Letters to the Editor

Pyramid point

To The Editor:
Re “Pyramid Club may become first ‘drag landmark’” (news article, Dec. 21):

It is great news that the Landmarks Preservation Commission is at last considering granting landmark status to a few properties in the East Village. While the architecture of the West Village is largely protected by contiguous historic districts, preservation advocates on the other side of Fifth Ave. have not been as effective. Familiar low-rise streetscapes — and ethnically and economically diverse faces — are rapidly disappearing, replaced by tall, shiny, new dormitories, hotels and luxury condos, especially on the Bowery and Third Ave.

I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, long enough to see the prostitutes and skinheads, drag queens and addicts give way to hedge-fund managers, baby carriages and branch banks (sigh). The Pyramid Club certainly should be remembered as the democratic vessel where all those disparate, alienated, creative elements were brought together. This only-possible-in-New-York mix produced a look and sound that defined the 1980s internationally.

The building at 101 Avenue A is likely eligible for listing just because of that recent cultural history. But its past is richer and deeper still, and just as dependent on the indomitable population of the East Village. Like Webster Hall (also under L.P.C. consideration) it was a focus of immigrant life — the site of balls and weddings, political meetings and labor rallies. For the last quarter of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, under a succession of names, this hall was critical to the education, recreation and organization of a thriving German community.

I love the neighborhood and am saddened by the recent loss of its unique institutions (2nd Ave. Deli, CBGB). Homogenization of the East Village may not be inevitable, but surely there is not much time to prevent it.
Leo J. Blackman

Pre-Pyramid history

To The Editor:
Re “Pyramid Club may become first ‘drag landmark’” (news article, Dec. 21):

Thank you for your article about the hopeful landmark designation for 101 Avenue A. As Patrick Hedlund well details, the building has been home to the Pyramid Club since 1979, a time of acute interest to many of us passionate about recent past decades in the Lower East Side.

You do a honorable job covering the important architectural and social history of this largely intact 130-year-old tenement. Since most of those who drank beer in Leppig’s Hall, starting in the late 1800s with the first and second Messrs. Leppig — father and son were known as the Mayors of Avenue A — are dead and most of us who know the commercial establishment there as the Pyramid Club are hopefully yet alive, much of Chelsea Now’s article covers the history we remember: Extraordinary history in an extraordinary tenement building.

While perhaps less immediately engaging, 101 Avenue A through its first 102 years of history warrants landmark designation based upon social, historic and architectural merit, described in the nomination submitted by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. As Kern’s Hall, Shultz’s Hall and eventually Leppig’s Hall, the building served as an important gathering place for the German immigrant community for social, religious and work purposes.

As we appreciate with the landmarking of the old P.S. 64, the former El Bohio, the history of our immigrant communities deserves honor and remembrance. The gathering places in which they led their social lives are a tangible and vanishing heritage and must be protected. Landmark designation is the most appropriate means. No less than for any other reason, the tenement at 101 Avenue A deserves designation as an individual New York City landmark based on the role it played in the flourishing of Kleindeutchland (the Lower East Side’s “Little Germany”) until the General Slocum disaster.

Thank you again for an important article.
Michael Rosen

The pits: No Apple bathroom

To The Editor:
Re “Where meat once ruled, Apple adds a whole new flavor” (news article, Dec. 14):

It is a wonderful thing to have another Apple Store in the Big Apple, closer to us in the Far West Village. Real apples have pits, but the Apple Store on 14th St. has no pit stop. Customers spend hours purchasing equipment, going to seminars, waiting on line to talk to geeks at the Genius Bar. But they had better wear diapers, or do as they do in other parts of the world — use the sewers outside if they have to go. Evidently, the architects and designers of the new store must believe that Mac techies are just virtual humans, with no biological functions left.
Jacqueline Taylor Basker

Trump hotel helps city

To The Editor:
I write to you as a person who over the course of my life lived in the Village and owned property there for about 60 years. My family also lived and owned property there since the early 1900s. I subscribe to your publication even though I no longer reside in New York City.

In general, you seem to be siding with the anti-progress nuts of the so-called Soho Alliance — a group of people with nothing to do, but who seek a public-relations fueled publicity trip.

On Varick St., for as many years as I can remember, there was a vacant lot. It was used as a parking lot, which brought the city very little revenue and a small handful of jobs.

Now Donald Trump is putting up a large hotel there. This will bring the city millions in real estate taxes. It has created jobs for construction workers. It will provide hundreds of permanent jobs — for maids, doormen and porters, handymen, concierges, staff, etc.

On Houston St. — a street where I owned property — for many years there were empty lots along the south side. Recently, on Greene, Wooster and Mercer Sts., these lots have been built on, bringing additional tax revenue to the city and adding quality apartments.

Sean Seani — or whatever his name — wants publicity. Trump is not a saint, he’s a real estate developer. But the West Village and the Varick St. area will be helped by this hotel. As industrial use in Lower Manhattan is being phased out, a transformation to different uses must be encouraged.
Joseph Marra