East Village turns out to save its ‘heart and soul’

Villager photo by Jefferson Siegel
Robert Tierney, Landmarks Preservation Commission chairperson, listening to testimony at Tuesday’s public hearing on the old P.S. 64, a photo of which is on the laptop screen in front of him.

By Sarah Ferguson

Preservationists, community advocates and East Village residents packed the hearing room of the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday to sing the praises of the former P.S. 64 on E. Ninth St.

With owner Gregg Singer still determined to raze the back half of the building to put up a 19-story dorm, local residents pleaded tearfully at times with the commissioners to grant this century-old elementary school building permanent landmark status.

One by one, people took to the mic to testify on the cultural and historic significance of the now empty school, which was designed by famed architect Charles B.J. Snyder in 1904 for the neighborhood’s then teeming immigrant population of German Lutherans and Eastern European Jews, and later became home to CHARAS/El Bohio, a Puerto Rican-run community center, after the city abandoned the property in the 1970s.

“It’s the heart and soul of the community, and to have this building removed would just be a travesty,” said Barbara Caporale, a filmmaker turned community activist who battled to save CHARAS.

The written testimony submitted by area politicians was equally impassioned. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn termed the building a “landmark of community struggle.”

City Comptroller William Thompson called it a “critical cultural resource for the East Village.”

And Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo, an aide to Congressmember Nydia Velazquez delivered what sounded like a prose poem of devotion. Speaking for Velazquez, she celebrated the old P.S. 64 as a symbol of “transcendence through struggle,” terming it “no less than our most important historical and architectural treasure.”

At P.S. 64, Maldonado-Salcedo noted, Snyder experimented with an innovative H-plan design that provided raised courtyards and maximized light and air — then considered key to enlightening young minds. And its ground-floor auditorium was one of the first to provide free assembly space to the local community “thirsting for news and culture,” Maldonado-Salcedo said.

“The Lower East Side is underlandmarked,” she continued. “We are losing significant buildings and replacing them with conventional condos, dormitories and bars.”

Councilmember Rosie Mendez was the only elected official to appear in person. She spoke plainly but emotionally about the legacy of CHARAS and its co-founder Armando Perez, who besides working alongside her as a Democratic district leader was also a close friend.

Mendez described CHARAS as a hub for the homesteading and community garden movements that rose up on the Lower East Side during the 1970s, as residents worked to reclaim the then bombed-out neighborhood. She credited CHARAS with starting the neighborhood’s first recycling program at La Plaza Cultural garden down the block, which CHARAS members founded. Many nonprofit organizations were “incubated” in the buildings cavernous classrooms, she noted.

Mendez also said that her predecessor, Margarita Lopez, had wanted to landmark the building before it was auctioned to Singer in 1998.

“We didn’t learn the procedures. We didn’t know how,” she conceded.

Eighty-six-year-old Lillian Lifflander recalled how her brothers attended P.S. 64 “after 1925,” when it was still a boys school.

“The Lower East Side was divided then,” she told the commissioners. “When you walked around you knew this was a Polish street, that was an Italian street. The only thing that united the parents was their love and pride in P.S. 64. There can be no better tribute or memorial to the immigrant population of New York than to designate P.S. 64 as a landmark.”

Another woman who said she was raised by immigrants born in Alphabet City contrasted the legacy of inclusion symbolized by P.S. 64 and CHARAS, with the “new high-income co-ops going up in the neighborhood, which give us the message that we no longer can afford to be in the neighborhood.”

“It’s really important that you send a message that we still belong here and we matter,” she said.

Her points were echoed by Father Julio Torres of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery.

“We are choked by gentrification,” he said. “Even my own church is being threatened by this drive to take over the East Village and turn it into something else.”

An aide to State Senator Martin Connor made his own “show and tell” presentation: a cardboard box filled with 5,000 unmailed postcards collected from people who support saving the building — in addition to another 15,000 postcards already sent in and some 5,300 handwritten letters.

Only two people spoke out against landmarking the building. The first was Allen Bortnik, a retired businessman from Brooklyn who has been involved in political races on the Lower East Side, and who said he took an interest in Singer because of Singer’s family’s history of building cemeteries and retirement communities for Jews.

Bortnick described P.S. 64 as a “worn-out and dilapidated building that has outlived its usefulness” and claimed the campaign to save it was led by “jilted miscreants who seek unlawful gain at someone else’s expense” by seeking to recoup the building from Singer.

Bortnick also came out in support of installing a dorm there for foreign and out-of-state students.

“Considering that many of these students are now forced to live doubled-, tripled- and even quadrupled-up in dilapidated buildings, on the upper floors of walk-ups, what is wrong with that?” he demanded, seemingly unaware that many long-term residents are forced to live that way, too.

The other dissident was Roberto Caballero, a longtime nemesis of Margarita Lopez, who seemed to oppose the preservation of P.S. 64 because she championed it.

“Antonio Pagan ignited this entire process by assuring that P.S. 64 would be auctioned,” he said of the former councilmember. “In the same way that Giuliani honored Pagan by auctioning the building, Bloomberg is honoring Margarita Lopez by landmarking it.”

But their complaints did not dampen the enthusiasm of the 12 commissioners, who seemed won over by three solid hours of testimony.

Commissioner Roberta Brandes Gratz called it “the most extraordinary public hearing that I’ve ever witnessed in my three years serving” on the commission. She and two other commissioners announced they were ready to designate the building immediately.

But at the request of Singer, the board agreed to hold a second hearing on June 6, when the developer will have the opportunity to bring his own “expert witnesses” to testify why the building does not merit designation.

In exchange for the delay, Landmarks Chairperson Robert Tierney said Singer’s attorney had signed a “standstill agreement” barring him from performing any interior or exterior work until June 7, the day after the hearing.

Asked by Brooklyn commission member Libby Ryan what would happen if Singer violated that agreement, Tierney responded: “Then the owner would come to us with unclean hands, and that is not in his best interests.”

Singer’s attorney Jeffrey Glen acknowledged that landmark status now seems a shoo-in for P.S. 64, though he did not rule out further legal challenges. He said that landmarking the building would unfairly burden Singer’s efforts to develop the property, because it would require him to apply for a certificate of appropriateness every time he wanted to change something.

Singer is still appealing the city’s rejection of his application to demolish the back half of the building to put up the dormitory tower, while preserving P.S. 64’s old facade. And he’ll be back in court on Monday to fend off a legal challenge brought by four local residents, who are seeking to prevent him from acting on an already approved permit that allows him to remove the Beaux Arts building’s ornate cast-stone cornices and window detailing.

On May 9, Appellate Court Judge David Saxe extended an injunction restraining Singer from acting on that permit, but the case has yet to be resolved.

Even landmarking doesn’t prevent Singer from demolishing those architectural elements, though he’d be under the scrutiny of the Landmarks Commission first and risk arousing the ire of City Hall.

At the close of Tuesday’s hearings, the impetuous Singer was still threatening to take his chances.

“This building is coming down,” he told East Village Community Coalition member Michael Rosen, who lives in the penthouse of the adjacent Christodora building, and has made preserving P.S. 64 his personal crusade.

“Bye, bye,” Singer added, waving his fingers at Rosen mockingly.