A slice of NY history comes under threat
>>There are fewer and fewer places left in New York City where you can walk through a door and feel transported back in time. Among them is 80 St Marks Place, a Prohibition-era speakeasy converted into an off-Broadway theatre in the early 1960s.
Inside the front door there are still hooks embedded in the brick where steel plates were once hung to buy time during police raids. The lobby walls are covered with framed, autographed photos of famous actors, including Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford.
A narrow hallway connects the lobby with William Barnacle Tavern, where you can still get absinthe from a bar that has been in place since the 1920s. The performance space itself, Theater 80, is intimate, with a 199-seat capacity.
But like so many of the city’s treasures, the theatre, the tavern and the Museum of the American Gangster, on the second floor, are all facing extinction because of the pandemic.
Lorcan and Genie Otway, who own the buildings at 78 and 80 St Marks Place are now scrambling to prevent a mortgage investor from auctioning them off.
“The shutdown offered us no protection from creditors, which I think is unconscionable,” Lorcan Otway said during a recent tour of the building and its underground tunnels, through which contraband was smuggled during the 1920s and ’30s.
Mr Otway, whose father bought the buildings in 1964, said that the theatre, museum and tavern were in good financial health until March 2020, when they were shuttered by a state mandate that affected virtually all corners of the performance and service industries. Shortly before then, he had taken out a US$6.1 million (202.5 million baht) mortgage against the properties to settle an inheritance dispute, pay legal fees and finance needed renovations.
With the pandemic lockdown and a precipitous decline in revenue, that loan went into default and was purchased by Maverick Real Estate Partners about a year ago.
Mr Otway, who dug out the theatre space with his father when he was 9 and had turned down many offers by developers over the years, said that he had hired an attorney to renegotiate the payment terms, but the original lender sold the debt to Maverick without his knowledge.
Maverick, Mr Otway said, then raised the interest to 24%, from 10%, bringing the roughly $6 million debt to about $8 million.
Joe John Battista, artistic director of the 13th Street Repertory Theater, is familiar with a conflict like this. His company was recently evicted from the space it has called home since 1972.
“Real estate is real estate, but this is the arts,” Mr Battista said. “There ought to be some special attention paid when the city stands to lose a piece of cultural history like this.”
Theater 80 hosted plays throughout the 1960s, including the pre-Broadway run of the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. From 1970 until Mr Otway’s father died in 1994, the space was used to screen movies; for a time, it was New York City’s longest continuously running house devoted exclusively to revival films.
City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera remembered seeing Shakespeare at Theater 80 when she was a teenager. “This is a heartbreaking story,” she said, adding that the complexities of running even the smallest business in New York now require a team of experts.
“This is a huge advantage to the larger developers, the real estate companies, the financial institutions that can both take on this cost and hire a team to manage it,” Ms Rivera said. “And the detriment is, not just to the small landlords and the deterioration of assets to people of otherwise moderate means, but also to the community at large who lose the landlords who are interested in providing beneficial things.”
Arthur Z Schwartz, a lawyer with a reputation for representing underdog clients, said that there needs to be some type of legislative change to rein in distressed mortgage purchasing.
“Besides the fact that you have a predatory lender who set this up so there was basically no way he would be able to make the payments, then shift it from being a mortgage to being some kind of commercial paper,” he said.
John McDonagh, an old friend of Mr Otway’s, has scheduled a benefit performance of his show Off the Meter a comedic monologue about his decades of driving a yellow cab in New York, with all the profits benefiting Theater 80.
“I’m just trying to help save a theatre that Covid, gentrification and big bankers are trying to take,” said Mr McDonagh, whose show runs Jan 21-23.
“St Marks Place without Theater 80 would be like Houston Street without Katz’s Deli,” he said.