News From LESPI FALL 2019

Vol. 10 No. 3 Fall 2019

Gov. Al Smith’s LES Neighborhood

LESPI’s Deborah Wye and FOTLES’s Mitchell Grubler surveying the area.

Grubler surveying the area. LESPI and the Friends of the Lower East Side recently surveyed a wonderful but not widely known Lower East Side enclave: the blocks around Al Smith’s home at 25 Oliver Street, including St. James Place, James Street, and Madison Street. Al Smith (1873-1944), one of New York’s most popular governors, lived in this area for some 50 years, initially at a home on South Street where he watched the Brooklyn Bridge rise. His church and school – the landmarked St. James Roman Catholic Church on James Street and its nearby grammar school on St. James Place, built in 1837 and 1868 respectively – are both still standing.

The streets around Oliver Street encompass many buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, some enlarged and altered, but most intact and constituting an environment that Smith would easily recognize today. He lived with his young family in an apartment at 28 Oliver Street (located in what is now P.S. 1 Alfred E. Smith Elementary School playground), before moving across the street to No. 25 – still very much intact – in 1909 for larger quarters. He was still living there in 1919 when he was elected Governor of New York for the first of four terms. Well-known across the country as “The Happy Warrior,” Smith also earned a second nickname, one that acknowledged his old neighborhood—he was proudly recognized as, “The King of Oliver Street.”

East River Park Update

Track House Comfort Station.

The City continues to move forward with its plan to bulldoze John V. Lindsay East River Park, create an 8-12 foot high berm to provide protection against storm surge and sea level rise, and build an elevated new park on top. This, plan, part of the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, will impact historic architectural resources in and around East River Park. LESPI is a consulting party to the Project’s Section 106 Review Process, which assesses the historic preservation impacts of the plan.

As part of this process, LESPI advocated for the preservation of the Marine Engine No. 66 Fireboat House that currently serves as the home of the Lower East Side Ecology Center. Happily, preservation of the Fireboat House, which is eligible for the State and National Registers of Historic Places, is now included in the City’s plans. As strategies are developed to flood-proof the building, LESPI will have the opportunity to review and comment on which options are most historically and architecturally appropriate.

LESPI also advocated for the preservation of the Park’s two Art Deco-style Comfort Stations. These WPA-era structures had been passed over by both the City for landmarking and by the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) as part of their overall eligibility determination for State and National Register listing for the entire Park. Following LESPI’s inquiry with the SHPO, the State has agreed to re-review the buildings’ eligibility based on their individual merits. We’re currently compiling information on these structures to assist the SHPO. We’ll let you know the outcome.

Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame

One of the 32 granite blocks celebrating the stars of Yiddish Theater.

LESPI Board members Barry Feldman, Laura Sewell, and Deborah Wye are participating in a community working group to determine the fate of the deteriorating Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame on 2nd Avenue at East 10th Street. The Walk of Fame, similar to that on Hollywood Boulevard, honors the stars of the “Yiddish Rialto” theater district. Centered on Second Avenue below East 14th Street during the decades around the turn-of-the-20th-century, the “Yiddish Rialto” at its peak enjoyed a larger audience than the Broadway theaters uptown. A few of the Yiddish language theater buildings still remain, including the landmarked Louis N. Jaffe Theater on Second Avenue and East 12th Street. The Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame is presently in front of a Chase bank branch, but it originally marked the entry to the celebrated 2nd Avenue Deli. It was the Deli’s owner, the late Abe Lebewohl, who conceived and created this display in the 1980s. Ms. Wye has completed a condition survey of the 32 granite sidewalk blocks that celebrate sixty distinguished figures of the Yiddish Theater. The working group, organized by the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, is in the process of determining the best way forward to preserve these original blocks, which may include installing replicas of them at another location on 2nd Avenue.