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      Jack Goldstein, a Savior of Broadway Theaters, Dies at 74

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      He helped secure landmark status for more than two dozen theaters in the 1980s, then initiated the design competition that led to a new TKTS booth.Jack Goldstein, a preservationist who in the 1980s reacted to the razing of several venerable Broadway theaters under a Times Square redevelopment plan by helping to organize a successful campaign to give landmark status to more than two dozen other theaters, died on June 16 in Cold Spring, N.Y., in Putnam County. He was 74.The cause was a heart attack, said Tom Miller, his executor.Over 30 years, Mr. Goldstein established himself as an effective behind-the-scenes player on Broadway.He was the executive director of the nonprofit Save the Theaters, which was formed to prevent the future destruction of playhouses. He was an executive at Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union, and with the Theater Development Fund, where he initiated the design competition that led to the creation of a new TKTS discount ticket booth in Duffy Square, topped with a dramatic cascade of 27 ruby-red structural glass steps that rises above West 47th Street.“Jack had a great artistic eye and a deep commitment to good government,” Gretchen Dykstra, the former president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, said in a phone interview.Mr. Goldstein arrived in Manhattan in the spring of 1982, during a difficult financial period for Broadway andaround the time of the wrenching demolition of the Helen Hayes and Morosco Theaters — the most distinctive of the five theaters between West 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway that were leveled to make way for the towering New York Marriott Marquis Hotel.The sites of the Hayes and Morosco Theaters had become the center of protests by actors, playwrights and others until the wrecking balls began swinging that March.The actor Jason Robards speaking at a rally in 1982 in an unsuccessful effort to preserve the Morosco Theater. Others on the platform included the actor Christopher Reeve, second from left. Mr. Goldstein joined the Broadway preservation effort that year. Marilyn K. Yee/The New York TimesMr. Goldstein told a conference at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan in 2014, “The destruction in the center of Broadway of beloved, important and, from the actors’ point of view, irreplaceable instruments of their art form and communication, was an affront.”Mr. Goldstein, who had a background in historic preservation, was initially a volunteer with the Committee to Save the Theaters, which had been formed by Actors’ Equity. He soon shifted to join and then run its spinoff organization, Save the Theaters.“Since it was clear that the city no longer recognized the value of the Broadway theaters,” he told Metropolis, an architecture and design magazine, in 2004, “No. 1 on the agenda was to bring to bear whatever legal disincentives to demolition were available and apply them to the historic theaters.”For six years, Mr. Goldstein and other preservationists focused on getting protection for theaters from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.Part of the process was examining theaters’ interiors and exteriors to determine which might be designated landmarks. He brought actors to the commission’s hearings to impart their knowledge of the theaters. And he collaborated on a report with an architect, Hugh Hardy, that stressed the full geometry of the theaters — their shape, layout and acoustical properties — rather than just their decorative detail, as standards for landmark designation.Speaking to the Skyscraper conference, Mr. Goldstein cited, for example, the “spatial relationships and building techniques behind the walls” that allowed actors to speak without a microphone, or in a whisper, and be heard by 600 to 1,400 theatergoers.Workmen cutting away steel from the roof of the Helen Hayes Theater in 1982.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“He was well spoken and enormously energetic,” Kent Barwick, a former chairman of the landmarks commission, said in an interview. “He was doing what needed to be done at the time. Was he always right in his judgment? No. Was he always fair? No. Was he dramatic? Of course — he was coming out of Actors’ Equity.”In 1987, the commission designated 28 theaters as landmarks — some for their exteriors, some for their interiors, some for both. (The sale of the Mark Hellinger Theater to a church in 1991 brought the group to 27.) The city’s Board of Estimate, a powerful governing body at the time, approved the designations in March 1988.Theater owners objected to the landmarking “as a confiscation of the value of the building because it limited its use to live theater,” Rocco Landesman, a former president of Jujamcyn Theaters, said by phone. He said of the buildings: “You couldn’t tear them down, and it was difficult to build above them if you didn’t have the rights. Value was taken without compensation.”The owners sued to overturn the landmarking of 22 of the theaters, but in 1992 the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case after the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division had upheld the designations.Mr. Goldstein in 1997. Looking back with satisfaction in 2014, he said he thought he had made an impact on Broadway. “I feel, ‘job done,’” he said.TDFJack Lewis Goldstein was born on March 5, 1949, in Jersey City, N.J. His father, Joseph, was an Army officer and a physician whose work took him and his family to Maryland, Germany and other postings. His mother, Thelma (Ginsberg) Goldstein, was a homemaker, potter and political activist. The couple eventually divorced.Jack’s maternal grandmother took him to his first Broadway show, Lionel Bart’s musical “Oliver!,” which opened at the Imperial Theater in 1963.“‘Oliver!’ was the first time I experienced that suspension of disbelief,” Mr. Goldstein told Crain’s New York Business in 1998. After attending the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Goldstein graduated from George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1972. He worked in Manhattan at the National Design Center, which exhibited home furnishings, before moving to Washington, where he was an assistant to the director of programs at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a small federal agency that would play a role in persuading him to go to Broadway.While he was in Washington, the Interior Department, responding to a petition from preservationists, determined that the Morosco was eligible to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and that if the developer of the Marriott Marquis wanted to tear it down, the company would need a waiver from the advisory council. Mr. Goldstein contended in an affidavit that Lyn Nofziger, an aide to President Ronald Reagan, had told the council to grant the waiver or lose its government funding — an assertion Mr. Nofziger denied.Frustrated, Mr. Goldstein soon left Washington to join the Broadway preservationists, whose efforts to save the Morosco were by then doomed to fail.After leaving Save the Theaters in 1988, Mr. Goldstein was a special assistant for government affairs to Ron Silver, the actor and president of Actors’ Equity, and the project director of the Broadway Initiatives Working Group, which was formed to evaluate Broadway’s future. He was the executive director of the nonprofit Theater Development Fund, which makes theater more affordable and accessible, from 1998 to 2001.When he announced the competition to design a new TKTS booth in 1999, Mr. Goldstein recognized how beloved and important the slapdash, pipe-and-canvas structure had become to theatergoers over 26 years. But, as he told The New York Times, “time and weather have taken their toll.”The new TKTS booth was not completed until 2008, a year before Mr. Goldstein returned to Actors’ Equity as its national director of governance policy and support.In 2012, he became an antiques dealer in Cold Spring. He previously owned a seasonal antiques store in Rehoboth, Del.He is survived by a brother, Leonard.Mr. Goldstein acknowledged that he had made an impact on Broadway.“I think I’ve made a contribution when I walk through Times Square and see theaters filled — many would have been swept away,” he told The Highlands Current of Cold Spring in 2014. “I feel, ‘job done.’” More

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      Philip Schuyler Is Knocked Off His Pedestal in Albany

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      A statue of the Revolutionary War general, newly prominent thanks to the musical “Hamilton,” has been removed from its place outside Albany City Hall because he enslaved people.There was a time when one probably had to be a committed Revolutionary War buff or an aficionado of early Albany aristocracy to know the name Philip J. Schuyler.But that was before “Hamilton.”Indeed, as any devotee of the blockbuster musical can tell you, the Schuylers were Colonial-era movers and shakers, and the central figures in the show’s fraught love triangle between Hamilton and two of the Schuyler sisters.And while Philip Schuyler never speaks during the show, he is a presence even before he becomes Hamilton’s father-in-law: “Take Philip Schuyler, the man is loaded,” Aaron Burr intones, and Schuyler is mentioned frequently by his daughters, Angelica, Eliza and Peggy.In reality, Schuyler was much more prominent than a bit part: the patriarch of a wealthy Albany family — a patroon, as Dutch-era landowners were known — he served as a New York lawmaker, a United States senator, and a major general in the war with the British, and was a close friend of George Washington.Those accomplishments had resulted in a seven-foot-tall statue of Schuyler being placed, nearly a century ago, on a pedestal in front of Albany’s grandly Romanesque City Hall, just across from the State Capitol. In recent years it sometimes drew “Hamilton” fans to snap selfies.The Schuyler statue — in bronze, by J. Massey Rhind, a Scottish-born sculptor — had stood outside City Hall since 1925. iStock/Getty ImagesBut Schuyler also enslaved people, by some accounts among the most in the Albany area at the time. That fact has led to a reconsideration of his legacy, and ultimately to his statue’s removal — a slow-motion retreat on a flatbed trailer — after years of delays and amid a backlash by some who argue that such actions do little to remedy past sins and may even miss an opportunity for education.The removal is part of a wider reckoning with the racist actions of historical figures, a movement that gained steam during the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer in Minneapolis. That re-evaluation has included the removal or dismantling of scores of monuments devoted to Confederate figures, and has even touched on Hamilton himself, who some scholars say is likely to have enslaved people despite his reputation as an abolitionist.In Schuyler’s case, the statue’s detachment — from a pedestal hiding a 1920s time capsule, complete with a letter from a Schuyler descendant — was authorized by Albany’s mayor, Kathy Sheehan, via executive order in June 2020.In an interview, Ms. Sheehan said that her decision had come, in part, after concerns were raised by Black members of her staff. “You couldn’t get into City Hall without walking past the statue,” said Sheehan, a Democrat, who said budget problems and the pandemic had stymied earlier efforts to move the statue.Mayor Kathy Sheehan of Albany held a news conference after a time capsule was discovered in the base of the statue.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesMs. Sheehan noted that Schuyler’s slaveholding was well-known. Nearly two decades ago, the remains of enslaved people were discovered buried on property once owned by the Schuyler family.Alice Green, the executive director of the Center for Law and Justice, a civil rights organization in Albany, said that the statue’s removal was “a relief.”“It didn’t seem right that we should have a statue on public property, glorifying and paying tribute to someone who had done what he did to African American people,” said Dr. Green, adding that her group had worked for years to have Schuyler sent packing, and that the publicity around “Hamilton” may have given the effort momentum.“Some people, I think, became more angry after learning more about who Schuyler was,” Dr. Green said. “And they only were able to do that because people started talking about Schuyler as a result of ‘Hamilton.’”The removal was met with opposition from some prominent local lawmakers: Representative Elise Stefanik, the third-highest ranking Republican in the House majority, who represents a district in Northern New York, accused Ms. Sheehan of trying to “erase history” with the statue’s removal.Jeff Perlee, a Republican member of the Albany County Legislature, echoed that.“I just think it reflects poorly on Albany, and its awareness of its own history,” said Mr. Perlee, adding that — unlike Confederate figures — Schuyler was “someone who sacrificed everything he had to create this country.”“Can you imagine Boston turning its back on Sam Adams or Virginia denying Thomas Jefferson?” Mr. Perlee continued. “The leaders in those places, I think, are sophisticated enough to understand the historical context and the whole measure of attributes and negative features of historical figures. And unfortunately, the leaders in Albany don’t.”Workers with the time capsule, and its contents, found in the base of the statue.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThere is no question that Schuyler — and Hamilton — had a major presence in Albany. Hamilton, who famously died in a duel with Burr, his political rival, in 1804, was married to Eliza Schuyler at the family’s mansion on Albany’s south side in 1780, where Hamilton also worked on the U.S. Constitution, according to “Oh Albany!,” a history of the city by William Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Both Hamilton and Burr also had law practices in the capital, not far from City Hall.The Schuyler Mansion, overlooking the Hudson River, was a seat of power in old Albany, an impressive estate with formal gardens and a working farm manned by dozens of enslaved people and other servants, according to the state’s parks department. Mr. Kennedy said that Schuyler — who married Catherine Van Rensselaer, from another prominent Dutch family — was host to some of America’s most famous figures at its most formative moments.“He was constantly talking with people like Benjamin Franklin when they were planning the Declaration of Independence,” said Kennedy, who is 95 and the éminence grise of Albany’s literary scene. “And his house was a place of common traffic with the leadership of this nation.”The Schuyler statue — in bronze, by J. Massey Rhind, a Scottish-born sculptor — was a gift of George C. Hawley, a local beer baron, and treated as front-page news in the Knickerbocker Press, which recounted a parade and thousands of onlookers at its unveiling, including military units and Boy Scouts, in June 1925.“The attention of millions of persons from all parts of the world will be arrested by General Schuyler’s figure, eloquent reminder of duties of manhood and obligations of citizenship,” the Press quoted Charles H. Johnson, the keynote speaker, as saying.Mr. Johnson’s prediction may have been hyperbolic, but the smash success of “Hamilton” — which opened at the Public Theater in 2015 and transferred to Broadway — has had a spillover effect to related Albany attractions. Attendance at the Schuyler mansion — now a state historic site — doubled between 2015 to 2019, as officials there and others began offering special Alexander Hamilton tours at the mansion and around Albany.The Schuyler sisters have also had their close-up, with specialized tours at the mansion, and a 2019 exhibition at the Albany Institute of History and Art.The Schuyler sisters: Phillipa Soo as Eliza, Renee Elise Goldsberry as Angelica and Jasmine Cephas Jones as Peggy in “Hamilton” on Broadway in 2015.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, however, historians here do not try to whitewash Schuyler’s personal connection with slaveholding, including at the mansion, said Heidi L. Hill, the site’s manager. The mansion’s exhibits highlight the stories of an enslaved butler and valet of Philip Schuyler, as well the story of an enslaved woman who fled the mansion. The mansion also was the publisher of a 2020 paper linking Hamilton to slavery.Schuyler died in 1804, just months after Hamilton was killed in the duel. Schuyler’s fame ebbed, but his name has continued to be affixed to villages, schools and bakeries around the Albany area (though some of those have also decided to change their names).“He’s one of those figures that’s like hugely significant in his own lifetime, but he doesn’t have quite as prominent a role post-Revolution,” said Maeve Kane, an associate professor of history at the University at Albany. “So he has this role during the Revolution and then he kind of fades away.”Dr. Kane added that while the musical hadn’t necessarily changed the perception of Philip Schuyler, it had “acted as a catalyst for these broader conversations about early America.”“And as a historian, I think that’s valuable,” Dr. Kane said.As for the sculpture itself, the bronze was taken to an undisclosed location as the city considers where it put it; a 2022 study, “What to Do With Phil?,” authored by a local youth group — the Young Abolitionist Leadership Institute — considered several options, including moving the statue to a location near the Capitol.In the meantime, Mayor Sheehan says that she hopes that a new city commission — likely to be approved by Albany’s Common Council this summer — will find a good spot where the fullness of Schuyler’s life can be told, saying the removal is “not about scrubbing” the past.“It’s not about cancel culture and not about canceling him, but about moving him to a place where the entire story is contextualized,” she said, adding, “You cannot contextualize the history of anyone on a traffic circle.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Transformers’ Statues Cause a Big Fight in Georgetown

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      A professor decorated a sidewalk in Georgetown with 10-foot sculptures of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime. The well-heeled locals were not pleased.The thing about putting a pair of 10-foot statues of metal-hewn Transformers outside your townhouse in the most picturesque district of the nation’s capital is that the neighbors are going to have opinions.And on Prospect Street in Georgetown, they were not pleased.The statues — Bumblebee and Optimus Prime, two of the good guys from the long-running “Transformers” movie franchise — appeared in January 2021 outside the white-brick home of Newton Howard, a cognitive scientist and machine-learning expert with ties to the intelligence community.He had ordered them from a factory in Taiwan to the tune of more than $25,000 each. Where large brick planters had once blended in with the local aesthetic, there was now something akin to outsider art by way of an anonymous welder and Hollywood’s reinterpretation of 1980s toys.Plenty of people love the statues, which resemble invaders from the future, in a neighborhood that does its best to hang on to its cobblestone past. Students at nearby Georgetown University can’t get enough. Neither can tourists: The Transformers statues have their own entry on Google Maps as a place of interest, with 4.9 stars. “The best part of visiting Georgetown,” one reviewer declared.“People are at my door every day,” Dr. Howard, 53, said at his home on a recent afternoon. “It doesn’t bother me. I find it to be beautiful that actually people are appreciating things.”But some of his neighbors are less enthusiastic, and the critics of his notion of a Georgetown-appropriate sidewalk display have been trying to get rid of Bumblebee and Optimus Prime for more than two years.Dr. Howard, a bald man with an unplaceable accent, wears dark round eyeglasses that come equipped with a camera and a microprocessor that allows him to translate languages on the spot, he said.He paid $3.75 million for the townhouse and moved in during the pandemic. In 2021, he snapped up the one next door for $4.8 million. The homes lie close to his job at Georgetown University School of Medicine, where he is a research professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology. (He added to his real estate holdings in 2022, when he bought a $3.6 million home in Potomac, Md. It has 14 bathrooms and a bocce court.)Dr. Howard greeting tourists who stopped by to see his Transformers sculptures.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesPutting up the Transformers wasn’t the only thing Dr. Howard did to irritate his Georgetown neighbors, who learned shortly after his arrival that he wasn’t some sort of shabby, retiring professor. He had flashy taste and he liked to show it off, parking a number of expensive cars on Prospect Street: a yellow McClaren 720S (new ones start at $310,000), a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT (which goes for $1.4 million and up), a Porsche 918 (fewer than 1000 were made, and they go for well over $1 million). Not to mention an MRAP tank and a small airplane from his collection that he once parked in front of his home. The car show came to a stop only after he received complaints.A rich guy with loud cars is one thing, a known story. The Transformers were something else altogether. They quickly became a flashpoint in Georgetown, and on the internet, after the local news site DCist reported on the efforts of Dr. Howard’s neighbors to get the statues removed.Sally Quinn, the author and longtime Georgetown resident, said she was firmly in the anti-Transformers camp. “I think they’re really ugly,” she said. “Some people may like them. You know, everybody’s taste in art is different. But that’s not the point.”The point, she continued, was historical preservation: “People come to Georgetown because it’s Georgetown. It’s a beautiful, quaint village.”But the author Kitty Kelley, who said she has lived in the neighborhood for “two husbands,” or since 1977, sent Dr. Howard a handwritten card in support of his sidewalk flair.“All you have to do is take a walk through Georgetown, and you’re going to see gnomes and wrought-iron benches,” said Ms. Kelley, who is known for her dishy biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (“Jackie Oh!”), Oprah and Nancy Reagan. “You’ll see cement lions of all sizes. So why should this man be deprived of using the space right outside his front door?”“Maybe it isn’t Picasso,” she continued. “It isn’t a sculpture by Degas, but I think he’s entitled.”Ms. Kelley noted that her own outdoor decorations have included topiary monkeys, a seven-foot bird feeder and “an angel who’s shooting something across the yard.”So: Was Dr. Howard a champion of free expression who found himself on a crusade against exclusionary zoning and “snooty neighbors,” as Slate cast him? Or was he an attention-seeking scofflaw with questionable taste?Or maybe this was simply a case of an eccentric and mysteriously rich guy being eccentric and mysteriously rich.Optimus Prime, a Transformers statue in front of Dr. Howard’s home, with flowers in its hand.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesNeighbors Weigh InGeorgetown is not the most futuristic place. Some of the streets still have cobblestone and the remains of streetcar tracks. The neighborhood is filled with pastel rowhouses from the 18th and 19th centuries and with newer homes meant to recall the older structures.The area also has its share of stately brick mansions that make you wonder who lives there, or used to. Often, it’s someone well-off, but occasionally it’s a someone someone. Power players in media, politics and entertainment — like Madeleine Albright, Ben Bradlee, Katherine Graham, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Elizabeth Taylor — have called Georgetown home. But it wasn’t always Washington’s glamour spot.“Georgetown was kind of a dump in the early 20th century,” said George Derek Musgrove, the co-author of the 2017 study “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”The old houses had largely fallen into disrepair, and the neighborhood was home to working-class Irish and African Americans. Then, with the explosion of government hiring during the New Deal, Ivy League graduates moved in. They fixed up their homes in an array of styles until the national craze for historical preservation took hold. In 1950, “Old Georgetown” was designated a federal historic district, with all the restrictions on home modification that entailed.“By the time you get to 1960, and John Kennedy leaves his Georgetown mansion on N Street for the White House, you just couldn’t afford to get in if you wanted to,” Mr. Musgrove said.A lot of the residents support efforts to keep things more or less the same. Catherine Emmerson, whose family lives close to Dr. Howard, helped start the Prospect Street Citizens’ Association a few years ago to stop a condo conversion that would have blocked local residents’ views of the Potomac River. When the Transformers arrived, the group had a new target.It’s not that the association was against celebrating film history. In fact, its members argued that the condo conversion would have threatened something that ought to be a landmark (and now is): a set of steep steps on Prospect Street, built in 1895, that appeared in “The Exorcist.” (Think: tumbling priest.)But that was “The Exorcist.” A film. (Maybe?) An old movie, at least. The “Transformers” franchise, which has grossed more than $5 billion across six films, was more like … I.P. (Michael Bay, the “Transformers” producer, declined to comment on Dr. Howard’s decorating choices or the neighbors’ reaction.)And the Citizens’ Association had clear recourse. Before putting up the statues, Dr. Howard did not apply for any kind of permit, despite Georgetown’s historic status and the fact that the sidewalk is public space.There is a process, a local official emphasized when he appeared in front of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission via video in March 2021, three months after Bumblebee and Optimus Prime had become part of the neighborhood. And he had bypassed it entirely.The commission went on to inform him that, before gaining approval, he would have to apply to something else: the Old Georgetown Board, a federal body of three architects that ruled on any changes to the exteriors of properties.Ms. Emmerson and another neighbor, the author and former television journalist Luke Russert, also weighed in. Ms. Emmerson argued that the statues represented a safety hazard and drew crowds of disruptive gawkers. (Dr. Howard later had his Transformers bolted in place.)An Optimus Prime statue watches over the neighborhood from Dr. Howard’s rooftop.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesMr. Russert was more blunt. “What’s to stop someone from putting up a statue of Joseph Stalin and saying, well, this is provocative, it’s art, it speaks to me?” he argued. “They are a nuisance, they are an eyesore, and they detract from the spirit of the neighborhood.”As tensions continued, Dr. Howard said he started hearing two terms that he had never heard before — NIMBY and YIMBY. (“Not in my backyard” vs. “Yes in my backyard.”) The pro-development crowd wanted to claim him as a hero. He declined to ally himself, exactly. Instead, Dr. Howard argued, his statues were all about “the American idea,” because they welcomed visitors to a cloistered part of the city.“You don’t want to just come up with ways to shut down your neighborhood so nobody comes into it,” he said.His critics disputed the notion that he was motivated by an idea of civic good. “His repeated disregard for the law and procedure tells a story of someone who is not operating in good faith for the collective community,” Ms. Emmerson wrote in an email to The New York Times.‘The Real Tony Stark’There was no horde outside Dr. Howard’s townhouse on a recent Sunday afternoon. A young man paused to snap a photo of his 2-year-old son standing with the statues. The toddler’s blue and yellow shoes matched Optimus Prime’s color scheme.From the rooftop, a six-foot Optimus Prime statue peeked down at the street. It had once stood at the front door, but after the initial controversy Dr. Howard commissioned a taller version for the sidewalk. Then he moved the original, perched as if part of some SWAT team on the lookout for any Decepticons.The interior of Dr. Howard’s home, which he said he decorated himself, resembled a lair. The glassy back of the townhouse overlooks the Potomac, where the buzz of jets headed into and out of Reagan National Airport adds to the techno-paradise vibe. Motorcycles were parked in the living areas as objets, and five more Transformer statues stood guard. There was also a giant model of Iron Man, a Marvel superhero dear to Dr. Howard.“A lot of people used to call me the real Tony Stark,” he said, referring to Iron Man’s alter ego.The interior of Dr. Howard’s Georgetown home includes motorcycles and more Transformers sculptures.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesThe memorabilia on display included his concealed carry permit, as well as framed photographs of him with Bill Clinton and Tim Tebow, the former N.F.L. quarterback who became known for kneeling in prayer on the field. Dr. Howard, who said he is a follower of Messianic Judaism, a religion sometimes referred to colloquially as Jews for Jesus, said that he and Mr. Tebow belong to the same fellowship group. (Mr. Tebow couldn’t be reached for comment.)His home was fastidious, except for a half-built child’s toy in the living room. Dr. Howard has four children, ranging in age from 5 to 26, he said. (The older children are from a previous marriage.) He and his wife, Rebecca, are also fostering five Afghan refugees, he added.Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, became friends with Dr. Howard through a shared interest in Afghanistan.“I call him Tony Stark,” he said. “I would have called him that without the statue.” (Senator Mullin made a splash in 2021 for personally trying to escort Americans out of Afghanistan after Kabul fell to the Taliban, against the explicit wishes of the State and Defense Departments. Dr. Howard was “very involved” in similar efforts, Senator Mullin said.)The professor — who is, duh, a fan of the “Transformers” movies — said the sculptures had a deeper meaning for him. Not only did they represent machines and humans coexisting in harmony, he said, but the word “transform” had a great deal of personal significance.“I like changing things when you’re in a status quo and they’re wrong,” he said. “When one looks at themselves and feels self-pity and falls into dwellings of darkness, you should transform.”Dr. Howard has gone through several transformations himself. He was born in the Sinai Peninsula when Israel controlled it. His family — Egyptian Jews who ended up living in France, he said — moved to the United States when he was 11.He said he joined the Army at 18, then worked as a linguist in Michigan “across various agencies,” specializing in Arabic, Farsi and Dari. He changed his name around that time because, he said, “it was offered by an agency.” He declined to provide more detail.“There’s a lot of things during that phase of my career that should be kept secret,” he said.Dr. Howard — whose doctorates include concentrations in mathematics and neuroscience, and who holds an appointment at the University of Oxford alongside the one at Georgetown — is a curious mix of limelight-seeking and discreet. After college, he said, he worked in military intelligence. He later did work for InQTel, which is functionally the C.I.A.’s venture capital fund.What precisely he did to get rich is unclear. He said his wealth resulted from selling various businesses, some of which he could not talk about. The walls of his townhouse are filled with commemorative plaques of his patents, many of which have defense industry applications, including “Wireless Network for Routing a Signal Without Using a Tower” and “System and Method for Automated Detection of Situational Awareness.”A tabletop Transformer in Dr. Howard’s townhouse beside a couple upright books.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesHe said he suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2000 while delivering medical supplies, though he declined to offer more detail. After his recovery, he decided to focus on applying the principles of machine learning to the human brain, and turned to neuroscience. “I figured instead of sitting and getting my brain worked on, I would work on it myself by studying it,” he said.His ventures include Aiberry, a start-up that tries to use A.I. analysis to improve on mental health screening. He said he hoped to help solve the problem of degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s with a cloud-connected device implanted in the brain, using A.I. to optimize the levels of deep brain stimulation.In other words, he would like to help human beings preserve their humanity by becoming a little more machine.The RulingThe Old Georgetown Board seems to rule with an iron fist — just try putting up a neon sign in the neighborhood — but its power is advisory. The city of Washington, D.C., has the real authority to enforce decisions, but the influence of neighbors complaining in unison cannot be discounted.Topher Mathews, a commissioner for Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission, said that the Transformers mess wouldn’t even make his top five neighborhood dramas of the past 10 years. Easily outstripping it, for instance, was the agita caused over the opening on O Street of Call Your Mother Deli, which attracts long lines.And locals love to bring up the Tree Incident of 2018, which involved a new homeowner’s decision to prune and cut down magnolia trees on his property, which happened to be the former home of Ms. Onassis. In response, a neighbor created a Halloween display with a mock tombstone reading, “Beloved magnolia 1840-2018 destroyed R.I.P.,” and a grim reaper that announced “Tree Killer Lives There.”Dr. Howard has argued that his statues constitute meaningful public art. The “Transformers” movies follow a classic good-versus-evil struggle in which the Autobots (the good guys) work to save humanity from the Decepticons (the bad guys). Reviewing the first installment of the franchise in 2007, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that it was “part car commercial, part military recruitment ad, a bumper-to-bumper pileup of big cars, big guns and, as befits its recently weaned target demographic, big breasts.” The Old Georgetown Board took up the matter of Dr. Howard’s statues in spring 2021, and the city gave him a six-month permit to keep them up. But well after the six months was up, Bumblebee and Optimus Prime were still in place.Dr. Newton Howard shows off a device that he says will use A.I. to optimize and adjust the levels of deep brain stimulation.Zak Arctander for The New York TimesBy the time the board met again, in April 2023, Dr. Howard claimed that he had spent tens of thousands of dollars fighting to keep his statues up, an amount that included legal and architect advisory fees and city fines.This time, the board ordered him to take the statues down. Instead of complying, Dr. Howard appealed to the D.C. Public Space Committee. He also rebuffed offers from the Advisory Neighborhood Commission to help him find another place in the neighborhood to display his statues.Dr. Howard seems to enjoy the attention that has come with the ongoing case. He has talked extensively with the press about his crusade. He was flattered that Paramount, the studio behind the Transformers movie, had invited him to the Washington premiere of the next installment, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” which comes out June 9.As DCist and The Washington Post chronicled the twists and turns of the neighborhood drama, sentiment online seemed to swing his way. A student at Georgetown University started a Change.org petition, signed by more than 900 people, to keep the statues up. “This is so dumb,” Hayden Gise, an Advisory Neighborhood Commission vice chair who lives in a neighborhood close to Georgetown, wrote on Twitter. “Let him live oh my god. Everyone loves property rights until some guy does something cool.”On May 25, the statues’ fate went before the Public Space Committee. Dr. Howard had hired Paul Strauss, D.C.’s shadow senator, to represent him. Or, as Mr. Strauss put it, he was acting as counsel for Optimus Prime, while a colleague represented Bumblebee.“People have misunderstood the issue,” Mr. Strauss said. “You talk about compatibility with a historic district? Technically, these guys are millennia old. I mean, they’re prehistoric.”Mr. Strauss and Dr. Howard also persuaded Peter Cullen and Dan Gilvezan, actors who voiced Optimus Prime and Bumblebee on the 1980s cartoon series based on the toys, to attest at the hearing about the history and significance of the nearly 40-year franchise.The entreaties didn’t work. The D.C. Public Space Committee denied Dr. Howard a permit, meaning that he would have to take the statues down himself, or the city would. It wasn’t a question of art; it was a question of following the rules.Dr. Howard didn’t seem inclined to stand down. Before the meeting, he suggested that he would appeal a ruling against him on First Amendment grounds. His lawyer clarified that they saw the issue as one of equal protection: Plenty of people fill their sidewalk planters in Georgetown and never get dinged for it. Why is his client required to seek a permit for what is in his planter?After the meeting, Dr. Howard said he thought he would apply for a new permit. But he seemed deflated.“I’m sad,” he said in a text to a reporter, adding,“What do you think I should do?”The victory that Dr. Howard said he was seeking was a moral one.“I know what these Transformers mean to me,” he said. “What does it mean to them?”As of June 1, the statues were still standing.Kitty Bennett contributed research. More

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      36 Hours in Rio de Janeiro: Things to Do and See

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      1 p.m.
      Lunch, then more samba
      There are two excellent lunch options on Rua do Senado, both from the same owner, that offer very different experiences. On the high end is Lilia, a suave two-floor lunch spot with a changing prix-fixe menu that is eclectic and focused on fresh ingredients (lunch for two, about 300 reais). If you prefer snacks at streetside tables, head a few doors down to Labuta Bar for torresmo (fried pork belly), croquettes, oysters and sandwiches, washed down with house-made iced mate or a cold beer (lunch for two, about 90 reais). A few steps away, catch live samba at one of the city’s oldest bars, Armazém Senado, founded in 1907. The business, which was once a market, still has its high shelves stocked with toilet paper and bleach — along with plenty of bottles of cachaça. More

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      On Gay Street, Another Piece of NYC’s History Is Coming Down

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      Like other vulnerable landmarks across the city, the house at 14 Gay Street — which helped inspire the musical “Wonderful Town” — is being demolished.One Monday in late November, preservationists, politicians, neighbors and looky-loos gathered at dusk on Manhattan’s tiny Gay Street, a slim crescent in the heart of Greenwich Village, to protest the demolition of a nearly 200-year-old house there. The place in question, 14 Gay Street, is one of a clutch of six winsome but precarious early 19th-century buildings on Gay and Christopher Streets that were owned for decades by Celeste Martin, a singular character devoted to her properties and to the often eccentric cast of tenants she nurtured.Ms. Martin died in late 2018, at 94, with no will and no close relatives, so the city took over her holdings, selling 14 Gay Street and its siblings for about $9 million to a buyer who flipped them last April to Lionel Nazarian, a 37-year-old developer, for about $12 million. Since then, Mr. Nazarian has done foundation work that has destabilized 14 Gay Street and imperiled its neighbors, so the city has ordered its demolition, a slow, laborious process that began just before Thanksgiving.Chillingly, this scenario is one that is playing out all over the city, said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation and the organizer of the November protest: As developers have been buying up vulnerable landmark properties, they are either allowing them to deteriorate or doing work that compromises public safety. In the last year, he said, more than a dozen such buildings have come down.Celeste Martin, who died in 2018 at 94, owned six historic properties on Gay and Christopher Streets, including 14 Gay Street. A singular character, she doted on her properties and her often eccentric tenants.Harry ZernikeMr. Berman blames the lack of oversight and coordination by city agencies. “As a result,” he said, “our neighborhoods are paying the price, our city’s history and heritage are paying the price, and the irreplaceable historic landmarks that distinguish New York from everywhere else are being lost.”The city, along with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in a statement it had approved plans for the work on Gay Street and that Mr. Nazarian’s construction crew did not follow their instructions. Preservationists like Mr. Berman and local politicians like Deborah Glick have cried foul, declaring that the city and the commission should have been overseeing the work and described Mr. Nazarian as a bad actor. In 2017, he was accused of creating hazardous conditions and tenant harassment in a property he owns in the East Village. Mr. Berman wondered if his actions were deliberate, to insure he wouldn’t have to restore his new holdings, but be allowed to tear them down and start fresh. For his part, Mr. Nazarian said the construction workers made a terrible mistake, adding that he loves historic architecture and just wants to preserve the buildings.The doughty but fragile antique buildings that Ms. Martin left behind “are part of this incredible surviving collection of very early houses,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. “Dozens were built in the 1820s, but not many are left — certainly not in groups on a small, intimate street. They are really precious.”The building at 14 Gay Street dates to 1827; its siblings, a year later. “They were originally built for the mercantile class,” Mr. Dolkart said. “They weren’t built for the wealthy. They aren’t pristine museum pieces: You can see they had lived, and been lived in, over time.”That’s significant, because the early 19th century was the last period “that modest people, shop owners and small business owners, could afford to live in a single-family home in a built-up section of Manhattan,” he continued. “You can still see a number of these houses peppering the Village.”By the end of the century, many had evolved into boardinghouses and multifamily dwellings. By then, Gay Street was an integrated block, with a large Black community and a melting pot of immigrants from Ireland, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany and Belgium.Demolition recently began at 14 Gay Street. The city has ordered that the work be done by hand and the material saved for use in a reconstruction overseen by the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAll six buildings are landmarked — Gay Street is in the Village’s historic district — but No. 14 is especially noteworthy as a literary artifact, the onetime home of Ruth McKenney, who memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment there in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. (For years, a longtime tenant of the apartment, David Ryan, was awakened by tourists belting the refrain of the musical’s signature number, “Why, oh why, oh why-oh/Why did I ever leave Ohio?” and peering through the bars of his bedroom window. When the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, he suffered acutely.)Ms. Martin’s father, Edmond, who was French, bought the six buildings that now belong to Mr. Nazarian in the 1920s, along with several other properties in the Village, including a fanciful pink Moorish-looking townhouse on Waverly Place, where Ms. Martin grew up. While his father wanted him to join the family’s sail-making business, Edmond fancied himself a real estate mogul and an artist. With the help of his wife, Ramee, he turned the Gay and Christopher Street buildings into a complex of furnished studio apartments, decorated by Ramee and outfitted with slipcovers and curtains sewn by their nanny.In her short story “Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus,” Ms. McKenney renders Edmond as a pompous landlord with artistic pretensions — his character was called Mr. Appopolous in the musical — and her $45 a month basement flat, where she lived with her sister, Eileen, as a dimly lit dump sprouting with mold, including a particularly aggressive fungus that draped from the ceiling. “Every night we cut it down with Eileen’s manicure scissors,” she wrote, “and every morning it was long enough to braid. Eileen thought there was something shameful about the fungus, and she always carefully cut it down before we had a party.”The building in 2003, the year “Wonderful Town” was revived on Broadway.Harry ZernikeEdmond was said to have been miffed by his portrayal in Ms. McKenney’s work; he felt his artistic talents weren’t appropriately recognized. He was not a bad painter, said Matt McGhee, who for decades sold exquisite Christmas ornaments out of his fairyland boutique at 18 Christopher and lived in a one-bedroom next door.Notably, though, Edmond was a racist, cited by the city for refusing to rent to Black people. At one point, he hung a sign in his office at 16 Gay Street declaring this policy. In 1959, The Daily News reported, he filed a suit against the city, claiming that its anti-discrimination housing law interfered with his “aesthetic freedom.” Needless to say, he did not prevail.When he died in 1985, Ms. Martin inherited his properties, but not his bigotry. However, she was never the most assiduous steward of the houses.As Jeanne Kelly, the former director of fossil preparations at the American Museum of Natural History and a Gay Street neighbor for two decades, put it, they were held together with spit and a prayer, and the haphazard ministrations of a retinue of helpers that at one point included a super who was blind and a physics teacher with a number of aliases.But Ms. Martin was generous to her tenants, offering to waive rent if they were in extremis and delivering Christmas gifts of pink Champagne and sweets. (One year, Mr. McGhee said, the gifts included stuffed animals; he received a dog.)She doted on many of the tenants, but Mr. Ryan, who moved into the McKenney apartment in the early 1970s and decorated it with distinctive, decaying élan, English country style, was a favorite. When “Wonderful Town” was in revival on Broadway in December of 2003, they saw the musical together. A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Ryan died in a fire that consumed his apartment, and Ms. Martin never quite recovered.Instead of renovating the apartment, neighbors said, she left it to rot and to the rats. “It was the beginning of her decline,” Ms. Kelly said.David Ryan was the last tenant of the basement apartment that Ruth McKenney rendered as a dimly lit dump in her short stories.Harry ZernikeMr. Ryan decorated the apartment with distinctive, decaying élan…Harry Zernike….in an English country style that involved layers of Persian carpets, velvet- and chintz-upholstered furniture, classical statuary, candelabras and prints in gilded frames.Harry ZernikeSince 1976, Denise Marsa, a singer-songwriter, has lived in her tidy studio around the corner, in the building Ms. Martin once owned at 18 Christopher Street. (She can still remember the original rent: $174.24.). She tried to help Ms. Martin in her final years, urging her to make a will, but her landlord “lived in a fairy tale,” she said.Today, Ms. Marsa, 68, is the last residential tenant in the building, her cheerful apartment, with its kitchen tucked into a closet, an object lesson in small-space living and the promise of studio life as a launching pad. She, too, has rendered her home in song, as Comden and Green once did, in a number featured in “The Pass,” her one-woman show about making it in the big city, which she performed at United Solo, a theater festival in Manhattan, in the fall of 2021. (The storefronts below her are full; John Derian, the purveyor of his own brand of charming decay, took over the spot occupied by Mr. McGhee four years ago.)Back at the rally organized by Mr. Berman, the mood was festive, despite everything. The growl of a bulldozer interrupted the protesters. Its driver, a private contractor, said he was there to do work under the road in front of 14 Gay Street. When questioned, he said he did not know who had hired him, and beat a retreat. Across the street, Joan Goldberg, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens, was holding a quasi-open house at 13 Gay Street, a modest Greek Revival built around 1840 and owned by Margaret Kunstler, the widow of the civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who died in 1995 and was known for representing some controversial clients. (The house is on the market for $6.9 million.)“It was a wonderful street to live on,” Ms. Kunstler said. “We had big Halloweens. Sometimes we would shut down the street for birthday parties. The house was open; there were constant comings and goings.”Ruth McKenney memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment 14 Gay Street in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein.These days, from the top floor of Ms. Kunstler’s house, you can see into the dark cavity that is all that’s left of where Ruth and Eileen McKenney once lived: two gaping window frames braced by wooden beams.Representatives from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the city said that the city will be taking action against Mr. Nazarian for what they say was illegal work done there. Furthermore, the city is requiring that the demolition of 14 Gay Street be done by hand and its material saved for use in a reconstruction that the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission will oversee.“I never intended to just let them rot,” Mr. Nazarian said of the buildings.Asked to estimate what it might cost to restore them, he said, “More than I thought.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      In the Village, Another Piece of the City’s History Is Coming Down

      by

      Like other vulnerable landmarks across the city, the house at 14 Gay Street — which helped inspire the musical “Wonderful Town” — is being demolished.One Monday in late November, preservationists, politicians, neighbors and looky-loos gathered at dusk on Manhattan’s tiny Gay Street, a slim crescent in the heart of Greenwich Village, to protest the demolition of a nearly 200-year-old house there. The place in question, 14 Gay Street, is one of a clutch of six winsome but precarious early 19th-century buildings on Gay and Christopher Streets that were owned for decades by Celeste Martin, a singular character devoted to her properties and to the often eccentric cast of tenants she nurtured.Ms. Martin died in late 2018, at 94, with no will and no close relatives, so the city took over her holdings, selling 14 Gay Street and its siblings for about $9 million to a buyer who flipped them last April to Lionel Nazarian, a 37-year-old developer, for about $12 million. Since then, Mr. Nazarian has done foundation work that has destabilized 14 Gay Street and imperiled its neighbors, so the city has ordered its demolition, a slow, laborious process that began just before Thanksgiving.Chillingly, this scenario is one that is playing out all over the city, said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation and the organizer of the November protest: As developers have been buying up vulnerable landmark properties, they are either allowing them to deteriorate or doing work that compromises public safety. In the last year, he said, more than a dozen such buildings have come down.Celeste Martin, who died in 2018 at 94, owned six historic properties on Gay and Christopher Streets, including 14 Gay Street. A singular character, she doted on her properties and her often eccentric tenants.Harry ZernikeMr. Berman blames the lack of oversight and coordination by city agencies. “As a result,” he said, “our neighborhoods are paying the price, our city’s history and heritage are paying the price, and the irreplaceable historic landmarks that distinguish New York from everywhere else are being lost.”The city, along with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in statement it had approved plans for the work on Gay Street and that Mr. Nazarian’s construction crew did not follow their instructions. Preservationists like Mr. Berman and local politicians like Deborah Glick have cried foul, declaring that the city and the commission should have been overseeing the work and described Mr. Nazarian as a bad actor. In 2017, he was accused of creating hazardous conditions and tenant harassment in a property he owns in the East Village. Mr. Berman wondered if his actions were deliberate, to insure he wouldn’t have to restore his new holdings, but be allowed to tear them down and start fresh. For his part, Mr. Nazarian said the construction workers made a terrible mistake, adding that he loves historic architecture and just wants to preserve the buildings.The doughty but fragile antique buildings that Ms. Martin left behind “are part of this incredible surviving collection of very early houses,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. “Dozens were built in the 1820s, but not many are left — certainly not in groups on a small, intimate street. They are really precious.”The building at 14 Gay Street dates to 1827; its siblings, a year later. “They were originally built for the mercantile class,” Mr. Dolkart said. “They weren’t built for the wealthy. They aren’t pristine museum pieces: You can see they had lived, and been lived in, over time.”That’s significant, because the early 19th century was the last period “that modest people, shop owners and small business owners, could afford to live in a single-family home in a built-up section of Manhattan,” he continued. “You can still see a number of these houses peppering the Village.”By the end of the century, many had evolved into boardinghouses and multifamily dwellings. By then, Gay Street was an integrated block, with a large Black community and a melting pot of immigrants from Ireland, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany and Belgium.Demolition recently began at 14 Gay Street. The city has ordered that the work be done by hand and the material saved for use in a reconstruction overseen by the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAll six buildings are landmarked — Gay Street is in the Village’s historic district — but No. 14 is especially noteworthy as a literary artifact, the onetime home of Ruth McKenney, who memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment there in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. (For years, a longtime tenant of the apartment, David Ryan, was awakened by tourists belting the refrain of the musical’s signature number, “Why, oh why, oh why-oh/Why did I ever leave Ohio?” and peering through the bars of his bedroom window. When the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, he suffered acutely.)Ms. Martin’s father, Edmond, who was French, bought the six buildings that now belong to Mr. Nazarian in the 1920s, along with several other properties in the Village, including a fanciful pink Moorish-looking townhouse on Waverly Place, where Ms. Martin grew up. While his father wanted him to join the family’s sail-making business, Edmond fancied himself a real estate mogul and an artist. With the help of his wife, Ramee, he turned the Gay and Christopher Street buildings into a complex of furnished studio apartments, decorated by Ramee and outfitted with slipcovers and curtains sewn by their nanny.In her short story “Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus,” Ms. McKenney renders Edmond as a pompous landlord with artistic pretensions — his character was called Mr. Appopolous in the musical — and her $45 a month basement flat, where she lived with her sister, Eileen, as a dimly lit dump sprouting with mold, including a particularly aggressive fungus that draped from the ceiling. “Every night we cut it down with Eileen’s manicure scissors,” she wrote, “and every morning it was long enough to braid. Eileen thought there was something shameful about the fungus, and she always carefully cut it down before we had a party.”The building in 2003, the year “Wonderful Town” was revived on Broadway.Harry ZernikeEdmond was said to have been miffed by his portrayal in Ms. McKenney’s work; he felt his artistic talents weren’t appropriately recognized. He was not a bad painter, said Matt McGhee, who for decades sold exquisite Christmas ornaments out of his fairyland boutique at 18 Christopher and lived in a one-bedroom next door.Notably, though, Edmond was a racist, cited by the city for refusing to rent to Black people. At one point, he hung a sign in his office at 16 Gay Street declaring this policy. In 1959, The Daily News reported, he filed a suit against the city, claiming that its anti-discrimination housing law interfered with his “aesthetic freedom.” Needless to say, he did not prevail.When he died in 1985, Ms. Martin inherited his properties, but not his bigotry. However, she was never the most assiduous steward of the houses.As Jeanne Kelly, the former director of fossil preparations at the American Museum of Natural History and a Gay Street neighbor for two decades, put it, they were held together with spit and a prayer, and the haphazard ministrations of a retinue of helpers that at one point included a super who was blind and a physics teacher with a number of aliases.But Ms. Martin was generous to her tenants, offering to waive rent if they were in extremis and delivering Christmas gifts of pink Champagne and sweets. (One year, Mr. McGhee said, the gifts included stuffed animals; he received a dog.)She doted on many of the tenants, but Mr. Ryan, who moved into the McKenney apartment in the early 1970s and decorated it with distinctive, decaying élan, English country style, was a favorite. When “Wonderful Town” was in revival on Broadway in December of 2003, they saw the musical together. A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Ryan died in a fire that consumed his apartment, and Ms. Martin never quite recovered.Instead of renovating the apartment, neighbors said, she left it to rot and to the rats. “It was the beginning of her decline,” Ms. Kelly said.David Ryan was the last tenant of the basement apartment that Ruth McKenney rendered as a dimly lit dump in her short stories.Harry ZernikeMr. Ryan decorated the apartment with distinctive, decaying élan…Harry Zernike….in an English country style that involved layers of Persian carpets, velvet- and chintz-upholstered furniture, classical statuary, candelabras and prints in gilded frames.Harry ZernikeSince 1976, Denise Marsa, a singer-songwriter, has lived in her tidy studio around the corner, in the building Ms. Martin once owned at 18 Christopher Street. (She can still remember the original rent: $174.24.). She tried to help Ms. Martin in her final years, urging her to make a will, but her landlord “lived in a fairy tale,” she said.Today, Ms. Marsa, 68, is the last residential tenant in the building, her cheerful apartment, with its kitchen tucked into a closet, an object lesson in small-space living and the promise of studio life as a launching pad. She, too, has rendered her home in song, as Comden and Green once did, in a number featured in “The Pass,” her one-woman show about making it in the big city, which she performed at United Solo, a theater festival in Manhattan, in the fall of 2021. (The storefronts below her are full; John Derian, the purveyor of his own brand of charming decay, took over the spot occupied by Mr. McGhee four years ago.)Back at the rally organized by Mr. Berman, the mood was festive, despite everything. The growl of a bulldozer interrupted the protesters. Its driver, a private contractor, said he was there to do work under the road in front of 14 Gay Street. When questioned, he said he did not know who had hired him, and beat a retreat. Across the street, Joan Goldberg, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens, was holding a quasi-open house at 13 Gay Street, a modest Greek Revival built around 1840 and owned by Margaret Kunstler, the widow of the civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who died in 1995 and was known for representing some controversial clients. (The house is on the market for $6.9 million.)“It was a wonderful street to live on,” Ms. Kunstler said. “We had big Halloweens. Sometimes we would shut down the street for birthday parties. The house was open; there were constant comings and goings.”Ruth McKenney memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment 14 Gay Street in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein.These days, from the top floor of Ms. Kunstler’s house, you can see into the dark cavity that is all that’s left of where Ruth and Eileen McKenney once lived: two gaping window frames braced by wooden beams.Representatives from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the city said that the city will be taking action against Mr. Nazarian for what they say was illegal work done there. Furthermore, the city is requiring that the demolition of 14 Gay Street be done by hand and its material saved for use in a reconstruction that the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission will oversee.“I never intended to just let them rot,” Mr. Nazarian said of the buildings.Asked to estimate what it might cost to restore them, he said, “More than I thought.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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      A Scruffy Guitar Shop Survives the Chelsea Hotel’s Chic Makeover

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      After a costly renovation, a landmark of Manhattan that was once home to Patti Smith and Bob Dylan is drawing a different crowd. Dan Courtenay, the proprietor of Chelsea Guitars, is fine with that.Ever since the Chelsea Hotel emerged from a long and costly renovation to become one of Manhattan’s trendiest playgrounds, the old hole-in-the-wall guitar shop on the ground floor has become an unlikely link to the building’s fabled bohemian past.Opened in the late 1980s, Chelsea Guitars has sold picks and strings to Patti Smith and Dee Dee Ramone. It started out as one of the hotel’s many street-level mom-and-pop shops. Now it’s the last one standing, a cluttered den of rare and vintage guitars that seems out of step with its chic surroundings. Hotel guests and out-of-towners who stumble into it, sometimes with one of the Lobby Bar’s signature $28 martinis swirling around in their bellies, are smitten by its scruffiness.Mr. Courtenay’s store occupies the small street-level space between the red awning of the freshly scrubbed bohemian landmark and the El Quijote restaurant.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesA mannequin of Marilyn Monroe strumming a ukulele sits outside the shop’s entrance on West 23rd Street. The narrow interior has cracked marble floors, a slow-spinning ceiling fan and brick walls lined with pictures of Albert King, Elmore James and other blues greats.Emerging from one wall, trompe l’oeil style, is the head of a Tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Stanley — a homage to the Chelsea Hotel’s former manager Stanley Bard, who sometimes accepted paintings in lieu of rent checks from the building’s eccentric tenants.After the hotel was closed to guests in 2011, the 12-story Gilded Age era building was shrouded in scaffolding and netting for years, as a faction of its rent-stabilized tenants tried to thwart a top-to-bottom renovation. BD Hotels, a boutique hotel firm in New York that operates the Bowery and the Jane, ultimately prevailed, and its sleekly reimagined Hotel Chelsea opened in the summer. The more than 40 tenants who remain in the building can now order room service.The hotel’s well-scrubbed appearance might have startled the artists who lived there when drug dealers roamed the stairwells and cheap rooms provided sanctuary for Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Robert Mapplethorpe. Suites start at around $700 a night.The elegant Lobby Bar serves the Edie ’67, a cocktail mixed partly with mezcal and Lapsang tea named after the Andy Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick. El Quijote, the Spanish restaurant that was once the hotel’s sleepy canteen, has been overhauled into a culinary hot spot. The Bard Room, named in honor of Mr. Bard, who died in 2017, has been the site of parties for The New Yorker and the British fashion company Mulberry.Mr. Courtenay walks through the newly renovated lobby.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWhen two tourists from Poland, Irena Sierakowska and Przemyslaw Gulda, made a pilgrimage to the Chelsea on a recent day, they saw a doorman in a beanie cap and red gloves who greeted guests carrying shopping bags into the building. But they found the grit they were looking for when they walked into Chelsea Guitars.“When you live in Poland, your connection to New York is movies,” Mr. Gulda said. “But here, I walk in and feel like I’m in that movie. I think: This is it!”Ms. Sierakowska said she came to see the Chelsea Hotel because of a Leonard Cohen song, “Chelsea Hotel #2,” a 1974 ode to Janis Joplin written by Mr. Cohen, who lived for a time in Room 424.Behind the cluttered counter, a 68-year-old-man with long silvery hair and tinted glasses looked up from his bento box lunch. It was Dan Courtenay, the longtime owner of Chelsea Guitars. He told the couple that he once had a customer who recorded a famous cover of Mr. Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”“Jeff Buckley? Yeah, he used to come by here,” he said. “We’d do work on his guitars.”“Did you meet Marilyn?” he continued, referring to the kitsch statue out front. “I found her behind a trash can in Long Island. She’s pretty helpful, because I can tell anyone trying to find me, ‘Look for Marilyn.’”“People from all around the world, just like you guys, come to see the Chelsea Hotel, and then they end up in my shop,” he added. “To them, seeing the magical Chelsea Hotel, it’s like visiting what was once Oz — a downtrodden Oz.”As the couple, giddy from their contact high with a crustier New York, prepared to leave, Mr. Courtenay scribbled his number on a card and handed it to them.“If you get lost, or have any problems taking the subway,” he said, “call us.”If Chelsea Guitars has accrued cultural significance as an unkempt holdout in the newly pristine hotel, then Mr. Courtenay is its resident bard, eager to pass on the building’s mythology to anyone who enters his store, whether or not they buy a $6,000 1964 Epiphone Riviera or the other worship-worthy rare guitars on the walls. If you get him going, he’ll tell tales about what he says he has seen running the shop for more than three decades.Joan Baez once stopped by and gave him her Chinese takeout leftovers for lunch, he said. When the band Oasis was in town, Noel Gallagher came in and asked to see a rare Gibson acoustic stored away in the back of the shop. Mr. Courtenay was in a grumpy mood that day, so he told Mr. Gallagher to go fetch him a cup of coffee while he retrieved it.During Patti Smith’s brief residence in the hotel in the mid-1990s, her teenage son, Jackson, used to hang out in the shop playing Green Day riffs. And there was the time Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top dropped in before heading to El Quijote, where a confrontation ensued when the restaurant asked him to take off his signature tasseled cap.“They told him, ‘You’ve got to take off the hat,’” Mr. Courtenay recalled. “Billy said, ‘I don’t take this hat off when I’m sleeping.’”There was also the guitar busker named Vlad, who seemingly knew only a few chords and sang about his woes in a thick Eastern European accent at a nearby subway station, becoming known as the Polish Bluesman of Chelsea. There was also the mysterious woman who lived in the hotel, and who was rumored to come from wealth, whom Mr. Courtenay observed for years as she hailed invisible cabs outside the building. And there was the shop’s resident cat, a Russian blue named Boris.In addition to rare vintage guitars, Chelsea Guitars sells the small necessities.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“Boris had one tooth, no nails and one ear shot off,” Mr. Courtenay said. “He’d belonged to a troubled lady who lived upstairs. We kidnapped him to save his life.”“Boris despised dogs,” he continued. “He’d sit atop a Marshall amp and then leap onto any dog that came into the shop. He’d also take the elevator to visit people in the hotel. He’d go into El Quijote to say hello to customers. When I went to Paris, I discovered a postcard being sold to tourists, and to my shock, it was a picture of Boris at the Chelsea Hotel.”Rosanne Cash lives nearby with her husband, the musician and producer John Leventhal. In an email, she wrote: “We both appreciate the total anomaly Chelsea Guitars is in the current shiny, hip version of what Chelsea has become. We moved to Chelsea in ’96, and Dan’s blessed little hovel was a beacon and still connects us to the glorious grit.”Mr. Leventhal said: “Dan runs a freewheeling and almost improvisational kind of space. I often go there just to talk with him about life.”Mr. Courtenay grew up in Queens Village. His father was a police chief, and his mother worked as a secretary. He briefly lived in the hotel, in a terrace apartment just above his shop about two decades ago. “I used to go downstairs in my pajamas with a cup of coffee and I was still late for work,” he said. “I’ve been late my whole life.” He eventually moved to the nearby Penn South co-op houses, where he has lived ever since.He has no children and lives alone. He walks four blocks to work, rarely arriving before the princely hour of 2 p.m. And as far as he’s concerned, rock ’n’ roll died in 1971, when Duane Allman perished after a motorcycle crash — which explains why he had no clue who Nirvana were when the band walked into his shop at the height of their fame.But Mr. Courtenay’s Lebowski-like demeanor belies the determination that has allowed him to keep his shop in the hotel. He has survived two close calls so far.A smoker rests a hand on the old Marilyn Monroe statue outside his shop.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesA photo in Chelsea Guitars shows the proprietor’s father, Daniel J. Courtenay, who was a police chief with the New York Police Department.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesOriginally, Chelsea Guitars occupied a bigger space a few doors down from its current location. After the hotel’s board ousted Stanley Bard in 2007, however, many of the building’s artistic tenants felt that they had lost their protector. Then the families that had long owned the Victorian Gothic palace put it up for sale, resulting in the chaotic succession of ownership turnovers that transformed the hotel into an embattled construction site.In 2009, Mr. Courtenay learned that his lease wouldn’t be renewed. After the man who ran the building’s ground-floor Balabanis Tailor shop retired, he brokered a deal to move into the newly vacated space. El Quijote waiters helped carry his wares to the tiny new location.Four years ago, Chelsea Guitars was imperiled again. BD Hotels, the group that oversaw the renovation, reportedly planned to convert his shop into a building entranceway. This time, Mr. Courtenay took his plight to the press, and the resulting coverage in a neighborhood newspaper, Chelsea Now, created a groundswell of community support for his cause.BD Hotels offered him a five-year lease and didn’t raise his rent. Mr. Courtenay taped the newspaper’s follow-up article to his shop window. “Chelsea Guitars to Remain in Iconic Location” is the headline.Nevertheless, Mr. Courtenay — who stressed that he maintains amicable relations with his landlord — wonders what the fate of his shop will be in the chic haven that has risen around him, which is set to include a spa, a Japanese restaurant and a cafe.“I don’t know what will happen when my lease ends,” he said. “I like to think that they see we come with the hotel, but who knows. People have told me, ‘You could leave and start elsewhere.’ But to me, it’s all about the Chelsea Hotel or nothing. If I went elsewhere, I’d just be a guitar store.”Ira Drukier, the hotelier who owns the Hotel Chelsea with Sean MacPherson and Richard Born, said that Chelsea Guitars is a welcome holdout in his establishment.Stanley the T. Rex minds the store.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“The hotel has a long history, and he’s part of it in his own way,” Mr. Drukier said. “It just seems like the right thing to do is let him stay here and do what he’s been doing for so many years.” He added: “His spot is a tiny hole-in-the-wall. It’s not like I can fit some big restaurant in it.”One recent evening — not long after Michael Chaiken, who was the first curator of the Bob Dylan Archive, stopped by to drop off his Fender Telecaster — Mr. Courtenay needed to use the bathroom. Because his shop doesn’t have one, he stepped outside and went into the Hotel Chelsea.As he passed the grand double doors that lead to the Lobby Bar, a rowdy din emerged, so he decided to check out the scene. In the lounge, the host looked on as hotel guests had uni toasts and dirty martini oysters while telegenic 30-somethings waited for a seat at the bar.Mr. Courtenay’s customers have included Jeff Buckley, Rosanne Cash, Noel Gallagher, John Leventhal, Dee Dee Ramone and Patti Smith.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesAs people brushed past Mr. Courtenay’s shaggy and lumbering figure, he mused on how the city’s nostalgists liked to dwell on the ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel.“There are people who still want this place to be closed up and for it to be the 1950s again,” he said. “Do I wish Stanley Bard was here? And that it was still the zany 1950s and that I was talking to Jackson Pollock? Yeah, I do. But I look at it now, and it’s full of life and people again, and that’s a wonderful thing.”“I already wept for this hotel’s past a long time ago,” he said. “And you can’t bring back the past.” More