her neighbors.

Bill Antalics, who has lived in the neighborhood for “years,” says that the archdiocese is giving up on “on a landmark building,” by knocking St. Brigid’s down, and sees it as a precursor of things to come. He thinks there’ll be “no Lower East Side … in ten years … all in the name of money.”

Cori Brown who owns Ringlet, a salon next to the empty lot where St. Brigid’s School once stood has concerns about the environmental effects the demolition is going to have. “I’ve [got] a business. There’s gonna be rats and noise and dirt, and it’s gonna be awful. I hope it goes fast,” she said.

Abigail Valentin, who lives across the street from the church, made her first communion there. Her uncle married there. She appeared shocked once she realized that the demolition was happening. “I knew it was gonna happen, but I didn’t know it was gonna happen now. I thought someone was gonna step up to the plate.”

-- Matt Elzweig