A History of the East Village and Its Architecture
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A History of the East Village and Its Architecture by Francis Morrone with chapters by Rebecca Amato and Jean Arrington * December, 2018 Commissioned by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation 232 East Eleventh Street New York, NY 10003 Report funded by Preserve New York, a grant program of the Preservation League of New York State and the New York State Council on the Arts Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation 232 East Eleventh Street, New York, NY 10003 212-475-9585 Phone 212-475-9582 Fax www.gvshp.org [email protected] Board of Trustees: Arthur Levin, President Trevor Stewart, Vice President Kyung Choi Bordes, Vice President Allan Sperling, Secretary/Treasurer Mary Ann Arisman Tom Birchard Dick Blodgett Jessica Davis Cassie Glover David Hottenroth Anita Isola John Lamb Justine Leguizamo Leslie Mason Ruth McCoy Andrew Paul Robert Rogers Katherine Schoonover Marilyn Sobel Judith Stonehill Naomi Usher Linda Yowell F. Anthony Zunino, III Staff: Andrew Berman, Executive Director Sarah Bean Apmann, Director of Research and Preservation Harry Bubbins, East Village and Special Projects Director Ariel Kates, Manager of Programming and Communications Matthew Morowitz, Program and Administrative Associate Sam Moskowitz, Director of Operations Lannyl Stephens, Director of Development and Special Events The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation was founded in 1980 to preserve the architectural heritage and cultural history of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo. /gvshp /gvshp_nyc www.gvshp.org/donate Acknowledgements This report was edited by Sarah Bean Apmann, GVSHP Director of Research and Preservation, Karen Loew, and Amanda Davis. This project is funded by Preserve New York, a grant program of the Preservation League of New York State and the New York State Council on the Arts. Additional support provided by the Kaplen Foundation. Special thanks to the many interns who have contributed research and photography to this project. Unless otherwise noted, all images are by GVSHP. Other images in the History chapter are from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Foreword Few places in New York City, indeed in America, are as rich in history as the East Village. And that history runs deep -- to New York’s earliest days, and even before. The neighborhood contains streets that pre-date the Manhattan grid, following Native American trails or Dutch colonial roads. It was home to part of the earliest settlement of free Africans in North America. Its earliest extant buildings date to the 18th century, and include the oldest site of continuous religious worship in New York. Its building stock was developed by families as venerable as the Stuyvesants and the Astors. It was the home to the East River Dry Dock district, one of New York’s busiest stretches of waterfront until the Erie Canal shifted the center of maritime activity to the Hudson River, making New York City the commercial capital of America. And that’s just the earliest chapter of the East Village story. While the neighborhood contained some of New York’s most elegant and desirable homes from the first decades after American independence (several of which still stand today on St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue), in the 19th century the neighborhood became one of the great portals for immigrants to America. Some of the most densely-populated streets in the country, even the world, were found within its bounds, and for a half century the East Village contained the largest settlement of German speakers outside of Berlin and Vienna, whose presence is still apparent in the architecture of many of the neighborhood’s tenements and institutions. Radical social movements took hold here, led by the likes of Emma Goldman and Dorothy Day. By the early 20th century the neighborhood was part of the largest settlement of Jews in the world, and Second Avenue, the ‘Yiddish Rialto,’ was one of the fonts of worldwide Jewish culture and of New York popular culture. The first federally-subsidized housing development in the United States was built here. After World War II, many of the first migrants from Puerto Rico to the mainland made their home here, as did many Ukrainian and Polish refugees from communism. Few parts of New York could be said to so thoroughly embody the devastation and the rebirth which swept through the city in the second half of the 20th century. The East Village suffered an epidemic of drugs, crime, and abandonment – by both private property owners and city government. But innovative movements took hold in the neighborhood which reimagined its streets and its buildings as homes for a new generation of urban pioneers. In the 1960s, countercultural spaces flourished in former ethnic performance venues such as Andy Warhol’s ‘The Dom’ on St. Mark’s Place, and Bill Graham’s Fillmore East on Second Avenue. Radical new forms of urban homesteading were established by CHARAS-El Bohio at the former P.S. 64, at the Liz Christie Garden (New York’s first community garden) and at “squats” like C-SQUAT and the Umbrella House, where abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots were reclaimed and new life was breathed into them. The Cooper Square Committee successfully fought off Robert Moses’ urban renewal/destruction efforts, and charted a new path for adaptive reuse and non-displacement that manifests in today’s Fourth Arts Block, among other places. Performance Space 122, LaMaMa Etc., Anthology Film Archives, and Theater for the New City took possession of formerly abandoned city-owned buildings, launching cultural entities with bold and unconventional new visions. Cultural and artistic revolutions also emanated from the East Village during this time. In the 1960s, the Hare Krishna movement and the New York Chapter of the Young Lords were both founded in Tompkins Square. In the 1970s, punk rock was born at CBGB on the Bowery. In the 1980s, Club 57 and 51X on St. Mark’s Place played a key role in launching the careers of artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Pyramid Club on Avenue A launched a new era of politically-conscious performance art, particularly drag-based performance art, giving birth to the Wigstock Festival. The East Village can even claim credit as the birthplace of the “shag” haircut (at Paul McGregor’s Haircutters, 15 St. Mark’s Place) and “the happening” (at the Reuben Gallery, 61 Fourth Avenue). The legacy of this rich cultural history can still be discerned in the streets and buildings of the East Village today. Early 19th century houses remain, though many have been altered to accommodate commerce, worship, or performance. An incredible array of civic and institutional buildings continue on, including the largest collection of CBJ Snyder schools in the city and some of New York’s earliest public libraries. Houses of worship reflecting a kaleidoscope of ethnicities and religious denominations survive in every corner of the neighborhood, often shoehorned onto 25 foot wide lots. And of course one of New York’s most impressive and intact arrays of 19th and early 20th century tenements live on in these blocks. Some date as far back as the first half of the 19th century when this form of housing was new, while many others were designed with florid detail by some of New York’s most prominent architects, including George F. Pelham and the Herter Brothers. And in spite of its gritty, workaday veneer, the East Village can also boast works by prominent architectural luminaries such as Emery Roth, Ralph Walker, James Renwick, Calvert Vaux, and Ithiel Town, to name just a few. But make no mistake – while this rich legacy survives in the hundred-odd blocks of the East Village, it is disappearing, and disappearing quickly. Over the years of the research and writing of this report, dozens of historic buildings in the neighborhood have been demolished or disfigured, including several early 19th century rowhouses that survived, improbably, in the easternmost reaches of the neighborhood. Churches and theaters, a hundred years old or more, have been destroyed. And cornices, wooden and cast-iron storefronts, and architectural detail that survived a century or more are being ripped from buildings, leaving them a shell of their former selves. The East Village has always been a place of welcome to newcomers. But without further efforts to preserve its history, newcomers to the East Village will have no idea of, and no way to appreciate, the distinct and varied lives and experiences of those who came before them. Now is the time for entities like the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to act to protect the rich confluence of social, cultural, and architectural history that is the East Village. Andrew Berman Executive Director, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation December, 2018 Table of Contents I. A History of the East Village and its Architecture 1 II. Row Houses 62 III. Tenements 88 IV. Institutional Buildings 113 V. Commercial and Industrial Buildings 127 VI. Houses of Worship 147 VII. Buildings for Art and Artists 174 VIII. Snyder Public Schools 213 IX. Public Housing 225 Warren Hall St. Mark's Tompkins Church-in-the-Bowery Square Cherub Library Christodora Tenements House E 14 ST Labor "Pelham Row" Temple Tenements E 13 ST Van Tassell & Kearney E 12 ST Auction Mart 4 AV St. Mark's 3 AV 3 Historic District E 11 ST East 10th Street Historic District Stuyvesant Fish E 10 ST Dry Dock House Banking House E 9 ST Tompkins STUYVESANT ST Ottendorfer Library Square ST MARK'S PL Park E 8 ST The Cooper Union E 7 ST Political Row The Orpheum Theater E 6 ST East Village/ Theatre 80 Lower East Side Historic District E 5 ST E 4 ST Aschenbrodel Verein/ 2 AV 2 1 AV 1 AV A AV AV B AV AV D AV La Mama Theater C AV E 3 ST E 2 ST E 1 ST 101 Avenue A St.