CHARAS / El Bohio / P.S. 64

This is the former P.S. 64 building and location of CHARAS/El Bohio, on 9th between B and C (the Christodora seen on the left). There’s a lot that I could write here, but I will try to condense it to the best of my ability: this building was constructed between 1904 and 1906, crucial years in the evolution of the LES from “Kleindeutschland” into a largely Eastern-European Jewish neighborhood. Designed by C.B.J Snyder, P.S. 64 was an innovative public school building, among other things the first in NYC to provide free professional theater to the public (its grand Auditorium was the site of many productions, talks, and important local political events - supposedly FDR would gauge the strength of his Jewish base by the turnout for his speeches at the school). In the 70’s the city shut the doors and it fell into disrepair. CHARAS, a community organization that had sprung out of Puerto Rican gang culture, alongside Reverend Norman Eddy’s Adopt-A-Building organization (which had recently moved its headquarters from East Harlem to the LES), worked together to reclaim this great building as a cultural center for the area many warmly dubbed Loisaida. From their new home in “El Bohio”, CHARAS worked not only to host after school and physical fitness programs, arts classes, foster many early artists, activists, and cultural organizations through residency programs and by providing space in the famous auditorium; they were also urban ecology pioneers, working with the city to install some of the first solar-heating in public housing, establishing many of our favorite community gardens, even building geodesic domes with Buckminster Fuller. El Bohio was open and active until 1999 when the Giuliani administration’s sale of the building to millionaire developer Gregg Singer closed. In an unprecedented turn, DeBalsio announced during his re-election campaign that the city was interested in re-acquiring the building, despite Singer’s years of attempts to develop the site, and recent lawsuits contending a conspiracy against his plans to turn the site into college dorms. As of writing this I do not know where these plans stand.

Comments

NYCHA's "NextGen Neighborhood" Towers & the Fate of the "White House"

In a previous post I discussed the city's plan to demolish the LaGuardia Bathhouse building, one of the oldest public baths in NYC, an attempt in-part to save face in the wake of the recently unveiled plans to raise the East River Park. I anticipate similar news for the "White House", the former Rivington Street Public Baths, which sits squatly in the middle of the Baruch Houses, maybe a 15 minute walk from the LaGuardia Bathhouse building. A short history: At 118 years old, the Baruch Bathhouse building is not only the oldest public bathhouse in the city, but also the first of its kind to be opened in New York. It's namesake, Dr. Simon Baruch, was an Eastern European Jew who moved to South Carolina in 1855 (at 15 years old) to live with, and work for, a wealthy German-Jewish family. After receiving his medical degree in 1862, Baruch served as a surgeon in the f*cking Confederate army (even treating soldiers for weeks after the defeat at Gettys

Union of Orthodox Rabbis Building Bought and Emptied –– Artifacts Remain

Wednesday afternoon, a childhood friend of mine –– whose family has been at their apartment on East Broadway since 1956 –– got in touch with me about what sounded like people clearing out the buildings next to his at 237 and 235 East Broadway (Sharis Adath Israel and the former home of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis respectively). When I arrived on the scene that same afternoon, the doors to 235 East Broadway were being shut and two Junklugger trucks were just pulling away from the curb, stacked with what looked like large amounts of furniture. East Broadway was littered with papers that had blown off the back of these trucks, and as I started to pick them up I saw that many of these documents represented records of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, correspondence in Hebrew and Yiddish, newspaper clippings, pages from religious books, all of which dating back decades. I called Junkluggers and asked if they would be able to intercept any of these documents before they were inevitab

Paper Bag Players Sign Disappears From 185 East Broadway

After almost forty years, the simple block letter sign reading "Paper Bag Players" was taken out of the window at 185 East Broadway, almost a year after the building sold for 6.1 million dollars. Founded in 1958 (four years after the start of Joe Papp's "New York Shakespeare Festival", later Shakespeare in the Park, which first held productions at the nearby East River Amphitheater) the Paper Bag Players are a non-profit children's theater group which in many respects attempted to meld aspects of alternative theater with programming for children's education, arriving at 185 East Broadway around 1981. I called and spoke to somebody at Paper Bag Players a week ago and was told they had relocated uptown, having permanently left their space at 185 East Broadway after the building was sold. I wish to speak briefly on the history of 185 East Broadway, but in doing so must include 183 and 187 East Broadway as well (to the right and left

A Hidden Lower East Side

Search This Blog