HALL RENEWED
As St. Anthony faces closure, famous practice gym gets makeover as music hall
Shawn Christie is a server at Cellar 335, a new bar and restaurant in the basement of White Eagle Hall, a centuryold building on Newark Avenue in Jersey City. He is 28; tattoos intertwine on both arms. Rings hang from his nose and eyebrow. He is on the clock at 6:30 p.m. when Bob Hurley, the basketball coach at nearby St. Anthony High, and his wife Chris, the team’s scorekeeper, drive over after practice. They amble down four steps into a space that evokes a dark romance, heavy on reds and blacks. On exposed brick, graffiti murals mix with seven species of moss. The Hurleys drink it all in, eyeing repurposed church pews, prayer candles and tiki-style cocktails on tabletops. They recall where a weight bench used to be and how you could once hear the rhythm of bouncing basketballs above. Hurley points out that trash barrels were once stored where patrons now enter. Christie approaches them.
“Have you ever been here before?” Christie says.
“Oh, we’ve been here for many years,” Chris says.
“Dude, dude,” Bob says. “I was here in 1968 the first time. Where were you?”
“Well, have you been here since all that’s been done to the restaurant?” Christie says. “It was basketball, right?”
“So I’m the coach,” Hurley says. “We used to practice here.”
“We had a couple people come in here,” Christie says. “They wanted to take a tour of the kitchen. They used to play basketball here.”
Hurley nods. He is 69, white haired and the winner of more than 1,200 games. A member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, he grows nostalgic regarding an old gym in a gentrifying city. He is aware of the performing arts space being refurbished here in White Eagle Hall, the three-story edifice with faces of Polish luminaries looking down on whirring traffic. He recalls wall-to-wall battles upstairs, no frills, no fouls, a four-point line on the court, bingo cards flying and the raised decibels of his aria, a combination of sneakers squeaking and Hurley squawking. He is best known for his unbridled brio and ability to command the space. Twenty-eight of his teams won state championships; eight went unbeaten. More than 150 Friars played Division I in college; seven made the NBA. White Eagle, as he knew it, was a magnet and a landmark owned by the St. Anthony of Padua parish on Monmouth Street. The bandbox was a place where players, from his sons Bobby and Danny to Lloyd Daniels, fired off threes before crossing half court and earned floor burns on allout dives by radiators. Prospectors parked on the sidewalk. No matter the sweat, no one dared wander into the basement showers.
“The place wasn’t kept clean. There was no maintenance,” Bob says. “God knows what kind of diseases one could get from attempting to take a shower here.”
“We put the weight room in,” Chris says. “Tried to spruce it up.”
Hurley knows all the reliquary’s quirks. He is the reason urban and suburban aspirants answered White Eagle’s siren call, chasing loose balls behind the stage curtain into crawlspaces and fighting onto the lobby’s checkered floor past a phone booth out front. He remembers defenders trapping ball handlers, forcing them into corners beneath stairwells. He details non-negotiable contracts and night curfews. Tattoos were taboo. Piercings were prohibited. Each gym rat learned that one ground rule was inviolable: if you played, you helped put up folding tables for bingo and took them back down, but that is all past. The heavy lifting was done during the halcyon days, and his team moved to a spacious charter school gym down the block from St. Anthony High, also owned by the parish, in 2000. White Eagle was already failing by then, and fell into further disrepair. Abandonment drew vagrants until a Brooklynborn developer with a Ukrainian wife who is an artist purchased the hall for $1.1 million in 2012. Lights of varying colors flash on the yellow brick exterior.
“We’ve driven by three times a week peeking at changes,” says Bob, whose teams practiced on the first floor for 32 years. He was a probation officer then and has since retired. He is also St. Anthony’s president as the enrollment drops to 160, down from 263 a decade ago. The school struggles annually to meet financial demands. Successful with fundraising in the past, donor fatigue has set in. He recognizes the irony in White Eagle re-opening as St. Anthony High is set to close.
“Is it really cool-looking upstairs?” Chris says.
“Awesome, amazing,” Christie says. “It’s finished. We’re waiting for them to announce the first show.”
“I was just looking through the window on the ground floor,” Chris says. “There used to be a phone booth there.”
“I really want to see when it pops off, when it really pops off,” Christie says.
“I still look at that building from when it was falling down,” Bob says. “Nobody wanted it.”
Christie informs them that he is not their server. He was just settling them. “Sorry!” Bob says. “Sorry!” Chris says. “Sorry we tortured you!”
“No, I’m jealous,” Christie says. “I want to hear what’s going on! I’ll have the manager come.”
Peter Arnone, the manager, introduces himself. He recognizes Bob, listens to tales about rollicking Polish weddings from a bygone era and inquires about their cocktail tastes. He suggests Zombie Priest Punch. It consists of Bacardi 8, El Dorado 151, Appleton 12-year-old Jamaican rum, pineapple, passion fruit, absinthe and angostura bitters. Hurley and his wife exchange looks. It comes with two straws.
“Sounds like a play,” Bob says. “I think out of a timeout we run that.”
Spicy cornbread, avocado fried rice and lime-soy garlic wings are served.
“A little fun,” Arnone says. “Obviously you had a lot of fun here.”
“Mostly upstairs,” Bob says. “Down here was the cleaning and the weight room, lockers, storage areas.”
“Welcome back,” Arnone says. “Welcome to our little oasis beneath the streets.”
There is a framed black-andwhite photograph of White Eagle that collects dust in a closet at St. Anthony High, a half mile from the hall. It features a full layout of the space replete with wooden bingo tables being set up. Players carry three chairs at a time. The photographer's vantage point is from the balcony above the gym’s entrance. Out of view is a basket affixed to the balcony. Its rim measures just below 10 feet tall and becomes the preferred basket for guards to dunk on. The opposite basket is anchored on the stage with a radiator weighing it down. No dunks are allowed on it. In all, there are 63 folding tables with wooden tops. Players carry them from the stage to the hardwood with an “A” in the center court circle. Upon entering, each visitor comes across two words on a sheet of paper: “BINGO RULES.”
“We always practiced Sunday mornings, taking tables down because they had bingo Saturday nights,” Hurley says. “There were always college coaches helping us break down tables. Ohio State coach Eldon Miller was limping around one morning in 1981 when he recruited my guard Mandy Johnson. After practice, I said to his assistant, ‘What’s wrong?’ He walks with me and says, ‘When we lost last night to Northwestern, Coach Miller kicked a locker, broke his big toe.’ But he still came, helped with
tables. That’s real. Coaches aren’t real like that anymore. They’re all CEOs. Instead of looking like wimps, the coaches would help us take them down.”
There was a motto: “Don’t come in here with any weak s---.” Hurley lost count of the kids he kicked out years ago. Public haranguing is a regular part of his coaching style; players absorbed and abided. If Hurley didn’t like the pattern or pace of play, he introduced restrictions. There were games without dribbling. There were also games when one was forced to shoot with only his weak hand. To jump higher, Hurley had them wear Strength shoes: plyometric sneakers with a platform affixed to the sole. They were supposed to build calf muscles and add 5-10 inches to a player’s vertical. Hurley experimented with games that included two players in Strength shoes and three in basketball sneakers. There were no corner threes due to real estate constraints and the balcony’s overhang. The court measured 75 feet long and 38 feet wide. Up and down they went. Focus was fundamental in the midst of run outs and quick releases. A clock was always running; each point was tallied.
“Kids would come home from the NBA or college — David Rivers, Jerry Walker, whoever — and be treated like dog poop,” Hurley says, “because it was all about, ‘We don’t give a s--- where you play or who you are. It’s winners here.’”
Outsiders entered with eyes widened. Most were eager to prove worthy of a return invite. Teens reported to the Eagle from all over Jersey City and Hudson County, from Pavonia Avenue to the Duncan Projects to Lincoln Park. Word spread that the best runs in the tri-state could be had on site. Chris Jent, a forward from Sparta, N.J., and teammate of Bobby’s on the N.J. Roadrunners AAU team, sped up the New Jersey Turnpike in his grandmother’s white Chevy Caprice Classic, switching onto the shoulder to pass cars in order to be on time to help set up in order to secure a spot. Pat Sullivan of Bogota pieced together rides, alternating between his brother Matt and New Jersey Transit buses. Kenny Atkinson, bouncing around Europe as a pro, drove a Ford Fairmont 60 miles each way from Northport when home. Daniels cruised up from the Shore in a white Mercedes Benz 500. Hurley told Daniels that Foster Park, a formidable Flatbush battleground, was “suburban” by comparison.
“You had to handle the ball, my man,” Daniels says. “No bull s--ting there.”
The open-gym schedule was sacrosanct: Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 3-5 pm. To choose sides, all players granted access to the court lined up from smallest to tallest. They counted off 1-2-3-4-5 and repeated the numbers until enough teams were picked. Games went to 13 for a half, 25 for a final. No fouls were called until game point. There was no air conditioning; an electric fan circulated hot air. If you lost, you caught a breeze on the steps outside, relegated to watching buses passing by, uncertain if you would get another game. Former Friar Carlos Cueto is a gym legend for playing on after blood spilled from his nose. Bob Knight, the coach of Indiana, was in the gym that afternoon with Mickey Corcoran, who coached Bill Parcells in high school. The head Hoosier watched as Cueto maintained his dribble long enough to advance the ball while trapped by Rodrick Rhodes and Jermaine Womack. Contact was made; blood followed. Cueto sprinted into a bathroom, stuffed tissues up his nose to staunch the flow and re-entered. Knight turned to Hurley.
“I love this f---ing place,” Knight said.
Many celebrate the meritocracy. Only one reflects on the mirrors. Bill Raftery, the former Seton Hall head coach and current college basketball broadcaster for CBS and Fox Sports 1, holds an inimitable memory. It pre-dates Hurley and traces back to 1959 and Raftery’s career at St. Cecilia’s of Kearny, N.J. Raftery was already en route to being the Garden State’s all-time leading schoolboy scorer, and he knew how to negotiate courts with unusual contours and accidental character. St. James in Newark hosted its games in a hospital. St. Michael’s in Jersey City offered a linoleum floor. St. Michael’s in Union City was in a bank on Broadway. At St. Michael’s in Jersey City, Raftery once scored a layup and momentum carried him out the doorway into the hall. Opposing fans locked him out. But nothing topped the White Eagle Hall experience — and one foul call in particular.
“Phil Miller is the ref. I drive to the basket. There are mirrors on a wall,” Raftery says. “St. Cecilia vs. St. Anthony. Miller is under the basket. Whistle blows. Phil goes, ‘Offensive foul, push off.’ I go, ‘Phil, you couldn’t see it.’ He says, ‘Oh, yeah, I saw it through the mirror.’ He calls a foul on me via mirror. Those were the gyms.”
A hallmark still hangs in a window by White Eagle’s service entrance. ST. ANTHONY’S BINGO EVERY SATURDAY INTO SUNDAY
10:30 PM MINI + MIDNIGHT BINGO
Coaches keep images in their minds to offer a frame of reference. They remember seeing graffiti and a fire escape on the front by the bingo sign and believing they were in the wrong spot. There was no way the nation’s top team practiced inside. St. Joseph’s University coach Phil Martelli remembers the first time he visited. It was a facility for the fleet and the crafty. Hurley’s kids probed each crevice. He relished that every recruiter was on the job when standing against the wall. Everyone knew the most dangerous person in the hall was any newcomer who thought it was a smart idea to bring a cup of coffee inside. All was inbounds.
“Makes me think we’ve lost our way,” Martelli says. “Basketball used to be outdoors on asphalt, shirts and skins, not that long ago. Now we evaluate in A/C, we fly to Vegas to watch a Jersey team play a Philly team.”
“There were broken windows, the floors were sagging, beams were falling, it was abandoned,” says Ben LoPiccolo, the CEO of an eponymous development group. He stands in White Eagle’s lobby,
ticket booth constructed from pieces of a 26-foot altar that once stood inside St. Boniface Church on First Street, and details dilapidation he happened upon when he first walked the hall in 2004. “It was definitely uninhabitable, dangerous just to walk through. Your foot would sink through the floor. There were areas where you had to tape off. It was pretty bad.”
LoPiccolo studied it with practiced patience. Raised by entrepreneurial immigrants from Italy, he spent time in Brooklyn, Queens, Italy and Hackensack as a youth. He was in the market to build condos when White Eagle was put up for sale. St. Anthony of Padua parish still owned the hall at the time. The price was too high.
“I went home and said, ‘Honey I found a theatre,’” he says. “It’s a sin to take out this theatre and turn it into condos. I’ll never hear the end of it, you know? I left it alone. I said, ‘I’m just going to be walk away.’ I told her I would love to develop it into a theatre, but it’s too expensive to make it work.”
His wife, Olga Levina, heads the Jersey City Theatre Center as its artistic director. He kept track of the neighborhood during the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession. He then watched the real estate market drop, as well. In 2012, he agreed to buy the hall that had been constructed circa 1910. Polish immigrants and craftsmen built it under the leadership of Father Peter Boleslaus Kwiatowski. In addition to basketball practices, the space hosted weddings, recitals, banquets, strike rallies and protests. Polish celebrations included singing of “Sto lat.” By the time LoPiccolo took over, a blue scoreboard was still on one wall. Baskets survived, as well, but a drop ceiling above the court lost panels over time. Hallowed ground looked ready to be hollowed out. LoPiccolo started to rip away wood-panel walls to reach the original red brick of the structure. Above his head was a revelation.
“You could see that there was some details up there,” LoPiccolo says. “I didn’t know if it was stained glass or whatever it was. But the church said to me before I bought it: ‘There is stained glass up there. Before you close, we want to take it out.’”
LoPiccolo agreed. He insisted the church carry out the removal of the glass, though. If it was not gone by the closing date, then the church would forfeit it. As the closing date neared, LoPiccolo called and asked if the church had removed the glass. The church conceded it all, saying it was too expensive to take out. LoPiccolo also learned that the two skylights were tarred over on the roof, likely a preventive measure during World War II to black out a potential German bombing target.
“We didn’t know it was this nice,” LoPiccolo says. “We had no idea.”
There are two hand-crafted, stained-glass skylights now visible that Hurley never knew about. One commemorates Frédéric Chopin, the classical music composer, and the other honors Marcella Sembrich, an internationally renowned opera star. She sang 11 seasons with New York Metropolitan Opera. The glass was removed pane by pane. It was then brought to a studio in Bergen County. An extensive restoration process was carried out. Light now shines down to the floor.
“I remember stains on glass,” says high school basketball talent evaluator Tom Konchalski, who often visited the gym. “I do not remember stained glass.”
The court that doubled as a launching pad for an unlikely dynasty was also preserved. Laid down in the standard tongue-andgroove flooring, each board was removed cautiously. Pieces were brought to a storage garage and left there for two and a half years. The hardwood was repurposed and makes up three bar counters and balcony flooring now. LoPiccolo refers to it as “that special floor, magical floor,” and describes the new surface in its place. First, two layers of concrete were poured. They sit on 600 springs to isolate sound systems when bands blast on the stage that has been extended outward with stairs on both sides. Likewise, when ballet or theatre is performed, noise from the restaurants below will be cancelled out.
“It basically is a floating room,” LoPiccolo says. “No echo in here.”
Warm bodies and amplified sound are coming soon. Costs from acquisition and construction were about $6.2 million. LoPiccolo is ready to welcome customers.
“There were some days when you want to give up, and then I would think about guys like Bobby Hurley and say to myself, ‘It has been a place of never giving up and moving ahead.’ There is some magic in here.”
Levina walks the backstage area, pointing to a shower performers will use and a staircase that leads to the balcony above. The iron railings are original and she strides across the old hardwood. The original tin ceiling was sandblasted and restored. It was so brittle that it would just fall apart upon touch. LoPiccolo used baking soda with a technique that peels off paint without any damage. Levina sighs.
“Homeless people had taken over,” she says of first visiting. “There were newspapers on the floor, food and hair. All the stories were about homicides. I was like, ‘Ben! Let’s go from here. Are you sure it is safe?’”
She looks out a third-story office window at One World Trade Center. She talks about her journey from Kiev to Belarus, from nights at Brooklyn Academy of Music to Jersey City’s evolving scene.
“Chopin! In Jersey City!” she says. “You probably can’t find that in Poland, but here it is. The dreamers have it!”
There is a death in the Friar family to announce. Hurley requests quiet.
“I’m not quite the same today, you need to be,” he says, resting on a chair before 17 players on the hardwood floor by the east baseline inside Hudson County Schools of Technology. The players train their eyes on him. “You’ll read about Richie Wejnert if you read any of our yearbooks. Richie was a true hard worker. I sat with him three weeks ago. I spent the day with his family today. He’s being buried tomorrow at 57 years old. He died of cancer. I don’t care today. What I just gave you is all I got. We have a great staff, and you’re highly motivated, aren’t ya? Let’s go.”
It is February 23. The Friars are in the state playoffs. This is the
gymnasium that the program uprooted to when it departed White Eagle. There are banners celebrating Hurley’s 1,000th win on February 2, 2011, last season’s team that went 32-0 and one with the year of each of the 28 state championships that the school won. The left side of the hardwood is emblazoned: COACH HURLEY’S COURT. The Friars host games here. They did not at White Eagle. They were an itinerant team back then, Hurley forever using his pivot foot at places like Mount Carmel and Sacred Heart, St. Peter’s College and the Armory on Montgomery. There was Public School No. 28 in the Heights, as well as Public School Nos. 11, 17, 25 and 27.
“He didn’t do more with less,” Martelli says. “He did more with nothing.”
There is no title from 2017 that will testify to that. Hurley’s team falls in the sectional final to Hudson Catholic, a school that stands by the Armory, two weeks later. His point guard R.J. Cole, the program’s latest thousand-point scorer, will attend Howard next. Sophomore guard Alex Rice is considered a rising prospect.
Offseason workouts start almost immediately. The Monday-Wednesday-Friday rhythm remains. Hurley hones his unsparing honesty. He drops into a defensive stance; one player wears a T-shirt that says, “Sideline, Baseline, No Middle.” There is only one folding table and four chairs. Six rims are available for the shirts and skins. Off to the side, on a basket screwed into a cinder block wall, Hurley’s grandson, Gabe, spins his ball and curls around it. He pump fakes, rips the ball through and drives. He finishes with his right hand and hurries to do it again.
Gabe is seven. His T-shirt is from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. It reads: “Run. Score. Repeat.”
His sister joins him. She is five. Her name is Anna. She wears a Tshirt from the hall of fame, as well. It reads: “Losing Is Not An Option.”
Construction is omnipresent across Bob Hurley Sr. Way from St. Anthony High. Cranes lift beams; men in hard hats shout orders at the Marin Residences site, a project that encompasses 300,000 square feet. It is rising in between the city’s growing skyline and three-story brownstones, but the midday din does not distract Hurley. He arrives at school around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, and informs St. Anthony faculty and staff that the school will close for good on June 30. Fundraising the last few months is short of the money needed to satisfy debts to the Archdiocese and operate the school. Hurley and administrators spent years staving off a closing, but they are 40 students short on enrollment and unable to guarantee $500,000. The school announces that it “could not sustain itself as a viable educational institution.”
“It was the same rob Peter to pay Paul routine that we’ve been going through the last 25 years,” he says.
Hurley holds back tears. He mentions the Felician sisters who helped run the school for years, the nine consecutive state titles the Friars won and the first attempt to raise funds off of the program’s success. That was in 1989. The team went 32-0. Enrollment was 306 and tuition cost $1,350. A fundraiser was held to buy a brick for a potential gymnasium after gaining prominence. No gym ever came, and money was constantly an issue as the school tried to keep its tuition at $6,100. Hurley donated checks given to him for conducting clinics to the school. In the last year, there was talk of the parish selling the schoolhouse in order for the high school to survive and relocate. Rosemary McFadden, a trustee, insists it just wouldn’t work.
“This is a very valuable piece of property,” she says. “Look around at what is happening. At some point or other it is going to be sold.”
Hurley looks worn, but his face regains color when he talks about old times. He tracks all of the changes. There are several properties between the school and White Eagle with signs on fences surrounding them. The posts read: “DANGER! DEMOLITION IN PROGRESS.” Workers hammer nails into wood; saws buzz. About 7,000 units of housing are under construction; another 19,000 have been approved, per the office of Mayor Steven M. Fulop.
“The renaissance is at full blast,” says Anna Siniscalchi, who works at Second Street Bakery near White Eagle. She is 77 and takes orders for sausage bread on the brick oven. She recalls St. Anthony’s players coming in after workouts. “Some of the original I’ll go. I just don’t know if I can walk in there to eat. If I go in, I want to rip my shirt off, get ready for basketball and go to war. carlos cueto, former st. anthony’s player residents are still here. They should do the weddings at White Eagle again.”
Hurley refers to the school’s block as “a woosie neighborhood” now. For a few years, he had moved to a new place in the Newport neighborhood, but he re-routed to Paulus Hook because he felt the transient populace lacked a true community feeling. He talks about old street corners and taking the No. 9 bus from Greenville to St. Peter’s Prep as a student decades before a light rail came to town.
“I want people to remember the way it really was,” Hurley says, “this place and the effect it had on kids.”
In the back of the St. Anthony Auditorium, Cueto, the legend with the bloody nose, listens. He catches up with Hurley’s wife and they examine photos of All-Americans like Rhodes and Bobby. Chris Hurley mentions getting everyone together at White Eagle sometime soon. The hall opens two days later with a performance by Nimbus Dance Works, and comedian James Judd is scheduled to take the stage next weekend. Cueto laughs. At a celebration of Hurley’s 50 years with St. Anthony last fall, Cueto had black T-shirts made up. They read: STRAIGHT OUT OF WHITE EAGLE.
“I’ll go. I just don’t know if I can walk in there to eat,” he says. “If I go in, I want to rip my shirt off, get ready for basketball and go to war.”