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Bialystoker Nursing Home To Be Flanked by Glass Towers


     The Bialystoker Home for the Aged, a striking Art-Deco building on East Broadway and Clinton, was opened in 1931, a symbol of the Jewish community's dedication to providing care for the significant elderly population of the neighborhood. Between the 1860's and the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of the Jewish population of Bialystok, Poland, (yes you guessed it, the town to which the bialy owes its name) settled in the Lower East Side - numbering in the tens of thousands, they made up a significant portion of the Jewish population of the neighborhood. As the Jewish immigrant community on the LES swelled in the beginning of the 20th century, so too did the need for a community-centered system of elderly care increase, especially one which would cater to the large Orthodox community which made up a significant portion of the older Jews in the area. 
     In an incredible effort, Yiddish mutual aid societies organized the poor and working class Bialystoker community into a system of "home-ownership" in which families were able to contribute small amounts of money towards the purchasing of the literal bricks with which the building was constructed. When the center opened it not only provided hundreds of residences, but an auditorium, two synagogues, and housed the Bialystoker landsleit, a relief organization for Bialystoker's across the globe.
      In 2011 the Bialystoker Nursing Home closed after 80 years of continuing to help to care for the large elderly population of the neighborhood, Jewish and not, and then in 2013 it was granted landmark status after years of efforts by local community organizations - in the Fall of 2015, the building itself (228 East Broadway), Dorah Cohen Memorial Park to it's left (226 East Broadway) and the former office building (the "consulate building" for Flight of the Conchords fans, at 232 East Broadway), sold together for roughly $18 million - and then, only a year later, the LLC which purchased the properties flipped them for $47.5 million dollars to the Ascend Group, helmed by Rob Kaliner, who rose to prominence with the 2007 construction of the aptly named "A Building" luxury condominiums at 13th between A and 1st. Describing his motivations in an interview a year later, Kliner said there had been "no luxury product on the market at the time in the East Village." (Since then, Kliner partnered with real-estate "mini mogul" Ben Shaoul in 2011 to purchase and develop the former nursing home at 62 Avenue B [itself the former site of the Avenue B Loews Theater, built by Marcus Loew in 1913 after demolishing a series of tenements, one of which Loew himself was born in], converting it into the Liberty Toye luxury apartment building in 2013, to be sold again for $85 million this past summer.)
      Four days after Ascend Group's 2016 purchase of the string of properties along East Broadway, Kliner, without warning, ordered the 45 year-old Jewish heritage mural on the west face of 232 East Broadway to be whitewashed.

(painted in either 1971 or 1973)
Soon after, the building entirely was demolished as Kliner moved ahead with his plans to erect two glass towers, one on either side of the Bialystoker Nursing Home, at anywhere from 15-33 stories. This past June, in a stunning move, the residents of the Seward Park Co-Op behind the properties, voted against the $54 million dollar sale of their air-rights, seeming putting a halt to Kliner's primary plan for the towers. While stunned by this rebuke, Kliner responded venomously that this rebuke would hurt the cash-strapped Co-Op complex much more than it would his business, as they will presumably will go ahead with the more modest plan to build 17-story and 20-story tower instead.
       
    

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