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      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

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      in Television

      For a ‘Cobra Kai’ Star, There’s Nothing a Good Basket Won’t Fix

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat I LoveFor a ‘Cobra Kai’ Star, There’s Nothing a Good Basket Won’t Fix‘I have a hard time saying no to a basket,’ said the actor Courtney Henggeler, explaining her approach to decorating her family’s Long Island rental.Courtney Henggeler’s Evolving Aesthetic13 PhotosView Slide Show ›Adam Macchia for The New York TimesFeb. 16, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETSmart mothers know better than to bring their young children on trips to the grocery store. The little ones tend to lobby vigorously for things that, in the end, will benefit no one but the family dentist. And they probe, at high volume, matters that Mommy may not want to discuss in public.Courtney Henggeler can speak with some authority on this topic. Not long ago, she was wheeling her cart through the supermarket when her 4-year-old son, Oscar, loudly asked, “Why do we have so many houses?”“People who were listening must have thought we were very wealthy,” said Ms. Henggeler, 42, who co-stars in the hit Netflix series “Cobra Kai,” a spinoff of 1984’s “The Karate Kid.” (She also appeared on “The Big Bang Theory” as Sheldon’s twin sister, and had a recurring role in the first few seasons of “Mom.”) “It’s just that we move around. I film ‘Cobra Kai’ in Atlanta, and we were in a house for three months one year, and the next year we were in another house.”Oscar may be relieved to know that his family — until recently based in Los Angeles, also in a series of rentals — is zeroing in on a permanent address. A year or so ago, Ms. Henggeler, who grew up in the Poconos and in Seaford, Long Island, and her husband, Ross Kohn, a movie producer who was raised in Westchester, decided to move back to New York and settle there to be closer to Ms. Henggeler’s ailing mother.The plan: to rent for a few years and then build their dream house.Courtney Henggeler, 42, one of the stars of the Netflix series “Cobra Kai,” lives with her family in a rented house in Huntington, N.Y. “I love the doors, I love the moldings, I love the big windows,” she said.Credit…Adam Macchia for The New York TimesCourtney Henggeler, 42Occupation: ActorIn the pink: “It was very important to me to have a soft-pink bedroom for my daughter. Poor kid. She’s probably, like, ‘I just want a blue wall, Mom.’”“I’d been to a million weddings before I got married, so I kind of figured out what I wanted and didn’t want for my own wedding,” said Ms. Henggeler, who married Mr. Kohn in 2015 and had a second child, a daughter, Georgie, almost two years ago. “I felt the same about houses. I’ve lived in so many that I kind of knew what I wanted.”What she wanted from a rental “seemed kind of absurd, and my husband looked at me as if I had five heads. But I said, ‘We’ll find it.’”They found it — and more — in the form of a brand-new transitional colonial in Huntington, N.Y. It had four bedrooms. She would have settled for two bathrooms, but got four and a half. A light, bright kitchen with a six-burner stove? Check. Crown moldings? (In abundance.) Dark hardwood floors? (Be still, her heart.)“I never knew how important flooring was,” she said. “My previous homes had orange-y wood. I stay up at night looking at wood flooring on Instagram.”The backyard is smaller than she would have liked, as is the sole bathtub. Family baths, a favorite routine, are now on hold. But those deficiencies were offset by the basement exercise room (“I was like, ‘Who am I, with a gym in my house?’”); the radiant-heat floors in the bathroom (“My children are now, like, ‘I can’t live without heated floor, Mommy,’ and I’m, like, ‘Me, too,’”); the central vacuum system (“What a princess I’ve become; I can’t live without this now, either”); and the kitchen’s instant hot-water dispenser.The foyer is “actually my favorite little spot in the house,” she said.Credit…Adam Macchia for The New York TimesBut Ms. Henggeler was thrilled practically senseless by the foyer, which she has outfitted with a bench and a pillow. “It’s actually my favorite little spot in the house,” she said. “In the house we left in Los Angeles, you walked in and you were immediately in the living room, and that drove me bonkers.”But wait! There’s more: a mudroom. “I always wanted one,” she said. “I love what people do with them. A mudroom is a functional space, but you can have fun with it.”Her idea of fun, in this case, centers on baskets — on coat hooks, under the bench, holding gloves and scarves and grocery bags. “I have a hard time saying no to a basket,” she said. “It’s probably the thing I bought most of for this house. My attitude is: Let’s make it beautiful.”Mr. Kohn’s outerwear apparently falls well short of that standard. “Ross wants to hang his jacket in the mudroom, and I tell him to put it in the closet,” Ms. Henggeler said.Another example of their differing views on décor: He likes a modern look with clean lines, while she gravitates toward old houses and feminine touches. “I came into the relationship with a lot of sparkly things,” she said.Out of regard for her husband’s feelings, she has designated Georgie’s room her “girlie-girl outlet,” painting it a blush-rose and using it as a repository for treasures from her own childhood, among them a mirror, some books and framed pictures. Ms. Henggeler sums it up nicely: “The room looks like my apartment would look now if I hadn’t married a man who doesn’t want to live in a house with pink.”Ms. Henggeler painted the nursery for her daughter, Georgie, pink — her own favorite color.Credit…Adam Macchia for The New York TimesBut she understands the appeal of a different palette. She loves how the slate-gray walls in the dining room set off the collection of Jim Marshall rock-star photographs she inherited from her godfather.She says her aesthetic is evolving — though how exactly she isn’t quite sure, apart from moving in the direction of the California-chic look embodied by the designer Jenni Kayne.She is contemplating the acquisition of a chaise longue for the living room. It will take over the spot that was, until recently, filled by a mattress that she and Mr. Kohn bought for the first home they shared. “We didn’t want to take it to the curb until garbage-collection day, so we put it in here. But our kids loved jumping on it, and it stayed for another seven months,” Ms. Henggeler said.“At the moment,” she added, “I’m in the there’s-nothing-a-throw-blanket-won’t-fix phase of design.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Getting to Know You, Again

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGetting to Know You, AgainThe pandemic has sent many people back to their parents’ homes, giving both generations new insight and a chance at a different kind of relationship.Before the pandemic, the comedian Nikki Glaser, left, pitched a show about moving back in with her parents, E.J. and Julie Glaser, as an adult. The pandemic made what seemed like an unlikely scenario into a reality.   Credit…Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesFeb. 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETPatricia Mitchell was newly widowed, still grieving and adjusting to living alone after 50 years of marriage, when her daughter, Emily Mitchell-Marell, called last March. It was the early days of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns. Ms. Mitchell-Marell had recently given birth to a baby girl. She also had a 4-year-old son, and the schools in Brooklyn, where she lives, had been closed.Ms. Mitchell, a 74-year-old retired family therapist, heard the stress and panic in her daughter’s voice. “Having a baby, a job, a son and a pandemic was completely overwhelming to her,” she said. “Emily asked to come here.”And so, in the kind of surprising life upheaval the pandemic has made almost commonplace, Ms. Mitchell’s youngest daughter, her son-in-law and two grandchildren moved into her rambling old house outside Woodstock, N.Y. Eleven months later, the family is still there, eating dinner together every night and amazed to be doing so.“I have not spent this kind of time with Emily in 20 years,” Ms. Mitchell said. Her tone was that of someone who had received a complicated gift.For Patricia Mitchell, living with her granddaughter, Vera, has been “a real treat.”Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesLast July, a remarkable survey by the Pew Research Center found that more than half of people between the ages of 18 and 29 were living with their parents. Not since the Great Depression had so many adult children dwelled at home. It wasn’t only young adults, either. Job losses, school closings or other pandemic-induced reasons have driven many older children like Ms. Mitchell-Marell, who is 40, back to the nest.Because the young dominate the public’s attention, and because they own the bully pulpit of social media, the demographic phenomenon has been told largely from their viewpoint. The consensus attitude was perhaps best expressed by the young woman who made a TikTok set to the tune of “New York” by Alicia Keys, describing her quarantine with her mom and dad in the ’burbs. Sample lyric: “My parents won’t let me use their car/My friends all live too far/Twenty-five minutes from Dallas, Dallas, DALL-ASSSSSS!!!!!!!!”But as a middle-aged woman named Randi Cohen, whose 30-year-old daughter moved home to Columbus, Ohio, last spring, said, in what sounded like mild aggrievement, “There is another side to all of this.” Ah, yes, the side that doesn’t express themselves on TikTok.Imagine you have dutifully raised your children and released them into the world, growing accustomed to infrequent visits around the holidays, and then suddenly they’re back, a decade or more later, sleeping in their old bedrooms and sacking the fridge. It’s the sort of whiplash plot Hollywood movies are built on. Yet for millions of parents during the pandemic, it became a reality.Whether it played as a domestic comedy or psychological thriller depends on individual family dynamics. But every parent-child relationship is, to varying degrees, an emotional minefield. Navigating it successfully only grows harder when the child living in your house is all grown up: How do you make a 30-year-old pick up his dirty laundry?Getting ReacquaintedPatricia Mitchell, far right, who was recently widowed, finds herself living with her daughter, Emily, her son-in-law, Ben, and her grandchildren, Maximus and Vera.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesReflecting on her experience over the past year, Ms. Mitchell expressed both gratitude and fatigue. She’s had the chance to observe, up close, her daughter’s happy marriage and mature approach toward work and motherhood, which has been gratifying as a parent. Helping raise her granddaughter from birth has been “really a treat,” and a welcome distraction from her grief and loneliness. Her son-in-law became the man of the house, doing chores and repairs.But living in a crowded, active, child-centered household again at her age can be exhausting. “There’s more food shopping and dishes and cleaning and laundry,” Ms. Mitchell said. “The noise level. The house wakes up very early. The level of activity is a bit shocking to my system, if you want to know the truth.”Parents have had to make adjustments of all kinds, as they welcome back children whose lives may have diverged widely from their own, and of which they may have only a vague idea. Empty nesters, they’ve been plunged back into hands-on parenting and asked to fulfill seemingly exotic requests.“He has a trainer that he works with and this trainer also has a specific diet” for him, said Janet Schaffler, 65, about her 34-year-old son, Kyle, who lives in Manhattan and came home to Indianapolis for two months at the start of the pandemic, and then again for weekslong stretches. Ms. Schaffler, who handles the cooking and shopping, found herself running what amounted to an Equinox juice bar out of her kitchen.“Everything had to be weighed. It was high protein, no bad carbs,” she said. “I needed to go to Trader Joe’s to buy this, another supermarket for that,” on top of shopping and cooking for herself and her husband. “Making sure everyone had what they needed, I never had any rest.”Ms. Cohen discovered that her daughter, Hannah Berkeley Cohen, while living in Cuba as a freelance journalist and tour guide, had evidently became a gourmet, because back home in Ohio, she now objected to her parents’ more simple meals.“She comes in and she’s a foodie and she’s appalled by what we eat. We don’t spend an hour preparing food and adding sauces because that’s what she and her boyfriend do,” Ms. Cohen said. “We had some talks about, ‘This is how we live. If you want to make dinner for us, that’s lovely.’”Bill Vien, 58, welcomed his daughter and son, both in their 20s, back home to Vermont for several months last year. His daughter, Corinne, co-hosts, “Two Girls One Ghost,” apodcast about ghosts and the paranormal. Mr. Vien and his wife were asked to maintain complete silence — no talking, no TV, not even shoes on the hardwood floors — while she recorded for three hours twice a week.“My wife never lets laundry get ahead of her,” Mr. Vien said. “Of course, we have one of those washers and dryers that make a chime.”Diane Camara welcomed her son, Jared Alexander, back home after his theater tour was canceled.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFor Diane Camara, whose 25-year-old son, Jared Alexander, an actor and writer, moved back into her home in Stratford, Conn., after the show he was scheduled to perform in was canceled, the adjustment was more internal, one of perception.“When he came back, I went into mom mode. I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m taking care of you. What do you have to worry about, you’re just a kid,’” Ms. Camara, 50, said. “It took me a minute to realize, ‘No, he’s an adult. And he’s going through it just like I’m going through it. And in some ways worse than me. He’s the one displaced, he lost his tour.”A Gift of TimeIndeed, these were not like the carefree stays of a summer home from college. Nor were they brief visits with the pressure release valve of a known end date. The children returned during a year of health risks, economic ruin and social and political upheaval, and with their own careers and adult responsibilities to manage through a global pandemic that has stretched on without end.But once the shock of events wore off and everyone found a routine, many parents said they were brought closer to their grown children. For the first time in years, and with a different feeling, there were family dinners, game nights, watching TV together, exchanging ideas as mature adults.“We drink a glass of wine and talk. We sit and watch movies,” Ms. Cohen, whose daughter remains at home, said. “We’ve never done that before. She can be a girlie girl, so she does my nails. It is lovely spending time with her.”Ms. Camara and Mr. Alexander in the garden they planted together last summer.Credit…Jared AlexanderLast summer, Ms. Camara and her son planted a flower garden in her backyard, the first garden for both of them. “We just got out there. We worked together as a team really well,” Ms. Camara said.A reluctant gardener initially, Mr. Alexander said watering the flowers and watching them slowly grow became a way to not only bond with his mother but come to terms with his interrupted life. He wrote an essay about the experience for a website.“It helped me adjust,” he said. “This isn’t going to be two weeks, two months. It’s going to be awhile. It wound up turning into something special.”There was, for parents, the added marvel of really seeing who their children had become as adults. Back under the same roof, they had a window into their children’s work and social lives and relationships.Leroy Rutherford has watched his daughter, Chrissy, start a business while back home. “That was nice seeing her start up something of her own,” he said.Credit…Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesLeroy Rutherford, 72, watched his daughter, Chrissy Rutherford, start a brand consultancy out of her childhood bedroom in Bedford, N.Y., where she’s been staying since giving up her apartment in Manhattan last April. He may complain about the dirty dishes Ms. Rutherford leaves in the sink, but he admires her work ethic. “She gets up from 8 in the morning and starts working. And 7 or 8 at night, she’s still on her phone or her computer,” Mr. Rutherford said. “That was nice seeing her start up something of her own.”Ms. Schaffler, the mother in Indianapolis, concurred. “You always think they’re never going to be able to grow up and cope by themselves,” she said. “Well, he can and he has. Just listening to him on his work calls. Not eavesdropping but just listening. He’s sounding just like his dad now. I could appreciate and be quite proud of that.”More than anything, there was time. Precious, unexpected time. In the summer months, Mr. Vien, his wife and two children would stop working each day and have lunch together on the deck. He got to watch his son and daughter, four years apart and usually living on opposite coasts, develop a tighter relationship over their stay. His daughter had gone off to college in California at 17 and stayed there during breaks to do internships, and Mr. Vien and his wife had felt time with her had been “stolen.” The pandemic gave it back.Shannon Holtzman, whose grown daughters, Carolyn and Larkin, both returned home to New Orleans for several months (Carolyn remains there), echoed the sentiment. “I regret the pandemic and wish it had never happened,” Ms. Holtzman said. “But for us, this has been a gift. We’ll likely never have this time again.”She marveled aloud, “This was the first birthday of mine where I had both daughters home since 2004.”The Stuff of Comedy“I thought this would destroy us,” said Nikki Glaser of moving back in with her parents, E.J. and Julie Glaser. The opposite has been true.Credit…Whitney Curtis for The New York TimesIf there could be a poster family for quarantining together during the pandemic, it would be the Glasers — that is, Nikki Glaser, a 36-year-old stand-up comedian and actress, and her parents, E.J. and Julie Glaser. When the pandemic struck, Ms. Glaser was in Los Angeles on a work trip. She had invited her parents along, and so she decided not to return to her New York apartment but to go back with them to her childhood home, in St. Louis. As the pandemic grew worse and her comedy gigs and other projects were canceled, she stayed. “I thought this would destroy us, me living there for 10 months,” she said. “But I didn’t want to leave.”Ms. Glaser has turned being back in her Midwestern childhood home as a single woman and famous person into an extended bit. In TV interviews, like one with Conan O’Brien last May, she appeared on Zoom from her father’s home office. When she guest-hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live!, in July, she booked her parents as the house band, cutting to them in their living room (Mr. Glaser plays acoustic guitar and Mrs. Glaser sings). A show Ms. Glaser had been writing before the pandemic, in which she gets canceled by the internet and has to move back home to St. Louis — “Which used to be some, like, kind of sci-fi thing,” she told Mr. O’Brien — became her lived experience. Meanwhile, her parents have become minor celebrities through their appearances on TV and on her social media channels.“I have 16,000 followers on Instagram,” Mr. Glaser said.His wife chimed in, “He had two before this.”More important, the couple have reconnected with their daughter, who for years saw her family infrequently as she built her comedy career on the coasts. “I’ve tried to get her to sing with me ever since she was a small child,” Mr. Glaser said. “She started learning guitar and we played and sang together a lot during the last few months.”After 10 months living with her parents, Ms. Glaser recently moved out and rented her own apartment again — in St. Louis. Nikki Glaser in a stand-up performance.Credit…Ben Vogelsang“I always argued that it was for the best,” Ms. Glaser said about choosing to live away from home. “This year has made me reflect upon what actually makes me happy. I love my family and I love being around them.”Shifting RelationshipsAs the pandemic stretches on, some parents, including Ms. Mitchell, continue to house their grown children. Her newborn granddaughter is nearly one, and she and Ms. Mitchell-Marell are closer than ever. In fact, Ms. Mitchell-Marell and her husband are considering relocating to the Hudson Valley. “I do want to be near her now in a way that wasn’t as important to me,” Ms. Mitchell-Marell said. “And I don’t want to separate her and my baby.”Said Ms. Mitchell, “They wouldn’t have come back without the pandemic. I do think they’re going to find a place in the valley. And be nearby. And that will be very great.” Other parents are empty nesters again.Marilyn LaMonica, 76 and a psychoanalyst, welcomed her 48-year-old son, daughter-in-law and 5-year-old grandson into the Brooklyn house she shares with her husband for three months last spring.At first, to be together seemed like a fantasy fulfilled, a return to the large Italian family of her childhood. But between cooking for five people three times a day, worrying about her loved ones getting the virus and balancing the competing needs of everyone in the house, the experience was something more complicated. Ms. LaMonica called those months “a blur” and “a bundle of mixed feelings,” summing up how other parents said they felt.And yet, when it was over, and her son and his family returned to their Manhattan apartment, Ms. LaMonica admitted to a sense of sadness, as if she were letting her child go all over again.“It’s not rational,” she said. “But I felt a very deep sense of loss.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Isiah Whitlock Jr., on Leaving Chelsea for Gramercy Park

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat I LoveIsiah Whitlock Jr., on Leaving Chelsea for Gramercy ParkThe actor, known for starring roles on shows like “Your Honor” and “The Wire,” has a new apartment — with a key to the park.Isiah Whitlock Jr.: ‘You’ve Got to Live in a Place You Love’14 PhotosView Slide Show ›Katherine Marks for The New York TimesJan. 19, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETIsiah Whitlock Jr. lived in Chelsea before Chelsea was trendy.“I was looking for an apartment in New York, and I sort of had my choice of Chelsea or Harlem, and I really couldn’t see my girlfriend in Harlem,” he said. “So we chose Chelsea, which at the time was a little bit of a terrifying neighborhood.”Mr. Whitlock, 66, is one of the stars of the new Showtime mini-series “Your Honor,” but is perhaps best known for playing the corrupt state senator Clay Davis on “The Wire.” He has also appeared in films like “Cedar Rapids,” “BlacKkKlansman” and “Da 5 Bloods.” Twenty or so years ago, he was an emerging actor who got a sweet deal on a duplex a few blocks from the meatpacking district, with two bedrooms and a working fireplace. He put his own stamp on it — Flokati rug and beanbag chairs — after his girlfriend moved out. A few years later, the landlord suggested it was time for Mr. Whitlock to vacate the premises, too, but framed the request in a more flattering manner.Mr. Whitlock’s sectional sofa arrived in the reverse configuration from what he was expecting. In time, he has come to view it as a fortunate mistake. “This way, it really opens up the room.”Credit…Katherine Marks for The New York Times“One day she told me in passing, ‘You know, I really don’t want you becoming famous, because I don’t want tour buses pulling up in front of the house,’” Mr. Whitlock said. “I thought it was sort of a joke, but she wasn’t laughing.”“I never did get a solid reason,” he added. “I suspected she wanted a lot more money. I could have paid more, but she wanted me gone.”Isiah Whitlock, 66Occupation: ActorHome sweet home: “As an actor, you’re out and about and meeting all kinds of people, and it’s nice to be able to come home and shut the door and kind of chill.”Mr. Whitlock decamped to a gloomy walk-up nearby. “It was so dark I sometimes had to go outside and take a walk to wake up,” he recalled. “I would say to myself, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ and then I’d get a job and be gone for three months. And then I’d get another job and be gone again.” Finally — perhaps it was when intruders started stealing tenants’ mail and packages — he’d had enough.Last August, friends sublet him their one-bedroom apartment in a postwar Gramercy Park co-op, with a rooftop terrace and a coveted key to the park. “And if my friends are nice to me, they can come in with me,” Mr. Whitlock said. This is his first doorman building and his first elevator building.“I sort of had a long talk with myself and said, ‘You know, it’s time for you to grow up and stop living the way you’ve been living,’” he said. “When I was working so much and was barely home, it was sort of out of sight, out of mind. But with Covid, I really need to be in a place I enjoy.” He said he intends to buy an apartment when the sublet is up — in fact, was in talks to buy on the Upper East Side last spring, but the pandemic put everything on ice.“It’s beautiful,” Mr. Whitlock said of his poster of Bill Pickett, credited with being the first Black cowboy star. Credit…Katherine Marks for The New York TimesThe company he hired to pack and move his worldly goods did a poor job of it, Mr. Whitlock said, necessitating the replacement of several pieces of furniture. Fortunately, a number of treasures arrived intact, including a Robert Rauschenberg silk-screen on mirror-coated plexiglass, part of the “Star Quarters” series; the framed front page of the final edition of the Village Voice; a poster of Bill Pickett, known as the first African-American cowboy star (“It’s a beautiful poster, one of the best things I have in the house”); and a photo of a somewhat younger, somewhat trimmer Mr. Whitlock.“That’s my band. I used to be in a band,” he said, by way of explaining the picture. “And believe it or not, the guy in the white jumpsuit — that’s me. I didn’t play an instrument. I just sang and danced and drove the girls wild.”The movers were also mindful of the cuckoo clock Mr. Whitlock bought in Germany; the wood box containing the trinkets he collected during his two trips to Burning Man; and the framed, signed sheet music of a song composed by Arthur Miller for the 1997 Off Broadway production of Miller’s play “The American Clock.” (Mr. Whitlock was a member of the cast.)He ordered a tufted, L-shaped teal sectional online, but when it arrived the configuration was the reverse of what he’d expected. In time, he has come to view the purchase as a fortunate mistake. “This way, it really opens up the room,” said Mr. Whitlock, who lined the sofa with a row of pillows he bought in Vietnam and Thailand while shooting “Da 5 Bloods.” The television sits atop a new credenza made of honey-colored wood. His beloved shag rug pulls it all together.The work by Robert Rauschenberg hanging over the dining table “is like the center of the apartment,” he said.Credit…Katherine Marks for The New York TimesA serious cook, he hung a pot rack in the kitchen. But you’d be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Whitlock maybe cares a bit more about drink than food. He proudly showed off the half dozen hand-painted coffee cups and saucers he had specially made during a trip to Deruta, Italy.Even more proudly, he offered a tour of the 200-bottle, glass-fronted wine cooler. Harlan Estate, Chateau Montviel, Chateau Latour and Chateau d’Yquem are among the vineyards represented here, with Dom Pérignon at the ready for celebrating when the pandemic is finally over. There are also several bottles of vintage Whitlock, made by you-know-who at a fully equipped site in New Jersey, with grapes from Napa Valley.“You know, as a matter of fact, I think I’ll just take that out and have it tonight,” he said of a 2014 Cabernet Whitlock. “Trust me, I’ve got a lot of it.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Movies

      J.R.R. Tolkien House Comes on the Market

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyExclusiveJ.R.R. Tolkien House Comes on the MarketLiterary fans and celebrities who starred in Tolkien films start a crowdfunding campaign to preserve the house.J.R.R. Tolkien lived in this Oxford home and wrote “The Hobbit” and much of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy here.Credit…Pictures courtesy of Breckon and BreckonBy More