November 1, 2024

By Katie Heiserman

“There Is No School Design Like P.S. 64” 

Built from 1904 to 1906, the former P.S. 64 at 605 East 9th Street in the East Village off of Avenue B near Tompkins Square Park is a five-story building designed by celebrated Progressive Era architect and engineer C.B.J. Snyder during his tenure as Superintendent of School Buildings. Snyder spearheaded reforms to school architecture that, in Professor Jean Arrington’s words, “transformed the 19th-century schoolhouse into the 20th-century school building” and reflected the revived value placed on education, ushered into the new century by progressive reformers. 

Among Snyder’s innovations was the H-Plan, which arranged school buildings around two courtyards, guaranteeing air and light to every classroom, forming a shield against the clamor of city life, and offering rare and cherished open space in crowded neighborhoods. Beyond construction technique, Snyder was celebrated for supporting a more hands-on curriculum, advocated by educational theorists such as John Dewey, by building diversified spaces such as roof playgrounds, art studios, science labs, and rehearsal spaces. 

Snyder oversaw the construction of more than 350 New York City schools, two-thirds of which still stand. Designated as a New York City landmark in 2006, P.S. 64 stands out among them for its elaborate French Renaissance Revival style. The landmark designation report reads, “There is no school design like P.S. 64…Its keyed surrounds, slate-covered mansard roof, terra-cotta moldings and keystones, contrasting brick and stone materials, and pediments filled with fruit and foliage resulted in a visually prominent school building.”

In 1977, P.S. 64 shut its doors amidst a wave of school, library, hospital, and firehouse closures. In the middle of a financial crisis, the City implemented devastating austerity measures, disinvesting from low-wealth neighborhoods with drastic cuts to public services. The building was abandoned and vandalized.

P.S. 64 Becomes “El Bohío”

“There wasn’t any electricity. They stole all the copper wiring out of the building. It was totally stolen from the fifth floor to the basement,” community organizer Chino Garcia recalled in an oral history interview conducted for the Archive Project in 2017. “We found some of the original doors…People were using them as picnic tables in different locations throughout the neighborhood. So they returned them to us.” Garcia was among a group of local residents who began to restore the former P.S. 64 in 1978. His group partnered with the nonprofit Adopt-A-Building, which offered a construction training program. 

During the financial crisis, small “self-help” nonprofits and groups such as Adopt-A-Building proliferated as community members looked to each other to make up for the lack of municipal investment. Garcia was co-founder of his own nonprofit called CHARAS, named for its five founders. The first letter of each person’s name made up the acronym. CHARAS was born from an earlier organization, the Real Great Society (RGS), formed in 1964 by Garcia, Angelo Rodriguez, and Armando Perez. All three founders were former youth gang members who used the organizational and leadership skills they had honed as part of their gangs to develop social programs in predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

RGS’s activities were wide-ranging but especially emphasized education and arts programming. They offered community classes in reading, arts and crafts, and English language for Spanish speakers, and a crash course program for people who had not completed high school. They also formed the Visiting Mothers Union, an exchange babysitting service for working mothers, the Theater of Courage, which led to a partnership with New York University’s drama department, and the University of the Streets, which enrolled 1,500 people in its free courses in 1967. RGS’s leaders chose to rename the organization to CHARAS because, as a more Spanish-inflected acronym, it was easier for some community members to pronounce. In November 1971, they incorporated as CHARAS, Inc. 

CHARAS’ potential remained stifled throughout the 1970s because it lacked a sizable facility to host programs. The founders were in search of a community center and took notice of the abandoned P.S. 64 school building. A one-page typed document in CHARAS’ records at CUNY’s Centro Library and Archives urges readers to “[p]icture if you will, a sturdy, old former school building given new life…It is the largest space for community and cultural activities in the neighborhood.” The large windows, bright auditoriums, and roomy rehearsal spaces Snyder had designed at P.S. 64 were the stuff of dreams for CHARAS. The group broke into the school and began repairing and restoring some of its original features. It gave the building a new name, “El Bohío,” which translates from Taíno to “the hut.” While CHARAS initially occupied the building illegally, within less than a year, the City leased it to the organization on a month-to-month basis, specifying in the contract that the building be used for community purposes. In 1984, CHARAS signed a fifteen-year lease with the City.

With El Bohío rehabilitated, CHARAS’ activities exploded. It optimized the use of the building with community galleries, afterschool programs, Latin dance workshops, photography classes, martial arts trainings, cabaret nights, theater productions, office space for other organizations, meeting space for Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, and more. It made headlines for its benefits, which featured donated works by eminent artists including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Martin Wong, and Claes Oldenburg as CHARAS became a popular, trendy fixture of the gentrifying neighborhood. 

A College Dormitory To Be?

In the 1980s, as private landlords defaulted on their properties during the financial crisis, the City of New York acquired ownership of about 50 percent of the Lower East Side’s residential real estate. As property values rose throughout the 1990s, the Giuliani Administration started auctioning city-owned land to private developers. In the summer of 1998, a few months before El Bohío’s lease was up, the City put El Bohío (or “Parcel 41”) up for sale. 

Gregg Singer was the highest bidder. He had budgeted $12 million for the building but ultimately purchased it for just $3.15 million. Singer planned to demolish the building and replace it with a 19-story dormitory for New York University. Because the lot was zoned for community use, he could not build luxury condominiums, but a brochure for the dorms-to-be claimed a “new college living experience” with a theater, game room, and yoga studios. Singer served CHARAS an eviction order shortly after the sale, but CHARAS struck back with a lawsuit. CHARAS was finally evicted in December 2001 after a judge ruled against them.

“When the idea came up about landmarking the building, I felt that was a good move…the structure should be protected no matter what because it’s a unique facility and those H-designed buildings are unique. There’s not too many of them left,” Garcia mentioned in his 2017 oral history. Garcia and other CHARAS members began working alongside the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP, now Village Preservation) to push through an individual landmark designation for P.S. 64. When Singer caught wind, he had much of the building’s ornamentation removed in an unsuccessful attempt to stymy the designation. 

In May 2006, GVSHP submitted testimony to the Landmark Preservation Commission supporting El Bohío’s landmarking. Its statement included the following: “GVSHP typically focuses on areas just west of the former P.S. 64. However, we feel strongly about the need to designate this building…a final chapter of this building’s history [has] yet to be written, and it is up to the Commission to decide how it will end.” One month later, El Bohío was landmarked as (former) Public School 64.

The saga that followed resulted in a stop work order in 2015, but the building continues to sit vacant, and its fate remains unknown. CHARAS and Singer alike are in limbo. Nonetheless, CHARAS supporters hold out hope that they’ll regain ownership of the building, perhaps by convincing the City to take it back by eminent domain. While CHARAS’ operations have halted, Garcia described his and other CHARAS advocates’ continued commitment to reclaiming El Bohío to us: “For the last eighteen years, annually, we have several events in relationship to that building, just to let the community and the developer and the City know that we’re still around and we did not forget them.”