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“We Are at War”: Heshy Tischler Is Not Done Stirring Up Orthodox Brooklyn

2020-10-09T15:35:08-04:00

Stephen Lovekin/Shutterstock

Borough Park’s populist agitator may be arrested on Monday. His response: “You just wait for round two.”

Editor’s note: This story was produced in partnership with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

On a sunny afternoon in June, Heshy Tischler showed up at Williamsburg’s Middleton Playground with bolt cutters. The local playgrounds had been closed for months, and because the peak of the pandemic had passed — although it was hardly over, and risk remained substantial — the large families of Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods were frustrated. Videos showing lively playgrounds in other neighborhoods were circulating in Orthodox WhatsApp chats, and the prospect of a summer without sleepaway camps loomed. For weeks, Tischler had been at protests calling on the governor to open summer camps, going so far as naming it “the Heshy Movement.” Now he was taking matters into his own hands.

Cheers rose as the lock and chain fell away. “Come on in, guys,” he said, in his trademark voice — Jackie Gleason by way of Moe from The Simpsons — as boys in yarmulkes and girls in long dresses milled around him. One man chanted “Hesh-y! Hesh-y!” The next day, local elected officials — State Senator Simcha Felder, State Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein, and City Councilman Kalman Yeger — were standing by Tischler’s side, opening up playground after playground in defiance of the mayor’s orders intended to stop the spread of COVID-19. They even posed on a swing set, Tischler standing behind the city councilman and state assemblyman, ready to give them a push. The brazen act of civil disobedience, amplified by the fact that Tischler himself did not wear a mask, resonated far beyond Brooklyn. Ted Cruz tweeted “Bravo.”

He had unlocked more than a playground. He was now well on his way to folk-hero status among the youth of Borough Park, who, as the neighborhood stepped up its refusal to abide by the restrictions that Andrew Cuomo announced for stemming new COVID outbreaks, would become Tischler’s army, following him into battle against the governor, the media, and members of his own community. This week, it all blew up in the streets, leaving a lot of people in his community appalled. “He’s an opportunist,” Yosef Rapaport, a publicist and podcast host who lives in Borough Park, said. “Every community has its crazy hotheads, and those people are attracted to him.”

“I’m willing to give my life for it,” Tischler told me on Wednesday of his fight to keep the yeshivas and synagogues open and the governor out of his neighborhood. “I will not stand idly by while they’re doing lies. And I will stand before the holy maker and tell him that I tried my best to fight this. Because these people are lying.”

It’s all part of The Heshy Show — the never-ending stream of videos Tischler posts to his Instagram and Twitter feeds, which make the rounds in Orthodox WhatsApp groups, that tell the story of Tischler’s ascent to hero status in young Borough Park. They were also promotional material for The Just Enough Heshy Show, Tischler’s radio program that airs Wednesday evenings, as he reminds his Instagram followers in most of the videos he posts. The real-life show and the radio show are one.

To the Orthodox Jewish residents of Borough Park, Tischler is their own Donald Trump. To those mothers and children who looked longingly at that playground until he stepped in, he’s the big guy — literally — speaking up for the little guy who feels powerless and alienated. To virtually everyone else, he’s a boor who whips up deadly behavior, one who puts his followers at risk of illness and death in order to further his ambitions. In the months following the playground event, he would threaten Cuomo that “if you touch my boy Trump, I’m going to put you over my knee, Cuomo, and smack you around like a little girl when you cry”; call Mayor Bill de Blasio an “idiot” (and sometimes “the Führer”); call Chirlane McCray, de Blasio’s wife, a “retard woman,” as well as an unclear epithet that was variously heard as racist or merely insulting. Earlier this week, he ginned up a mob to corner an Orthodox reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, calling him an informer.

Community members and those who grew up there and left declined to comment on Tischler on the record. Some worried that giving him attention would only encourage him; others worried he would come after them if they spoke out. City Council Speaker Corey Johnson declined to comment on Tischler’s behavior, although he retweeted condemnations of the attacks on Kornbluh. So did State Senator Brad Hoylman, at first: “Our personal belief is that this kind of extremism is inflamed by attention, and we’d prefer not to contribute to it,” his spokesperson said on Thursday. But Hoylman later changed his mind, calling for the Brooklyn district attorney to investigate the violence at Wednesday night’s protest, and saying of Tischler, “I don’t know the man personally, and I don’t know how much support he truly has among his neighbors. He does not speak for all.” Added Rapaport, “We need to avoid embarrassing people, but he embarrasses himself. I have no compunction denouncing his violence. He is responsible for instigating it and creating an uncontrollable scene.” For a lot of New Yorkers, this was the week they got more than enough Heshy.

The playground episode in June marked the beginning of his rise from an ex-convict and radio host to leader of an anti-lockdown protest movement that would rock the city and draw the bewildered attention of the mayor, the governor, and just about every other resident of the city who wondered what on earth was going on in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn.

Although he’s a longtime Borough Park resident, Tischler himself is something of an outsider. In a community where most men wear a black suit every day, he stands out in his untucked wrinkled white shirt, his signature press pass (really an advertisement for the radio show) slung around the collar. Unlike most of his Hasidic neighbors, he has a television at home, where he watches Fox News (his wife prefers CNN, which he hates). And unlike the established leaders of his community who operate through conventional channels, scheduling meetings with the mayor and governor and issuing measured statements, Tischler is unencumbered by all that, insulting politicians whenever he pleases. Even his detractors admit that he cares for his community, volunteering to pack boxes of food for the poor, visiting the sick in hospitals, making time to help formerly incarcerated residents find jobs. He gets calls from people in the community all the time: “Please try to refine your speaking. Please wear a suit. Heshy, please try to use proper language,” he says they tell him. He answers to no one.

Except in 2013, when a judge sentenced him to a year and a day in prison for immigration fraud. Tischler and 11 co-conspirators had been charged with extracting fees from thousands of undocumented immigrants, pretending to employ them at jobs that didn’t exist. (“I love Trump, but I still don’t agree with him on immigration,” Tischler says now. “I believe this country should be open to everyone.”) “It is clear in the case of Mr. Tischler that there is a wide disconnect between his acts of religious charity and his views about the need to conform to the laws of civil society,” said the judge, Naomi Reice Buchwald, according to a sentencing document. “Not only did he commit the crimes charged as well as an earlier immigration fraud, but he has built up literally pages and pages of debts and judgments that are recited in the presentence report which can only be understood as reflecting a dismissive view of the obligations of a civil society and perhaps worse.” He did his time in Otisville, an Orange County prison known for accommodating Orthodox Jewish practice.

Six years later, the obligations of a civil society have, in most people’s view, expanded to include mask-wearing and social distancing, the two changes that public-health experts say make the most difference in slowing the spread of COVID-19. But inside Borough Park — where many believed the community reached herd immunity months ago, where the influence of right-wing media is strong, and where highly social habits run counter to distancing directives — those practices have relatively few adherents. By mid-May, the community had largely resumed normal life, with its synagogues and yeshivas that defined pre-pandemic daily routines reopened.

This presented a dilemma for the neighborhood’s political leadership. First, they fruitlessly exhorted residents to comply with the city’s public-health rules. Then they sought to get New York State’s overnight camps, extensions of the community’s education system, opened for the summer — and fell short there, too. By late summer, those leaders, previously prominent in the community response to the pandemic, had mostly vanished from the front lines. Into the void stepped Tischler, telling his followers that the city’s case numbers were spurious (“Their testing results are lies!” he said Wednesday); posting a video of himself from a large outdoor wedding, even after those very gatherings were blamed for rising COVID cases in August; and vowing not to let Cuomo crack down on Borough Park. “You’re not coming into my neighborhood. We’re going to do whatever we want,” Tischler said to Cuomo in the wedding video, guests mingling and violin music in the background.

“The Brooklyn Jewish community has had a void of leadership. It has a lot of frustrated residents who would like to see an active response to the declarations by the governor and the mayor,” Nachum Segal, an Orthodox radio host, told me. “So a guy like this comes along and says a lot of the things a lot of people are thinking, and the things that are frustrating people. He’s going to get attention.”

The ultimate frustration was thrust onto the neighborhood a week ago at the beginning of Sukkot, the fall harvest festival. After an uptick in new COVID cases in late September, city and state officials had seemed to race to close businesses and, in an ultimate affront, limit synagogue attendance in response to rising COVID infections in the area. “One of the prime places of mass gatherings are houses of worship. I understand it’s a sensitive topic, but that is the truth,” Cuomo said at a press conference Tuesday.

Normally during Sukkot, when school is closed, thousands of teenagers fill the streets of Borough Park, roaming up and down 13th Avenue in front of kosher ice-cream shops and bookstores selling religious texts. What would normally be a boisterous crowd in search of a concert or dance party this year turned into a ready-made assembly for protest. Depending on whom you ask, what happened over the course of the next two nights either ended Tischler’s rise or propelled it to another plane.

On Tuesday, boys and young men burned a pile of face masks in the middle of the street. They blocked city buses from moving through the neighborhood. And Tischler, grabbing a megaphone, told the crowd, “You are my soldiers! We are at war!” Angered by outside scrutiny, they chased a photographer away. Around 2 a.m., a community member taking video was chased and beaten. He was Berish Getz, the brother of Mordy Getz, a businessman who had spoken out in favor of mask-wearing and social distancing back in April and was labeled a moser — one who informs on his fellow Jews to the authorities. Some Jewish legal texts suggest that a moser is subject to the death penalty, making it a particularly menacing designation.

The next day, Wednesday, Tischler weaponized the label further. In a video taken in front of a cemetery and posted to Instagram, he called Jacob Kornbluh, a reporter for Jewish Insider and himself a member of the Hasidic community in Borough Park, a “moser” and a “rat.” The night before, Kornbluh had texted Tischler and asked him to apologize to the community for inciting violence. When Kornbluh showed up to Wednesday night’s protest, Tischler cornered him against a brick wall, summoning a large crowd to surround him. “You’re a moser,” Tischler screamed in Kornbluh’s face. “Everybody scream moser!” Apart from the Jewish music and dancing, it was a scene very much like a Trump rally, from the Trump 2020 flags that protesters carried to the ease with which they could be turned against the media.

That was unsurprising to some who have watched the community’s attitudes shift in a way that dovetails with the country’s. “The community is driven and guided by a combination of paranoia and a desire for full personal autonomy while excluding outsiders, outsider point of view, and that which makes them uncomfortable. Trump validates a lot of their attitudes,” said Menashe Shapiro, a political consultant. “Trump is the cocaine; Tischler is one of the dealers (as are super-right-wing radio, blogs, and podcasts). The community are the addicts.”

The violence at both protests was condemned widely by elected officials, from former state assemblyman Dov Hikind — “I’m ashamed of what happened,” he said of Tuesday’s protest — to de Blasio, who said about Wednesday’s incident, “It’s absolutely unacceptable. Disgusting, really.” Tischler wouldn’t take responsibility for it. In fact, he wouldn’t even admit it happened.

“There was no violence,” he told me on Thursday afternoon. “If there would have been violence, there would have been somebody arrested.” (Kornbluh says he was punched and kicked, and there’s video showing someone trying to hit Getz on Tuesday night with a traffic cone.) In an Instagram video that same day, Tischler announced that he had put on a suit and presented himself at the 66th Precinct for arrest, only to be told he was not under investigation.

But on Friday, rumors swirled in Brooklyn’s Orthodox community that Tischler would step back from public life. Some said he was considering dropping out of his run for City Council before he’d even officially launched his campaign. In a phone call Friday afternoon, Tischler said he had never even considered dropping out. If anything, he doubled down: “Whatever you’ve seen me do, you’re going to see bigger and better things,” he said. “I’m going after the governor and the mayor personally now. There’ll be so much, he’s not going to be able to control this city. He’s not going to know what hit him,” Tischler said. “You just wait for round two.”

And shortly after that, he posted yet another video to social media announcing that he would be arrested at 10 a.m. Monday at the 66th Precinct in Borough Park. “I’ll be taken in for inciting a riot,” he announced directly to the camera in a rambling speech. He said he would plead not guilty, called Kornbluh a “very terrible bad man,” and apologized to Chirlane McCray. “Heshy Tischler here will be walking into jail with Pastor McCaul” — a local minister who called for Tischler’s arrest on Thursday — “and a lawyer and turning himself in, and I’m very upset about this … I’m hoping that I can be out for The Just Enough Heshy Show at nine o’clock Wednesday night.”

Even after all that, he seems to believe that this week is his ticket not back to jail but to City Hall. Three years ago, Tischler ran for City Council and, in a three-way race, drew just 670 votes out of nearly 17,000 cast. Now that Chaim Deutsch, the city councilman representing a host of Orthodox neighborhoods in South Brooklyn in District 48, is term limited, Tischler thinks he can win that seat. “It would be like bringing Trump in — something refreshing,” said Soya Radin, a longtime Borough Park resident who is Tischler’s radio co-host. “So we wouldn’t have the same people regurgitating ‘I’m going to make changes. I’m going to do this’ and then not doing it.”

Political insiders aren’t so sure. “I think the community would be deeply disserved, because I don’t think any of his colleagues would take him seriously,” said Mark Botnick, a former adviser to Michael Bloomberg. “You need someone who can work with people and not just be a rabble-rouser.”

And, again like Trump, he knows exactly how to call attention to himself. He’s been getting so much press, he bragged to me, “that I don’t even have to spend any money … They never actually started listening to me until you guys started giving me the promotion, since the parks.”

Could he pull it off? On his home turf of Instagram, Tischler has earned a host of new critics, and it’s unclear whether he could win the support of local leaders or rabbis. But Borough Park mothers won’t soon forget how Tischler fought for their right to send their children to the playground — the hyperlocal pandemic version, perhaps, of universal prekindergarten. “Kids absolutely idolize him, worship him,” said Rayne Lunger, a local mother. And it’s hard to discount the throngs of young men, many of voting age, following him through the streets, willing to wave any flag and shout any slogan for the man who promises to keep the yeshivas and synagogues open.

“I wouldn’t say he has a shot,” Kornbluh said, hours before Tischler turned the mob on him. “But Trump also didn’t have a shot.”

The VP Debate Stage Is the Coronavirus Response in Physical, Design-Failure Form

2020-10-07T15:00:59-04:00

ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images

Partitions? Please.

A clear contender for the worst design of 2020 has emerged: the stage for tonight’s vice-presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. And we’re not talking about the bald-eagle setpiece that looks like it was borrowed from a budget beer brand. (Debate stages do tend to look like bad game shows, so that’s par for the course.) It’s the puny plexiglass partitions that ~~will not~~ are somehow supposed to protect the vice-presidential candidates from catching COVID-19. Experts say they’re useless.

What a glaringly obvious symbol of the ineffective, embarrassing, and negligent response to addressing the pandemic. As a thought experiment, imagine if one of the debaters were smoking and exhaled visible smoke: Would it reach the other debater in this setup? Of course it would. As Josh Gondelman, a writer for Desus & Mero, pointed out on Twitter, “We protect salad bars better than this.”

We protect salad bars better than this. https://t.co/Jvmw7CE7Ut
— Josh Gondelman (@joshgondelman) October 7, 2020

This barely half-baked protection is a barely half-baked response after the Biden-Harris campaign asked the Commission on Presidential Debates for additional precautions. Even as there has been a spike of coronavirus cases in the White House, Pence, who is chair of the White House’s coronavirus task force and has been exposed to known carriers of the virus, has tested negative. The Pence campaign’s people initially scoffed at the suggestion of a physical barrier, saying that they didn’t believe that barriers worked, but eventually agreed to the partitions. The two candidates will also be standing 12 feet apart, farther than usual.

The arched top on these pathetic plexiglass dividers manifests the inadequate and superficial responses deployed to address the deep, structural failures of American society. pic.twitter.com/Pz8Kc2DD9B
— Antonio Pacheco (@_p_antonio) October 7, 2020

The science explaining how COVID-19 spreads is still evolving. Many public-health officials recommend physical barriers as a way to help stop the spread of the virus, and nearly all agree that the intent is to catch exhaled aerosol particles and expelled droplets. The CDC recently issued a report confirming that airborne transmission is possible and that particles can linger in indoor air. It’s not that plexiglass barriers are inherently a bad idea, but these look to be about five to six feet tall and maybe three feet wide. Perhaps something that actually enclosed the candidates? Curved in over and around them, at least? Instead, each partition was trimmed into an arch, presumably for looks, removing a significant amount of protective material. If only there was someone involved with that set who cared as much about actually addressing COVID-19 as the stagecraft surrounding it.

Memo Admonishes 30 Park Place Residents Not to Be “Less Than Kind” When Asked to Mask Up

2020-10-06T13:36:52-04:00

Nicole Beauchamp/Flickr

Some Four Seasons apartment-dwellers have reportedly been giving the staff a hard time.

The Four Seasons Private Residences at 30 Park Place is one of the swankiest condo residences downtown. The 82nd-floor, 4,538-square-foot apartment that has claimed to be the highest terraced penthouse in all of Manhattan was originally listed at $30 million. In September, a four-bedroom on the 56th floor sold for $6.65 million, and a three-bedroom on the 51st floor sold for $5.45 million, according to city records. But the international buyers and finance bros who live in these apartments don’t like being told what to do — especially, say, Mask up, please! Cover your nose, too — and, judging by a recent memo, they have been taking it out on the staff.

On September 7, the management sent an email to all residents, warning them that their access privileges to the 38th-floor gym would be temporarily revoked if they failed to abide by new COVID safety protocols. “We have had a couple of instances in the past week where patrons have had to be reminded by our team of the rules (especially the Masks and Screening) and the response has been less than kind,” the email, obtained by Curbed, reads. “I would like to ask everyone to please be respectful to our team members, and to each other.”

The email also reminded residents that, due to a five-person-occupancy limit, personal trainers and guests are not allowed in the gym. “The team is there for your health and safety and are responsible for helping to ensure that we are in full compliance with the current guidelines,” it continues. “We ask that you please follow them for the benefit of everyone in the Community. Individuals who continue to disregard the rules may have their access privileges temporarily removed.”

On Thursday — a few hours after 100 protesters clustered on the corner of Broadway and Park Place to demand a blanket eviction moratorium — three residents of 30 Park Place confirmed to Curbed that they had received the email. All said that most occupants have been observing mask rules, but one told us on condition of anonymity that there are still some who outright refuse or wear them slung under their chins and generally seem to have no “regard for anyone but themselves.”

“I hadn’t seen anything since they sent the email,” the resident said. “Then today, I was walking in behind another guy who wasn’t wearing one, and the doorman basically begged him to put one on, and he flicked him away dismissively.” Curbed saw dozens of people enter and exit the building over the course of about three hours on Thursday, and all of them were masked except for one, who walked directly into a waiting Town Car.

The Secret to Year-Round Streeteries? What Greenhouses Can Teach Us

2020-10-06T10:30:00-04:00

The architecture firms Woods Bagot and ARUP designed a prefabricated, flat-pack, all-season outdoor restaurant design. | Courtesy Woods Bagot

An alternative to those “space bubbles.”

After Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that outdoor dining could continue year-round, there was a cheer — and then worry about a chill. Just how practical can eating in streeteries be when winter sets in?

One attempted solution is the so-called “space bubbles” an Upper West Side café is trying out. But a new concept from the architecture firm Woods Bagot and Arup might be more scalable and pleasant: a prefabricated, modular restaurant made of plywood, with a simple canopy that could be fitted with vinyl or polycarbonate during the winter, like a greenhouse, or with a shade-giving material in the summer, like a cabana.

Aside from the wood canopy, the streetery concept looks like many of the other plywood enclosures that have popped up across the city already. But the secret sauce is all in how it’s put together.

Woods Bagot and Arup prioritized designing something that someone could build quickly — important given that construction in the street is challenging and restaurants do not have time for a lengthy build-out — and for not a lot of money. They began by basing the measurements on standard sizes of hardware-store plywood sheets and beams. Next, they used a type of joinery that slots together so that restaurants could assemble them without needing a lot of tools. And importantly: If they decide not to stay open year-round, they can disassemble them and put the parts in storage for use next year.

Courtesy Woods Bagot and ARUP

During warm weather, the protective materials can be removed.

“You’re putting it together like a 3D puzzle,” says David Brown, an architect at Woods Bagot. He estimates that, once everything is cut, it will only take a couple of hours to assemble. “We’re trying to make it simple so people without construction experience can put it together. We’ve all been stuck with Ikea furniture and an Allen wrench and totally lost, so this has as few mechanical fasteners as possible.”

Restaurants could then either double wrap the streetery with vinyl film — an inexpensive yet effective form of insulation, which is often used on drafty windows — or screw on polycarbonate panels. If a restaurant does have a budget for heaters, the design is flexible enough to accommodate freestanding or ceiling-mounted options. The estimated cost to build one of these? Less than $1,000 for materials. (Heaters not included.)

The concept is one of many from Neighborhoods Now, an initiative from the Urban Design Forum and the Van Alen Institute that explored ways design could help with reopening challenges across the city. Woods Bagot and Arup collaborated with the Community League of the Heights (CLOTH) on specific ideas for Washington Heights, but the ideas could work across the city.

Courtesy Woods Bagot and Arup

The outdoor restaurants comes together like a 3D puzzle. The architects call this a “plug and play” design, which means that depending on the season, restaurants can cover the wood frame with whatever material is most appropriate. Something that offers shade in the summer, and something that lets the sun’s rays warm it in the winter.

While Arup, Woods Bagot, and CLOTH spoke to businesses in Washington Heights while they were developing the concept, they haven’t yet gotten any bites to actually build one.

“There was some concern about the length of time these could be up,” Brown says. “Now that it’s been announced that open restaurants are permanent, we’re reaching back out. That the design has built-in winterizing would hopefully be more appealing.”

Why Is Ex–Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Buying Houses En Masse in Utah?

2020-10-05T13:05:13-04:00

Peter Bohler/Redux

Hsieh has purchased 71 bathrooms in less than three months.

Ex–Zappos chief Tony Hsieh is buying up millions of dollars’ worth of real estate in the small ski town of Park City, Utah, and no one quite knows why. After two decades as CEO, Hsieh quietly stepped down from the online shoe retailer this past August without a formal announcement. His retirement present to himself? Tens of millions of dollars in Utah homes.

Park City knows wealth: It’s the site of the Sundance Film Festival, and Michael Jordan and Will Smith, as well as the festival’s co-founder Robert Redford, own houses there. But according to public records in Summit County, Utah, the scale and timeframe of Hsieh’s purchases is likely unprecedented; after buying a 4,395-square-foot home on Empire Avenue in March, he bought three more houses and a vacant lot in July, and four more homes in August. All of this — worth at least an estimated $39 million— was purchased through a Nevada entity called Pickled Investments, which Hsieh manages.

Since then, the almost billionaire has closed on three more homes, each purchased using different LLCs that all list Hsieh’s original Empire Avenue house as the registered address. And he’s reportedly under contract on three more properties that will close this month. Altogether, over the past 11 weeks, he’s got himself 57 bedrooms, 71.5 bathrooms, and 68,169 square feet. Throw in the two vacant lots and his retirement buying spree has cost a total market value of around $56 million.

Clearly, one man cannot occupy all this real estate. (Hsieh memorably lives in a trailer park most of the time.) Is he buying up homes so that all of his friends can come quarantine in Park City? (Seven of the properties are on the same street, Aspen Springs Drive, and four are on Empire Avenue.) Is this, as friends say, a digital detox helping the ex-CEO to “disconnect”? Is he going into the renovate-and-flip business? Is he aiming to become the next Property Brother? Does he just like talking to salesmen?

An August report by Eater Vegas stated that local chef Dan Krohmer is going to work for Hsieh in Park City to “bring more arts, culture, and food to the city.” Curbed reached out to Hsieh multiple times for comment on his plans and hasn’t received a response. But this isn’t the first time Hsieh has gone all-in on a town. In 2013, he relocated his Amazon-owned shoe company to Las Vegas’s downtown district, investing roughly $350 million of his own capital to turn the rundown area north of the Strip into a hot spot with shipping-container buildings, pyrotechnic sculptures, and a llama-themed Airstream trailer park.

The most important question remains: If Hsieh has indeed moved out of his 240-square-foot trailer in Vegas and into any one of his 15 new Park City homes, did Marley and Triton, his pet alpacas, join him? Or did they get their own place down the block?

Can Balconies, Bigger Lobbies, and Package Rooms Help Save Public Housing?

2020-10-05T10:50:03-04:00

A new concept from the Regional Plan Association and Peterson Rich Office proposes renovating and expanding NYCHA buildings. | Courtesy Peterson Rich Office

Peterson Rich Office walks us through an idea, developed with the Regional Plan Association, that calls for adaptive reuse and infill on NYCHA campuses.

Everyone can agree that something has to be done about the chronic problems facing public housing in New York, with its $32 billion maintenance backlog — elevators out, heat and hot water out, toxic mold, pest and vermin infestations, and fiscal mismanagement, to start — and, in a city where the working class is priced out of the market — a 160,000-person waiting list. But politicians, residents, and advocates don’t always see eye to eye on what to do about it.

Now the Regional Plan Association (RPA), which for decades has developed big-think ideas for how to improve life in the New York area, has a few suggestions. For the past year, it has been working with the New York–based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office (PRO), whose co-founders had been named the Richard Kaplan Chairs for Urban Design as part of a newly established fellowship position, to create design solutions for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

Infill proposals typically call for new freestanding buildings, but PRO and the RPA’s concept essentially adds wings to existing structures. Part of the reasoning is that expanding buildings outward could better integrate NYCHA campuses with neighborhoods. These expanded sections include lobbies that are closer to the street and additional units.

While PRO is best known for its upscale residential and arts and culture work (the firm recently renovated Galerie Perrotin and is working on the Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art), it also has an interest in urban design. Miriam Peterson, who co-founded the firm with her partner, Nathan Rich, is from New York City and studied urban economics before going to architecture school. Rich was a teacher at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he researched rapid urbanization in Asia.

Over the past few years, the firm has published conceptual projects that show how design could help address NYCHA’s maintenance challenges and the city’s affordable-housing shortage. 9x18 — a conceptual project from when Peterson, Rich, and urban planner Sagi Golan were fellows at the Institute for Public Architecture — proposed building new affordable-housing units on NYCHA surface-parking lots. Roof by Roof explored how to build new affordable housing on top of existing NYCHA buildings.

In the absence of adequate public funding for housing — and a federal policy that says there cannot be a net increase in the number of public-housing units — city leaders have turned to private development. The Bloomberg administration, which heavily promoted so-called public-private partnerships, floated the idea of leasing NYCHA open-space land (including its surprisingly extensive stock of surface parking) to private developers, who would then build mixed-income housing. The idea was that the leasing fees collected would help fund the maintenance and repairs to existing buildings and that developers would have to build an 80:20 ratio of market rate to affordable units. However, many City Council members, housing advocates, and tenants denounced the idea as a land grab that is privatizing resources that should remain public.

Of course, private capital isn’t the only way to fund the maintenance backlog NYCHA faces, but it is one of the most readily available sources. In its 2015 NextGeneration NYCHA plan and 2018 NYCHA 2.0 plan, the de Blasio administration looked to the Obama-era Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD) — which allows public-housing agencies to switch how they receive federal funds, from Section 9 (how NYCHA is typically funded) to Section 8 (the voucher program to private landlords) — as a way to fund infill development and transfer management of public housing to private entities. These policies have resulted in unpopular proposals to demolish existing housing in order to build new, privately managed buildings.

Meanwhile, the Green New Deal for Public Housing bill, sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calls for $180 billion of investment in public housing across the country, including NYCHA, to fund repairs, maintenance, and retrofits; however, broad political support for enacting such a bill is absent.

Last month, the RPA and PRO released their report, “Scalable Design Solutions for NYCHA,” which proposes ways in which existing buildings could be retrofitted and expanded to help meet the needs of current residents and also make room for more people. It knits together many of the ideas that have come before: infill, replacing outdated systems with more energy-efficient decentralized ones, better integrating NYCHA campuses with their neighborhoods, and restoring public housing to a dignified place to live.

The heart of the plan? Retrofitting existing towers and expanding them. PRO proposes adding private balconies to each unit, which would hold individually controllable heating and cooling equipment; layering on a secondary roof structure, which would help with leaks and also provide space for solar panels; and expanding the buildings outward to make space for more units, to integrate campuses with their surrounding neighborhoods, and to create more accessible and welcoming lobbies.

The report shows how these proposals could work in a case-study location, the Cooper Park Houses, located in East Williamsburg. This NYCHA campus currently has $120 million in unmet capital needs. Under existing zoning regulations, Cooper Park only has half of its as-of-right floor area constructed and could support an additional 550,836 square feet of development. PRO isn’t the first entity to recognize this. Cooper Park was to be the site of a NextGen infill development, which recently stalled due to pushback from residents and local officials.

Peterson and Rich walk us through their concept.

What did you find out about the architectural problems and challenges with NYCHA?

Nathan Rich: There are a number. There are architectural challenges and then there are maintenance challenges. And to some extent, they’re not separated from each other, but I would start with the maintenance ones. They’re maybe a little less sexy, but they’re the ones that impact residents on a daily basis.

The steam-boiler systems are failing; residents regularly lose heat and don’t have individual control over the heat. The systems are also leaking and causing mold to build up in a lot of the older buildings. It’s a huge public-health issue.

Most NYCHA buildings are masonry, and they’re built without insulation. They have old windows, so they’re extremely leaky and energy inefficient. They’re a major cost, and resident comfort issues come along with that. These are real nuts-and-bolts issues with the building, and architectural solutions to those issues are what we’re trying to propose.

Miriam Peterson: One of the things that is typical to many NYCHA buildings is that the ground floor is sort of part above and part below grade, so what it means is that there’s a big volume of space that’s at street level that’s not occupied. Some of it is mechanical space or maintenance offices. But that also means that there’s an accessibility issue with getting into the building. Many lobbies are up a set of steps. Then the lobbies themselves are very small and have poor access to natural light.

NR: NYCHA developments are based on a post-WWII vision of the nuclear family, so there are a lot of two-bedroom and four-bedroom apartments. NYCHA’s resident data analysis shows that there is a huge need for one-bedroom and studio apartments. [Editor’s note: NYCHA estimates that 40 percent of households are living in units that aren’t the right size for their families: 44,663 households are living in underoccupied units; 11,403 are living in what the agency calls “extremely underoccupied” units; and at least 15,103 are living in overcrowded units.]

Walk us through how the Scalable Design Solutions solve some of NYCHA’s problems.

NR: We have an index of all the campuses around the city and picked Cooper Park [as a case study on how these solutions could work] because, in some ways, it’s the most quintessential type of campus. You have these mid-rise buildings separated from one another by significant distances on a superblock site. It’s also in [East Williamsburg], a neighborhood that has a fairly high density and is developing quickly.

MP: There are some specific reasons why comprehensive infill [on NYCHA sites] tends to be really challenging. One is a new building would require access, and so you often find one at the edge of a cul-de-sac or a parking lot. Two is a kind of nerdy building-code regulation: For habitable spaces, which all residential spaces need to be, you need to have proper light and air circulation. Windows have to be a certain distance away from other habitable spaces. So you typically see a 30-foot setback and what that means then is 60 feet between window to window on a NYCHA infill project. This limits where new buildings can go.

Another reason for the expansion approach? Building setbacks, as mandated by zoning codes. At Cooper Park, the case-study campus, the only areas that could accommodate new structures were in the center of the campuses or on recreation space.

In thinking about that distance limitation, we started to rethink infill from the perspective of a horizontal extension of existing buildings [instead of building a separate new building]. This means that upgrades to the existing buildings are not only important but are inextricable in executing a new build. So we feel like there is a great opportunity for showing residents right away that priority one is fixing your building, your physical space, your needs.

NR: Infill can be a completely separate building, and there have been a number of infill proposals that residents have managed to stop because they weren’t seeing any direct benefit to the existing buildings. You have to improve the existing building with an extension.

MP: This development strategy acts on the existing building, and that opens up opportunities for rethinking ground floors, for providing specific amenities people come to expect in residential architecture today, which really weren’t part of the plan of these buildings when they were constructed in the 1930s to 1970s and 1980s, like mail and package rooms or trash and recycling collection.

Extension-based infill [brings the entrances of buildings closer to the street] and provides opportunities for residents to enter directly off of the sidewalk. We also use the extension as an opportunity to make smaller ADA-accessible units that could be an opportunity for relocating or rightsizing elderly residents into units that aren’t only better at meeting their needs at this stage in their life but also closer to the lobby. This could open up [existing] bigger apartments to families.

Part of the extension plan is to build balconies onto every existing unit. Why?

NR: The balconies do three things. The first is a quality-of-life benefit. During COVID, it’s become much more apparent that having privately accessible outdoor space is just a huge benefit to quality of life in New York City. Most NYCHA residents don’t have direct access to outdoor space from their units.

The second thing this does is the balcony provides a place to put a condenser for new mechanical systems. We’re proposing split systems be installed, which means there’s a condenser that sits on the balcony, and there are small air handlers that can blow both heat and cool air into the units. Residents could have individual control over the temperature in their units. [Editor’s note: Heat and hot water are included in the rent NYCHA residents pay. Out of NYCHA’s 328 developments, 257 are master-metered for electricity, which means individual units are not metered, and the Authority pays for electricity for the whole campus’ consumption. PRO did not analyze what impact this new system would have on resident expenses.]

MP: Air-conditioning units tend to stay in the windows all year round. So when you have a leaky building that’s not performing well from an energy perspective, and you have a big hole in your window with a big AC unit in it, it sort of layers problems on top of problems.

NR: The third thing balconies can do is become a general cladding strategy on the building. NYCHA is interested in recladding its buildings and balconies, which could include both open and semi-enclosed spaces [as] part of that strategy.

The plan proposes new balconies for every unit. These additions would provide private outdoor space for existing units and also hold energy-efficient and modernized heating and cooling equipment.

Have you thought of the actual numbers involved in developing this concept?

MP: We were advised by the RPA to not go down that path too far.

We, and the RPA, intentionally wanted the primary focus of the work to be about how the architectural and urban-design strategies could be the first step in a wider-reaching participatory design process that would engage multiple stakeholders. For that reason, we steered clear of addressing questions of both construction costs and funding streams, as that could immediately get into the territory of asking “for whom” and “by whom,” which we felt would shift the focus entirely on what affordability mix could be proposed.

The big bottom line is: Where does the money come from to actually implement things? And that, in my opinion, is the biggest hurdle to change, and a solution that architects and architecture — we’re not necessarily equipped with the tools to come up with complicated financial modeling or dealing with funding sources for projects like this.

The elephant in the room with many of the proposals and ideas for NYCHA is the privatization of public goods. What do you say to those concerns?

NR: It’s all about how you’ve established revenue streams in order to fund the repairs and improve the existing buildings. And the money has to come from somewhere. It requires creativity, and private development is not the only way to do it. But there is a lot of land available on NYCHA sites, so it’s one strategy that NYCHA has worked with in the past as a way of generating income. You have to forefront resident needs in the existing buildings in order to have that conversation.

I think sometimes the conversations between public versus private, and the sort of politics around that, are a distraction from the core issue, which is that there are 450,000 people who live in these buildings that are falling apart, and we need to figure out how to fix them.

NYCHA has released quite a few design guidelines over the past few years — everything from codifying the best practices for rehabilitating buildings to setting a vision for the future, like the Connected Communities Guidebook. How does your work with this report build on what has come before? And how do you view the role of this document?

NR: All of those documents — Connected Communities, NextGen NYCHA, the Sustainability Agenda — were sort of our up-front due diligence: understanding them, reading through them, and taking them into consideration. And the RPA itself also did a year of work, before we came onboard to generate the policy recommendations and reports to City Council, to get resident input. There’s a tremendous amount of information-gathering up front to make sure we were making good choices.

One of the tools that architects have that many other professionals don’t is visualization. And so when we draw through things, and we diagram things, it creates a platform for conversion in a way that text and policy don’t. It can make things suddenly more real. It gives you something to sketch on top of. Our hope is that it can be a tool for doing that and for communicating with different stakeholders.

Then there are very specific recommendations in [our report] that I think just make sense. We didn’t come up with those on our own. NYCHA is already considering replacing the steam systems with split systems, but we’ve tried to create some specific architectural solutions for implementing those things.

So what happens next?

MP: There are several actionable proposals and elements of the proposal that are thoroughly thought through and within reach. The process of getting there could be started by involving all the residents and relevant communities. Our hope is to work with the housing authority to find opportunities for piloting those ideas.

NR: This study was really meant to be a case study and a series of recommendations and concepts for the beginning of a conversation. Now that it’s out there, I’m looking forward to engaging with a wider range of community groups and resident groups to start to implement their perspectives as well. Now that the report is in the public, there are more opportunities for collaboration.

Is the U.S. Really Planting a Billion Trees, as Trump Said?

2020-09-30T00:20:00-04:00

Proof that Donald Trump has in fact planted one tree, with French president Emmanuel Macron in 2018. (It died.) | AFP via Getty Images

Or maybe a trillion? Either way, it won’t do much to stop climate change.

“We are planting a billion trees, a billion-tree project, and it’s very exciting for a lot of people.” During the climate portion of tonight’s presidential debate — if you could call it a debate — President Donald Trump made this curious claim, one that left knowledgeable people saying “huh?” Is the U.S. really planting a billion trees? And will that do anything to slow the warming climate?

During his State of the Union speech in February, Trump also mentioned something about trees, only the number he mentioned was a trillion, not a billion. “To protect the environment, days ago, I announced that the United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and the private sector to plant new trees in America and all around the world,” he said. Yet there’s no evidence that the U.S. has launched a concerted federal effort to plant new trees since then, even though Environmental Protection Agency director Andrew Wheeler confirmed a few days later that it was, in fact, happening.

The Trillion Trees Initiative is a real thing named 1t.org which was announced at this year’s World Economic Forum and sponsored by the United Nations, aiming to plant forests via a global coalition. (Many countries, including Pakistan and New Zealand, have also made their own pledges.) Trees, of course, naturally sequester carbon by drawing in carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases that warm the planet. Certainly it is good to have more of them, particularly in urbanized or industrial areas, to replace those lost to development and deforestation. They can lower the temperature by several degrees, increase biodiversity, clean the air, and mitigate droughts, and (needless to say) they look nice. But what Trump is talking about is called “afforestation,” which means planting a large number of trees, often of a single species, sometimes in places trees have not grown before, as a climate-change solution. These tree fields are often pulp or lumber plantations more than they are actual forests. And when that is assessed as an overarching silver-bullet climate solution, the science just isn’t there.

After a 2019 study went viral, claiming that planting one trillion — not billion, trillion — trees globally could capture one-third of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, tree-planting-as-emissions-offset became a trendy environmental pledge. But climate scientists quickly refuted the study — the carbon math does not quite pencil out, there aren’t nearly enough acres suitable for reforesting, and doing so does not reproduce the ecologies of naturally occurring forests, which take decades to grow and include much more than trees. (A better solution, one study proposed, would be to return deforested lands back to the indigenous people who have managed them for centuries. Don’t wait up for this to happen.) But more critically, scientists say that “just planting trees” is more performance than solution — it gives climate-change-denying leaders like Trump a way to look like they’re acting without doing nearly as much actual emissions-reduction work as they appear to (which is why Republicans introduced a “carbon-capture” bill that included planting trees without any other climate action). It’s as cockamamie as his claim that better “forest management”— basically raking leaves, the way he claims the Finnish president told him to — will single-handedly stop wildfires. None of this will do what Trump says it will do.

Trees will be key to helping the world adapt to the global warming that decades of failing to act has already locked in. But if the United States did, hypothetically, want to slow and reverse climate change, it should reduce the emissions that cause that climate change. Which is something that Trump’s opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, plans to do.

Expect More Piles of Garbage — Proverbial and Otherwise — as NYC’s Budget Crisis Unfolds

2020-09-29T11:42:17-04:00

Getty Images

What if we lose too many rich people?

To the delight of the city’s rat population (and the dismay of the rest of us), garbage was not getting picked up as quickly as usual this summer. Facing a sudden budget shortfall resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council cut $106 million from the Department of Sanitation’s budget in June, leading to reduced trash collection. The mayor has since walked back some of the cuts under pressure from business executives. But the piles of garbage — literal and proverbial — may only grow bigger. This may be the beginning of a prolonged budget crisis for the city.

New York is facing an estimated $13.5 billion revenue loss through 2022. Typically, it takes three or four years for a recession to impact the city’s tax revenue. But because the pandemic closed businesses and confined people to their apartments (or drove them out of town) almost overnight, there was an immediate impact on the city’s tax collection. “This [crisis] came fast and furious,” said Maria Doulis, vice-president of the Citizens Budget Commission. “It was unprecedented to suffer a steep decline in current-year revenue in the middle of the fiscal year. Now it’s very serious.”

Beginning in mid-March, sales and income-tax revenue fell precipitously, requiring the state to make immediate adjustments to the budget. At the end of June, the City Council and the mayor agreed to a budget for 2021 that included a variety of cuts and shifts that would save the city $1 billion. But there are no easy answers for what comes next. Making matters worse: de Blasio and Cuomo don’t get along, the NYPD’s political grip on City Hall remains firm, and it is possible that Donald Trump might be reelected.

The wealthy leaving the city

The New York Times estimates that roughly 5 percent of New York City residents left town this spring and summer. This is evident in Manhattan’s housing market, where vacancies are rising, rents are falling, and sales prices are (finally) in decline. Seeing their work dry up, some moved to places where rent is cheaper to wait out the crisis. Many of the most affluent spent lockdown in second homes which now — after more than six months —could technically be considered their primary residences. The “flight to the suburbs” narrative is a bit overblown, but it’s still happening some in New York City. The longer it takes for these people to return (or be replaced by other high-earning professionals), the more damage the city’s budget will endure — damage that could lead to drastic cuts to services like trash pickup and the subway system. Those cuts, in turn, could incentivize more New Yorkers to leave the city (either temporarily or permanently), creating yet more holes in the budget — a vicious cycle.

Rich people may be part of the reason the city is unaffordable, but they also pay a lot in taxes and tend to spend more when they eat out, shop for clothing, hire personal trainers, buy art, remodel their homes, or go to the opera. In the worst-case scenario, this cycle spirals out of control, ushering in a new depression rivaling the mid-1970s crisis that almost led New York City to bankruptcy.

Where those well-off people reside — and where they end up paying taxes — will have an outsize effect on city (and state) budgets. Personal income taxes made up 13.8 percent of all revenue for the city in 2016, and workers earning more than $500,000 paid 47.7 percent of the city’s personal-income tax. On the state level, personal-income taxes made up 30.7 percent of revenue in 2016, and workers earning more than $500,000 paid 46.2 percent of New York State’s personal-income tax. If the city and state can no longer collect taxes from the wealthiest residents — many of whom have decamped to homes in Connecticut and Florida — their budgets will have to compromise dramatically. Sales-tax revenues would presumably fall as well, and property-tax revenues might fall, too, should the loss of population cause home valuations to drop across the board.

New York City has been steadily losing population for a few years now — in part because it has become unaffordable. And recent legislation aimed at taxing the wealthy — like the 2019 “mansion tax” and the new cap on state and local tax deductions implemented by the Republican tax law in 2017 — may offer further incentive for wealthy New Yorkers to relocate.

Cuomo versus de Blasio

The mayor and the governor are both Democrats, but they are hardly chummy. The two openly feuded over MTA funding in 2017 and even wrestled over who had the authority to shut down the city when the pandemic hit in March. Their relationship — or lack thereof — could have huge consequences in the coming budget crisis.

While the State Legislature has given the Metropolitan Transit Authority and Cuomo the authority to borrow money to cover short-term operating expenses during the pandemic, it has so far balked at the idea of giving that authority to de Blasio — despite his repeated pleas to borrow $15 billion. Cuomo has lectured the city on the ills of borrowing to cover operating expenses, but the city has had borrowing authority since the 1970s and hasn’t yet fallen into fiscal oblivion. It took out $2 billion in loans, for instance, in the aftermath of 9/11.

Trump to City: Drop Dead

Might the city get a bailout from the feds? The city benefited from a federal-aid package earlier in the pandemic, receiving $1.9 billion. But Congressional efforts to pass another aid package have stalled.

More concerning is President Donald Trump’s hostility toward his home city, which he abandoned early in his presidential term for Florida. Trump, in his reelection campaign, has declared that he is the only man who can save the suburbs from the carnage in the “Democrat cities.” Carnage that is, to a large extent, nonexistent. His Department of Justice labeled New York City an “anarchist jurisdiction” this month. But walking the streets of Manhattan, where many New Yorkers are happily sipping $25 cocktails at outdoor streeteries, one might wonder where — exactly — the “anarchy” is.

Can we tax our way out of this?

New Jersey recently raised taxes on millionaires, and a group of lawmakers is pushing New York State to do the same.

But raising taxes on millionaires at this particular moment in time could backfire, given that the budget crisis has been largely triggered by … millionaires leaving the city to avoid paying taxes here. The fear is that rich people have the resources to pick up and move, and you don’t want to drive even more of them to Palm Beach for good. There are other options as well. For instance, taxing marijuana — but we’d have to legalize it first, and it wouldn’t be a silver arrow for the city’s budget problems even if it was legalized.

Or stick it to the labor unions?

If the city can’t find the money, it will have to resort to more cuts. The revised 2021 budget — announced in June — doesn’t actually contain all that many, according to Doulis, and the plan calls for that $1 billion to be found in unspecified labor savings. A failure to find those savings could result in as many as 22,000 layoffs, according to de Blasio. The Citizens Budget Commission notes that more than 95 percent of municipal employees don’t pay anything toward their health-insurance premiums, and a modest contribution would result in $531 million in savings. The unions would no doubt have something to say about that.

The revised budget also cut $474 million from the NYPD budget. Most of that comes from specifying a one-time reduction in overtime expenses that won’t recur; overtime spending for the NYPD has ballooned in recent years, from about $600 million in 2014 to $820 million in 2020. Amid a wave of protests across the country sparked by George Floyd’s murder in May, activists have been calling for cuts to NYPD’s budget. But it’s a politically thorny path to take for de Blasio, particularly given his fraught relationship with the cops.

In fact, almost every path forward for the city is thorny. And external factors beyond the mayor’s control will ultimately determine how the budget crisis pans out. Chief among these factors is, of course, how the pandemic unfolds. If the city is forced into another lockdown, it’s not hard to see how the situation could spiral out of control.

In other words, be prepared to deal with more garbage.

Here’s What We Know About the Guy Who Dumped Two Sacks of Eels Into Prospect Park Lake

2020-09-28T20:56:49-04:00

An eel.

What do you do when you spot such a thing? A 311 call seems inadequate.

He thought, at first, that they were snakes. Two enormous contractor bags, bursting with serpents, ripped open and spilling onto the path along the southwestern edge of Prospect Park Lake, looking like the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But they were another nightmare entirely: eels. Hundreds of foot-long eels, writhing lethargically and ready to die.

Andrew Orkin had been running. (Not from the eels, at least initially.) A composer by day, he’d jogged from his home in Prospect Lefferts Gardens through sunset in the park. The crowds had diminished as the afternoon’s humid barbecues thinned out, and as he rounded the southwestern edge of the park on Sunday, he slowed to stretch in a quiet spot along the lake near Vanderbilt Playground. Then he picked up on a sudden commotion. A woman screamed. Whipping around, Andrew glimpsed a terrible, wriggling pile. Could those be snakes leaking out of that bag? The woman seemed to think so. Andrew isn’t a New Yorker—he grew up in South Africa—and he knows about snakes. He was ready to sprint off, until a fisherman tipped him to the strangeness at hand.

Dominick Pabon, who was nearby by the lake’s shore, has been catfishing there at night since he was 14. He’s seen some shit, but nothing like this. But Dom, a chef and oyster caterer, knows the park—its ecology, its rules, its derelictions—and he notices when things are unusual. He’d come from Sunset Park with his wife for the evening’s cool water, which draws catfish into shallower catching range. When Dom spied the man wearing all white with the sacks in tow, he knew something was up.

The man had come from just outside the park, seemingly from a waiting car, walking with the calm of someone who would like to be ignored. He dragged two heavy black plastic trash bags alongside him. The plain white outfit, Andrew thought, suggested that he was a kitchen or market worker. He knew what he was doing, Dom believed.

A twig lay in his path, and it snagged one of the sacks, tearing it open and freeing dozens of eels. With still some 30 yards to the lake, and a growing clique of onlookers beginning to indignantly ask what he was doing, the bringer of eels began to panic. “I’m saving their lives!” he promised as he picked up the eels and began to toss them into the lake. “It was a pretty unusual thing to to see. So, not that surprising for 2020,” Andrew says. “It was one of those things where it’s like ‘Oh yeah this seems this seems totally, uh, on point.”

Dom wasn’t having it though. He’d caught a few of these black spotted eels before at the lake, in recent years—two-footers. They aren’t supposed to be there. In 2015, the Parks Department installed an eel ladder to help American eels cross the East 182nd Street Dam and repopulate the Bronx River, but Dom says they’re not native to Prospect Park, and according to the Prospect Park Alliance, they most definitely have not been stocked in the lake by the Parks Department. (Though this report, from 1971, says that a couple may have been tossed in by the sponsors of a fishing contest.) Dom was furious at what he saw as a damaging act. In a video captured during the event, Dom confronts the eel-bringer in futility, and pleads with him to stop, before resigning himself to observation. “You’re corrupt, dude,” he seethes.

The old heads who have always come to hunt the lake’s bass have seen fewer and fewer fish in recent years, and Dom is sure it’s the result of the dumping of invasive species. “That’s what’s messing up the whole ecosystem,” he says. “The eels populate like bunnies and they eat everything. So they’re stealing from the native fish.”

He suspects that the eels came from a pet-shop tank, the kind he often sees in his neighborhood. Maybe something had gone wrong with the tanks, he suggests, and the eels had begun a slow in-store death, so the eel liberator had headed over to the park to perhaps save them. They were moving so slowly as they were released, he thought, that they had to have been struggling for a while.

Andrew called the police, who seemed as surprised as he was, but were relatively unhelpful. He later called 311, where he was informed that there was no clear protocol for a complaint about the dumping of live eels in a lake, and transferred back to the cops.

Dom and his wife, for their part, stayed in the park for two more hours, attempting to flag down a policeman—to no avail. “There were like three paddy wagons that had their lights on, but they kept passing us. I was waving my arms wearing a white T-shirt under the lights. They could see me and they kept going,” Dom said. “What if I had really been in trouble like with something else?”

Two Legendary NYC Artists in Their Once-Bohemian Village Garden

2020-09-28T11:30:28-04:00

Pat Steir and Francesco Clemente have lived across from one another in the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens historic district for thirty years. They took portraits of the other this summer. | Portraits by Pat Steir and Francesco Clemente, courtesy Lévy Gorvy

Painters Pat Steir and Francesco Clemente spent the pandemic painting and chatting with one another across their back yard.

Painters Pat Steir, 80, and Francesco Clemente, 68, have been neighbors for three decades and friends for even longer. They’re from a generation of artists who came into their own during the 1970s and 1980s and settled in then-raffish parts of town which have since become almost unbearably polished. Steir, who once wryly told the New York Times that she’d been “forgotten and rediscovered many times,” has a new documentary about her life and work. Clemente has had a steady and successful career. They live across from one another at the MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens, a courtyard in Greenwich Village that you can only access from the townhouses surrounding it. Inside, you’ll find a stone path looping around a lawn and very tall trees.

“When we moved in there in 1990, I sort of elbowed my way into controlling the garden,” Steir says. “So I planted, with the help of two other neighbors, shrubs and grass and we made it what we thought was beautiful.”

It’s one of those old New York spaces that seem like they should’ve disappeared years ago, and in some ways it already has. Condos are now adjacent to the historic townhouses (a few years ago, Anna Wintour, another famous resident of the Gardens, railed against them at a community board meeting) and the area has steadily changed from a Beat-era enclave — Bob Dylan and Alexander Calder were residents — into something much less bohemian.

As new residents have moved in, the fences around the private gardens have grown taller, and the plants more cookie cutter. Some residents hired professional landscapers and gardeners. Things became more “normal” looking, as Steir describes.

“They wanted privets, I wanted flowering shrubs,” she says. “I’m in a constant battle with the new tenants. I had to ward off people who wanted to plant fake grass. And I said, ‘No! It will kill your children. It will off-gas!’ They thought I was an old coot.”

Farzad Owrang; courtesy Lévy Gorvy

Painter Francesco Clemente’s watercolor, titled 5-8-2020, is part of an exhibition at Lévy Gorvy, which includes over three decades of his work. Clemente works across many different mediums, and watercolor is one he returns to time and again because of his itinerant lifestyle.

Meanwhile, life has become much quieter. The annual May Day dinner parties, which were once organized by Alexander Calder’s late daughter Mary, no longer take place. Clemente and his wife Alba, a costume designer, raised their family in the garden and recall days when all of the kids would just run around playing together. But now children aren’t as common.

The strangeness of this summer struck some residents as familiar: “When the pandemic started, all of a sudden Soho was all boarded up and looked exactly as it did when I moved to New York 50 years ago,” Clemente says. “So for me it was not a shock; it was a sense of tenderness and ‘oh the past is coming back.’ Now it’s not like that. But you know, beauty and the economy don’t necessarily go together. Less options may create more beauty and so a more prosperous New York isn’t necessarily a more creative New York.”

Clemente and Steir often try to speak to one another by yelling across the courtyard. Meanwhile, they’ve turned their backyards into makeshift studios. Steir — who’s known for her enormous abstract paintings that look like cascading waterfalls — and Clemente, who is known for surreal portraits and landscapes, currently have concurrent shows at the Lévy Gorvy gallery.

Farzad Owrang; courtesy Lévy Gorvy

Pat Steir is known for large, monumental canvases. But the current exhibition at Lévy Gorvy showcases a survey of her works on paper, which she are a regular part of her personal practice but are rarely released for public view. Untitled — an oil, pencil, ink, and acrylic work from 2008 — is one such piece.

In April, Clemente’s daughter Nina, the chef at the Standard hotel, married her longtime partner Wayne Rambharose, in the garden. Clemente, who is ordained, officiated the wedding.

“They’ve been a couple for many years, but it took a lockdown to get married,” he says.

“I saw it from a distance,” Steir says.

What will come of the MacDougal-Sullivan gardens in the future? In a way, the garden has evolved to reflect the neighborhood — and the city — that surrounds it. And as the West Village and Soho have become blue-chip real estate, it has come to feel less like an artistic enclave and more like a playground for the wealthy. Salman Rushdie — who is a friend of Clemente’s — set his 2017 novel The Golden House, which centered around a rich family’s fall from grace, in the garden. The family, fleeing Mumbai, moves into a townhouse that’s maintained as an anonymous holding.

“When I am in conversation with my American friends, they always say: We have no history. But of course there is history everywhere,” Clemente says. “In the garden, there is history. We are all worried. Because when history moves, there may be blood. So we hope that this will not happen, and we look for a joyful outcome … maybe we’ll all be able to hug in the garden again.”