St. Luke’s Place and Leroy Street between Hudson and Seventh Avenue South

Splendid Encampment

By David Crohn

Faced with interrogating the inanimate, teasing the hidden life from buildings and streets—at least half of which happens behind closed doors—is daunting. It takes time, patience and an open mind.

Seldom, as I’m sure anyone can imagine, does anything notable simply step up and present itself. You have to talk to people who know better, peer through windows and doors. Sometimes you have to squint to make the pieces fit.

All of this is a given, every time. I am reminded whenever I explore a new block. When things go well the pain is less acute; by some imprecise magic, I squeeze the stone, and blood comes out.

But this block—so lush, and largely uniform—seems impenetrable. Rowhouse after rowhouse after rowhouse—each three stories high. Why? And why does the name Leroy Street end right where the street bends, only to pick up again west of Hudson?

Andy Warhol and Steve Reich taught us the hypnotic beauty of repetition, but I doubt that’s what the 19th century builder had in mind for the stretch of 15 rowhouses that, for many, defines St. Luke’s Place and Leroy Street between Seventh Ave. South and Hudson Street.

We know that back then it wasn’t uncommon to rename a portion of a block to boost its putative prestige. Which is what Trinity Church, which owned all the land here, did before selling it all off starting in 1851. (The 15 residences along St. Luke’s Place are numbered sequentially.)

Christopher Gray, writing in the New York Times in 1996, calls the swath of homogeny “a mystery of 19th-century real-estate development in New York: who or what was the common agent that produced such a uniform row?” He didn’t know then, and my research turned up nothing better. But whoever it was, they liked brick and brownstone. They wielded a top-notch cookie cutter, aesthetically speaking, using the Renaissance and Greek Revival styles popular with the upper crust at the time.

At Seventh Avenue South and Leroy Street, things aren’t nearly so pretty, or so clean. The end of St. Luke’s Place is marked by apartment buildings that suddenly tower over their neighbors; go further around the corner, north along Seventh Ave. South, and trash litters the sidewalk. There’s graffiti, and across the street, a vacant storefront.

But for the splendidly encamped residents of St. Luke’s Place, the trees and the turn protect their niche. The Greeks had a special name for the revelatory twist—chiasmus—and it is through that convolution that the blood of this block pumps.

Living Here
The quick and easy way to move to this pricey block would be through 9300 Realty or CitiHabitats. The former has a fifth-floor walk-up studio apartment available at 53 Leroy ($2,395 a month), and the latter handles rentals next door at 51. A quick call to CitiHabitats revealed that nothing was available at press time; but they leave their sign up, a nod to frequent vacancies for the young professionals and students who tend to make up the majority of their clientele.

Amenities
The block is strictly residential, but its neighboring stretch of Hudson Street is home to the Candy Café, a retro-style eatery; Out of the Kitchen, for semi-gourmet takeout; and a mini-grocery store.

What Happened Here
Maybe it’s the location. Maybe it’s the regality of those rowhouses. Either way, St. Luke’s Place has a history replete with prominent former residents: former Mayor James J. Walker (1926-1932), for whom the park across the street, formerly a cemetery, is named. (Note the so-called “mayoral lampposts” at number 6.) Also, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Timothy Leary. TV’s Cosby family may have lived in Brooklyn, but the exterior to their home was shot at 10 St. Luke’s Place.

My favorite though is the playful poet Marianne Moore, who made Modernism charming while living at “14 St. Luke’s Place when she first moved to New York City.” So says the plaque across the street, next door to the Hudson Park branch of the New York Public Library where she worked. Moore wore a tricorn hat and black cape to boxing matches, wrote to the Ford Motor Company suggesting the name “Utopian Turtletop” for the car that would become the Edsel, and wrote in her poem “To a Snail,” which could have been called “To St. Luke’s Place”: “It is not the acquisition of any one thing/that is able to adorn/or the incidental quality that occurs/as a concomitant of something well said,/that we value in style,/ but the principle that is hid…”

dcrohn@gmail.com

Edith O'Hara and the 13th Street Repertory

OK, so this has nothing to do with blocks or real estate or history, but I wrote it and it tells a sad story of how real estate continues to steamroll over the small and wonderful institutions that make New York--and especially Downtown--special.


The Final Curtain for the 13th Street Repertory?
A fixture of downtown fights for its life
By David Crohn

If Edith O’Hara wanted, she could be very, very rich. But even $2 million is an empty and useless sum to the woman who has spent 35 years on the 13th Street Repertory Theater. To her, the theater is irreplaceable.

O’Hara is fighting the battle of her life fighting for her theater. Her building’s co-owners want to evict the company to make millions in the cutthroat world of Manhattan real estate. That would close the curtain for a place that has not only hosted the longest running Off-Off Broadway play in American history, but has cultivated young talent since its inception in 1972. The company’s most famous export has been Israel Horowitz’s “Line” for the past 33 years, but it’s only one of hundreds that have been performed there, from children’s theater to informal workshops to works by giants like Tennessee Williams.

“The place is a fixture,” said Horowitz, 68, from his East Village home just a few blocks from the theater. “When kids come to New York to be actors—and they come by the boxcar—the first shock is ‘What now what do I do?’ Edith has created this place where kids can find a home. I can’t name another place in New York City like that.”

Small-Town Girl
Born in 1917 on a farm in the wilds of northern Idaho, educated in a one-room schoolhouse, O’Hara still displays the plucky spirit of a small-town girl. In an interview with Our Town Downtown, she recalled with fondness the day when, in the seventh grade, the theater bug bit her.

“I didn’t know anything about acting, but the teacher put me in a production where I played George Washington,” she said. “And that was it for me. I just thought, ‘This is the greatest.’”

From then on she acted whenever she could, eventually finding her way to the University of Idaho and a drama degree.

But shortly after graduation, she says, her path changed. Her true calling revealed itself: she would work behind the scenes as an artistic director and teacher, in order to nurture the creativity in others. “Creativity in the world is so important,” O’Hara said; so many people in the world have “creativity in their souls and it’s suppressed and not given attention and they don't even know they have it.”

By 1970, she had formed a summer stock for teenagers in Pennsylvania, the Plowright Players, and was touring with a successful musical called “Touch.” The production brought her to New York City and a now-defunct theater on East Fourth Street. After it closed, in 1971, her three kids had established their own careers in the arts—her daughter Jenny has a recurring role as Doug Heffernan’s mother on “The King of Queens—and her husband John had passed away. She decided to stay in the city and found her own theater company.

A yearlong search brought her to 13th Street, via an ad in The Village Voice. She saw the building, a five-story brownstone between 5th and 6th Avenues, and thought, “This is it.” She’s been living and working there ever since. Every morning she walks down the steps to the ground floor, a cozy office and living room crowded with worn-in chairs and a kitchen with an old-fashioned icebox. She hosts journalists like me, along with interns and actors and aspiring playwrights. She hands every young person she meets a tattered three-ring binder and has them fill out a questionnaire with their contact information, skills and aspirations. They are asked to answer the question, What got you interested in theater?

The book is mostly full, but there is plenty of room left, plenty of blank pages remaining to be filled.

Lines Are Drawn
For 10 years Edith and her budding company leased the space. It was cheap back then, so cheap that although she can’t remember the rent, she knows they never had trouble paying it. In 1982 she and her daughter Jenny decided to buy the place. They began the hunt for a partner to help raise the $100,000 down payment to buy the $400,000 space. A Cleveland investor named Gordon Milde showed up. He came from seemingly out of nowhere, and was so affable, agreeable and enthusiastic, that they named their new partnership White Knight Ltd. “He was like our white knight in shining armor,” O’Hara said.

But things with Milde soured quickly. He revealed not only his true intentions—the burgeoning gold mine of Manhattan real estate—but turned out to be a personally difficult person.

Milde owned half of the building, with Edith and the company owning a quarter each. When attempts to buy O’Hara out so he could sell to developers proved futile, Milde became cantankerous—even while gradually paying off the mortgage on the building. O’Hara says he started by evicting members of the company who lived upstairs, then left threatening phone messages. In the early 90s he was caught stealing from O’Hara’s apartment, and she was forced to slap him with a restraining order.

Milde returned to Cleveland, and two years ago faded from the picture by selling his shares in the building to Steven and Beth Lowenthal, for “a song”: less than a million dollars, nowhere near what they were worth. Jenny and her husband managed to raise enough money to buy them not long ago, but the Lowenthals backed out of the deal at the last minute.

O’Hara and the Lowenthals are at a standoff. They offered her a million dollars to back off, then doubled it. But she refuses to sell her shares, and they can’t make her. An eviction notice is pending, as the Repertory’s litigation—which challenges the validity of Milde’s original sale of his shares to the Lowenthals—continues.
According to O’Hara and Mitchell Zingman, the Repertory’s attorney, the Lowenthals are in talks with the owners of the building next door to the west to sell them the air rights. And the Rep’s home, 50 West 13th Street, is worth $5 million according to a recent appraisal.

The Shows Go On
As the legal battle continues, so does the life of the theater. Though she tears up when telling her story, which could end with the Rep’s final curtain, O’Hara is tireless in her old age. She is a kind of den mother to the people who come here seven days a week—to study acting, to rehearse and perform and to learn the behind-the-scenes, technical end of drama production.

Every Friday and Saturday night at 9:30pm, the theater, with its 50 seats and fantastic acoustics, shows “Line,” whose spare intensity, absurdist premise and painfully funny slapstick make it reminiscent of the Irish Playwright Samuel Beckett, who Horowitz knew personally.

“Line” opens with an unkempt and grimy young man sleeping on stage. He wakes up, breakfasts on potato chips and Budweiser, and stands at attention: he is first on line. Characters are introduced one by one to the stage, and begin to wrangle for first place. It is never revealed what they are waiting for; it’s not even clear if the characters themselves know. As they use their wits, fists and sex to get up front, the play's ambiguous—and ambivalent—take on race, capitalism and the sexual revolution quietly thrill the small audiences who come week after week.

When asked why he thinks “Line” has survived so long in the same place, Horowitz is mystified, although pleased that he has been able to help the Repertory in his own small way. He hasn’t accepted royalties from the performances for years, despite the fact that it’s been popularly received by audiences in 30 languages all over the world.

But still, Horowitz can understand “Line”’s appeal. “It’s a real downtown type of play,” he said, referring to its minimal set—just a piece of adhesive tape on the floor—and brazen take on feminine sexuality. And any New Yorker can relate to the play’s themes of ceaseless competition in an indifferent and chaotic world. I asked Horowitz if this was his intended theme, and he replied only by quoting Beckett: “Having a playwright describe his play would be like a snail describing its shell.”

Ronald Washington is a 27-year-old Virginia native who joined the cast of “Line” a few weeks ago. This is his third appearance Off Off Broadway, but he said he found the atmosphere at the Rep to be uniquely welcoming.

“It’s just nice being here,” he said. “Edith is a lovely woman. She has been a very nice person as far as getting me up to speed with the show and offering me sound advice.”

Like most other people interviewed for this article, Washington was eager to mention that he’d “hate to see the theater get shut down,” and not just because it would end his indefinite run as Dolan, one of the play’s fiercest and richly layered characters. Behind the scenes, he said, “It’s a very inviting environment for an actor. A lot of times [when you join an ongoing production] you’re beholden to however things were going, but here they take your creativity into account.”
Laurie Bell, 24, a student of stage management and design at Lehman College, interns on 13th Street a few hours a week. She said that when it came time to look for an internship, she was immediately drawn to the 13th Street Repertory.

“I chose this one because it seemed like it would be small and intimate,” she said—and it was. “I walked in and immediately felt like I had been here before. I know I’ll get to wear a lot of hats, which is just what I was looking for.”

In addition to stage-managing the Rep’s production of “Five-Story Walkup,” Bell may get to work on a series of recently unearthed plays by Tennessee Williams. Four short one-acts, now showing on Monday and Tuesday nights, are getting their New York premiere—on the same stage where, according to O’Hara, Williams sat and said that small theaters like this one “was where the future of theater lay.”

A prescient statement from someone who died in 1983, at a time when even he was having trouble getting his work performed, even before the age of mass media conglomeration.

A Grim Outlook
O’Hara, along with her right-hand woman Sandra Nordgren, the company’s 11-year technical director, remain hopeful. But they know the outlook is grim. Legal fees continue to mount up; they exceed $100,000, Nordgren said.

Small, local art collectives like Family Tree, a group of artists, musicians, dancers and poets from Fordham, perform occasional fundraisers. And weekly classes, at about 360 dollars for a two-month term, bring in some revenue.

But at only $17 dollars for a ticket to see a show, Nordgren and O’Hara have been forced to sit on the stage and address their small audiences personally after most performances. They ask if there is anything anyone can do to help publicize their plight, any philanthropic organizations people may know of that they can contact directly. Then, a collection basket goes around. “People want to help, they come forward with good intentions, but everyone is so busy,” Nordgren said.

One option the company is just starting to explore is having the building landmarked. According to a handwritten deed dating from 1821 and an old article in The Villager newspaper, the building dates back to 1780. It may have even been a stop on the Underground Railroad, O’Hara said, pointing to a trap door in the basement that would have been used by slaves to escape to the basement.

But Underground Railroad or not, landmarking is a very long process and an unreliable opportunity. It’s the second, flimsier front in a battle that O’Hara seems determined to wage until the end.

“I don’t give up. I’m a fighter,” O’Hara said. I asked her why not just take the $2 million the Lowenthals have offered her and start a new company in a different space? She’s just “too old,” she said. And anyway, this is literally her home.

Life will go on, of course, for the Company and its players if it is evicted, and, as Horowitz says, “it’s been a lovely ride.” But, he adds, “There will be a hole. It’ll be sad to see another apartment building in New York City instead of a unique little theater.”

Charlton Street between Varick Street and 6th Avenue

A Shrine of Covet

By David Crohn

The Bible says it’s bad to covet things. I’ve always assumed that’s not because of the harm you can inflict on your object but rather the way envy can handicap your judgment or screw up a perfectly nice stroll downtown.

Well, the Bible never tried sharing a one-bedroom, illegally converted Greenpoint storefront with his coke-snorting former college roommate. Or walked along Charlton Street between Varick Street and 6th Avenue.

With its whistle-clean stoops and breezy elegance, this is a shrine of covet. To the Things You Will Never Have. Hardcore real estate porn.

And I suspect some of the people who live there like it that way. How else to explain the way in which one woman sat, in the middle of her luxuriously appointed living room, laptop splayed open, windows wantonly flung open with curtains pushed aside, the light of early afternoon pouring in? And to think, she flashed me a dirty look when my neck went rubber and I peered in as I ambled by.

This immodest woman lives on the north side of the street, in one of a long row of homes that provide the perfect primer on Federal Architecture. So named because it was born during the late 18th century, Federal Architecture was “the first of our new republic,” says the “AIA Guide to New York City.” “Dignified and restrained, it emphasized geometric form and harmonious proportion and was executed in both wood and masonry.”

Inside, the homes are stately and bright, the epitome of what can only be called high class.

The southern side of the block isn’t as luscious as the northern side—which is a little like saying Veuve Clicquot tastes better than Dom Perignon. The Elisabeth Irwin High School, which boasts Robert De Niro and former “Nation” editor Victor Navasky as alums, sits here, in a large building with an ornate and very collegiate façade. On the southeast side of the block are several old townhouses of the kind that are a common site in the best-preserved parts of Greenwich Village and SoHo.
But no matter how often I pass the townhouses downtown, and the two- and three-story homes on the north side of the street, I still salivate when I see them, and I often have to temper my envy with rhetorical thanks that I do not live in Greenpoint anymore.

Renting and Buying
The only listings to be found on this block right now are at 2 Charlton Street, the large box that is uncharacteristic of the historic beauty of the rest of this block. Charlton House, as it’s known, has studios starting at $1,575. In lieu of regality or style, it has in-house laundry facilities and 24-hour doorman service. There are two one-bedrooms for sale: one for $785,000, and the other for $889,000. If, on the other hand, you have the dough and don’t mind waiting for the opportunity, expect to pay millions for one of those Federal-style homes on the northern half of the block.

What Happened Here
Often when we talk about historical places downtown, we are talking about the history of the city itself. Not here. At the corner of Varick and Charlton Streets once stood Richmond Hill, a colonial mansion built in 1767 that served as the military headquarters for George Washington when he was commander of the Revolutionary Army. Vice President John Adams and Aaron Burr slept there. According to NYSonglines.com, in 1831 Richmond Hill was converted into a theater that featured Isaac Van Amburgh, an early pioneer of the circus, um, arts. Legend has it he was the first to stick his head in a lion’s mouth. The culmination of his act was to make a lamb lie down with a lion—a riff on the Book of Isaiah, in which the lamb actually gets with a wolf, but same diff. The theater was demolished in 1849.

Amenities
None, which is not entirely a bad thing. The length, architectural uniformity (on one side) and dearth of commercial establishments on this block give it the feeling of an enclosed mini-district, kind of like housing projects in Utopia. There is a high-end deli at the southeast corner of the block, as well as a bodegaesque mini-grocery nearby on 6th Avenue. Keep heading west on Charlton, through MacDougal Street, and the sudden shrinkage of the buildings and narrowing of the street herald your entrance into SoHo proper, which is Amenity Central.

Extreme Preservationism: Waverly Place at Christopher Street

The West Village building that suffers from neglectitis

By David Crohn

(from Our Town Downtown)

For those who fear that downtown Manhattan is quickly festering with hypermodern projections of glass and steel at the expense of everything old and grand, consider the Northern Dispensary in the West Village.

Consider this triangle on Waverly Place, at a spot where that winding way abuts with Christopher Street. The Dispensary has not been remodeled, refurbished or re-anything-ed since it was built in 1831. It has been unoccupied for about 15 years, its curious inertia and shadowy history resulting from the convergence of two factors: the charitable intentions of its builder on one hand and the eccentric detachment of its current generation of owners on the other. Inside, unused dental equipment collects dust.

“It’s one of the more vexing sites in the neighborhood,” Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation Executive Director Andrew Berman said of the Dispensary, the only building in Manhattan with one side touching two streets (Christopher and Grove) and two sides touching one (the fickle Waverly Place). “People in the area have called me. They’re frustrated about seeing that wonderful building just sitting there and possibly deteriorating.”

The city handed the site over to the titular Northern Dispensary organization (Chelsea and the West Village were then Manhattan’s uptown) when the building was built, under the stipulation that it be used only as a clinic for the poor, for people who couldn’t afford to stay in hospital. And that’s how it was operated, serving tens of thousands of the area’s sick—up until 1920, when outpatient service began to supplant walk-ins and overnighters.

Bigger and better hospitals opened around town as the city expanded, and over the years the Dispensary became solely a dental clinic. Its decline into disuse began in 1986 when the now-defunct organization that ran it refused to treat patients with AIDS. It closed in 1989 and a year later was bought by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, who had hoped to open a 15-room SRO for homeless people with AIDS. The local community board at the time endorsed the idea, but a group of neighbors and businesses opposed it. In 1998 the Diocese finally sold the Dispensary to enigmatic real estate investor William Gottlieb.

That’s where the history stops.

Unlike most investors, who buy and swiftly flip, Gottlieb liked to do absolutely nothing with his properties. One historic building in Manhattan burned down on his watch. He died in 1999, and it appears as though the ancestors who control his estate also inherited his unexplained resistance to do much of anything at all with the 75 or so properties they own around Greenwich Village—including nearly a fifth of the Meatpacking District. (Every blue moon or so, the Gottlieb estate-owned Keller Hotel, at West and Barrow Streets, will undergo a spasm of renovation.)

Hoping to see something done with the Dispensary that would be “respectful of the building’s history and beauty,” Berman and other preservationists have tried reaching out to the estate’s current lead agents, Mollie and Neal Bender, who are Gottlieb’s niece and nephew. “They never respond,” said Berman. “It’s unfortunate that there’s this state of limbo presiding over such a beautiful building.”

And even if they did, breathing life into the structure would be further impeded by that deed requiring it to be used to dispense medical help for the needy. It’s a worthy goal, but a prickly dilemma: nowhere in that contract does it say that the Dispensary has to be used for anything at all.

Renting and Buying
Not in this building. There are plenty of places on Waverly, with rents starting at about $2,000 for a studio. Grab a roommate, however, and you can probably find a convertible one-bedroom for $3,000, thus saving a few hundred on your monthly dues. When it comes to buying, the West Village has some of the priciest apartments in the city, but if you hunt around, you can probably find a decent one-bedroom for $400,000—and it might even overlook a lovely, neglected dispensary.

What Happened Here
Legend has it that Edgar Allen Poe was a patient here in 1837. Although the presence of this prominent convalescent does grant the place and the block a certain mystique, the author of “The Oblong Box” was a sickly fellow who moved around a lot (he lived a few doors down, at 137 Waverly Place, for a short time, and on West 3rd Street). So if a literary or medical historian were so inclined, he could probably dig up many places where Poe took a short-lasting cure. Broke and in the later stages of alcoholism, he was found in a Baltimore gutter wearing someone else’s clothes in 1849. He died a few days later.
dcrohn@gmail.com

Trees Fall: Seventh Ave. South between Charles and West 10th Streets

And I hear it
by David Crohn

With so many storefronts of all sizes dotting the typical downtown streetscape, it’s easy for the observer to forget that it isn’t faceless nature deciding what stays, what goes and the tenure of each occupant.
I mean, of course you know that there are people—people with fortunes, ambitions, and vicissitudes—behind the topography, but we’re rarely conscious of the fact. Most of the time our observations are steeped in the casual whimsy of the occasional consumer. And so we see the shuttered restaurant that once hosted a first date with someone we haven’t kissed in years and think, oh, that’s too bad.
The melancholy is in due course leavened by the anticipation of a stationary store that will replace the café; now we won’t have to trek uptown for that favorite pen or special grade of resume paper. And so, in the heart’s battleground, a very New York skirmish unfolds: the pragmatic versus the romantic, and the former wins. Anyway, mourning a single empty storefront would be like bemoaning a single fallen tree in a vast and dense forest.
But while surveying the streetscape on Seventh Ave. South between Charles and West 10th Streets this week, I noticed, really noticed for the first time, that the entire block was riddled with commercial casualties. Almost every business there has folded or changed hands in recent months. There’s an organic bakery replacing a copy shop, a vintage clothing store that moved elsewhere, a restaurant that morphed from a French bistro into a Moroccan tapas bar. Café Rafaello, a popular neighborhood hangout where I once saw David Johansen eating chicken wings and telling his family about CBGB, shuttered its doors. Like other paranoiacs, I do not believe in coincidences. There must be a reason for so much bad fortune all at once, some catastrophe or mustachioed villain behind my observation.
Not so, according to Andrew Pittel, of Pittel and Co.
“A bunch of leases just came up at the same time,” said Pittel, a broker who is familiar with the area.
Pittel is optimistic about the block’s future. He represents Kroman and Co., which owns another one of the commercial spaces that went out of business, a former pizza place at 131 Seventh Avenue South. He said he’s fielded interest in the 650-square-foot space from high-profile retailers and restaurateurs and looks forward to what he predicts will be a renaissance for the strip. With nothing but low-rise commercial establishments on the block, it’s like a miniature “mall,” he said, that could link up the two hubs—11th Street and the commercially thriving Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street—to the north and south.
Although restaurants have to compete against one another, entrepreneurs don’t frown on new neighbors. Said Pittel: “Competition breeds traffic, traffic breeds business.”
Amenities
The only constants to survive the lease shakeup were Agave, a mid-priced Southwestern place; Tanti Baci, an intimate Italian bistro; and the generically named, ominously bland Village Cafe. It’s a trannie bar. If you’ve ever wondered what a linebacker in heels might look like, pop in. They’re open from 9pm to 4am. There’s an ATM inside.
Buying
It’s all commercial on this block. One block over in almost every direction though, the streets are lined with very old, very beautiful and expensive co-ops, ranging in price from $625,000 for a one-bedroom all the way up.
Renting
A good friend lives right around the corner, in a building that faces Seventh Avenue South on one side and Charles Street on the other. She will soon be able to enjoy an organic muffin and the sexually ambivalent (and ambiguous) company of the patrons at the Village Café anytime she wants. All that, for only $1,298 per month, which is not bad for a great West Village location. Her place is small, but it has huge windows with gorgeous views, and her rent is stabilized: she’s been there for about five years and the price has gone up in steady but small increments every year.
Residents and Regulars
Quentin Tarantino has a pied-a-terre on Charles, just east of Seventh Avenue South.
What Happened Here
Seventh Avenue South was built in 1917 to connect Seventh Avenue to Varick Street, which begins at Houston. This coincided with the building of the West Side Interborough Rapid Transit System—better known now as the 1, 2, 3 and A, C, E lines—and follows its original route. Many structures were demolished in the process, leaving behind the unusual triangular lots that characterize the Avenue below 11th Street.

dcrohn@gmail.com

Weehawken St.

A Hidden Place:
By David Crohn

(Originally appeared in Our Town Downtown in October 2006--but I can promise you not much has changed since then.)

The Creator may have a master plan, but He hasn’t been anywhere near Weehawken St. Weehawken, the smallest street in Manhattan, is a hodge podge, proof positive that downtown evolved willy nilly—in defiant contrast to Midtown’s even grids and Squares.
At least one quarter of this block—which, by the way, makes up the entire street, between Christopher to the south, West 10th to the north, and one block over from the West Side Highway, euphemized West Street—is a handsome five-story building in white and green that wouldn’t look out of place near Fifth Ave. below 14th St. It’s probably the only piece of residential real estate on the block that can yield a healthy market rate (see below).
Then there’s the rest of the block. Two doors south of the 3-5 Weehawken St. Condominiums, as they’re known, is the slimy back end of a bar around the corner. One door south is the mysterious 7 Weehawken St., whose ghosts couldn’t be reached for this story.
Across from the Condos is a historic cottage that was just purchased for $2.2 million by the son of sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Jean-Louis Bourgeois, who also owns real estate in Africa and New Mexico, plans to fill the front, commercial end of the building facing West St. with a museum dedicated to water and the waterfront. Once a pickup dive for late-night cruisers fresh off the PATH train, then a porn shop, 392 West Street will, if Bourgeois has his soggy druthers, house a fully functioning waterfall, reaching partially underground.
Like we said, a hodge podge.
A warning to amateur surveyors and TV tour guide planners: The residents of this block frown on visitors. On a recent trip there, your inquisitive correspondent failed to draw little besides a dirty look and a grunt from a super taking out the garbage and a young woman applying a fresh coat of paint to 3 Weehawken’s façade.
Other than snoopers, Weehawken St. residents have a complaint that can be universally justified. Residents, and especially their forefathers, really hate when truckers, cabs, pedestrians or anyone else stop to pee there. So much so that along the west end of the street there are five signs asking people not to urinate, with four different ways of saying it. Our favorite, writ large in ye olde typeface: “Please respect our neighbors and our NEIGHBORHOOD. Do not urinate on this Block.”

Buying
Unless you can make do with a refrigerator box and SOMEWHERE ELSE TO URINATE, the only viable place to live on the block is at the 3-5 Weehawken St. Condominiums. But it’s a nice place. After the apartments were converted in April, most of the renters bought in quickly at a reduced rate, said Carolyn Palmieri, a broker who works for the management company. The two units left—one at number 3, one at 5, both one-bedrooms—are selling for $1,000 per square foot. That’s relatively inexpensive for the Far West Village. But what makes that price a steal, at least for one of those units, is that it provides river views, and as anyone familiar with Manhattan real estate can tell you, river views are precious. And because the city designated the area a Historic District in May, that view is here to stay.

Renting
None available since April.

Residents and Regulars
Handbag designer and former White House page Monica Lewinsky lives and shops for groceries at the Archives, nearby at 666 Greenwich St.

What Happened Here
Perhaps ghosts really do haunt the block. The boundaries of the new Weehawken Street Historic District are partially concurrent with the walls of the Newgate State Prison, which closed in 1797. In 1834 the city gave the area another shot, building a market along the newly cut alley consisting of “a wooden open-shed structure with wide overhanging eaves, a building type that was the most common for markets in the United States in the 19th century,” according to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. But nobody shopped there, and the market closed. Shipbuilder George M. Munson built a saloon out of remnants of the market in 1867, one of the first documented liquor businesses in the area. The address—392 West Street.

Amenities
Let’s see, besides the big D’Agostino a short walk over to Greenwich St., there’s the Badlands porn emporium on West St. and the Dugout gay sports bar a few steps away on Christopher. Which is to say, you got it all.

Perfect for
Manhattanites who drive. The history buff. Those who long to see Jersey. Gustave von Aschenbach.