BY EILEEN STUKANE | News that the owner of one of the most beloved houses in the Greenwich Village Historic District — a small crooked house on the corner of Greenwich and Charles Sts. that rests against the taller building where I live — wanted to tear it down and sell the site for development for $20 million, stunned those of us who live next door.
Quickly, the neighborhood became galvanized and the newly emerging West Village Residents Association (WVRA), which was formed to help preserve quality of life in the square block bordered by Hudson, Perry, Greenwich and Charles Sts., met to learn whether anything could be done to save the 19th-century, single-family, wooden clapboard-style house, which we knew to be lovingly cared for by its owner, at least up to the point that this most recent news had broken.
Decades ago, I had often walked past the “For Sale” sign on the property that held a small angular dwelling on a dirt lot homesteaded by weeds and mice. In 1988, the year I got married and began my life on Greenwich St., Suri Bieler, a single woman with her own prop-rental company, bought the storybook site and began her life on Charles St.
She moved into the crooked house with her beautiful black dog, Charlie. By herself, she restored the house, banished the weeds, saved the existing fig, magnolia and sour cherry trees, and made the dirt lot into grass and gardens. What gutsiness and imagination! These qualities she shared with one of the house’s former residents, Margaret Wise Brown, who wrote the children’s classics “Goodnight Moon,” “The Runaway Bunny” and many more books, while she lived there.
Brown resided in the house, which she called Cobble Court, in the 1940s and ’50s. Back then, the house stood on York Ave. and E. 71st St. To save it from demolition in 1967, the farmhouse was purchased and transported on a flatbed truck to the wedge-shaped corner of Greenwich and Charles Sts. by a Swedish couple, the Bernhards, who also moved the cobblestones that gave the house its name.
According to Brown’s biographer, Leonard S. Marcus (“Margaret Wise Brown, Awakened By The Moon”), in 1952, when she was interviewed by the Richmond News Leader at home in Cobble Court, Brown told the reporter: “I used to come by to look at this house to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it.”
As the reporter wrote, “Satisfied as to its existence, she had finally gotten Cobble Court for herself, ‘thinking they would be less apt to tear it down if I was in it.’ ”
Her story about the house itself was published posthumously as “The Hidden House” (Henry Holt, 1953): “It was a little house/in the middle of a big city,/And nobody knew/it was there.”
Everyone knows it’s there now, not in its original 900-square-foot size, but enlarged by about 500 square feet after Bieler, who married and had a son, needed more space for her family.
In 2000, the expansion of the house was carefully conceived by architect George Boyle, who faithfully followed the lines of Brown’s Cobble Court, right down to the original, angled rooftop, and in doing so, made it seem as if the house remained itself, but had just grown up. Recognizing the accomplishment, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation granted Bieler its 2003 Historic Preservation Award for the restoration of her home. For my building, there was a sense of pride that we were close to something so important to the community. Generous to onlookers, the family allowed a wide gate that permitted viewing, and walking tours made regular stops.
Imagine the surprise on the block this July, when Andrew Greenberg, of ERG Property Advisors, listed the corner property as a “blank canvas” for developers willing to pay $20 million. What about the iconic little house?
The consternation in the community and at G.V.S.H.P. reverberated and the listing was revised to a “development site” for “potential visions, from boutique condominiums, apartments or a one-of-a-kind townhouse,” with a note that the site currently has “1 unit, 2 stories, Built in 1899.”
It appeared that the offering had no interest in targeting the sale of a historic house to someone who favored preservation and tradition. The rumor mill began churning out possibilities: Bieler was going to move the house, or go into partnership with a developer, or set the house on fire to get the best price. A request for comment I e-mailed to Suri Bieler asking for a chance to speak about her plans and stop the rumors went unanswered.
So does this beautifully restored house in the Greenwich Village Historic District just become another, “What did you expect? This is New York!” story, where land is monetized and turned over to the highest bidder for the greatest profit? Some folks say that’s as it should be, that people have a right to make as much money as they can from their assets. Why make only several million when you can make multiple millions more?
Others, and I put myself in this category, mourn what’s happening to New York City and my Greenwich Village, where the changes have come swiftly. Where developers develop for themselves, to make a profit using every loophole the city has to offer, tear down history, and then leave behind their ubiquitous glass-and-steel structures blocking light and air. And yes, whether there is an adjacent McMansion of three or four stories or a narrow structure of six stories on the site, my building would become yet another of those like so many others with compromised quality of life. But that’s not the issue.
Greenwich Village will eventually lose its character and become just another set of streets in the city if pieces of historical significance are removed piece by piece. G.V.S.H.P. and WVRA have strong arguments for keeping Cobble Court in place since it sits in a historic district that was designated in 1969, after the little house was already at its current address.
However, the decision-making power rests with the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. As Andrew Berman, executive director of G.V.S.H.P., explained to me about any house in the Greenwich Village Historic District: “Any application to make any changes to an exterior has to go through a public hearing process and is subject to the approval or disapproval of the L.P.C. That means moving it, changing it, subtracting from it, adding to it, tearing it down, building anew, repainting, repointing, anything. The L.P.C. — regarding the Charles St. house — would absolutely have the power to say, ‘No, you cannot move it.’ But they also would have the power to say, ‘Yes, you can move it.’ ”
As for the advocacy role of G.V.S.H.P., Berman said, “From our perspective, the house belongs there, it should stay there forever, and it should stay there largely in the form that it’s in now. But what the L.P.C. would or would not decide with an application in front of them, nobody can say that they know the answer to that question.”
In 2000-2001, a furor arose among Village residents, preservationists and local elected officials when New York University’s School of Law announced that it was tearing down the house that Edgar Allan Poe resided in at 85 W. Third St., the place where he wrote “The Cask of Amontillado” and revised and published “The Raven.” The historic building was to be demolished to make way for the $98 million Furman Hall.
The end result of that preservation fight was that N.Y.U. redesigned its building and promised to reconstruct the facades of three historic buildings, using the original bricks and restoring the stoops. None of the original bricks were ever used — false brick facades are in place — and there are no stoops to the buildings. However, there is a plaque in place designating Poe’s residency.
But a plaque seems small compensation for what Greenwich Village lost, and continues to risk losing.
I keep thinking of Margaret Wise Brown saying after her move into Cobble Court: “They would be less likely to tear it down if I was in it.”
In spirit, isn’t she still?
