Lower East Side Protests Developer’s Designs on Arts Center
By Allen Ranz

Lower East Side community activists are stepping up actions to save the Charas/El Bohio cultural center, located in a former school building on East Ninth Street and Avenue B that the city sold to a developer for $3.15 million in July.

On Oct. 14 the state Court of Appeals upheld the legitimacy of the auction. The Giuliani administration refused to disclose the identity of the buyer until presented with a Freedom of Information Act request set in motion by local City Councilmembers, especially Lower East Side Councilmember Margarita Lopez.

It became known in mid-October that the buyer is the Sing Fina (“Singer Financial”) corporation, owned by developer Gregg Singer. On October 22, 50 activists crowded the sidewalk outside Charas to await Singer’s arrival for a “walk-through” of the building with some bankers from whom he was attempting to borrow cash. Chanting “Get Out of Our Neighborhood,” and listening to a brass band—one of the many musical groups that rehearses at Charas—playing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” the protestors watched as the bankers, city Department of Administrative Services bureaucrats, and developers worked up the nerve to walk through the unfriendly crowd. “We hope this will make financiers realize that this is a bad investment,” says Susan Howard, one of the organizers of the protest. On Nov. 4, about 100 people picketed outside Singer’s apartment in a luxury building on East 35th Street.

Sources have indicated that Singer was planning to lease the property to a for-profit nursing home, which would charge Medicare and Medicaid large fees but would still be within the constraints of land-use regulations that designate the building for “community facility use.” There is evidence, however, that Singer’s “anchor tenant”—the nursing home—may have pulled out of the deal, because Sing Fina has been circulating an advertisement (which was, perhaps inadvertently, sent to an advocacy group friendly to Charas) offering space in the “School Building” to “health-care facilities, clinics, physician groups, organizations in the helping field, and the arts. Charas chairman Armando Perez says the advertisement seems to indicate that Singer lacks tenants and would therefore have trouble getting financing. “They have put down a $600,000 down payment, and they will default if they don’t come up with the balance of $3.15 million, and without anchor tenants already in place, no bank is going to loan a little company like Sing Fina that kind of money.”

Perez also congratulated local activists for for the disappearance of Singer’s anchor tenant. “They thought that the activism was all going to chill out after a month or so, but in the months following the auction, all kinds of ad hoc groups have formed that are fighting to save Charas, and this is an embarrassment to anybody who might have been thinking of moving in.”

Although protesters attempted to block the steps of Charas, Perez cleared a path for the unwelcome visitors. “We can’t lock them out because it’s in the lease that we have to allow the city access for inspection, otherwise they’d have an excuse to break the lease,” he said. Singer and his entourage toured the building unmolested except for the dozens of placards stuck to the walls denouncing “Greedy Gregg Singer,” which had been placed there in his honor. They discussed their intention to add a couple of new floors to the five-story building, although they were extremely vague about what they were planning to put inside.

“The plan to add extra floors gives us a new angle to fight from, because something like that has to go through both Community Board 3 and the City Council, and a majority support us in both places,” says Perez. “We know that they are planning to violate the ‘community use’ requirement, because a small for-profit company like Sing Fina will have to move from community use to making the building a source of private profit, and we’re going to keep after them.”

Charas organizers are also meeting with representatives of the Screen Actors Guild, which took the initiative of contacting the community center over concern for the lack of affordable artist rehearsal and performance space.

Meanwhile, Charas continues normal operations, with full bookings of rehearsal and exhibition space, as well as activities ranging from collection of supplies for Puerto Rican/Dominican hurricane relief to daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Charas’ lease now runs only from month to month, and the city could in theory issue an eviction notice at any time.

“Eventually, they may realize that that it’ll be easier to just sell the building to us so we can keep doing our work,” says Perez. “Before they put the building on the auction block, they were offering to let us have it for $365,000, which we know we could raise.”