The Battle for Gotham (57 page)

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.

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.