The vacant school building at the center of one of the longest-running battles over gentrification in Manhattan looks battered and forlorn on Ninth Street off Avenue B in the thriving East Village.
In a tribute to its history as a beloved community and artistic hub in the 1980s and 1990s, artists have painted colorful murals on the 10th Street side of the five-story structure and black-and-white sketches of neighborhood heroes on the front. But the windows and once proud entryways are sealed off with cinder blocks.
On a cool spring morning, Gregg L. Singer flicked on a small flashlight as he entered the dank onetime school building that he won at a raucous city auction in 1998. His flashlight beam barely illuminated the dark interior, where he had demolished the classroom walls and stripped the historic building of asbestos, plumbing, and electricity in an unsuccessful attempt to create a dormitory.
Singer, 61, was able to evict Charas/El Bohio, the mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood organization that operated the school building, which it had used to create space for the University of the Streets, English-language classes, arts groups such as Teatro Chicana Raza, dance recitals, the WOW Café Theatre, after-school programs, martial arts, and jazz.
But locked in a war of attrition with community activists, wealthy opponents, three successive city councilwomen from the district, and three mayors, he has not been able to do much else over the past 25 years. And this fall, after a quarter-century of battling, a barrage of lawsuits, and a last-minute plea to Mayor Eric Adams, he ran out of time.
Singer’s lender forced him into bankruptcy. Shortly before the property was to be auctioned off in November, a mysterious L.L.C. bought the building’s debt from Singer’s lender, Madison Realty Capital, and took control. The person or persons behind the L.L.C. have not been identified, but it is widely believed to be Aaron Sosnick, a hedge-fund manager, Singer’s arch nemesis and an unlikely, well-heeled ally of the would-be developer’s opposition.
Sosnick, who twice before attempted to buy the building from Singer, did not respond to requests for an interview. The activists, local residents, and elected officials say they have no information as to the new owner. But a few short years ago, Sosnick rescued a nearby building from a possible condo conversion. Has he done it again?
Singer, by his own account a mere millionaire compared with the billionaire Sosnick, angrily dismissed the idea that this is a battle over gentrification. He told me last month that while he may have lost the building, he is not giving up the fight. He has vowed to continue his civil-racketeering lawsuit against Sosnick, former mayor Bill de Blasio, and city officials, who, he claims, conspired to prevent him from moving forward with a private dormitory so that Sosnick could gain control of the property. “Sosnick obviously wants the building,” Singer tells me. “His plan was to make sure I don’t get a permit so he could pick it up cheap.”
“All I wanted to do,” he says, “was get the building renovated and put into service for any legal use.”
But that’s not what many in the community want to happen.
“We want to preserve and celebrate the cultural heritage of the building for the Lower East Side,” said City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera. “It is going to take a large investment of capital funds to restore this building, there is no doubt. We still feel that this is something that the city can do and is a real legacy item for whoever helps.”
For his part, Sosnick explained in a December 2022 deposition that a dorm of “itinerant students” would be disruptive. “There is still a desire by many people to regain some sort of use for the community,” he said.
Singer’s summation of the situation is probably the only thing on which all parties would agree: “It’s a crazy New York story.”
Die Yuppie Scum
It’s a variation on a story told throughout the United States in recent years, from Boston and Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where gentrification of once blue-collar and minority communities has put housing outside the reach of longtime residents. But rarely do the stories of resistance turn into a sprawling, decades-long saga.
Half of New York City’s households do not earn enough to comfortably manage rent, food, child care, transportation, and basic health care, up from 36 percent two years ago, according to a new report from the United Way of New York City and the Fund for the City of New York. For immigrants and people of color, the problem is even more severe.
But for those fighting against gentrification, the battle is never just about affordable housing. It can also be about the preservation of culture, community gardens, and institutions that bind a neighborhood together when city government has largely abandoned its responsibilities.
There are expensive condos and one-bedroom apartments renting for up to $4,000 a month throughout the East Village. Yet the street-level retail comprises small businesses and funky restaurants and shops, not national chains. There are still hundreds of units of public and rent-regulated apartments.
Long-standing cultural institutions, such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on East Third Street, are still going strong. This spring and summer Tompkins Square Park and the community gardens that former mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to sell off in the 1990s were lush and green, three of them within a short walk of old P.S. 64.
“People are taking credit for what we did, saying it was gentrification that made it beautiful,” said Maria Hernandez, who was a single mother when she began working with Charas in the late 1970s. “But, no, we started it with our sweat and blood.”
I first met Singer, then 44, in 2006, when, as a reporter for The New York Times, I wrote about this battle with community activists over the former school. At the time, his arch-nemesis was Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supported efforts to landmark the former school. Today, it is former mayor Bill de Blasio whom Singer rails against.
“People are taking credit for what we did, saying it was gentrification that made it beautiful. But, no, we started it with our sweat and blood.”
Singer, who lives on the Upper West Side, portrays himself as a victim of a corrupt political system in which the city’s Buildings Department granted him permits to convert the property to a dorm for Adelphi University in 2016, only to be overruled by City Hall. But, as even some of his supporters acknowledge, Singer never quite got the East Village, and why this building was so important to the community.
Singer complains that Sosnick bought the allegiance of local politicians and Mayor de Blasio with campaign contributions. But in one of many odd twists to this story, Singer contributed more to de Blasio’s mayoral campaigns ($2,500) than Sosnick ($1,350), who owns a triplex penthouse at Christadora House, a 16-story building adjacent to P.S. 64 that was formerly a settlement house and became the target of anti-gentrification protests in 1988 after it was converted to condominiums. Graffiti in the area once featured an upside-down martini glass with the words Die Yuppie Scum.
The Lower East Side and the East Village have long resisted attempts to displace the immigrants who called the area home for a century. In 1967, six blocks of tenements along Delancey Street, near the Williamsburg Bridge, were demolished as part of the Seward Park Urban Development plan. The mostly Puerto Rican families were promised the right of return.
But those blocks sat in limbo for the next five decades, as opposing forces squabbled over the future. The community board and local activists such as Frances Goldin demanded low-income housing, while the East River Housing Corporation, which operated 1,675 co-op apartments in the area, and the former Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver argued for retail and office space.
In 2013 the Bloomberg administration helped forge a compromise that led to the creation of Essex Crossing, a complex of nine new buildings with more than 1,079 apartments, 561 of them permanently designated for low- and middle-income families.
“I know it’ll never go back to the way it was,” Edward “Tito” Delgado, whose family was forced out of the neighborhood in the 1960s, told me at the time. “But I want the right for poor people to live here.”
Some critics contend that the grand compromise was not good enough, in that the new shops, gyms, restaurants, and office space are more suited to the moneyed newcomers than to struggling tenants.
“People Were Angry”
The struggle over P.S. 64 began in the dark days of 1977, when the city closed the school that had long served the children of immigrant families. Landlords were walking away from their buildings. Arson, rubble-strewn lots, and drug dealers prevailed. Residents who were struggling to make ends meet occupied abandoned tenements, which became known as “squats.”
Two years after the closing of the school, Charas, a group of Puerto Rican gang members turned community activists, moved into the old school building. Some came from the nearby Christadora on Avenue B. Abandoned in the 1960s, Christadora had been occupied by the Black Panthers and the Young Lords until a developer bought the building and transformed it into luxury condominiums.
Charas named their headquarters “El Bohio” and eventually got a lease for P.S. 64 from the city. “Charas was how I became a dancer, a performer, a teacher,” said Hernandez. “We were all so young. We restored the building. We were keeping kids off the streets.”
In 1998, then mayor Giuliani put the school building up for auction, with the support of the local councilman, Antonio Pagan, who had clashed with Charas. Protests ensued, delaying the auction twice. But on July 21 of that year, the building was sold to Singer, who was the highest bidder. Singer had to be escorted past protesters who had released thousands of insects in the auditorium in a vain attempt to stymie the sale.
“Charas was an organizing hub not only for community activists but for artists,” said one longtime member, Susan Howard. “You had this cross-pollination of everyday people, artists, and activists that came together in that space.”
The war of attrition was on. Singer, who took possession of the property a year later, posted an eviction notice for Charas on the door and whitewashed two murals on the exterior of the building. That set off another round of protests by Charas, their supporters, the community board, and Margarita Lopez, who would become the local councilwoman.
Singer says his original intention was to rent space to “nonprofits at cheap rents.” But many activists saw the sale as an attack on the neighborhood orchestrated by Mayor Giuliani.
“People were angry,” Lyn Pentecost, the former executive director of the Girls Club of the Lower East Side, told me in 2006. “This really was a Giuliani vendetta.”
Singer ultimately evicted Charas, but his plans were unclear. The building came with a deed restriction: the former school could only house health-care facilities, assisted living, student or faculty dorms, or nonprofits that serve the community, not luxury apartments. Singer claims he contacted hundreds of nonprofit organizations and community groups, but many were not interested, or were scared away by protesters.
Pentecost told me that she had met with Singer in those days, offering him $3 million if he would “sell us a wing of the building.” Singer declined, saying he only wanted to lease space.
By 2004, Singer landed on a potentially more lucrative plan, turning the building into a private dormitory and leasing beds to colleges. In a neighborhood that was already incensed by New York University’s voracious appetite for tenements in the East Village, he proposed erecting a 27-story dorm behind P.S. 64. Some activists feared that a dorm might be a Trojan horse for what would become market-rate apartments.
Singer has said that nine colleges and universities expressed interest, only to be dissuaded by Councilwoman Lopez.
“N.Y.U. dorms are a very touchy subject,” David McWater told me in 2006, when he was chairman of the local community board. “They’ve been a big, big reason for the loss of rent-controlled apartments.”
Singer had to be escorted past protesters who had released thousands of insects in the auditorium in a vain attempt to stymie the sale.
Singer pared his proposal to 19 stories, but the Bloomberg administration rejected his plans, determining that he had “failed to submit” proper documentation. His appeals in state Supreme Court were also unsuccessful.
Lopez, activists, and preservationists sought to landmark the former P.S. 64, which would make any building alterations difficult and more expensive for the would-be developer. A top official in the Bloomberg administration told me that the community had “veto power” and, in the end, Singer “will have to find an accommodation with the community.”
Instead, Singer stripped distinctive terra-cotta ornaments and copper cornices off the building’s exterior in an unsuccessful attempt to block landmarking efforts. In 2006, he filed a $100 million lawsuit claiming that Mayor Bloomberg had “cut a dirty political deal” to landmark the building with Lopez; “in exchange for her support of his re-election bid, he would see to it that his administration blocked the owner’s development plans.”
That lawsuit went nowhere. Lopez could not be reached for comment.
“For the government to sell me the building and then landmark it, it’s like bait and switch,” Singer said. “Complaints from the community didn’t bother me. It’s the government that’s the problem. They’ve blocked me from doing anything useful here.”
“I’ve Seen Both Sides of This Struggle”
It was during this period that another powerful bloc emerged to oppose Singer’s plans. Michael Rosen, a developer who lived in a penthouse at Christadora, pulled together his neighbor Sosnick and others in 2004 to form the East Village Community Coalition (E.V.C.C.). They joined forces with existing groups.
Ironically, it was Rosen who in 1999 developed one of the early symbols of gentrification on the Lower East Side: Red Square, a luxury residential building at Houston Street, between Avenues A and B, featuring an 18-foot-tall copper statue of Vladimir Lenin on the roof.
Singer has lately learned more about Rosen and Sosnick’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering through discovery in his most recent lawsuit. He contends that Rosen and Sosnick’s opposition was initially powered by their fear that a high-rise dorm would block their views at Christadora. Singer further contends that Sosnick, who has shown no previous interest in real-estate development in the East Village, wants to develop the property himself.
Sosnick, whose parents taught on American military bases, grew up in Los Angeles, attended high school in the Philippines, and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988. With his long, thick beard, bald pate, and T-shirt, he looks more like a hipster from Williamsburg than a billionaire. He now lives primarily in Nevada but still owns his Christadora penthouse.
In a 2022 deposition taken by Singer’s lawyers, Sosnick said he was drawn by the neighborhood’s “edginess.” “I wanted to see a well-run opposition to a dormitory building,” he said. “I wanted a level of sophistication that could match the sophistication that Mr. Singer brought with his money to hire attorneys and P.R. firms and so forth.”
After getting involved in the battle, Sosnick became a generous patron of some of his allies, donating millions of dollars to both the Landmarks Conservancy and the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
Sosnick recently acknowledged using a real-estate broker to make a previously undisclosed $40 million offer for the school building in 2009.
“Mr. Singer basically accepted it and then walked away,” Sosnick said during the deposition. Singer claims that negotiations broke down when Sosnick’s broker tried to whittle down the agreed-upon price. He argues that Sosnick wants the property for his own.
But if Sosnick was to develop the school for profit, as Singer suspects, his allies would turn on him as a traitor. “He’d be the new Singer” and a target of demonstrations, said Howard, who helped form the Save Charas committee in 1998.
Sosnick said he has no intention of becoming a developer. “There is still a desire by many people to regain some sort of use for the community,” he said.
In 2008, with the support of the East Village Community Coalition, preservationists, the local community boards, and others, the city council adopted a re-zoning for a 114-block area of the East Village and the Lower East Side, imposing height restrictions and adding incentives for preservation and affordable housing. Singer contends that the re-zoning, which further limited his options, was the work of Sosnick and his coalition.
“For the government to sell me the building and then landmark it, it’s like bait and switch.”
Maybe. But it is also true that the Bloomberg administration oversaw an unprecedented 124 re-zoning plans covering 10,300 blocks, or 40 percent of the city. Both sides made extensive use of the city’s “permanent government” of fixers, lobbyists, lawyers, and communications advisers who once worked in city government or served as mayoral appointees.
One consultant, George Arzt, worked briefly for Singer in 1999. He quit after three weeks and returned his $3,500 fee when, he said, Singer asked him to paint the local councilwoman, Margarita Lopez, as a beneficiary of a drug dealer at former P.S. 64. Years later, Arzt went to work for Sosnick and the East Village Community Coalition.
Singer denied Arzt’s story, saying he fired Arzt. But just prior to the falling out, Singer instructed Arzt on how to deal with Lopez in a Aug. 20, 1999 letter: “Many people have informed me that they believe illegal activity is taking place in the building. If this is true, then it may be time to attach Margarita Lopez to such events, since she is trying to protect El Bohio at all costs. Maybe she is deriving some personal benefits from such illegal use of the building.” (No evidence has come to light supporting these claims.)
In any event, the battle continued, with Singer scrambling to sign up universities or cultural institutions interested in dorm space, while elected officials and activists cajoled and lobbied City Hall and protested at the school.
In 2012, Singer signed a lease with Cooper Union for two floors and, a year later, signed up the Joffrey Ballet for two more floors. De Blasio’s Buildings Department couldn’t seem to make up its mind, issuing permits for renovations in August 2014, only to rescind them a month later. The same thing happened in 2015. As a result, the Joffrey Ballet dropped out of the picture.
Singer tried to get back on track in 2016 when the Buildings Department indicated that it would allow construction if he produced an acceptable lease with Cooper Union. Learning of the impending approval, Sosnick, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, and Councilwoman Rosie Méndez beseeched City Hall and the Buildings Department to look into it. Under mounting pressure, Singer said, Cooper Union terminated its lease.
But two weeks later, Singer found a replacement, signing a lease with Adelphi University for two floors. He gathered signatures on a petition in favor of putting a dorm into the vacant building, which the petitioners said was an eyesore. “I’ve seen both sides of this struggle,” said Paul Engler, who lives in a town house nearby. “I feel Singer’s been treated poorly, dishonestly.”
Opponents challenged the lease. But in August 2016, the Buildings Department indicated that it was ready to lift the stop-work order and approve construction permits, according to internal e-mails that have surfaced in the litigation. Three months later, Adelphi wrote to Mayor de Blasio seeking help in getting those permits.
“This Is Nuts”
The matter remained up in the air in 2017, when Paul Wolf, a real-estate broker working with Sosnick and his foundation, contacted Carl Weisbrod, then head of the city’s Planning Commission. Wolf offered a possible back-channel solution to the problem at former P.S. 64: a $50 million offer for the property that would make Singer whole.
“I represent a charity that has been trying to buy the building for years,” Wolf wrote, “with the plan being to work with the City and the community to find appropriate tenants and to help secure other philanthropic funds to support the fit-out of their spaces.” Weisbrod referred Wolf to Deputy Mayors Anthony Shorris and Alicia Glen. Meanwhile, elected officials, Sosnick, and other opponents to Singer’s plan continued to work against the project, publicly and privately.
Mayor de Blasio was in the midst of his re-election campaign in the fall of 2017 when he attended a town-hall meeting on the Lower East Side. He was armed with a briefing book noting the importance of the battle over P.S. 64, a former senior official told me recently. In response to a question from the audience, the mayor declared that the city was “interested in reacquiring the building.”
Singer’s opposition was elated. Sosnick contributed $1,000 to the mayor’s campaign.
Inside the administration, however, some officials were dumbfounded. “Where did this come from?,” Shorris wrote in an e-mail to colleagues. “The building is worth over $100 million and we have no use for it.” Glen responded to Shorris, “This is nuts.”
Some city officials also feared the repeat of a scandal that had engulfed the administration in 2016, when it approved a developer’s request to lift a similar deed restriction at Rivington House, another former school building on the Lower East Side, so it could build condos, in return for a $16.5 million payment to the city. After the ensuing brouhaha, the building was converted into a behavioral-health center.
Yet Mayor de Blasio was undeterred. Almost a year later, he was at a public event in Brooklyn where he said he was “very frustrated” with Singer, who he claimed had been “uncooperative” in the city’s efforts to purchase the building.
Yet de Blasio did nothing to reacquire the school building, and his public comments may have discouraged other colleges or universities from getting on board.
But by then Singer was running out of money. He was in default on his P.S. 64 loans, and Madison Realty Capital had started foreclosure proceedings. He had taken advantage of rocketing property values in Manhattan, eventually obtaining a $44 million consolidated loan. Eventually, the loan had swelled to more than $102 million with interest and penalties, and there was an additional $20 million in other debts and back taxes on the building.
The city’s Department of Buildings issued a vacate order for the building last December, after Singer failed to seal the property. The city hired a contractor to enclose the windows, dormers, and doorways to prevent skateboarders, graffiti artists, and other trespassers from entering what it said was a dangerous structure.
Singer owes the city an estimated $880,000 for that work. And his woes do not end there. Other lenders have moved in court to foreclose on his condo. In addition, P.S. 64 has accumulated almost 100 open-building violations, with potential fines totaling more than $100,000, according to the Department of Buildings.
Singer scoffs at the idea he owes the city money. How could he fix the building, he asks, when the city would not give him a construction permit?
Singer’s partners, including Onyx Asset Management, sued him in 2015, claiming that the would-be developer had repeatedly demanded more capital for a project that seemed to be going nowhere. They tried to force a sale of the property and put an end to Singer’s $30,000-a-month management fee. Singer, who unsuccessfully tried to have the suit dismissed, ultimately settled with his partners, who, according to bankruptcy records, are still owners of the property.
Meanwhile, Singer’s lawsuit in federal court against the city, Mayor de Blasio, Sosnick, and others was dismissed in 2019. A year later, he filed a 47-page complaint in state court. Singer’s lawyers asked the state court in March to accept an amended complaint alleging civil racketeering. That request is pending.
“My mentality is more of an investor’s mentality,” Singer told me by way of explaining his determination. “This has always been a next-generation property for me. If it wasn’t such a great location, I might’ve said, ‘Let’s move on.’”
Singer’s proposed civil-racketeering complaint makes use of e-mails between city officials, and among Sosnick and other opponents, as well as depositions from a wide variety of figures, including Sosnick.
A $44 million loan Singer obtained in 2016 swelled to more than $102 million with interest and penalties, and there’s an additional $20 million in other debts and back taxes on the building.
In a supplemental filing this November, Singer’s lawyers claimed that the city’s 2005 “dorm rule” had been applied exclusively to him, an example of the “bias and corruption” alleged in the complaint. The so-called dorm rule required an “institutional nexus” between a landlord seeking a permit and an educational institution. For that reason, city officials repeatedly rejected Singer’s permit applications. Yet, the pleading contends, the city failed to apply the “institutional nexus” rule to private dorm projects elsewhere.
But he faces a daunting hurdle. The state’s Appellate Division issued a decision on Singer’s original lawsuit that said that the “defendants’ conduct, as alleged in the original complaint, did not rise to the level of culpable conduct sufficient to support the claim.” Further, the court said that city officials are “entitled to immunity from plaintiffs’ claims seeking damages because the denial of a permit is a discretionary act.” As for Sosnick, his advisers and lobbyists, the court said, are also entitled “to immunity from liability for their lobbying activities.”
The city, which represents de Blasio, has asked that the complaint be dismissed. De Blasio did not respond to a request for comment.
“Mr. Singer has brought numerous unsuccessful lawsuits,” said Nick Paolucci, a spokesman for the city’s law department. “Multiple courts have already determined that the City did not violate his rights and his efforts to appeal and sue City officials have no merit.”
Last summer, Singer’s lender, Madison, gave him a temporary grace period to avoid a bankruptcy sale by obtaining new financing, construction permits and possible tenants, which would make the property more valuable. With a nod to New York’s housing crisis, he contacted the city this spring to say that he would voluntarily convert the building into “the Village,” new housing for homeless single adults or a sanctuary for immigrants. But to do that, he would need permits.
Singer’s entreaties were met with silence from City Hall. When I spoke to Singer in the spring of 2023 he was optimistic that Mayor Adams, who had taken office in 2022, would come to his rescue. Shortly after Adams’s election, Singer said that he had spoken with the mayor, who “told me personally that he’ll take care of this nonsense.” By September, his view of Mayor Adams had turned sour over the mayor’s failure to act.
The property was set for sale on November 8, with bids due by October 18. There were many expressions of interest, although potential buyers were wary of the longstanding controversy surrounding the building, the cost of rehabilitating P.S. 64, and the difficulty in today’s market of getting financing. But, in a pre-emptive move, Brian Shatz, a founder of Madison, filed notice on October 12 with the city’s Department of Finance that its P.S. 64 mortgage had been assigned to “605 E. 9th St Community Holding,” a newly created limited-liability company.
The lawyer who represented 605 East Ninth Street—the address of P.S. 64—did not return numerous calls requesting comment.
It is unlikely that a developer would bid on a property steeped in controversy. And it is quite possible that Sosnick, a self-described “oddball,” was behind the takeover. After all, Sosnick’s foundation bought the departing Boys’ Club building in the East Village for nearly $32 million in 2019 to ensure that it would not be converted into luxury condos. As with P.S. 64, Sosnick’s identity was kept hidden for weeks. But his intentions have become clear. The building is now leased by the Joyce Theater Foundation, which plans to buy the property with financing from Sosnick at a substantial discount from the purchase price. According to the Joyce Theater’s Web site, it is now offering rehearsal and studio space at the former Boys’ Club.
“He’s an angel investor if there ever was one,” said Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a state senator whose district until recently included the East Village. “He really cared about the neighborhood.”
Sosnick has been a contributor to the state senator’s election campaigns.
Sabrina Jones, a painter and illustrator of graphic novels, was a member of a feminist art collective, Carnival Knowledge, that had space on the second floor of El Bohio in the 1980s. She had to move to Brooklyn after losing her “big affordable studio at Charas” when the group was evicted. She returned last December for the first time in 20 years to join a group of artists painting murals on old P.S. 64.
“It was a revelation to be working in that building again and feeling that sense of community that I hadn’t experienced since I left,” Jones told me. “People were so happy to see something positive being done.”
Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, State Senator Brian Kavanagh, and Congressman Daniel Goldman wrote to Mayor Eric Adams in March asking for his support. Despite the costs, they and others remain hopeful.
“It has amazing significance for the Lower East Side,” Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer said of P.S. 64. “It’s a very expensive proposal. But anything’s possible.”
Charles V. Bagli is a former reporter at The New York Times and the author of Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made