The Battle for Gotham

by Roberta Brandes Gratz

  It was clear from the start that if we didn’t save this building, we would have to reinvent it. Four-fifths of American Jews had passed through the Lower East Side on their way to elsewhere. For the Lower East Side, the Eldridge Synagogue had been a major center of Jewish life, the synagogue among many. No other synagogue remained intact from that era. For so many new arrivals, their story started here. For some, we learned from former congregants, it was an occasional visit. For others, membership was the pride of their family. Sendor Yarmolowsky, president of the first Jewish-owned bank on the Lower East Side two blocks away, was its first president. Isaac Gellis, before he famously went into the salami and other delicatessen specialty business, was the first rabbi.

  Coincidentally, this synagogue brought together so many threads of my own life. I was brought up in a secular household, almost ignorant of Judaism. Learning about the synagogue and all aspects of Jewish life while working to save this building was a comfortable form of education for me. It would serve the same purpose for many secular Jews and for non-Jews as well, who subsequently visited or got involved in the rescue.

  OBSERVING THE URBAN PROCESS

  I had been interested in and written about historic preservation for years, and now here was a call to do something more than write about it. And I was fascinated too with the neighborhood. I was in the middle of writing my first book, The Living City, and was between publishers, in fact. But here I was discovering, observing, learning about urbanism in a new way. What a perfect urban laboratory in which to observe dramatic but incremental change! Here was the ultimate urban neighborhood, the cradle of immigration, the gateway for millions of new Americans. Here was an urban fabric very much the same as it was one hundred years earlier. Redbrick tenements now home to mostly Chinese, once home to Jews, Italians, and Germans. Storefronts with similar businesses from a hundred years ago—discount fashions, electronics, household goods, specialty foods—owned by new entrepreneurs who would move on as their predecessors had done. The new arrivals were absorbed, given a chance to adjust, to find work, to start a business, to educate themselves and their children. Wasn’t that a fundamental definition of urbanism?

  And it was all happening in the very same buildings declared a “slum” by Robert Moses decades earlier. The buildings looked the same. Time had taken its toll. But they were fully occupied by new waves of immigrants, either residents or small entrepreneurs. In fact, I’ve watched waves of new immigrants come and move on perhaps with greater speed than a century ago. People ignored the Lower East Side for decades, thinking it a slum, a residual identity from urban renewal days. Yet change—positive, creative, enduring change—had swept over this area of the Lower East Side, but the buildings haven’t been torn down to make it happen. In fact, the physical fabric of this neighborhood—with its variety of building types—was conducive to that process, fertile ground for adaptation, innovation, and growth. In recent years, new space seekers saw the potential of affordable sites in the unrestored tenements and storefronts—the young, the artists, the small restaurants. Attention had shifted. Block by block, especially during the citywide boom, the Lower East Side has become the place to be.

  MANY KINDS OF CHANGE

  I watched storefronts become Buddhist temples the way they had become synagogues a century earlier. One by one the Jewish merchants sold to the new arrivals. Grand Street, which was 100 percent Jewish-owned dry goods and assorted retail shops when I first started coming to the neighborhood, became an Asian food market with shoppers flooding in from all over the city. Chinatown was still a few blocks to the west. The Bowery was the boundary. Chinatown has since come several blocks east from its traditional environs. It happened over the course of more than a decade. Urban change unfolded daily before my eyes on the surrounding streets.

  The businesses on Eldridge Street, too, were still predominantly Jewish owned. Even some jewelers remained around the corner on Canal, dating from when Canal Street was the city’s jewelry center before it moved north to West Forty-seventh, known as the Diamond District since then. Now, too, Eldridge Street, from where it begins under the Manhattan Bridge at Division Street north past Canal and Grand, is 100 percent Asian.

  I watched a new local economy evolve to serve the new population. On Eldridge Street one finds a job-placement service, a beauty parlor, a bakery with fabulous almond cookies, clothing stores, and, of course, restaurants. Our Asian neighbors were curious whenever we had events drawing crowds and ever so respectful.

  I like to tell visitors to stand in front of the synagogue. I tell them to look up and down the block and look at the store signs. Just blink and in your mind’s eye convert those Asian letters on the signs to Hebrew and Yiddish. At that moment, you can see how the urban process has continued unabated. The people, the language, and the signs have changed, but the process, the fundamental urbanism, remains strong. In other areas of the Lower East Side, the transformation has been equally dramatic and economically productive. Today, in fact, some areas are upscale with popular boutiques, restaurants, and high-priced condos.

  11.2 Restored façade of the Eldridge Street Synagogue. Kate Milford.

  11.3 Restored interior with East Wall. The original Rose Window was replaced with glass brick after the 1938 hurricane but has since been replaced with a magnificent contemporary version designed by artist Kiki Smith and architect Deborah Gans. Kate Milford.

  Neighborhood change is not the only kind of change observed over the course of this twenty-five-year effort. Remember, in the mid-1980s, the city was still emerging out of its lowest point of the 1970s. Past images and feelings die hard. The Lower East Side was far from its increasingly upscale image of today. In fact, I had my handbag grabbed off my shoulder one early evening as I walked to the subway to go home. The city was not out of the woods in street crimes, and the Lower East Side was not a place many uptowners would venture to.

  It was difficult in the mid-1980s to lure a few people to join the board of the Eldridge Street Project that was in formation. It was also almost impossible to get people to come down to see it. So we did the next best thing. Brilliant consultants filmmaker Leonard Majzlin and historian Richard Rabinowitz created a short video that we took to living rooms uptown where interested hosts invited friends to come hear about the restoration effort. Fund-raising in this way proceeded ever so slowly and in very small increments, but at least it moved forward,3 forward enough to hire Jill Gothelf, a sharp, young, and enthusiastic preservation architect, 4 to lead us through a restoration.5

  PRESERVATION IS GREEN

  The restoration of the Eldridge Street Synagogue is the largest of a historic landmark in New York that is not affiliated with an institution, government agency, or private development. Actually, this was a conservation effort. The objective was to conserve all the original fabric of the building. And it is a prime example of green preservation; in fact, it is as green as preservation gets. Localism and recycling are the starting points of genuine green building, not technology, and Eldridge is a star performer on all counts. Eldridge not only embraces green building but rebuilds community and builds on cultural assets, another vital component of authentic sustainable development.

  Consider the localism component. Metaphorically speaking, Brooklyn restored the synagogue. Three high-skill firms—one in DUMBO,6 one on Staten Island, one in Williamsburg—restored the 66 stained-glass windows. A Williamsburg firm with ten to fourteen Brooklyn employees restored the 237 intricately detailed brass fixtures and 75-bulb chandelier. A Manhattan-based firm used forty-five of their mostly Brooklyn-based skilled artisans to conserve and restore the exquisitely detailed interior paint work. A Brooklyn salvage firm provided replacement timbers as needed from demolished buildings. A Long Island City firm restored the 154 benches, and another Long Island City woodworker restored wood window frames and doors. And that was just a start.

  11.4 The Eldridge Street Synagogue’s luminous restored window.

  Kate Milford.

&nbs
p; The attic insulation is recycled blue jeans, the bathroom stall partitions are recycled plastic milk jugs, and the lobby countertop is recycled glass, mostly soda and beer bottles produced at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Virtually every material element found in the deteriorated building remains, a fundamental goal from the start of this effort in 1982. Elements that couldn’t be restored were replaced in kind with recycled material. Not only did this feed the local economy, but think of all the long-distance truck trips avoided with local supplies and the trips avoided adding construction debris to our already overtaxed waste stream.7

  Sixty to 70 percent of rehabilitation costs normally goes to labor, primarily local labor; the rest goes to materials, much of which comes from nearby salvage. Locally earned wages stay in the local economy, and these jobs do not get shipped overseas. Ordinarily, new construction is half labor and half materials. Most materials for new construction are transported from afar. A million dollars in new construction generates 30.6 jobs, reports economist Donovan Rypkema. But the same million in rehabilitation creates 35.4 jobs. “Environmentalists cheer when used tires are incorporated into asphalt shingles and recycled newspapers become part of fiberboard,” says Rypkema, “but when we reuse an historic building, we’re recycling the whole thing.”

  Restoration of either historic landmarks or renovation of plain but functional old buildings gives more of a boost to a local economy, fulfills the goals of sustainability, and exceeds basic green building standards better than any new construction. As Time noted, “It would take an average of 65 years for the reduced carbon emissions from a new energy efficient home to make up the resources lost by demolishing an old one.”8

  Richard Moe, innovative and articulate president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has been speaking and writing on this subject with great passion in recent years. “Preservation is sustainability,” he argues. “Buildings are vast repositories of energy.” For a 50,000-square-foot building, he notes, the combined costs of teardown and replacement—hauling away tons of waste, reexcavating, manufacturing new construction materials, operating tools, and installing light and heating and cooling systems—”embody” the equivalent of 640,000 gallons of gasoline. Even if a project includes 40 percent recycled materials, he adds, it takes some sixty-five years for a “green-energy-efficient office building” to recover the energy lost in demolishing and replacing an existing building.

  Environmentalists have been very slow to recognize the value of the built environment, whether for energy or land conservation.9 “Green advocates coming from the environmental field come at it with eco-gadgetry—solar, wind, and anything high-tech,” says Clem Labine. “Somehow to be green, you need to be high-tech. But old houses are already built from the least-energy-consumptive materials like brick, plaster, timber, concrete. Old houses were sited to incorporate passive solar, natural ventilation, and trees. Townhouses with two long warm party walls you share with your neighbors are energy smart.” Nature guided the builder’s hand before technology.

  THE DENSITY ISSUE

  Advocates of new green buildings argue that not all old buildings can be made energy efficient. And they point to the overarching need for re-creating density, particularly in cities. First of all, given where they start from, most old buildings worthy of preservation can be made as energy efficient as necessary to strike a balance between preservation, especially of culture and history, and conservation.

  The density issue is more complicated and is often used by those who do not recognize the density already existing in low-rise urban neighborhoods with buildings of varying scale. Brooklyn, for example, is on its own one of the densest cities in the country, and the predominant scale is the brownstone, with most apartment houses under twelve stories. But the urban fabric is tight, varied in height, and stylistically diverse.

  And remember that the Lower East Side, where the dominant scale is the tenement, small apartment house, and former-loft manufacturing building, is an area still densely populated and economically vibrant. Next door to the synagogue, as another example, stood a classic five-story nineteenth-century brick row house. It once was owned by the synagogue and for decades had ground floor retail. It had a great backyard on the roof of the first-floor shop that was built the full one-hundred-foot length of the site. Pear and magnolia trees bloomed there magnificently. For years the Chinese owners maintained the trees.

  New owners tore down the structure and built a taller new, perhaps upscale, version, including a ground-floor shop. One floor was added, but the apartments were made bigger and the ceilings higher. Thus, less people live there now, but it is bigger. When it comes to density, size can be deceptive.

  Brownstone and tenement districts are already dense. One of the brilliant features of urban row houses of brownstone size or tenement is their versatility. Single family-residence, two-family or more, take your pick. They can convert to any configuration and back again, depending on the market and population. If density is appropriate, that four-story can be four apartments or eight, rental, condo, or co-op. In such cases, versatility is the key; density, when called for, can be the result.

  As far as the density issue goes, it will be decades before any city in this country need demolish one more existing structure in the name of new density; enough vacant land exists, from prior demolitions for big projects that never happened and parking lots, to accommodate the next hundred million people, to be sure.

  I don’t think I have seen a city in this country without a parking-lot surplus. Not all of them are as dramatic, perhaps, as Tulsa, but they all share the same disease. Tulsa experienced a building boom in the oil-discovery days of the 1920s and was rich in great Art Deco architecture. Many wonderful downtown specimens remain, but on a visit not long ago, I couldn’t understand why the streets around them remain empty of pedestrians. Little street-level retail was apparent. Some of the retail exists in the interior of buildings or at suburban malls, but that is not a sufficient explanation. Then I happened to go to the top floor of one of the city’s typically banal newer bank buildings. Looking out at the cityscape gave me an “aha moment.” Before me lay a sea of parking lots more numerous than the buildings they were created to serve. What a resource for future density, with parking built underground or unnecessary at all. People living and working in cities need to get used to walking a few blocks to their destination if density is ever to be achieved. Again, that means nibbling in one more way at the car culture.

  Even New York, as tightly built and dense as it already is, has a sufficient supply of parking lots to fill a big portion of the so-called anticipated need for the population expansion that is supposed to take place by 2030, although it is not clear how that assumption was arrived at. And certainly, planners’ calculations for future needs in all cities did not anticipate the economic collapse, the slowdown in new immigrants looking for jobs, or even the return of some immigrants to their home countries because of the loss of jobs.

  IF THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING CAN, WHAT IS THE QUESTION?

  The Empire State Building was already undergoing a $500 million renovation in April 2009 when manager Anthony E. Malkin announced $20 million in additional work to make it more energy efficient.10 The improvements to this 1931 Art Deco landmark with its 102 stories, 2.6 million square feet, 6,500 windows, and 73 elevators are meant to serve as a model for older skyscrapers everywhere. The building has 302 office tenants, and 13,000 people a day use it, including visitors to the observation tower. The renovation add-ons are expected to reduce the skyscraper’s energy use by 38 percent a year by 2013, at an annual savings of $4.4 million. Up-front costs, Malkin noted, are often a deterrent for retrofitting older buildings, but the energy savings are expected to pay back those costs in only three years.

  This is an enormous precedent for New York and every city. Seventy-eight percent of New York City’s greenhouse gases comes from the city’s buildings. Commercial buildings contribute 25 percent of that figure. At a press conference an
nouncing this plan, Mayor Bloomberg said, “They are showing the rest of the city that existing buildings, no matter how tall they are, no matter how old they are, can take steps to significantly reduce their energy consumption.” Exactly!

  The retrofit includes restoration, not replacement, of the existing double-hung wood windows. Here again, restoration versus replacement is significant. Restoration of wood windows is the least-understood building alteration today. The new windows never last as long as the restored wood windows do, and the vinyl of the new ones is not even recyclable when replacement is necessary in about ten or twenty years.11 Double-paned glass can be inserted in wood frames, and the result is often better than new.

  The Green Building Council, even with some baby steps to improvement, still resists acknowledging the true value of historic preservation. The popular point evaluation system still is skewed heavily in favor of new construction. The resistance is difficult to comprehend, unless it is coming from a construction industry of contractors and suppliers that has not yet embraced the economic potential of preservation.

  Environmental and green building movements undervalue preservation. The tension between them and the historic preservation movement is palpable. “A simmering rivalry,” Blair Kamen, Chicago Tribune architecture critic, called it. This is somewhat illogical, she notes: “Both camps drew inspiration from brilliant women who wrote brilliant books—Jane Jacobs, whose ‘Death and Life of Great American Cities’ assaulted the conventional wisdom about ‘urban renewal’; and Rachel Carson, whose ‘Silent Spring’ helped give birth to the environmental movement by documenting the harmful effect of pesticides. . . . Whether it was the built environment or the natural environment, these women moved their causes from the fringe to the mainstream. The movements they helped birth would seem to be the equivalent of sisters, or brothers—destined to be allies, not adversaries.”12