by Sam Roberts
Langdon Post estimated that half of the sixty-five thousand or so surviving old-law tenements like No. 97 would have been unable to comply with the latest standards. Indeed, after No. 97 was condemned in 1935, barring further residential occupancy, the building would never be upgraded to legally house another tenant—perhaps some squatters would call it home over the next half century—but only the ground-floor storefronts were still be permitted to operate.
In 1988, the four-story building was converted into the Tenement Museum, a gripping monument to its grim history and to its immigrant legacy. The shabby apartments were barely restored, to provide an authentic view of tenement living in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when, between the Civil War and the Depression, the building housed, in total, as many as seven thousand families. But, except for the public housing projects still peppered on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood is no longer a magnet for new immigrants seeking affordable apartments, for very good reason. The museum paid $750,000 for 97 Orchard in 1996. A decade later, when the museum purchased the 1888 tenement at 103 Orchard, on the corner of Delancey (once owned by Joseph Marcus, the founder of the Bank of United States), in order to expand, it had to pay $7 million.
Once home to more than one hundred tenants, this nineteenth-century building on Orchard Street was preserved as the Tenement Museum. (George Samoladas)
26
134 EAST SIXTIETH STREET
Holdout or hold-up? No. 134 on the south side of East Sixtieth Street was a typical brownstone until Jean Herman declared that her apartment was her castle. (William Sauro/New York Times, 1986)
Leases for rent-controlled apartments in New York typically expire only when their tenants do, which is one of many reasons why building something in the city usually takes longer and costs more than it does just about anywhere else. Manhattan, in particular, is peppered with high-rises that were configured to fit on irregularly angled plots of ground because a single renter or small-property owner exercised his or her constitutional right not to be deprived of property without due process of law.
Many of these holdouts and hostage situations happen behind the scenes: inconsequential leaseholders are bought off; the most recalcitrant tenants are plied with cash and other amenities and are relocated, often with long-term leases to rent-free apartments. Sometimes, developers are within their legal rights and win in court, but would rather pay a lump sum to spare themselves years of further nuisance litigation, and write off the cost as a routine business expense, just as they would a shakedown from a building inspector or an extortion threat from a corrupt labor union leader. Occasionally, failing to overcome a stumbling block, a developer cuts his losses, gives up, and either hopes to outlast the holdout or sells the site to someone else who has more patience or better negotiating skills, or is more aggressive or naive. If the hurdle is eventually resolved, it customarily ends with a confidentiality agreement, which prevents the winners (the developer, the holdout, and their lawyers, who collect a percentage of the settlement) from disclosing the details. (In a twist, in 2016 residents of a twelve-story loft building in Chelsea paid eleven million dollars for the air rights over a neighboring developer’s corner property to prevent him from building a tower than would block their views.)
In the 1980s, Jean Herman’s tenacity in resisting entreaties and incentives to vacate her brownstone apartment at 134 East Sixtieth Street captured the public’s imagination because it put a sympathetic face to an often-anonymous fight. As lyrics of Les Misérables facetiously suggest that “everybody loves a landlord,” but during New York City’s post-1970s-fiscal-crisis efforts to restore confidence and to spur economic development, the government’s concessions to developers (Donald Trump’s property tax abatement to renovate the Commodore Hotel on East Forty-Second Street was a glaring example) made landowners less likable than ever. In 1980, when Columbia was evicting residential tenants in Morningside Heights and warehousing apartments for future campus expansion, the university’s incoming president, Michael Sovern, was walking into the middle of a dispute with a holdout occupant of a Columbia-owned apartment that would take fully forty years of demonstrations, rent strikes, and litigation to resolve. Even before becoming president, as a Bronx-bred Columbia professor since 1960, Sovern was well aware of New York’s grim realities. “There’s no way,” he said, “to be a landlord and not be regarded as a bad guy.”
Jean Herman emerged as a modern-day Manhattan version of Barbara Fritchie, the nearly ninety-year-old folkloric heroine who supposedly taunted occupying Confederate troops by waving a Union ensign hanging from a pole in an upper-story window of her house in Frederick, Maryland, during the Civil War. The legendary incident was immortalized in a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier (which, historically, may have had more rhyme than reason) published in the October 1863 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Whittier wrote that after General Stonewall Jackson ordered his men to fire at the wooden staff, Fritchie snatched up the flag again: “She leaned far out on the window-sill, / And shook it forth with a royal will. / ‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.” General Jackson was just passing through and presumably had no plans to develop Fritchie’s property at 154 West Patrick Street after the Civil War. Victorious at Antietam and Fredericksburg the year before, Jackson could afford to graciously overlook her audacious defiance. As Whittier recounted the tale’s gratifying, if bittersweet finale: “A shade of sadness, a blush of shame / Over the face of the leader came; / The nobler nature within him stirred / To life at that woman’s deed and word: / ‘Who touches a hair on yon gray head / Dies like a dog! March on!’ he said.” Within months, both Fritchie and Jackson were dead. Neither lived to see how the war ended.
Jean Herman’s perseverance probably won’t reverberate with the passion, patriotism, and durability that Fritchie’s did, but she left a more enduring, extortionate, and visible legacy. The four-story, Italianate dark-chocolate brownstone town house that she lived in at 134 East Sixtieth Street was built in 1865, the same year that the South surrendered. Except for the slate mansard roof and dormers, it was prototypical of the literally thousands that would flank the city’s avenues and side streets in the latter decades of the nineteenth century as brownstone, much of it quarried near the Connecticut River and in northern New Jersey, succeeded brick as the preferred facade material. The row of identical brownstones on East Sixtieth was erected by James and John Fettretch, Scotch-Irish builders. Each was twenty feet wide, with a basement kitchen and a stoop that led to a living room and dining room. Development, deferred by the Civil War, had inevitably forged north of Forty-Second Street, literally gaining ground as new avenues and side streets were extended and paved. “On the East Side alone,” the Times reported, “between the Battery and the Harlem River, there are enough buildings in course of erection to make a respectable city.”
Christopher Gray wrote in his Times “Streetscapes” column that the original owner of No. 134 was a barber, Henry S. Day, who had lived on Sixth Avenue at the time and bought No. 134 for twenty-six thousand dollars (about four hundred thousand in today’s dollars), a hefty sum for someone who, as the first in a long line of landlords, was, appropriately enough, a professional hair-splitter. Day rented the town house to a single family headed by Julius Birge, a thirty-five-year-old German-born stockbroker, who immigrated in 1851 and probably commuted to his office on Exchange Place in lower Manhattan by the horse-drawn Third Avenue Railroad, which ran around the corner. After Birge vacated the premises in 1875, Day, his wife, two children, and several servants moved in for two years, followed by the Potoskys, whose patriarch ran a cloak company and who appeared to have been the last family to occupy the house exclusively. In 1892, shortly after the Bloomingdale Brothers expanded their cast-iron Third Avenue storefront around the corner toward Lexington Avenue, Day sold the house to Howard Pell, the scion of a venerable Knickerbocker family who lived on Fifth Avenue. Pell rented the house to Henry and Frieda Urb
an. Henry, the New York correspondent for Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger, a mass-circulation German national newspaper, encamped with their cook, a waitress, and seven boarders, including the Brazilian consul. No. 134 survived largely intact until the late 1920s, when the Pells leased it to James F. Meehan, a Bronx builder. Meehan’s development on former farmland in Hunts Point of two-family homes and, with the Henry Morgenthau Company, of a six-story, elevator-equipped residence for 103 families that was then the largest apartment house in the borough, was spurred by the arrival of the subway and the American Bank Note Company’s purchase of a site nearby for its new printing plant. After 1928, Meehan also redeveloped the south side of East Sixtieth Street between Lexington and Park Avenues in Manhattan, including Nos. 116, 117, and 134, as the block continued its transformation from single-family homes. The stoops were sliced off, the street-level space was recast to accommodate retail stores, and the upper floors were renovated into rental apartments. In 1937, the Pells sold the town house to the first in a succession of corporations. In 1981 the privately held Cohen Brothers Realty bought Nos. 134 and 138.
The realty company was assembling a parcel bounded by East Sixtieth and Sixty-First Streets and Lexington Avenue to erect a thirty-seven-story, blue granite, glass, and steel skyscraper designed by Helmut Jahn, who, the American Institute of Architects Guide wrote, “has provided New York with its most exotic skyline elements since those slender finialed towers of the 1930s from the Chrysler Building to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.” By 1986, after purchasing the Dollar Dry Dock building and three brownstones, Cohen Brothers owned the full Lexington Avenue blockfront. All but five of the residents of the brownstones were paid an average of four thousand dollars each to move; four recalcitrant tenants were given about six hundred thousand dollars each to get out. Jean Herman, who had occupied her fourth-floor, walk-up apartment for more than thirty years, was the only occupant remaining in No. 134. The lone holdout since 1984, she paid $168 a month for the rent-controlled, two-room, twenty-six-by-twenty-foot flat that, in a bow to Barbara Fritchie, she distinguished by planting window boxes with polychromatic geraniums and petunias, and occasionally festooned with a small American flag.
Under New York’s strict regulations, established in the wake of price-gouging during World War II, landlords are virtually precluded from evicting tenants in rent-regulated apartments if they have lived in them continuously (unless the owner proves, among other conditions, that he is unable to earn an 8.5 percent return on the property’s assessed valuation). The occupants can be bought out, presented with comparable alternatives, or given other incentives. Herman, a Barnard graduate, market researcher, freelance writer, public relations consultant, and cartoonist, was shown about two dozen other apartments by agents for Cohen Brothers, but rejected them because none, within her preferred boundaries of East Fifty-Fifth and Seventieth Streets and Park and Second Avenues, was rent-stabilized. She rebuffed an offer of eight hundred thousand dollars, which would have been roughly thirty-five hundred dollars per square foot in today’s dollars, the price for a one-bedroom apartment at 15 Central Park West, which has been described as the city’s most expensive condominium. “I’m sorry if I’m in the way,” she explained, “but I’m not going anywhere as long as I don’t have a better place to live that’s rent-stabilized and in this neighborhood.”
Finally, the Cohens gave up. The two adjacent brownstones were demolished, the fifth floor and rear of No. 134 were lopped off, the facade was restored, and 750 Lexington Avenue was built around Herman’s house. The skyscraper was completed in 1988, four years after Herman became the last holdout and seven years after the Cohens bought the brownstone, which a nearby Sephora store uses for storage and which now passes for an extended billboard for the Levi’s store next door. Formally known as International Plaza, 750 Lexington is thirty-one stories (the loss of No. 134’s footprint reduced its maximum height, costing the builders several thousand square feet in rentable space), and is topped with a distinctive Sumerian-style cap.
Other developers have paid even more to get rid of stubborn tenants and been delayed even longer. Some of the holdouts waited too long, though. Among the more iconic cases is the Nedick’s stand at West Thirty-Fourth Street and Herald Square, which prevented Macy’s from occupying the entirety of the immense square block stretching west to Seventh Avenue when it was competing to become “the world’s largest store.” An agent of Henry Siegel, a partner in Macy’s downtown competitor, Siegel-Cooper, scuttled Macy’s oral agreement with Alfred Duane Pell to buy the 1,154-square-foot corner property by offering $375,000, $125,000 more than Macy’s had offered. When it opened in 1896, the Siegel-Cooper palazzo on Sixth Avenue’s Ladies’ Mile, fifteen blocks south of Macy’s, billed itself as the largest store in the world. According to Holdouts (1984) by Andrew Alpern and Seymour Durst, Siegel wanted to bargain away the corner in return for Macy’s lease at West Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. But Macy’s wouldn’t bite. In 1902, Macy’s opened its giant nine-story, 1.6 million-square-foot retail space astride the Thirty-Fourth Street corner, which became a five-story building with a United Cigar Store on the ground floor. Macy’s never bought the coveted corner, but sometime after World War II, it was able to erect a seventy-foot-high billboard on top proclaiming its store in Herald Square, after Siegel-Cooper closed in 1917, as indisputably the world’s largest.
The Avenue of the Americas blockfront of the seventy-story RCA (now Comcast) Building in Rockefeller Center is flanked by two tiny holdouts that balked when the site for Rockefeller Center was being assembled. The 1,672-square-foot parcel on the southeast corner at Fiftieth Street and Avenue of the Americas sold to a grocer in 1852 for $1,600. A United Cigar Store leased it in 1930. After the death of the grocer’s grandson, the site sold in 1962 for $380,000 and Rockefeller Center finally acquired it in 1972. The northeast corner of Avenue of the Americas and West Forty-Ninth Street was more problematic. The property was easy to purchase, but the Hurley brothers, who operated a popular bar there, had a lease until 1942 that barred demolition. They demanded $250,000 (about $3.7 million in today’s dollars), which the Rockefellers refused to pay. After Prohibition was repealed, the brothers reopened their bar.
On the East Side, another stubborn tavern-keeper barred a developer from cornering the block. P. J. Clarke’s, a two-story nineteenth-century saloon (where The Lost Weekend, starring Ray Milland, was filmed) at Third Avenue and East Fifty-Fifth Street, refused to budge in the late 1960s, altering the footprint of 919 Third Avenue, a forty-seven-story office building. Nearby, Paul Brine was facing imminent eviction from his $90.14-a-month rent-regulated apartment on East Fifty-Third Street and Third Avenue after Sterling Equities argued that it was not his primary residence. Brine was the last tenant left, usually the one who is offered the most to leave. In 1983, when Brine threatened to appeal, the developer agreed to pay him nearly one million dollars to avoid years of further litigation and to get on with construction of its proposed office building. Brine’s lawyer was David Rozenholc, the bane of builders, who has extracted millions of dollars for his recalcitrant clients.
Regardless of the legal foundation for his argument or the eventual disposition, protracted litigation fulfills two fundamental goals: keeping his client in the apartment and costing the apoplectic developer more and more money for lawyers, debt on loans, and lost revenue. Rozenholc audaciously—and often successfully—advances his nine-tenths of the law argument: “A tenant has an ownership interest in real estate. A lease is a type of ownership—the law protects you, and the landlord’s interest is not greater than the tenant’s. Even if a tenant doesn’t have a lease, he is in possession, and that is obviously an interest.” Rozenholc also negotiated a seventeen-million-dollar buyout of one tenant at the Mayflower Hotel so Zeckendorf Development could build 15 Central Park West, and twenty-five million dollars from Tishman-Speyer to oust three tenants at Tenth Avenue and West Thirty-Fifth Street who stood in the way of its Hudson Yards project on the
West Side. In 1984, Ian Bruce Eichner offered about three million dollars to tenants—each got either ten years’ free rent in a renovated building on the Upper East Side or a payment of more than one hundred thousand dollars—to empty a row of brownstones on Third Avenue between East Sixty-Third and Sixty-Fourth Streets that he had bought for twenty million dollars and replace them with a 220-apartment condominium high-rise. “That’s America,” he said, shrugging.
By the late twentieth century, holdouts like Jean Herman were among the last tenants to resist as developers assembled sites for skyscrapers. (George Samoladas)
Money is an obvious motive for holding out, but why, when New Yorkers love to complain about the city and their own block, are they often so implacable about moving away? “I honestly do not know,” Jean Herman’s brother, Harold, said. “She liked the publicity; she liked the neighborhood.” Her lawyer, Joseph A. Fallon, suggested two other plausible explanations: “She had a principled opposition to overdevelopment,” he said. “And, she was eccentric.” Jean Herman died in 1992. She was sixty-nine. Her lease expired when she did. The most logical explanation for her pertinacity was her own: “This is my home,” she said, “and that’s all there is to it.”
27
60 HUDSON STREET