Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about a townhouse in Greenwich Village that could win landmark designation — if it’s not too late. We’ll also take a second look at a 1-cent postage stamp that is worth considerably more than that.
The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission voted on Tuesday to “calendar” a Greek Revival rowhouse on West 13th Street, meaning that it will put a public hearing about the 178-year-old building on its calendar. That is the first step toward deciding whether to designate it a landmark.
But preservationists who have been pushing for landmark status since 2020 worry that the calendaring has come a little late. The facade was stripped off a few weeks ago, something that “would not have happened had the commission acted sooner,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of Village Preservation, a nonprofit preservation advocacy group.
Still, Berman said that he was “thrilled” that it was now on a path that could lead to landmarking. (A spokeswoman for the commission said that only “nonhistoric” elements like an awning, fire escapes and ironwork around the door had been removed. “The historic facade remains in place,” she said.)
Village Preservation maintains that the building has connections to Black history and the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage and theatrical history. And the group would not take no for an answer.
It had made a pitch in 2020 largely based on the building’s most recent life, which began after a small theater was installed in the basement in 1959.
Then, starting in 1972, it was the home of the 13th Street Repertory Theater, an eclectic operation shepherded by an indefatigable impresario named Edith O’Hara. It was where the one-act play “Line” ran for more than 40 years, an Off Off Broadway record. It was also where “Boy Meet Boy,” New York’s first hit gay musical, opened in the 1970s. The aspiring performers who appeared there over the years included Richard Dreyfuss, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Chazz Palminteri and Amy Stiller.
O’Hara died in 2020, the curtain came down on the theater company, and the landmarks commission told Berman’s group that the building lacked “cultural significance within the context of Off Off Broadway theater.”
Village Preservation did more digging in the archives and found new details about Jacob Day, a Black caterer who made a fortune when catering was “one of the few profitable business opportunities that Black men could pursue,” Theresa Noonan, a researcher for the commission, said during a presentation before the calendar vote on Tuesday.
Noonan said that Day was worth $200,000 ($6 million in today’s dollars, she said) when he died in 1884. He had bought the house in 1859, “a time when African Americans faced substantial barriers to building wealth,” she said, but Day had established himself long before he made the purchase. Noonan showed an advertisement for Day’s catering business from 1873 that described him as a “well-known caterer of 25 years’ standing.”
Village Preservation says the suffragist Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet lived in the house for at least eight years when Day owned it. Garnet, a co-founder of the National Women’s Afro-American Union of New York, later moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. A playground in Williamsburg was named for her in 2021.
Village Preservation says Day is thought to have supported the Underground Railroad. As the writer John Freeman Gill noted, that idea has lived on because of a hidden basement room. The only way in was a trap door from what became the dressing room of the theater.
Now, said Kate Lemos McHale, the landmarks commission’s director of research, the house is “not in such good shape.”
“Frankly, during the later years of the theater, I think there were not the funds to keep it up,” she said. “And since then it has remained vacant, which is always concerning.”
There is graffiti on the facade and the front door.
Lemos McHale said the commission had been in discussions with the owner, who “plans to renovate and restore the front facade and renovate it for a new use on the inside.” Calls and an email to Atit Jariwala, whose name was listed on documents for the rowhouse and the hotel next door, went unanswered. No date has been set for the landmarks commission’s hearing on the proposed landmark designation.
Weather
Prepare for a mostly sunny day in the low 90s. At night it’ll be partly cloudy, with temperatures in the mid-70s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until July 4 (Independence Day).
That is a lot of money, especially considering that when the Z-grill was new, it sold for 1 cent.
The Z-grill is a postage stamp, and it sold for $4.36 million, including an 18 percent buyer’s premium for the auction house, Robert A Siegel Auction Galleries in Manhattan.
That made the Z-grill the most valuable U.S. postage stamp, topping an Inverted Jenny — one of 100 stamps from the famously misprinted sheet with the upside-down biplanes — that went for more than $2 million last year. The One-Cent Magenta from British Guiana, which sold for $8.3 million in 2021, remains the most expensive stamp in the world.
The Z-grill commands attention (and money) because it is one of only two such stamps known to exist; the other is owned by the New York Public Library. Scott Trepel, the president of Siegel, said in March that all the others that were printed had apparently been thrown away.
Until the sale, on Saturday, it had belonged to Bill Gross, who was known as the “bond king” when he headed an investment firm that managed $2 trillion in assets. He also had a huge portfolio of stamps that he estimated had cost him more than $100 million to assemble. But then he decided to sell them all. The top 100 lots at the auction brought in $18.12 million; a spokeswoman for Siegel said the buyer did not want to be identified.
METROPOLITAN diary
Stuck
Dear Diary:
I was leaving a friend’s apartment in Midtown when the elevator got stuck.
The lights shut off. So did the air-conditioning. We were stalled on the 17th floor.
There was a man in the elevator with me. As soon as we came to a halt, he turned to me with a serious expression and a calm demeanor.
“It’s best not to panic in these situations,” he said. “They will pass.”
A minute went by, and my breathing intensified. Claustrophobia was beginning to set in. My mind raced.
Again, the man spoke to me gently.
“We’ll be down in no time,” he said. “I’m sure.”
Another excruciating minute went by. The summer heat continued to rise in the tiny elevator.
