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Image provided by: Jefferson Market Library
1 % ■ • v^jnThis Issue; ^ / , ''v / 5/fOj^'W(/'s Company Preseif§ Its 10th Season .?>;>, SEE PACE NINE lEllott Feld In “The Real McCoy.\ (Greenfield Photo) ^ ■ downtown Board ^^Mjives Its OK School as Part Of Office Complex STORY PAGE TWO .1. i l . .■ (..'•C- Rap Design for New Sixth Avenue Building BY BRIAN O’DONOGHUE The marathon five-hour April 19 meeting of Community Board Two*s full member ship featured: fireworks over proposals to establish a new detoxification center and erect several new buildings in the Village; cheers from community groups which should receive emergency funding; and thrills as board members were sent fleeing from the auditorium in St. Vincents Hospital when a fire-alarm sounded. In other business, board members endors ed several bills which would mandate com mercial rent control. Public hearings were also demanded regarding both a planned resource recovery plant, which would oc cupy 4.3 acres by Canal Street and the Hud son River, and the State’s policies on deal ing with hazardous wastes. Five public hearings have already been held on the State’s approach to managing and transpor ting hazardous wastes, noted Eva Ettisch, chair of CB Two’s Environment Committee. However, she added, \the closest hearing was in Poughkeepsie.\ The hottest topic of the evening was a design for a six-story 34-unit residential building which would occupy 360-374 Sixth Avenue. By a 19 to 2 vote, board members asked the applicant to return with a \better The attempt of Loew’s Theaters to build a multi-plex cinema on tWs site gone, Communi ty Board Two members now say they want to see a “distinguished building” on this wide- open Sixth Avenue site, currently a Kinney Parking lot. (Vlllager/O’Donoghue Photo) design\ for the location, currently a parking lot, which was described as a \most impor tant site in the Greenwich Village Historic District.\ Board members were not kind to the design which architect James Polshek had described with obvious pride during the public hearing portion of the meeting. “He threw it together on a bad weekend,” theorized Helen lanello. \It’s cold, institu tional, an arsenal, an orphanage,\ declared Carol Jane way. \Bathroom tiles around the windows,\ she added, did not in her opinion constitute \a distinguished design.\ The opinion of the board was summed up best, perhaps, by Harris Diamond, who said, \ it’s OK, but OK is not enough.\ Polshek, a Village resident and dean of Columbia University’s School of Architec ture, squirmed in his scat and seemed to be struggling to contain himself as board members heaped abuse on his design. Dur ing a presentation earlier in the evening, the architect, whose clients include Pepsi Cola, Con Ed and the Emigrant Savings Bank, told the board, \I personally have worked very hard on this building. I take it, perhaps, as seriously as I have ever taken any building.\ \What we’d like,\ he said, \is a resolution Continued on Page 4 A Walking Tour Through Village Area’s Radical Past BY MAGDA DAJANI This is the season that taking walks start again, with groups taking to the streets, fill ed with folks whose heads are tilted towards the sky. One of the more unusual of those—and perhaps one that is of as much interest to downtown residents, themselves, as well as to tourists—is “A Walking Tour of Radical New York.\ This tour will keep you amused, walking, and looking up. Architecturally, New York has always been a great place for looking upward for the surprises at the tops of the buildings. Even as far back as the 17th Century, this was true, for the five and six story houses that the Dutch built had scrolled gable roofs. The modern tours are about an hour and a half of zig-zagging and backtracking around the Village area, chasing down the sites or architectural and historical happenings. The tour leaders. Bob Palmer and Scott Lewis, alternate smoothly with the narra tion. Palmer provides the political/historical anecdotes, and Lewis supplies the architec- tural/constructural information. And they both present the facts with an infectious en thusiasm. The tours take place on the first Saturday of every month, now through November, and meet in front of the Peace Building, 339 Lafayette. This location, owned by the War Resistors League, is home to a number of other movement groups, including the NYC Anti-Nuclear Group, The Womens Pentagon Action, Episcopal Churches for South Africa, and Freespace Alternate U (a school). It’s also where Palmer and Lewis both met. One of the first stops on the tour, on the corner of Bond and Lafayette Streets on the south side, is a womens’ shelter. Right next to it are three consecutive white buildings, whose facades are made entirely of cast iron, typical of the post-Civil War period, when you could order pre-fabricated cast iron facades for a building from a catalog. “What’s special about it,\ says Lewis, \is that it’s a good one. It’s eclectic.\ It was designed by Steven Hatch, and built in 1871 for a publisher. At 670 Broadway, at Bond Street, is the former Brook’s Brothers store, built in 1874, and designed by architect George Harney, who, with John Ruskin (an important art critic in 19th century England), initiated the “truth as beauty\ philosophy in architec ture, which refused any applied decoration. According to Lewis, they were influenced (Villager Photo by Brian O'Donoghue) by Eastlake, of whom Lewis says, \He sort of wrote not-very-accurate historie.s of Gothic architecture.\ This cast iron building is also standing on the site of the former home of Albert Gallatin, who was Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury, from 1801-1814, Another notable spot on the tour is Pfaffs, a bar under the sidewalk at Broadway north of Bleecker, which was a frequent hangout for Walt Vhiitman, and about which he wrote poems of “ ...Broadway's voice overhead..’’ One block north and also on Broadway is the site of the former Broadway Grand Cen tral Hotel, where Trotsky gave a farewell dinner to his friends before returning to Russia, It also was the subject of a number of landlord horror stories, and finally ended its life when it collapsed on the remaining tenants in 1974, killing a number of them. Palmer delights in telling of the occasion when the hotel’s owner had been taken to court by the building inspector, and were fined only $50 by Magistrate Irving Cooper. A new building for NYU housing was erected there around 1980, But, this location has more history to it . ^ Continued on Page }
