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      in Music

      A Pandemic, Then a Hurricane, Brings New Orleans Musicians ‘to Their Knees’

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      When Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans late last month, it took a piece of history with it. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a decrepit red brick building that had served as a kind of second home for Louis Armstrong during his boyhood in the early 1900s, was reduced to rubble.At the Little Gem Saloon next door, where some of the first jazz gigs were played, a three-story-tall mural paying homage to the pioneering cornetist Buddy Bolden was also ruined.Most of the city’s active music venues fared far better, suffering minor roof and water damage. But the storm was only the latest in a series of blows to the people and places that make up the jazz scene, in a city that stakes its identity on live music.“We’ve been without work for over 18 months now,” Big Sam Williams, a trombonist and bandleader, said in a phone interview from his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s a struggle and we’re just barely making it.”Doug Trager, who manages the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carrollton neighborhood, said that after 446 days of shutdown because of Covid-19, “we were just getting going” again before Ida hit. Now that the storm has created another setback, he said, “we’ll just try to keep waiting it out.”The Little Gem Saloon days after the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesLittle Gem Saloon and the Karnofsky Shop sit on the same block.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt has now been a year and a half since the pandemic first prompted a citywide moratorium on indoor performances. On Aug. 16, the city imposed a mandate requiring all patrons at bars and clubs to be vaccinated or recently tested for Covid-19, seeming to open the door to a new phase of reopening.But as the Delta variant surged, the city’s two major jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest, both already pushed back from their usual springtime schedule, were called off. That meant that, for the second year in a row, musicians would have to do without the most active period of their work year, when hordes of tourists arrive for the festivals and spillover gigs at clubs often provide enough work for area performers to pay the rent for months.A week and a half after the storm, many in the city’s live-music business say they will not be resting easy, even after things come back online.In interviews, local advocates said that zoning laws had long made small venue operators’ lives difficult, and that neighborhood clubs have run into needless red tape during the pandemic as the city has sometimes enforced strict permitting regulations around outdoor entertainment.“They’re counting on the continued presence of the culture bearers and the musicians, and they’re mistaken this time,” said Ashlye Keaton, a co-founder of the Ella Project, which provides legal assistance to and agitates on behalf of New Orleans artists. “The storm, coupled with Covid, has brought musicians to their knees.”While some venues have survived since March 2020 with substantial help from federal grants, including the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, other small and vulnerable clubs, particularly those nestled in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, often lacked the capacity or the wherewithal to apply. Many have held on largely thanks to fund-raisers and whatever performances they can safely pull off without raising the hackles of regulators and neighbors.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city will continue to enforce permitting for outdoor live entertainment events on a temporary basis, pointing out that the mayor had lifted its usual cap on those permits during the pandemic.“The Department of Safety & Permits fully supports and is actively working with partners in the City Council to enact legislation which balances the desire for outdoor entertainment, supports local artists and venues as well as preserves the quality of life for the neighbors and residents of each community,” the statement says.Preservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesTipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, will require some repairs to its roof.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMany of the city’s active venues were spared serious damage in the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPreservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida, and is slated to reopen once power is restored. Tipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, located closer to the water, will require some repairs to its roof.The New Orleans Jazz Market, a stately performance center in Central City, appears to have held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming nonetheless — just days after what was supposed to have been a triumphant reopening for its fall 2021 season.“This is very reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, and what we went through during that time, and I know a lot of New Orleans musicians are displaced,” said the drummer Adonis Rose, the artistic director of the Jazz Market and leader of its resident big band, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He called the storm a “tragedy, when we were just starting to see some glimmer of hope.”The New Orleans Jazz Market held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming after the hurricane.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, turned his club into a community gathering space during the pandemic.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a renowned trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, said in an interview on Monday that the electricity had just come back on at the popular neighborhood club, and he planned to get the place ready to rock.During the pandemic, Ruffins’s club served as a gathering spot and a kind of improvised community cafeteria. He moved concerts outside to the club’s patio, and cooked free meals of red beans and rice for residents of the surrounding Tremé neighborhood, and for musicians who were out of work.“I figured if I cooked for myself, I’d cook for the neighborhood,” Ruffins said.Howie Kaplan, the proprietor of the Howlin’ Wolf, a venue in downtown New Orleans, also began providing meals and other services to musicians in the early days of the pandemic. The program was subsumed into the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic earlier this year; he restarted it at the Howlin’ Wolf last month, in response to Hurricane Ida.“We’ve got a James Beard Award-winning chef on the grill right now, making these fantastic steaks that came from who knows where,” Kaplan said in a phone interview, adding that restaurants had come to donate food that they wouldn’t be able to prepare because of the power outage.Shortly after Hurricane Ida passed over the city, Jordan Hirsch — the editor of the online resource A Closer Walk, which provides detailed information on New Orleans’s heritage sites — set out to determine how the city’s most vulnerable music landmarks had held up.The program providing meals returned to the Howlin’ Wolf after Hurricane Ida.Jillian Marie PhotographyWhen he got to the Karnofsky shop, on South Rampart Street downtown, he saw that the building had become wreckage and the Bolden mural nearby had crumbled. But other equally old jazz landmarks along the block, the former Eagle Saloon and the Iroquois Theater, had miraculously pulled through. All four structures are on the national historic register; it’s safe to say that no single block in the United States today houses more early jazz history.A Cleveland-based developer, GBX Group, recently bought out most of the addresses on the street, and plans to rebuild it into a center of commerce that will also trumpet its role in jazz history. After the storm, GBX hired workers to collect the Karnofsky shop’s bricks, said its C.E.O., Drew Sparacia, hoping to at least partially rebuild the structure using the original materials.But Hirsch asked why the city had not done more to demand that the owners of these historic places, which to the outside observer appear to be mostly abandoned, keep them protected from the elements.“Tropical storms and hurricanes were sort of a constant threat for those buildings,” Hirsch said. “People have been sounding that alarm for 30 years.”Some other sites that made it through Hurricane Ida remain deeply endangered, according to preservationists. John McCusker, a jazz historian and photojournalist who has worked to preserve historic buildings in the city, said that Bolden’s former home in Central City and the old Dew Drop Inn — a midcentury music venue, hotel and community hub — were both in states of relative disrepair.McCusker lamented that the sites’ landlords hadn’t been compelled to restore and preserve the buildings.“We have this wealth of these buildings connected to the birth of this music, and the mechanisms of government have just proven maladroit at protecting them with the same vigor that they would enforce an inappropriate shutter in the French Quarter,” he said. More

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      Staging ‘The Glass Menagerie’ on the Fire Escapes That Inspired It

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      At Tennessee Williams’s childhood apartment in St. Louis, one of his most famous works has become an immersive event.ST. LOUIS — There’s a knowing twinkle in Tom Wingfield’s eye.He’s standing out on the second-floor fire escape, delivering the opening monologue of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” like a magician who knows his audience recognizes the trick. Wingfield, the play’s narrator and a thinly veiled self-portrait of Williams himself, played here by Bradley James Tejeda, sets the scene: “I take you back to an alley in St. Louis.”And there’s that twinkle, reminding us where we are.We’re not just in St. Louis, where Williams grew up and where his semi-autobiographical memory play unfolds. And not just in an alley, in the parking lot behind a fire-escape-covered apartment building much like the one where the Wingfield family might reside.Brenda Currin, left, and Bradley James Tejeda on a fire escape at 4633 Westminster Place in St. Louis.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesWe are on the corner of Westminster and Walton in the city’s Central West End neighborhood, outside the actual apartment building where Williams once lived. These are the fire escapes that likely helped inspire “The Glass Menagerie” in the first place.Williams’s family moved to 4633 Westminster Place — now called “The Tennessee” — from Mississippi in 1918, when Williams was 7, and lived there for four years before moving elsewhere in the city. He was long gone by the time he wrote “The Glass Menagerie,” his first hit, in 1944 — but this production, which opened Thursday from the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis, still feels unexpectedly immersive, with a set that stretches from a small stage in the parking lot to the existing maze of metal walkways that cover the side of the building.“We’re using fire escapes that he probably walked on,” the director, Brian Hohlfeld, said in an interview the week of opening night, adding, “It is very humbling and very daunting.”Hohlfeld and Carrie Houk, the festival’s executive artistic director, had initially targeted a local auditorium with ties to Williams’s early theater career for a 2020 “Menagerie” production. (That edition, last November, became a radio play.) As they weighed venue options for this year’s festival with health and safety considerations during the pandemic, the apartments seemed to be a serendipitous fit.The director, Brian Hohlfeld, left, and the executive artistic director, Carrie Houk, before a performance.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesHouk tracked down the owner of the building through Airbnb, where most of the nine units are available to rent — “The boyhood home of playwright Tennessee Williams” is listed as a main draw, with the going rate at the time of publication around $160 a night. The owner, Houk said in an interview, gave an immediate yes.Hohlfeld, a St. Louis native who now lives in California, and the cast — which also includes Brenda Currin, Elizabeth Teeter and Chauncy Thomas — are staying on location in the apartments during the run, which ends on Aug. 29. The housing decision was made, in part, to meet the Actors’ Equity Association’s ventilation guidelines — and frankly, Houk said, they needed the doorway. Many of the show’s entrances and exits are made through the back door of one of the units, to and from the second-floor fire escape.The festival has had the typical concerns that most open-air productions have — mainly, the unpredictability of St. Louis weather in August. But unlike other outdoor undertakings here — the Muny and the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival have both dealt with their fair share of rainy Missouri summers — putting on a show in an active neighborhood, on a residential street, comes with its own challenges.“Yesterday during rehearsal, this guy comes out to empty his trash. He walked down three stories with his trash bag, and we had to direct him toward the trash bin,” Hohlfeld said. “He was polite enough to go around front when he came back.”Opening night conditions were slightly better. Actors only had to compete with a car alarm, a distant siren or two and a passing car’s thumping bass in the alley.Watching a play on a residential street comes with challenges.Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesBut, Hohlfeld conceded, the ambience can also add something neat: “Occasionally lights will be turned on in the units, turned off, and it just gives it real life.”At least from the outside, nearby residents don’t seem to mind the noise — most passers-by on Thursday night stopped to take in a scene or two from the sidewalk, and a neighbor gave a standing ovation from the porch next door.“One of the things we were worried about is the neighbors complaining,” Houk said, “but I think they’re fascinated by it.”St. Louis is admittedly an odd location for a festival celebrating Williams, considering that it’s a place he notoriously despised. “When the Williams family moved to St. Louis from the South, it was a different St. Louis than it is now,” Houk said.Houk, who added that getting the festival started several years ago was a “battle” for that reason, thinks Williams didn’t hate the city so much as his family’s circumstances, many of which are on display in “The Glass Menagerie.”“It’s really about how he was trying desperately to get out of St. Louis, but at the same time, it captures the city and why he wanted to get out,” Hohlfeld said. “I think if he had moved here at a different time, he might have had a different attitude.”Still, the script is riddled with plenty of St. Louis references, all of which serve as additional winks to the audience: mentions of Washington University, where Williams attended for a time, and of several institutions in Forest Park (a bucolic spot that easily rivals Central Park, to anyone you ask here) — the art museum, the zoo’s massive 1904 World’s Fair bird cage and the Jewel Box greenhouse.And on Thursday night, in case any further reminder was needed of exactly where we were, one man stretching his legs during intermission posed the most familiar and inconsequential St. Louis greeting there is: Where, he wondered, did Williams go to high school? More

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      Colorado Opera House Attic Holds Century-Old Painted Sets

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      Hundreds of painted sets were discovered after a century in the attic of the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colo.LEADVILLE, Colo. — One summer day three years ago, Wendy Waszut-Barrett stumbled onto quite the discovery at the Tabor Opera House, high in the Colorado Rockies.“I still get excited about it now,” she said in a recent interview, “and I get all flushed.”Waszut-Barrett, a specialist in period theatrical painting who runs the company Historic Stage Services, was visiting various venues on a drive from her home near Minneapolis to Santa Fe, N.M. She made a stop here in Leadville, about 100 miles west of Denver, to check out the Tabor, which opened in 1879 and has since been designated a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Waszut-Barrett had heard rumors about old scenery being stored on the top floor of the Italianate theater, and asked if she could poke around.Scaffolding covers the exterior of the 19th-century opera house, right, which is undergoing a gut renovation.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times“Basically I got, ‘Sure, but you’re by yourself,’” she said. “So I went up there and it was unreal.”What she found may not have looked like much to the untrained eye: Greg Labbe, the mayor of Leadville, recently said, with laconic wonder, that “there were dusty rolls of stuff in the attic.”Waszut-Barrett knew better: “It was this amazing scope of scenery from 1879 to 1902, which is unheard-of in North America,” she said. The Tabor’s hitherto hidden collection held samples illustrating both the wing-and-shutter system of theatrical design (in which sets move horizontally across the floor) and the fly system that replaced it (in which they move vertically, with ropes and pulleys).The trove holds samples illustrating both the wing-and-shutter system of theatrical design (in which sets are moved horizontally across the floor) and the fly system that replaced it (in which they move vertically, with ropes and pulleys).Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesAnd all this because the local Elks put the old scenery away when they bought the opera house in 1901, and everybody just forgot about it.On a longer trip last fall, Waszut-Barrett, by then documenting her findings for the Tabor Opera House Preservation Foundation, unearthed wings and shutters; flats stacked against walls; and painted sets as big as 12 feet wide and 16 feet high — a mountain vista, a parlor room, a forest. All in all, reflecting the fact that some of them were double-sided, there were around 250 “painted compositions.”Tagging along on one of Waszut-Barrett’s visits to the Tabor earlier this month — the building is open for regular guided tours while it is being gut-renovated, and performances resume next year — I gaped at large painted canvases stretched out as if ready to be moved to the stage, while others were rolled up.Wendy Waszut-Barrett, a specialist in period theatrical design, gentlys clean a piece of scenery.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesBrushing delicately with a dry sponge, Waszut-Barrett demonstrated how she could reveal images lurking under decades’ worth of soot. A century-old piece of scenery would be revived, and what was remarkable is that if you looked at it through your phone’s camera, it magically acquired three-dimensional depth: “Sets were painted so both distance and stage lighting would make them pop, and the camera performs a similar function,” Waszut-Barrett explained.Design was a vital part of the Tabor audience’s enjoyment. In 1899, a local paper ran an ad for a weeklong engagement by the Kyle Thomas Comic Opera Company (“The Chimes of Normandy,” “H.M.S. Pinafore,” “The Pirates of Penzance” and “Olivette”) that boasted “new and magnificent costumes” and an “augmented cast” of 25 artists.A set element representing the door of a shack had been used in a performance of the Viennese operetta “Fatinitza,” and might have been left behind by the visiting Bostonians company after their performance in Leadville in 1889. Or perhaps it was forgotten in 1893 by the Calhoun Opera Company, which descended on the Tabor with, according to a newspaper ad, “a strong cast of principals, a strong chorus and THEIR OWN ORCHESTRA, under the baton of Carl Martens.”Pigments and brushes used in the restoration of the sets.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesBenjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesWalking around the opera house is like being teleported back to its glory days, when you might have settled down for a melodrama, a circus show, an Oscar Wilde lecture or the musical “Out of Bondage,” by the African American Hyers Sisters, whom an ad in a Colorado paper described as “the distinguished serio-comic queens of song and operatic prima donnas.”Or you might have seen the superstar soprano Emma Abbott, whom Katherine K. Preston, author of the book “Opera for the People,” called a “cultural activist” in a recent video chat — because Abbott had made opera accessible to the American masses by singing in English.“The history of the Tabor Opera House is utterly fascinating and the fact that we can physically share it through the historic building and stage scenery is remarkable,” said Jenny Buddenborg, president of the opera house’s preservation foundation, which operates the building in partnership with its current owner, the city of Leadville.The theater was used for operas, vaudeville, lectures, circus shows, concerts and more.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesOnly a select few today will recognize the name of the theater’s dedicatee, Horace Tabor, but he played a significant role in the cultural history of the American West. Back in the 1880s, Leadville was riding high on altitude (its elevation is just over 10,000 feet) and mining money, and Tabor was a top dog. He had made a huge fortune in silver — the town also turned J.J. and Molly Brown, of “unsinkable” fame, into millionaires — and like many rich men, he decided to spend some of it on a temple to entertainment, “the largest and best west of the Mississippi.”The Tabor Opera House quickly grabbed the attention of a bustling, rowdy city full of competing theaters, saloons and brothels. (The tycoon opened the even bigger Tabor Grand Opera House in Denver in 1881, but it was torn down in 1964.)Tabor did not just present shows; he became one. He scandalously traded his wife Augusta for a younger woman, the former Elizabeth McCourt Doe, and lost all his money when silver collapsed. After his death, in 1899, Baby Doe, as she was nicknamed, moved to a shack next to Horace’s old mine. Colorado’s harsh winter dealt the last blow, and one day she froze to death; the saga became the subject of the 1956 Douglas Moore and John Latouche opera “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” one of Beverly Sills’s finest turns. Riding a bike by the mine site, on the Mineral Belt Trail, was oddly moving, the setting’s isolation underlining the outlandishness of the whole Tabor story.Scenery stacked backstage in the Tabor Opera House.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesThe discovery of the sets adds a new chapter. Not only do they give us a rare glimpse of American scenic design in the 19th century, but they also evoke a time when entertainment was not as siloed as it is now, and what we call classical music was part of the vernacular, along with vaudeville and plays.“The artists that were painting this scenery were painting opera, World’s Fair midway exhibits, grand circus spectacles for Ringling Brothers, the Wild West show by Buffalo Bill,” Waszut-Barrett said. “They were creating the same visual aesthetic.”As exciting as all this is, the sets have created a new headache for the small foundation that runs the Tabor, since it now has to figure out how to restore and look after them, in addition to fixing up the building. Waszut-Barrett brought up as a potential inspiration the Drottningholm Palace Theater near Stockholm, which presents stagings using 18th-century machinery and sets.“Ideally, we’d love to continue using the sets in productions and sharing them with the public through our building tour program and other educational programming,” Buddenborg said. “We’re still wrapping our heads around what we have.” More

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      in Television

      New Kid Jonathan Knight on His 'Farmhouse Fixer' Life

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      ESSEX, Mass. — When he was 22 and flush from success as a member of the boy band New Kids on the Block, Jonathan Knight bought a Georgian house, built circa 1900, on the North Shore here, with a slate roof, Palladian windows, terraces and 12,000 square feet to pad around in.It was 1990, two years after the New Kids released their second studio album, “Hangin’ Tough,” which topped the Billboard charts, spawned several hit singles and went on to sell more than 14 million copies worldwide. Suddenly, the five members — Jonathan, his younger brother Jordan Knight, Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg and Danny Wood — went from scruffy kids from Boston to fantasy boyfriends for suburban teen girls everywhere.Mr. Knight invited his large family to move out of the city and come up to live with him in the new place. “And then we went on tour, so it was up to my brothers and sisters and mother to do the shopping,” Mr. Knight said, meaning for furniture. His mother’s taste ran to frilly curtains, floral sofas, busy patterned rugs, all appropriate to the house but not to a young pop star.Mr. Knight’s circa-1760 farmhouse.Tony Luong for The New York TimesThe flower garden.Tony Luong for The New York Times“I came home and was, like, ‘What is going on?’” Mr. Knight said. “Looking back, I’m like, what a dummy for buying a house like that at such a young age. It was ridiculous. Waste of money. Just stupid. Best day was when I sold that house.”Mr. Knight, who is now 52 and back before our eyeballs again, this time with a home-renovation show on HGTV, “Farmhouse Fixer,” is nevertheless living a version of his life at 22. In some ways, it is humbler. In others, grander. Because now, instead of his family all piled into that house, each person gets their own on the 10-acre rural Shangri-La he created just down the road.There are gardens, a fenced-in horse pasture, antique barns, wildflowers climbing up stone walls and several historic houses, all of which Mr. Knight owns. His mother, Marlene, lives in the circa-1890 dwelling as you enter the property; his nephew stays in the farmhouse with Italianate details across the field. Mr. Knight and his partner, Harley Rodriguez, are building a new Colonial-style home on a gentle rise in the center of it all, while living temporarily in a pretty circa-1760 farmhouse with a white-painted clapboard exterior, a pond for their six ducks and a little barn for their three goats.A grand piano is one of the few hints of his musical career.Tony Luong for The New York TimesPlenty of greenery inside, too.Tony Luong for The New York TimesThe couple bought the farmhouse when it came up for sale last year, selling the circa-1800s house in the nearby town of Ipswich where they’d lived for just one year. “I was like, ‘I have to buy it, I have to,’” said Mr. Knight, stretched out on a sofa in the farmhouse’s high-ceilinged living room on a recent morning. “I didn’t want somebody moving across the street. It just adds to the whole family compound.”Plus, it’s 260 years old, and as viewers of “Farmhouse Fixer” have discovered, Mr. Knight has a passion for historic houses. He grew up in a Victorian in the Dorchester section of Boston, which his hippie parents bought for something like $25,000 in the ’70s. He referred to it affectionately as “a big, old, cold, drafty holes-in-the-wall house.”For him, refurbishing houses that have seen better years isn’t a pop star’s hobby. It’s how he made his living, especially in the lean years after the New Kids fell from the pop-culture firmament in the grunge-y ’90s.On the six-episode series, which debuted in March and was just renewed for a second season, Mr. Knight and his interior designer partner, Kristina Crestin, roam New England, the land of old farmhouses in slow decline. They add open-plan kitchens and central air while keeping the old charm in the house so their current owners won’t call the bulldozers. When they achieve the right balance of historic preservation and modern amenities, Ms. Crestin said, Mr. Knight has been known to cry off camera.“When he walks in, I’m, like, ‘Wait, wait, watch.’ I want him to lose it with happiness,” Ms. Crestin said. “To me, he’s reacting to what was done well then. He’s looking at the original stonework. He seems to be reflecting back to the people who did it and the pride they took in their work.”Back in the day. From left, Donnie Wahlberg, Joey McIntyre, front, Danny Wood, Mr. Knight, front, and his brother, Jordan Knight.Michel Linssen/Redferns, via Getty ImagesFrom Hits to FlipsDressed in flannels and jeans and driving a pickup truck, on the show the still-boyishly handsome Mr. Knight comes across like a Yankee Chip Gaines — an image that isn’t made for TV. He actually does come home from a tour or recording session and hop on his tractor. He’s the sort who stops to admire an original newel post or a carpenter’s miter work from 200 years ago. His heart hurts a little when confronted with vinyl siding and plastic decking.Mr. Knight sighed thinking about those and other modern horrors. “I hate when people put trendy things in a house and it goes out of style so fast,” he said. “Like everybody’s using this pattern tile now. You’re going to look back and go, ‘That’s so 2020.’”Walking out to the property’s 18th-century post-and-beam barn, Mr. Knight explained that he hired a company to disassemble it, refurbish the wood beams one by one and rebuild it with a new roof and siding in a different spot, at probably 10 times the cost to build a new barn.“Everybody said, ‘Why?’” said Mr. Knight, looking up at the old ceiling beams. “It just has meaning. You know, it’s just my love of old things. It was standing since the 1700s. I wouldn’t tear it down. Now this thing will be around for another two or three hundred years.”From love songs to lavender.Tony Luong for The New York TimesHe never promised you a rose garden, and yet somehow….Tony Luong for The New York TimesMr. Knight was 16 when he joined the New Kids and 26 when their brand of sweet pop went out of fashion, they stopped selling out concerts and the carnival ride ground to a halt. With the rest of his life ahead of him, he had no idea what to do. While other young adults were in college or working their first jobs developing life skills, he’d lived inside the pop-star bubble. He didn’t know how to order for himself at a restaurant.“It was probably the scariest time in my life,” he said. “I just remember being home for a few days, opening the door to my bedroom in the morning and looking around and nobody’s there. The New Kids weren’t there. There were no tour buses. Everything was just done.”Mr. Knight spent a year staying up all night, sleeping until 4 in the afternoon and sinking into a deep depression. Then one day he got a call from a Boston cop who’d worked security detail for the group. He was flipping houses on the side and invited Mr. Knight to partner with him. “When he said ‘flip houses,’ I thought, Is this some mafia thing? We’re going to go in there and rob these people?” Mr. Knight said. “It was a term I’d never heard.”But Mr. Knight’s father was a carpenter and he’d grown up going to job sites with him on weekends. “And my mother is an old house nerd,” he said. “Me and my mother would drive around neighborhoods and look at old houses. To this day, I love driving slow down roads like, ‘Look at that place.’”Three horses owned by his mother are pastured on the property.Tony Luong for The New York TimesIn the vegetable garden.Tony Luong for The New York TimesSoon, Mr. Knight found himself pulling junk out of a trashy yard in West Roxbury and painting a banister at 3 a.m. ahead of the next day’s open house. Through the ’90s and into the 2000s, he estimates he bought, renovated and flipped a hundred or more houses, at first doing the construction work with his policeman partner and, as the business grew, with hired subcontractors.When the pair started doing new construction — “cookie-cutter boxes,” Mr. Knight called them — it was less appealing to him. And then the 2008 housing crash hit. “We’d just finished a nine-unit condo complex in Boston,” Mr. Knight recalled. “It was a lot of money lost in 2008. That’s actually when New Kids started up again. The timing was just perfect.”‘A Stress-Free Life’The band reunited in 2008 on the “Today” show, released a new album and went on a 150-date world tour. In the way of boy bands, Mr. Knight was the “shy one” in the group and his personal life largely remained a mystery to fans. He wasn’t closeted, but he also never declared on the cover of People, “I’m gay!” Rather, he was accidentally outed by fellow ’80s pop star Tiffany when she appeared on a 2011 episode of “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen” and told the host they’d dated, and that “he became gay later. I didn’t do it! But he’s fabulous.” She publicly apologized to Mr. Knight. He thought the whole episode was funny.Until the HGTV series, few knew about his history with a hammer, either. “I was doing New Kids, I’d come home, renovate houses,” he said. “On tour, so many fans would ask, What do you do? Even the New Kids, they never really knew what I did.”Swing went the strings of his heart: over the decades, Mr. Knight has relaxed into rural life.Tony Luong for The New York TimesIn recent years, Mr. Knight’s life has fallen into a happy rhythm of touring for three months every other year with the reformed New Kids, taking on three or four renovations a year for clients and spending the rest of the time as caretaker of his mini Old Sturbridge Village.Mr. Knight is forever embarking on improvement projects that demand his scattered attention (“I was never diagnosed with A.D.H.D.,” he said, “but everybody’s like, ‘You’ve got A.D.H.D.’”) and that remain in various states of completion. Currently, he’s having the barn prepared to stable his mother’s three horses. He’s learning to care for the goats he was given by a rent-a-goat company he featured on the show. He’s tending vegetable and flower gardens.And then there’s the 1760 farmhouse, renovated by its previous owners in 2004 “and it already feels dated,” he said with a sigh, adding, “It needs paint and furniture and a new kitchen and new bathrooms. It’s a lot.” He’s not sure who will live in the house when he’s done. He and Mr. Rodriguez will be moving across the street, as soon as their new-old home is finished.Surveying his expanse while puffing on a cigarette under the hot sun, Mr. Knight said, quite earnestly, “It’s such a stress-free life, the country life.” More

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      in Theater

      Where Oscar Wilde Once Slept (in Prison Garb)

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      Activists are trying to preserve the prison he was sent to after his conviction for “indecency,” saying his life is an important part of Britain’s history.READING, England —-The metal stairway creaks and groans underfoot on the way to cell C. 3.3, a bare oblong room of painted brick behind a large and forbidding prison door.It was here that Oscar Wilde was incarcerated for around 18 months in the late 19th century because of his homosexuality, and this was the inspiration for his grimly realistic portrayal of life behind bars, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”“You feel goose bumps going in there,” said Matt Rodda, a lawmaker representing part of this town, around 40 miles west of London, who compared the prison — closed on health and safety grounds in 2013 — to a time capsule.But few have seen the prison, which is rarely opened to the public, and moves to turn it into a public space have reached an impasse.Last month a 2.6 million pound bid — the equivalent of $3.7 million — from the municipality, Reading Council, to buy and convert the prison into a museum and arts center was rejected as too low by the government, which owns the property.Several movie stars, including the Reading-born actress Kate Winslet, support plans to open the site as — seemingly — does the street artist Banksy, one of whose murals is said to appear on one of the prison walls.“It’s got tremendous potential,” said Karen Rowland, a councilor in Reading with special responsibility for cultural issues, who is originally from New York and thinks the location is of importance not only as an artistic and cultural asset.Matt Rodda MP, the Labour Party member of parliament for Reading East (R), and Heritage consultant Karen Rowland (L), at the site of the Victorian jail and the ancient Reading Abbey.Mary Turner for The New York Times“Doubling that with LGBTQ+ interest, and having come from living right next to Stonewall in New York City, I know the value and the importance of a national heritage site for that community,” she said, referring to the Greenwich Village bar in New York credited as the starting place of the gay rights movement.The town of Reading proved to be an important place in the life of Oscar Wilde, a celebrated literary figure until 1895, when he was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in London and subsequently convicted of “gross indecency.” When he was transferred from a prison in London to Reading Gaol, it was supposed to be an improvement in his conditions. But prison rules still forbade most social interaction, the food was appalling and the sanitation worse.For an aesthete and sybarite like Wilde, incarceration was a crushing change of fortune depicted vividly in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which he wrote after his release. It recounts the fate of an inmate who was hanged in the prison grounds.“Each narrow cell in which we dwellIs a foul and dark latrine,And the fetid breath of living DeathChokes up each grated screen,And all, but Lust, is turned to dustIn Humanity’s machine”Gyles Brandreth, a writer, broadcaster, actor and former lawmaker who is honorary president of the Oscar Wilde Society, said the prison symbolized Wilde’s place in global literary, cultural and social history and needed to be saved.“There are not many literary figures whose life as well as their work plays a part in the national story, and indeed in the international story,” he said. “We are fascinated by his rise and by his fall and, because of the extraordinary change in attitudes to homosexuality over the century, he also has a place in social history. What we get in Reading Gaol is that transition from triumph to tragedy.”The Oscar Wilde gate outside the perimeter wall of the Victorian jail in Reading, England.Mary Turner for The New York TimesWilde’s situation in jail eventually improved when a new prison governor granted him access to more books and to writing paper. With that he was able to complete “De Profundis,” a lengthy letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, that included some more optimistic messages.“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” he wrote, citing his plank bed, loathsome food, hard labor, the “dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame.”He added, “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul.”In that spirit, those seeking to convert the jail believe that Reading, too, can turn the suffering of its former prisoners to something beneficial to the public. Local campaigners include Toby Davies, artistic director of the RABBLE Theatre, which in 2016 performed a play about the trial of Oscar Wilde in the chapel of the prison.“It was extraordinary, it will live with me for ever,” he said. “It’s a cliché, but it really does get in your blood, it is so dark and miserable — it feels like The Shawshank Redemption when you are in there. But as a result, there is something massively positive that comes out of that, that you think this is an opportunity for good.”Toby Davies, the artistic director of the RABBLE Theatre, which performed a play about Wilde’s trial at the prison in 2016.Mary Turner for The New York TimesReading Council’s bid for the site also aims to show off other aspects of the history of a town that was the burial place of King Henry I in 1136 but is arguably better known to most Britons for its big rail station.Tony Page, the deputy leader of Reading Council, said its plan would focus on arts and culture, accentuate the history of the jail — where Irish Republican prisoners were also held in the early 20th century — but also draw visitors to a neighboring site where King Henry I is buried.The precise location of the tomb has not been identified; it might be under a parking lot, as happened with Richard III in Leicester. Reading Abbey was largely destroyed in the 16th century and parts of it have been built over, though many ruins remain.Mr. Page, of Reading Council, said the Ministry of Justice, which owns Reading Prison, appeared to want around double the council’s bid for the site. That, he said, was unrealistic because it was based on prepandemic valuations and incorrect assumptions, made in an unsuccessful private sector bid, that planning laws would permit significant housing to be constructed on the site.Reading Council’s current proposal includes a much smaller amount of home-building and a boutique hotel, to help finance the conversion of the prison into a museum and arts center.Given that the site is costing the government around £250,000 a year to mothball, Mr. Page is frustrated that the ministry plans to put the site back on sale rather than enter into talks with him.Tony Page, the deputy leader of Reading Council, at Reading Civic Center.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIn a statement, the ministry said that “following discussions with the Council, the prison will be put back on the property market. Any sale will seek the best value for taxpayers and be reinvested into the justice system, while ensuring planning requirements for the historic site are met.”Campaigners have not given up yet, however. Mr. Rodda, the local lawmaker, wants a meeting with the government and said he hoped that other finance, perhaps from crowd funding, could top up the council’s bid.Like some others he is unenthusiastic about the council’s plans to build a boutique hotel on the site of a prison where many suffered and some died. Mr. Davies, the theater director, feels the same, though he thinks that it might be a price worth paying to transform a symbol of brutal penal servitude into one of culture and opportunity.That, he added, would be “an extraordinarily positive message from a town that has been associated with a train station, and shopping, and not much more.” More

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      in Movies

      A French Monument Remains Every Bit as Grand on Film

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      The Palais Garnier, which inspired the first “Phantom” in 1910, is silent at the moment, but it continues to hold the imagination.PARIS — Wearing heels and an off-the-shoulder evening dress, Emily Cooper arrives at the Paris Opera for a big performance. She hurries up the grand marble staircase, pauses to gape at the painted ceilings, and runs into a suave young Frenchman she knows.“Did you know they were performing ‘Swan Lake’ tonight? Is this a joke?” he asks her. “‘Swan Lake’ is for tourists.” After a terse exchange, Emily scurries off to take her seat in a velvet-lined opera box.The scene is from “Emily in Paris,” the popular Netflix series — one of dozens of productions for which the original Paris Opera building, the Palais Garnier, has provided a backdrop. In the nearly century and a half since its inauguration, the Garnier has been featured in everything from documentaries (Frederick Wiseman’s “La Danse,” on the Paris Opera Ballet), to live-action/animation movies (“Smurfs 2”) to motion pictures: Sofia Coppola’s 2006 “Marie Antoinette” and the 2018 biopic of Rudolf Nureyev, “The White Crow,” directed by Ralph Fiennes.The pandemic may have shut down house performances in the last year, but on-location shoots have continued, in accordance with strict Covid-19 protocols. Two movies have recently been filmed inside the Palais Garnier: “Couleurs de l’Incendie” starring the French actress Fanny Ardant, and “Le Ténor,” with the tenor Roberto Alagna.Jean-Yves Kaced, the opera’s commercial director, said the coronavirus pandemic had made it easier for the house to accommodate film and television crews. Under normal circumstances, the Garnier has a full slate of opera and ballet performances that cannot be interrupted by outside projects. In normal times, the building also welcomes visitors for daytime tours.“The absence of audiences at the moment is a sad reality, but it does allow us to be a bit more flexible in hosting outside productions,” Mr. Kaced said.With or without a pandemic, filming at the opera requires a hefty budget. A daylong shoot at the opera (for eight hours) costs roughly 30,000 euros (about $35,000), according to Paris Opera management. “All things rare are expensive,” said Mr. Kaced, adding, “Look at it this way: You don’t have to pay for set designs, and it’s less polluting!”Mr. Kaced said he had appeared in one production himself — “La Danse,” in a “supporting role,” a meeting-room discussion about selling sponsorship packages to American patrons.François Ivernel, whose company, Montebello Productions, produced “The White Crow,” confirmed that filming at the Palais Garnier was “not cheap,” and that the fee was not something to be negotiated, as is the case at other French cultural landmarks like the Louvre. “You take it or leave it,” he said.“The White Crow,” a biopic of Rudolf Nureyev starring Oleg Ivenko, featured three scenes shot at the Palais Garnier.Jessica Forde/Sony Pictures ClassicsMr. Ivernel listed three scenes in the movie that were shot at the Palais Garnier: the arrival of the Russian troupe, filmed in the grand foyer; a conversation between Nureyev and a French dancer, shot on the Garnier rooftop, with panoramic views of Paris; and shots of the performance hall, filmed from the stage. Filming of “The White Crow” coincided with the opera’s glamorous annual fund-raising gala, to which Mr. Ivernel was invited.The shoot was, on the whole, a “wonderful experience,” Mr. Ivernel said. Before filming, the team was allowed to spend three half-days backstage with the Paris Opera Ballet where, interestingly, Nureyev would become ballet director in 1983. They met dancers, watched rehearsals and visited the costume-making ateliers, where tutus hang from the ceiling. It was “all very useful for the director,” Mr. Ivernel said, “because it gave him a much better sense of what it was like to be a principal dancer,.”There was just one minor misstep, recalled Marie Hoffmann, who is in charge of rental of public spaces at the opera. While the crew was busy filming inside the opera house, Mr. Fiennes, who plays a ballet master, settled into a recently restored fauteuil, a period armchair usually kept behind a protective barrier. “We asked him, in the politest way possible, to give up the seat,” Ms. Hoffmann recalled.Filming inside the opera is a complex process. Before the pandemic, shoots had to happen at nighttime, when there were no more performances or visitors, and they were all-night affairs, running from 11 p.m. until 9 a.m., when the premises were cleaned for morning tourists.Because the building is a listed national monument, every corner of it is guarded and protected. As at Versailles and other French heritage sites, equipment cannot be placed directly on the floor: There must be a layer of protection such as a strip of carpeting. There are weight restrictions on camera equipment as well, and crews are followed everywhere by security.Have there ever been any accidents? “No, touch wood,” Ms. Hoffmann said.There has, however, been the odd anachronism.In the 2006 movie “Marie Antoinette” starring Kirsten Dunst, a masquerade ball scene was set inside the Palais Garnier, despite the fact that the building was built a century after the reign of Antoinette.Leigh Johnson/Columbia PicturesIn “Marie Antoinette,” the lavish masquerade ball scene is set inside the Palais Garnier. A masked Queen Marie Antoinette (played by Kirsten Dunst) twirls around a crowded dance floor — in the famous “Rotonde des Abonnés” (the circular hall under the stage), with its elaborate mosaics — and is later seen slithering down the opera’s curving marble staircase, flirting incognito with a handsome young count.There’s just one slight problem: The Palais Garnier was built a century after the reign of Marie Antoinette, who was executed in 1793. The anachronism is listed under “Goofs” in the Internet Movie Data Base: “The masquerade ball held in the Paris Opera is clearly seen to take place in the Palais Garnier in Paris, built between 1861 and 1875 during the reign of Napoleon III.”The Garnier also serves as the backdrop in the 1910 novel “The Phantom of the Opera,” by the French writer Gaston Leroux, who tells the melodramatic story of a disfigured musical prodigy who lives underneath the palace and kidnaps a glamorous young soprano.“Phantom” first captured the public’s visual imagination in 1925, in the film version of the novel starring Lon Chaney, and the story has been retold repeatedly, perhaps culminating in the 1980s stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.Oddly, none of the film adaptations of the novel are listed as having been shot on location in the Palais Garnier. Yet they have fueled a rumor that persists to this day: that there is a lake underneath the edifice.“When we take visitors around the basement area, they come expecting to see the lake,” Ms. Hoffmann said. “In fact, it’s a reservoir that’s the size of the main stage, and located right underneath it.”“We have no access to it,” she added. “It’s accessible only to Paris firefighters, who use it for diving training.” More

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      in Theater

      Rescuing an Off Off Broadway Theater With a Storied Past

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      Preservationists hope to save the 13th Street Repertory Company building, with a little help from the Underground Railroad. When Edith O’Hara, the mother hen and indefatigable leader of the eclectic 13th Street Repertory Company for nearly half a century, died last fall at age 103, the future became decidedly shaky for one of Off Off Broadway’s longest-operating stages.In an effort to ensure that it’s not the end of the run as well for the antebellum brick house where both the theater and Ms. O’Hara made their homes, preservationists are urging the city to grant landmark protection to the three-story Greek Revival structure.The city Landmarks Preservation Commission told an advocacy group in January that the quaint 1840s rowhouse with the intricate cast-iron portico at 50 West 13th Street was not distinguished enough to warrant landmark protection on its architectural merits, noting that further study was needed to determine the building’s “cultural significance within the context of Off Off Broadway theater.” Consequently, the group, Village Preservation, has dived into the archives to try to demonstrate that the building is a worthy cultural landmark based not only on its theatrical history but also on an intriguing, newly unearthed piece of African-American history involving a prominent 19th-century Black businessman and abolitionist.The new research “is very helpful and we have added it to our records,” Kate Lemos McHale, the commission’s research director, wrote the group on Feb. 24.A commission spokeswoman added in a statement to The Times that the city “is absolutely committed to recognizing Black history in the urban landscape,” which is why the agency recently launched Preserving Significant Places of Black History, “a world-class story map and educational tool.” She said that the city would “continue to review” 50 West 13th Street.Edith O’Hara, the leader of the 13th Street Repertory Company for nearly half a century, at the theater in 2006. Ms. O’Hara died last fall at age 103.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesA place of opportunity for generations of theatrical neophytes of varying talents, the quirky, no-frills 13th Street Repertory Company was an early stop for such performers as Richard Dreyfuss and Chazz Palminteri. “Line,” a one-act play by Israel Horovitz, ran there for more than 40 years, an Off Off Broadway record. And “Boy Meets Boy,” New York’s first hit gay musical, was first staged there in 1974, the brainchild of Bill Solly, an Englishman whom Ms. O’Hara had taken in and allowed to live upstairs from the theater.Whether the show will go on is unknown. The building is owned by White Knight Ltd., of which Ms. O’Hara’s three children collectively own a little over a third. The balance of the shares are owned in equal proportion by Stephan Loewentheil, a bookseller, and his ex-wife, Beth Farber. The O’Haras and Mr. Loewentheil previously fought a bitter, yearslong real estate battle that ended, in 2010, with an agreement that allowed Ms. O’Hara and her theater to remain in the building until her death. There is no provision for what comes next.The Thirteenth Street Repertory Company has been placed in the hands of its artistic director, Joe John Battista, who has vowed to continue making theater under the group’s name. But whether that will happen on 13th Street or elsewhere — and whether the building will ultimately be sold — depends on the outcome of an offstage drama.Jill O’Hara, one of Edith O’Hara’s two daughters, at the theater in 2017. Ms. O’Hara is a minority shareholder of the company that owns the building.John Taggart for The New York Times“It’s all still in the air at this point,” said Jill O’Hara, one of Edith’s daughters, who sits on White Knight’s board. “It’s a complex situation that’s not made any easier by the history with this guy,” she added, referring to Mr. Loewentheil.The building is managed for White Knight by Nate Loewentheil, the son of Mr. Loewentheil and Ms. Farber.“As someone who cares deeply about cities, I appreciate the history of 50 West 13th Street,” Nate Loewentheil said, “but the building has fallen into very significant disrepair over the past 15 years, so we are trying to figure out our next steps.” (Both his parents declined to comment.)Ms. O’Hara said that her mother believed that the building was once part of the Underground Railroad, the network of activists who helped enslaved African-Americans flee north to freedom before the Civil War. That belief has been perpetuated in local lore because a trap door in the theater’s dressing room leads to a hidden basement chamber unconnected to the rest of the basement.Although no evidence has emerged to support the Underground Railroad rumor, new research, performed by Village Preservation and supplemented by an independent historian and a reporter, suggests that the claim may not be outlandish.From 1858 to 1884, city directories and other records show, the house was owned by Jacob Day, a prominent African-American businessman active in abolitionism and other civil rights efforts. By 1871, Day was one of the wealthiest Black residents of New York City, according to The New York Times, with a net worth of more than $75,000, or around $1.6 million in today’s dollars.The Greek Revival house has an intricate cast-iron portico.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesThe building has fallen into disrepair, and its future is uncertain.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesAn 1880 issue of The People’s Advocate called Day “the fashionable caterer of East Thirteenth Street” and identified him as a leading member of “a colored aristocracy” in the city. “Beginning as a waiter, by economy and thrift after years of struggle he saved money enough to go into business himself,” the paper noted, adding that Day owned “several fine houses.”Newspaper articles appear to document Day’s involvement in civil rights causes over more than 30 years. In 1885, the year after his death, his efforts to further African-American self-determination were recognized in a history of Black Americans. “The Colored population of New York was equal to the great emergency that required them to put forth their personal exertions,” wrote George Washington Williams, spotlighting Day, along with his fellow Greenwich Village resident and abolitionist Dr. Henry Highland Garnet, for doing “much to elevate the Negro in self-respect and self-support.”Born in New York around 1817 to parents who were also born in the city, Day appears to have been publicly active in Black civil-rights efforts as a young man. Along with such prominent abolitionists as the New York publisher and Underground Railroad leader David Ruggles, a man named Jacob Day was among a group in 1840 that called, in the pages of The National Anti-Slavery Standard, for a “National Reform Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the United States of America,” an effort to combat the colonization movement that aimed to resettle Black Americans in Africa.Day was also a prominent member and the longtime treasurer of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the city’s second oldest Black church, which moved to nearby 166 Waverly Place shortly after Day bought his house and place of business on 13th Street.Tom Calarco, the author of several books on the Underground Railroad, said that an 1852 article in The Standard suggested a strong connection between the church and leading Underground Railroad figures.The newspaper report detailed an anti-colonization meeting at the church that had been called by the Committee of Thirteen, a vigorous Underground Railroad organization. The Rev. John T. Raymond, the church’s pastor, was a member of the committee and served as president at the 1852 meeting.The entrance to the 13th Street Repertory Company, which was shuttered last March because of the coronavirus. Edith O’Hara lived upstairs until her death last fall, and tenants still occupy the building.Katherine Marks for The New York TimesDay was “a major leader of the Black community, and he was connected up with other important people that were in the abolitionist movement,” Mr. Calarco said. “We know for at least 26 years, he was still participating in these important meetings with people who were leaders of the movement, so you have to make that assumption that he, if not directly, was indirectly involved in the Underground Railroad.”Mr. Calarco also shared a document showing that in 1846, Day was one of a roster of African-Americans given land grants in the Adirondack region of upstate New York by Gerrit Smith, a major underwriter of the Underground Railroad.Mr. Calarco speculated that Day may have used his wealth to fund Underground Railroad operations, whose conductors were often pressed for cash. “They needed the money,” he said, “to pay for the food, to pay for the travel, to pay for the clothes, to pay for people who helped transport” fugitives on boats and trains.After the Civil War, with slavery abolished, Day worked to secure the vote for all Black people in New York State. In 1866, The Standard reported, he was one of a group that called for a convention to remove the discriminatory provision in the state constitution that barred Black people from voting unless they owned property valued at the considerable sum of $250. “The war of steel is over … but the war of ideas must go on until in this country true democratic principles shall prevail,” the group wrote, echoing today’s battles over voter suppression.In 1871, a year after the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution finally prohibited the federal government and the states from denying or abridging the right to vote based on race or color, a massive jubilee parade of Black citizens wended its way uptown from Washington Square, with throngs of Black and white New Yorkers lining the route. At a “grand mass meeting” at the Cooper Union, The Times reported, Day was among the officers who issued a resolution declaring that the 15th Amendment could only improve the lot of Black Americans if “the exercise of the ballot shall at once be made safe, and our right to exercise it be maintained by civil authority.”In 1880, when the Black civil rights leader Frederick Douglass spoke at a rally for the Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield at the Cooper Union, Day was among the prominent citizens, Black and white, assembled onstage around him.During the period Day lived on 13th Street, the city’s largest African-American neighborhood, known as Little Africa, had developed nearby south of Washington Square, around Minetta Lane and Minetta and Bleecker Streets. The Abyssinian Baptist Church, whose finances Day managed, had moved to the Village to serve this population. So did the Freedman’s Savings Bank, an institution founded to help former slaves after the Civil War. Day kept an account at the bank, perhaps to support its mission.Reflecting on Day’s house on 13th Street, Sylviane A. Diouf, a historian of the African Diaspora who curated a digital exhibit called “Black New Yorkers” for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, said: “It’s important to preserve and show that there was an African and then an African-American presence in that area from the Dutch years and that they had institutions and businesses. It’s important to stress that, contrary to what people think, African-Americans didn’t just arrive in Harlem during the Great Migration, but they had a presence for 300 years before that.”By the late 19th century, fierce competition for housing from Italian immigrants was already pushing Black residents uptown from the Village to the Tenderloin district. And some of the lingering physical remnants of Little Africa were demolished in the 1920s by the extension of Sixth Avenue from Carmine Street to Canal Street.“Virtually all of the great institutions and landmarks and homes of leading figures of the 19th-century African-American community of Greenwich Village have been lost or highly compromised,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation. “50 west 13th Street is one of very few remaining homes of a leading African-American figure, not just in business but in the civil rights arena, that is largely intact from the many decades that he lived and worked there in the 19th century.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More