NEW YORK — There are fewer and fewer places left in New York
City where you can walk through a door and feel transported back in time. Among
them is 80 St. Marks Place, a Prohibition-era speak-easy converted into an
off-Broadway theater in the early 1960s.
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Inside the front door there are still hooks embedded in the
brick where steel plates were once hung to buy time during police raids. The
lobby walls are covered with framed, autographed photos from dozens of famous
actors, including Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy.
A narrow hallway connects the theater lobby with William
Barnacle Tavern, where you can still get absinthe from a bar that has been in
place since the 1920s. The performance space itself, Theater 80, is intimate,
with a 199-seat capacity. You can hear someone speaking at a normal volume from
anywhere in the room.
But like so many of the city’s treasures, the theater, the
tavern and the Museum of the American Gangster, on the second floor, are all
facing extinction because of the pandemic.
Lorcan and Genie Otway, who own the connected buildings at 78
and 80 St. Marks Place and live in an apartment upstairs, are now scrambling to
prevent a mortgage investor from auctioning them off.
“The shutdown offered us no protection from creditors, which I
think is unconscionable,” Lorcan Otway said during a recent tour of the
building and its underground tunnels, through which contraband was smuggled
during the 1920s and ’30s.
Otway, whose father bought the buildings in 1964, said that the
theater, museum and tavern were in good financial health until March 2020, when
they were shuttered by a state mandate that affected virtually all corners of
the performance and service industries. Shortly before then, he had taken out a
$6.1 million mortgage against the properties to settle an inheritance dispute,
pay legal fees and finance needed renovations.
With the pandemic lockdown and a precipitous decline in revenue,
that loan went into default and was purchased by Maverick Real Estate Partners
about a year ago. The firm, according to court documents, has closed more than
130 distressed debt transactions, with a total value of more than $300 million.
Otway, who dug out the theater space with his father when he was
9 and had turned down numerous offers by developers over the years, said that
he had hired an attorney to renegotiate the payment terms, but the original
lender stopped returning his phone calls and sold the debt to Maverick without
his knowledge.
Maverick, Otway said, then raised the interest rate to 24%, from
10%, bringing the roughly $6 million debt to about $8 million. The company did
not respond to messages asking for a comment.
Joe John Battista, artistic director of the 13th Street
Repertory Theater, is familiar with a conflict like this. His company was
recently evicted from the space it has called home since 1972 after a majority
of the building’s shareholders locked it out.
“Real estate is real estate, but this is the arts,” Battista
said. “There ought to be some special attention paid when the city stands to
lose a piece of cultural history like this.”
Theater 80 hosted plays throughout the 1960s, including the
pre-Broadway run of the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” From 1970
until Otway’s father died in 1994, the space was used to screen movies; for a
time, it was New York City’s longest continuously running house devoted
exclusively to revival films.
City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera grew up on the Lower East Side
of Manhattan and remembered seeing Shakespeare at Theater 80 when she was a
teenager. “This is a heartbreaking story,” she said, adding that the
complexities of running even the smallest business in New York now require a
team of experts.
“This is a huge advantage to the larger developers, the real
estate companies, the financial institutions that can both take on this cost and
hire a team to manage it,” Rivera said. “And the detriment is, not just to the
small landlords and the deterioration of assets to people of otherwise moderate
means, but also to the community at large who lose the landlords who are
interested in providing beneficial things.”
Arthur Z. Schwartz, a lawyer with a reputation for representing
underdog clients, said that there needs to be some type of legislative change
to rein in distressed mortgage purchasing.
“Beside the fact that you have a predatory lender who set this
up so there was basically no way he would ever be able to make the payments,
then shift it from being a mortgage to being some kind of commercial paper,”
Schwartz said. “That lets you get around a lot of the stuff we have these days
protecting mortgagees because of COVID.”
John McDonagh, an old friend of Otway’s, has scheduled a benefit
performance of his show “Off the Meter,” a comedic
monologue about his decades of driving a yellow cab in New York, with all the
profits benefiting Theater 80.
“I’m just trying to help save a theater that
COVID,
gentrification and big bankers are trying to take,” said McDonagh, whose show
runs Jan. 21-23 as part of Origin Theatre Company’s 1st Irish Festival.
“St. Marks Place without Theater 80 would be like Houston Street
without Katz’s Deli,” McDonagh said. “It would always feel like something was
missing from the East Village.”
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