NYU Demolishes Part of Provincetown Playhouse After Promising Preservation
After promising to preserve the interior theater space of the Provincetown Playhouse to the community, New York University apologized earlier this week for not informing community leaders that plans had changed.
From the Villager:
“Alicia Hurley, N.Y.U. vice president for government and community engagement, said a portion of the north wall of the theater, dating from before 1916, was removed about three weeks ago when it was found to be made partly of rubble and unstable. She said she discovered the removal only last Thurs., Aug. 13.
“My office should have known about it and takes full responsibility for the communications gap,” Hurley said. Work as related to the theater will cease and will not resume until a report is made to the community within the next two weeks. “The final shoring up of one wall of the theater is being done this week to hold everything in place, and then we’ll take a break from work in the theater part of the project,” Hurley said.
It’s déjà vu all over again; this comment sounds suspiciously like those issued by NYU when the Poe House was recreated with new bricks, despite promises to use the original bricks from the 1830’s house demolished for NYU’s Furman Hall. “There were simply not enough bricks left” after the dismantling claimed John Beckman, an NYU spokesman at the time. “The [legal settlement] agreement was it would include a representation of the facade of the kind of building that would have been on that street at the time Edgar Allan Poe lived there. And N.Y.U. has done that.”
As one of the parties to the lawsuit and settlement over the Poe and Judson Houses, HDC agrees that NYU lived up to its side of the agreement. But the fact remains that there should have never had to been a lawsuit over the Poe & Judson Houses in the first place, and that New York University should have rethought their development plans to account for the preservation of these historic buildings.
This was the thought behind the establishment of the Community Task Force on NYU Development by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, with the proclaimed result being “Planning Principles” which stressed community outreach and reuse of historic buildings whenever possible. The goal of the lengthy committee process was that something positive would come out of all the community unhappiness with the university’s developments. Instead, the community got a plan that proposed to destroy all but a fraction of an important historic building and a reality that finished the job with a heartfelt apology about the lack of communication. Whatever else this is, it’s not preservation.