Provincetown Playhouse Demolition – Was Anyone Really Surprised?
From The Villager:
It’s the same old N.Y.U.To The Editor:
Re “Provincetown drama encore as theater’s wall partly removed” (news article, Aug. 19):
With the discovery of the partial demolition of the walls of the Provincetown Playhouse theater which it promised to preserve, New York University has now reprised its lamentable behavior with the Poe House in 2002. There, too, N.Y.U. struck a deal with the community in which it promised to preserve a segment of this historic structure within its new Law School building. But when the scaffolding came down, N.Y.U. claimed it was not feasible to preserve and reuse the promised sections of the building, to the outrage of many.
What’s interesting in this case is that N.Y.U. had claimed that it had done a thorough engineering evaluation of the entire historic Provincetown Playhouse and Apartments building (of which the small theater it promised to preserve comprised less than 6 percent), and that this evaluation provided irrefutable evidence that the building was not structurally capable of being reused for the new Law School offices the university wanted to build on site.
Yet somehow it now seems the engineer’s evaluation missed that the walls of the theater that N.Y.U. was promising to preserve might not be able to be saved. N.Y.U. held out this promise as part of the basis upon which it received approvals for this project from many of its supporters. Even those of us who did not buy N.Y.U.’s argument and lobbied instead for preservation and reuse of the entire building — which the New York State Historic Preservation Office ruled was qualified for listing on the State and National Register of Historic Places — acknowledged that the plan to preserve the building’s theater section was a step forward from N.Y.U.’s original plan to demolish all but the tiny theater entry facade.
Now it would seem that N.Y.U. either hid the fact that it could not keep the promise upon which the approvals it sought were given, or at the very least failed to do due diligence to see if this commitment was one it was really in a position to make.
This comes on the heels of the discovery that N.Y.U. is seeking building permits for a taller and larger structure at the former Catholic Center site than it claimed it plans to build there; the reasons for this are still unclear, but the university’s claim that it had to file such permit applications in order to pursue a variance for the shorter, smaller building it promised to pursue have been refuted by the Department of Buildings.
Is this really the new N.Y.U. transparency, or just the same old N.Y.U. dishonesty?
Andrew Berman
Berman is executive director, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
Fooled by N.Y.U. again
To The Editor:
Re “Provincetown drama encore as theater’s wall partly removed” (news article, Aug. 19):
When the Historic Districts Council heard about the deal struck with New York University about “preserving” the Provincetown Playhouse, it felt like déjà vu all over again. More than seven years ago, a similar “preservation” solution was proposed and agreed upon for the Poe House; in that case, the university was going to rebuild the facade using the original bricks. Well, one thing led to another and the original bricks weren’t in good enough shape or perhaps there weren’t enough of them after the demolition. So alternate bricks were found and a strange homage to a federal rowhouse was constructed on W. Third St., perhaps 100 feet west from where the original historic building stood. Take a walk down W. Third St. sometime and see for yourself how well that “preservation” solution worked.
Therefore, when H.D.C. heard about the Provincetown compromise, we were rather wary of it. The issue is not and never should have become the design of the replacement building. The issue was the preservation of what N.Y.U. President Sexton once called “the fragile ecosystem” of the Village. The preservation solution was remarkably simple — the Provincetown Playhouse and Apartments should have been preserved, both on the site’s merits, as well as an anchor for a long-desired South Village Historic District, a goal N.Y.U. had professed to support.
Instead, a long-winded argument was made about the site’s historic integrity and alterations that were made 50 years ago robbing the site of its historic character. Balderdash. The theater was still the Provincetown Playhouse, which still had a strong, if not completely unbroken, 70-year history as a major theatrical center, which was proudly proclaimed in the Playbills of shows produced there until N.Y.U. closed the place’s doors to the public. That was the first step — soon the building became inadequate for the university’s needs and a perfectly fine historic building had to be replaced with a historicist building.
Never fear, though. N.Y.U. reassured the concerned community that the complex’s heart — the Provincetown Playhouse itself, which even the university’s consultants admitted had significance — would remain intact, if not untouched. Too bad no one walked down the block to Poe House to see how well that turned out.
Simeon Bankoff
Bankoff is executive director, Historic Districts Council