First Avenue & 3rd Street (First Houses)

Should I apologize for my long absence?  Have you all been waiting by the computer for me to write?  I know a lot of bloggers out there post multiple things a day.  But hey, that means by my analysis that I’m only about 264 posts behind since last time.  Piece of cake!  Let me just take a nap first and I’ll get right on it.

There’s still so much I want to talk about!  Remember how we were starting to look at some limited equity co-ops on the Lower East Side – as a kind of warm up to looking at some of the public housing?  Well let’s look at some of the public housing!  I’ve been thinking about it.

Because you read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (for example) and you come away feeling like public housing in the United States has been a failure.  Which it largely has been, both in execution and in design.  I mean in its physical design, which is what Jane especially goes after: the whole tower in the park thing; separating the development from the activity of the street and so ensuring that it will be unvisited by everyone who doesn’t live there and hence (in practice) be unwelcoming and unsafe for almost everyone (eg. you don’t walk through the projects, you walk around them).  In the larger sense of its design, as in the way it was envisioned, you could argue that public housing is a failure as well – made intentionally shoddy so as not to compete with private real estate concerns.  It had to be in essence for the poorest of the poor, because if it was for the working class, or (god forbid) the middle class even, they might start thinking that they didn’t have to get a mortgage (fully insured by the federal government – don’t call that government spending though) and buy their house on the private market.  And once it was for the poorest of the poor that pretty much sealed the deal in terms of execution – namely that the execution would be poor.  Poor for the poorest of the poor.  Spend very little money on the upkeep and security, etc, and then talk about what animals these poorest of the poor are to let their living spaces go this way.

This notion of public housing being a failure goes much further than Jane Jacobs of course (who after all, published her book in 1961) – at this point it’s part of pop culture really: the projects equal bad.  But there’s a kind of a false conflation that goes on I think in this notion of the failure of public housing – namely, equating the failure in design and execution with a failure in intentions or goals.  The point of public housing is to provide affordable housing.  And public housing does this by providing large apartment buildings that are 100% affordable (as opposed to inclusionary zoning’s 20%, for example).  Now yes, these are 100% affordable apartment buildings that in many cases  need a lot of improvement in terms of maintenance and security but these are 100% affordable apartment buildings that a lot of people want to live in (in NYC the waiting list is close to 250,000 families).  So yes, again, it needs some help in the execution, but the fundamental idea is sound.  People need affordable housing.  The private market often does a bad job in providing it.  If the government wants affordable housing it should build affordable housing.  That’s what it used to do!

And it did it first in NYC of course.  New York is home to the first public housing built in the United States – appropriately named First Houses – opened to its first tenants on Dec. 3 1935, as the first project of the newly created New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).  The 4-5 story, 8 building development still stands on 3rd St. between First Avenue and Avenue A, with a portion running down Avenue A to 2nd St. (and yeah, I know they might not be much to look at, but hey, it’s public housing).  The project replaced a number of older tenements on the site as an act of “slum clearance” – one of the requirements of the federal funding it received. The original idea had been to only replace every third tenement with new buildings but it was soon apparent that they were all in such poor structural condition that the whole lot would have to go.  Not all the owners were happy about this, and when one contested (Andrew Muller) – on the grounds that seizing the buildings, even with “just compensation,” went against the New York State (not to mention the United States) Constitution – the case made it all the way to the New York State Court of Appeals.  The court ultimately sided with the city, in what would serve as a landmark case regarding eminent domain.

But not all of the owners were so opposed.  In fact the principal owner of the site was one Vincent Astor, son of John Jacob Astor IV, himself the son of William Backhouse Astor Jr. and Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor (man, even when you’re talking about low income housing it’s hard to stay away from these folks).  Vincent Astor had inherited the site – along with a massive fortune – at the age of 20, after his father died on the Titanic.  By the early 1930s he had dedicated himself to philanthropy and was looking to separate himself from the role of slumlord.  He sold his parcels to NYCHA for half of their assessed value – a purchase made possible in large part by the issuance of a tax-free 66-year bond by NYCHA that effectively established the Authority’s credit.

It was a big deal when First Houses opened – serving 122 families at an average monthly rent of $6.05 per room (equivalent to roughly $100 per room today).  The dedication in Dec. of 1935 was broadcast on national radio and besides the reading of a congratulatory telegram from President Roosevelt, included speeches by Mrs. Roosevelt, Mayor LaGuardia, Governor Lehman, Robert Moses (of course! he was everywhere) and a whole host of other names I want to explore someday.  There’s a lot more here I want to explore!  Can you all wait for it?  (By my analysis there are approximately 4 of you).  Take a nap and get back to me.

First Avenue & 66th Street

I read Summery.org and I get jealous (I mean man, who is this woman?).  Posts like this one and this one especially.  It must be amazing to live somewhere where you can walk into a building that’s 500, or a 1000, or sometimes 2000 (0r more!) years old – to have such ready access to the relics and reminders of these whole other ways of being human that once existed on the earth.  And what relics!  I mean, how do you top them?  I’ve sometimes wondered that about the Europeans of today – do they feel in some inherent sense that they’re simply living amongst the remnants of their golden age?  Like they have to face daily the physical artifacts of what must have been the high point of their culture?  I mean, don’t get me wrong, despite what I might sometimes think I wouldn’t have really wanted to live back then myself, what with the plagues and the torture and the warfare, the public executions and the lack of toilet paper.  Still, to be able to wander amongst those relics in some kind of hazy dream of antiquity would be nice.

Here in New York the closest we can get to that is approximations and replicas – though some of them can do the trick, in a pinch.  The St. John Nepomucene Church has struck me as a decent one of late.  Their church building on First Avenue and 66th Street is the parish’s third since its founding in 1895, though it was the first one on this location; the parish started in a building on East 4th Street and then moved to East 57th Street before landing here.  Despite its appearance this church wasn’t built until 1925 – though again I guess you wouldn’t have thought that it’s been here since the 700s.  That’s kind of the look it has right?  It was modeled on the Sicilian Romanesque style (hey I just remembered that I wrote about the Romanesque style once in my oft recalled yet long forgotten youth).  Those lions kind of remind me of Venice too – back before people knew what lions really looked like.  The church itself is actually a Roman Catholic Slovak congregation but clearly the architect – John V. Van Pelt by the way – chose not to go that architectural route…though to be honest I’m not sure what a Roman Catholic Slovak architectural route would actually look like anyway.

Though the Nepomucene in the church’s name refers to its Slovakian heritage, so they’ve got that going at least.  It’s in honor of Saint John of Nepomuk – not to be confused with Saint John the Apostle (also known as Saint John the Evangelist, and the only apostle by the way not to die a martyr’s death) or Saint John the Baptist (he had his head cut off by King Herod) or Saint John Fisher (also beheaded, by King Henry VIII) or Saint John Houghton (drawn and quartered) or any of the other maybe 75 or so Saint Johns – no this was the one who died by being thrown into the Vltava river.  He was thrown into the Vltava River, the story goes, by King Wenceslaus because John of Nepomuk – the confessor of the Queen of Bohemia, King Wenceslaus’ wife – refused to divulge the secrets of her confession.  So yeah.  You know that Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslaus”?  Well that fucker threw this guy into the river!

Or actually not – the Wenceslaus of  Christmas cheer was Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia, supposedly assassinated by his brother Boleslav the Cruel (no relation to Vigo the Carpathian) in 935 and elevated to sainthood sometime later; he was also posthumously named a king and is seen today as the patron saint of the Czech state.  The Wenceslaus who drowned Saint John of Nepomuk in the river was King Wenceslaus IV, a member of the House of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia (by inheritance) as well as the German King (by election – by a bunch of princes, not the common people) and ruling under the name King of the Romans, which I believe means he was a Holy Roman Emperor – ruling from Prague.  All of which just goes to show that the world back then really didn’t make much sense.  But I don’t know, does it make much more sense now?  I’m writing this on a magical machine that I don’t understand at all – that will somehow allow these words to appear on a screen wherever in the world you might be sitting as long as it has something called an internet connection.  I don’t know; we don’t make buildings the way they did back then, I’ll give em that.  Although there’s little threat I might be drawn and quartered for anything that I might do or say or simply think – or even be thrown into a river for it.  That’s kind of nice.  I’m sipping on an iced coffee.  I don’t believe in Jesus.

First Avenue & 9th Street

All right so raise your hand if you haven’t spent some time here in your life – late nights hanging out, partying, dancing, or I don’t know, maybe even seeing some performance art. It’s pretty much everyone I’ve ever met, right? I’m not really sure how I can even write about this corner. But then again, how could I not write about this corner. I’ve spent enough time here the last few weeks (or did I mean to say, years?) that I can’t imagine writing on anything else. Are we too old to have a clubhouse? Probably. But whatever, this place is pretty much my clubhouse.

I’m talking about Performance Space 122 by the by, but again, most people probably know that already. I’m going to turn 30 this year, and I was 23 when I first started working here. So you know, it’s more or less where I’ve spent my twenties. And I’m really happy about that. Honestly. I don’t know if I’ve learned the wrong lesson or something, but I love working here. I love it more than ever. I have a mild amount of responsibility – I don’t get paid too much. I take it seriously (that word can mean a lot of things) – I give it my heart over and over again. I say hello to a lot of people. It seems somehow important, in a totally inconsequential way. Sorry to talk about myself so much, but I guess I’m saying, IT’S ALL GOOD. It’s the little moments, too, that make up history: the friendly interaction, the shuffling of feet. It’s okay to romanticize yourself, or even better, to romanticize life, especially if by doing so you kind of recognize your place in the universal equation. It’s so much better than complaining. I think a lot of the discourse these days is about categorizing, labeling and setting up false dichotomies. And I think that’s really boring.

I want to quote Melville for some reason (Moby Dick!): “What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about – however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody is one way or other served in much the same way – either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.” And this, “Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid.”

I know, he just set up a dichotomy there. But let’s just say I’m knocking down the dichotomy of dichotomy vs. non-dichotomy. What the hell am I talking about?

Performance Space 122 started out as Public School 122 (a middle school), built in 1894. By the 1970s it had been closed and abandoned by the city, but a number of visual artists moved in and started using the old classrooms as studios. In 1979 the choreographer Charles Moulton started using the second floor cafeteria (now P.S.’s main theater) for rehearsals and workshops. It would grow from there to become a year round presenting facility (thanks to the work of a lot of people who I’m not going to name here (Mark Russell!)) – with the downstairs gymnasium being converted to the second of P.S.’s two spaces. There are still artist studios on the top floors, with an affiliated gallery space on 9th Street, and the theater company Mabou Mines has their offices here as well.

So yeah, I’m going to plug the place. Come by here if you’ve never been. And come back here if you have. It’s awesome. Really, it’s one hundred percent awesome. Really? One hundred percent awesome? Well I seem to think so. I guess I’m in a good mood these days. But does that start to get boring? I probably say the same thing over and over again. David Byrne sings, “You start a conversation you can’t even finish/You’re talking a lot, but you’re not saying anything/When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed/Say something once, why say it again?” But then, he was singing about a Pyscho Killer. If we all said something once, what the hell would we keep talking about? Speaking of which, have I mentioned the weather yet? It still feels cold! Although statistically, perhaps, a bit above the normal.

(Originally posted Jan. 15th, 2010 on Takethehandle.com)