St. Denis Coming Down

Earlier this year I wrote in detail about the death of the great St. Denis building on 11th and Broadway, a building that should have been landmarked but wasn't, a building full of vital history -- from Alexander Graham Bell to Ulysses S. Grant, Susan B. Anthony, and a whole lot of Socialists, radicals, artists, and psychotherapists.

The building was bought by Normandy Partners in 2016 and all of the tenants were removed--hundreds of small businesspeople, myself included, put out. Today, the empty building is being prepped for demolition.



Crain's reported last week that Columbia Property Trust is "paying more than $70 million...to purchase a roughly 50% stake" in the property with co-owner Normandy Real Estate Partners.

The plan is to tear down the St. Denis and replace it with a glass box, "182,000 square feet of boutique office space for New York’s most progressive and creative companies," according to the press release -- which calls this neighborhood below Union Square: "Midtown South."

Of course, the St. Denis was already filled with hundreds of truly progressive and creative businesses, but we weren't the right sort of commodities.



Last week, the awning over the entrance was stripped away, along with a pair of antique lamps.

The asbestos abatement notices have been posted and the asbestos dumpster has arrived, a typical precursor to the wrecking machines.



Back to that press release:

"The new 12-story, loft-style building will comprise 182,000 square feet of boutique office space and will provide a dramatic complement to this quintessential New York neighborhood. With floor plates ranging from 3,600 to 22,000 square feet, 799 Broadway will feature floor-to-ceiling glass, private terraces, and 15 foot high ceilings. This combination of highly desirable location and state-of-the-art design will appeal to New York’s most progressive and creative companies.

'We are seeking selective development opportunities in our target markets to provide value and growth to our high-quality, well-leased portfolio,' said Nelson Mills, chief executive officer of Columbia."


architect's rendering

When the St. Denis is felled, 165 years of real and rebellious history will be destroyed for this cold and soulless sarcophagus.

The Village will be much poorer for it.


architect's rendering

Post Script:

The above rendering shows the dead lobby to come. Here's what one frequent visitor to the St. Denis had to say about its lobby, which was often full of antiques from the first-floor business:

“I loved that every time I visited there were new objects in the lobby. They often seemed to reflect whatever mood I was in. Or they’d reflect the weather. I’d come in on a stormy day and the lobby would be full of dark paintings or bleak statues. On sunny days, there would be golden chaise lounges and chandeliers. There was this one chandelier, massive and dripping in crystals. It was there on a day when I felt really good and it was like the sun was on the inside of the building. This dazzling object.”

Read more about the St. Denis here.

St. Denis Update

Last week, NY Yimby reported that permits have been filed to replace the historic St. Denis building with a new 12-story office building. The St. Denis is 165 years old, boasts an impressive history (Alexander Graham Bell, Ulysses S. Grant, W.E.B. Du Bois, and lots of communists) and was recently emptied of hundreds of small business people (myself included). You can read all about it here.

For those who hoped the St. Denis would not be demolished, this doesn't look good. But a look at the permits reveals an important note: "Development Challenge Process is pending Zoning Approval. For any issues, please contact the relevant borough office."

Does that mean there is hope to save this building?



The GVSHP put out an email to explain the situation:

"The bottom line is we are working very hard to get zoning or landmark protections for the University Place, Broadway, and 3rd and 4th Avenue corridors, which the Mayor continues to oppose. We are using the leverage provided by his desire to get approval of his 14th Street tech hub, which requires City Council approval. We are not there yet, but the wheels are turning.

What does this mean in terms of the St. Denis site? The short answer is no one can say yet. It is still very much possible for the city to adopt zoning or landmark protections that include that site and would affect what can happen there moving forward – either limiting the size and height of new development, or preventing demolition or significant alteration of the existing building. But that depends upon timing – of when such measures would be adopted, and when demolition or development on the site might begin."

GVSHP asks that you send these quick and easy pre-written letters to the Mayor, the Borough President, and Councilmember Carlina Rivera. Add a note to say that the St. Denis should be protected from total demolition. You can include this history to argue for protection.

St. Denis Down

In Jonathan Richman's song "Springtime in New York," there's a line that goes "When demolishing a building brings the smell of 1890 to the breeze." That's the smell you catch as you approach the destroyed St. Denis on Broadway and 11th Street. Only, in this case, it's the smell of 1853, the musty death of a great New York building.



I was fortunate to occupy the St. Denis, if only for a little while. It gave me peace and stability, and connected me to a deep and illustrious history. (I wrote about that extensively for the New York Review of Books.)

Now it's gone. Killed by greed.



Through the dirty plastic windows in the plywood wall, you can see the pile. The sturdy timbers that once held the place together. A pair of elevator doors suspended in open space. Bricks shaped and fired at the Hutton Brick Company up in Kingston.

(Though Hutton is often dated to 1865, 12 years after the St. Denis was built. Mr. Hutton once told a reader of the New York Times to keep the bricks for sentimental value. "They make lovely doorstops," he added.)



A few walls still stand, back toward the rear. This is where you can feel the ghosts, lingering in the murky shadows by peeling Ionic columns that might once have held up the ceiling of the fancy dining room.

They will also fall. The new owners want money and that means a glass coffin on top of this land, a miserable place to go and die.



I looked through every window, searching for remnants of the winding grand staircase, the mahogany banister gripped by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Graham Bell, Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Buffalo Bill Cody, P.T. Barnum, Susan B. Anthony, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcel Duchamp -- and all of these people, and many more, and me. But there was no sign of the banister, no sign of the wrought-iron dragons that held it.

They must have sold it for salvage.

When I turned to go, I beheld my old view, the one I felt blessed to see each night when I walked out of the St. Denis. Grace Church in all its beauty. In April, a magnolia tree in full flower, like a snow-covered mountain touched by pink.

It will be someone else's view now.



Read all my coverage on the life and death of the St. Denis building here

St. Denis' Last Days

Earlier this year I wrote about the death of the great St. Denis building on 11th and Broadway, a building that should be landmarked but isn't, a building full of vital history.

The building was bought by Normandy Partners in 2016 and all of the tenants were removed--hundreds of small businesspeople, myself included, put out. Today, a few remain, but they will soon be gone.


photo: Phil Penman

Now we hear that Normandy is "hungry for a refinancing," as The Real Deal reports. They want $187 million for the St. Denis.

Writes TRD:

"At 799 Broadway, the funding would in part go toward the construction of a new, nearly 190,000-square-foot office building replacing the existing office property... The existing building, formerly known as the St. Denis Hotel, will be completely vacated this month and readied for demolition this fall."

And there's a new rendering of the soulless, dead-eyed nothing pile of glass to come:



What was here before? What will they be murdering? Something more alive, more haunted, more storied than most buildings -- and certainly more than this zombie stack of hollow boxes.

Beyond the St. Denis, the entire neighborhood is under threat. Send these quick and easy pre-written letters to the Mayor, the Borough President, and Councilmember Carlina Rivera. Add a note to say that the St. Denis should be protected from total demolition. You can include this history to argue for protection.

The St. Denis Building

The St. Denis building south of Union Square is full of stories. For 165 years, it's been a place for the famous and the radical. Most recently, it's been full of shrinks.



But that's all coming to an end as the building is emptied--displacing hundreds of small business people (myself included)--and as Union Square changes under the pressures of hyper-gentrification and City Halls' "Tech Hub."



I talked to the people inside the St. Denis, and wrote up the story of the Death and Life of a Great American Building for the New York Review of Books Daily. Read it here.

Roland Antiques

VANISHED/MOVED

Roland, auctioneers of antiques, has left the city. Family owned and founded in 1973, they've been in the neighborhood south of Union Square since 1974, and in the St. Denis building at 11th Street and Broadway for several years.

But the neighborhood is being rapidly changed.



In 2015, the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) put out a call to redevelop a city-owned site on E. 14th Street. They were looking to “create an iconic commercial development” for tech startups and co-working spaces. Mayor de Blasio soon announced the winning “Tech Hub,” a glass tower that politicians and developers hope will boost more high-end development. It is attracting major real estate speculation, including Normandy Real Estate Partners’ 2016 purchase of the St. Denis building for $101 million.

Normandy stopped renewing leases, and hundreds of small business people--most of them psychotherapists and other providers of wellness--were forced to leave the building. I was one of them. (A longer story about the building is forthcoming.)

Roland is the latest loss.


2016

For years, people in the building took pleasure in Roland's presence. Regularly, the auction house would receive a truck full of antiques from some estate and unload them onto the sidewalk to take photos for their catalog.



Roland occupied a large corner space with several windows along 11th and Broadway, plus two showrooms along the back hallway and more in the basement, but this was not enough to contain all the items.

The antiques would overflow into the lobby of the building, where they'd stay for awhile, providing an ever-changing--and often strange--decor.



Every month, Roland held an auction.

Before attending the auction, you'd go to the preview, wandering in and out of the showrooms, looking at the objects. Sometimes, a prospective buyer would try out a baby grand piano, filling the halls with music. 



On auction day, always a Saturday, the main room filled with New York characters. Brothers Bill and Robert Roland ran the show, with Bill as auctioneer. Bids came in over the phone and the Internet. A few items sold for as little as 10 bucks. Others went for big money. That large nude painting of Milda, Lithuanian goddess of love, sold for $55,000.

I was looking forward to their March auction. I only went a few times, but I loved the energy of that room, the people, the jokes, the excitement. No more.



Roland is moving out to Long Island--you'll find them at 150 School Street in Glen Cove.

When I visited as they were sadly packing up, an employee told me, "Unless you're Christie's or Sotheby's, you can't stay in the city anymore. The rents are too high."

The Hole That Was St. Denis

A dream-like dispatch from author Elizabeth Wurtzel (who lives above the hole in the ground that was the St. Denis building, whose illustrious history and miserable death you can read all about here):



I have no idea what is in the dirt next door, but my guess is Love Canal, sewage from the Mississippi, cigarette butts, marijuana ash, slave remains, rats, mice, Three Mile island, Mount Etna, Mount Saint Helen, Dust Bowl, Adam, Eve, serpent, Satan, Chernobyl, Berlin Wall, acid rain, asbestos, uranium, geraniums, 9/11, 7/11, Donner Party, bird beaks, pigeon claws, squirrel tails, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Mafia hits washed up from the East River, cocaine, syringes, works, broken bottles, Bataan Death March, Manila massacre, Boston Tea Party, frog legs, goldfish, rusty pipes, mutant ninja turtles, alligators from Florida, red algae, yellow fever, Agent Orange, bubonic plague, gold teeth, silver spoons, copper wires, iron ore, Crest with fluoride, whitening strips, stripper tips, dollar bills, twenties laced with cocaine, subway tokens, expired MetroCards with unused fare, tickets to see Star Wars in 1976, bicentennial souvenirs, gutta-percha, cat guts, doll parts, golf balls, tennis racket strings, cashmere socks, polyester, rayon, pylon, nylon, Mylar, warped vinyl, scratched CDs, crispy leaves, shredded lettuce, tarnished keys, queen bees, xerox paper, pepper spray, Prozac pills, poppers, pooper scoopers, hula hoops, leis, fecal matter, aborted fetuses, snot, rot, cots, bots, shot glass shards, broken windows, chimney smoke, dice, playing cards, poker chips, lollipop sticks, toothpicks, used tissues, toilet water, wolf fangs, sunburn peel, hangnails, cavities, skin, split ends, fur balls, chicken bones, dissected cadavers, Big Bang, Little Miss Muffet, Humpty Dumpty, Rip Van Winkle, bog wood, petrified forest, primordial ooze, love letters, promises kept and broken.