AP News, August 5th, 2007
Artists' studios in the two red-brick towers that rise above Carnegie Hall were once home to Marlon Brando and Leonard Bernstein. Marilyn Monroe took acting lessons there, and Lucille Ball had voice coaching.
Between the towers, which have sheltered musicians and other artists for more than a century, are studios with double-height ceilings and huge skylights that catch the northern light artists consider ideal.
The special light and century-old wood creates "a stillness, a permanence that put my subjects at ease _ and that you're not going to get in one of those white boxes in a new building," said Josef Astor, a 51-year-old photographer who has occupied his eighth-floor studio since 1985. The studio is just a few feet above the ornate, white-and-gold ceiling of Carnegie Hall's main auditorium.
However, Astor and his neighbors might have to consider moving to new buildings. The Carnegie Hall Corporation is trying to evict its 50 tenants so it can gut the space and renovate beginning in 2009.
The residents aren't going without a fight.
On Friday, they won a reprieve when a judge issued a temporary restraining order barring Carnegie Hall from taking any action until the tenants' case can be heard Sept. 17.
The tenants' attorney, Arlene Boop, said the plan to gut the little-known Carnegie studios and apartments "is sort of like 'Let's bulldoze the Greek temple.'"
Carnegie's executive and artistic director, Clive Gillinson, said the space is needed to expand the hall's education programs, which benefit about 115,000 children.
"The space is going to be used for something that is totally about the mission of Carnegie Hall _ to provide a music education to every child," he said.
The concert hall was built in 1890 by industrialist Andrew Carnegie at the corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue. The towers _ one 12 stories, the other 15 _ were added several years later.
Tenants pay anywhere from several hundred dollars a month for a studio to several thousand, depending on whether it falls under the city's rent-control regulations.
The building survived a demolition threat in 1960, when violinist Isaac Stern led a public campaign to save it from developers who wanted to tear it down to build a high rise on the site.
The city bought it and leased it back to the Carnegie Hall Corporation.
Tenants' lawyers say the corporation's lease with the city obliges it to rent the studios as artists' work spaces and as residences.
Gillinson, however, insists that Carnegie Hall "does not have to rent the space at all."
The city says the dispute is a private matter between the corporation and its tenants.
Gillinson says the corporation has promised to help seven elderly tenants of rent-controlled apartments find "equivalent space or better." As for the tenants who are paying market rates, he said, moving to an equivalent property "is not a hardship."
Tenant Editta Sherman raised her five children in a studio with 30-foot ceilings where she has lived for 58 years.
"I'm not moving out! I'm going to be the last one in this building!" said the 95-year-old Sherman, a portrait photographer whose studio is filled with images of stars like Henry Fonda and Andy Warhol, Bernstein and Brando.
Two floors below is Ashtiana Sundeer, a painter and meditation teacher. She says Carnegie built the studios for artists, but some are being used as storage facilities and offices for contractors.
"Andrew Carnegie had a specific intention and that intention still has a value," she said. "We're Carnegie's children. We certainly have the right to be here."
Joseph Tonetti, an architect whose firm occupies four of the studios, says the battle is more than just another New York landlord versus tenant dispute. He said the inside of Carnegie's towers are unique.
"It's not something you're going to find anywhere else in New York," he said.
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On the Net:
Carnegie: http://www.carnegiehall.org/
