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Residents want to save mystery West Village building

By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer
More stories | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

April 21, 2008

Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, looking at 43 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. (Jefferson Siegel / April 20, 2008)

In New York City, in places where hard facts don't go, rumor and speculation fill the void.

Such is the case with 43 MacDougal St., an 1846 building that has for decades sat empty and abandoned in the West Village.

"I heard that it used to be a hangout for the mafia, and there was a police shootout there, and they had to close it for evidence," said Tal Kon, 22, who has lived on the picturesque block for a year.

"I've heard that the FBI, or the CIA, or somebody closed it down, and that there was a dead body in there," said Ronen Grady, who for four years has operated the hip cafe 12 Chairs across the street.

What is known about 43 MacDougal is that it is in the Charlton-King-Vandam Historic District, which makes it a landmark. It was home to a group called Citizens for a Better Village, an Italian American social club, and has fallen into a state of dangerous neglect.

Makeshift curtains cover every window in the four-story house. Rats scurry out of holes in the ground floor. Graffiti adorns the front doors.

The older residents, the ones with longer memories who recall when the neighborhood was home to the Genovese crime family, have kept the Omerta code, years after the last of the dons have been chased out.

"For years it was a social club, a numbers spot," said one woman who said she had lived in the area for all of her 64 years, and who most emphatically would not give her name. Vinny "the Chin" Gigante used to work out of there. They'd be in there, smoking cigarettes. People was used to it."

Even rock poetess Patti Smith, who has lived on the block for 10 years, is tight-lipped about the mystery building.

"I don't talk to reporters," she said before turning into her house.

Prospective buyers routinely knock on the house's doors and poke around the neighborhood to find out if the building is for sale.

It isn't, although the two men listed as owners, Abraham and Arthur Blasof, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

But the building, which would surely fetch many millions of dollars on the open market, isn't only of interest to real estate speculators.

Preservationists say 43 MacDougal is suffering from dangerous levels of neglect, and want the city to step in and save a historic building before it crumbles.

"The sad thing is that this is nearly 200-year old building that has clearly been taken good care of until very recently," said Andrew Berman, president of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. "People would kill to get their hands on it and put the love and care into it that it deserves."

Berman's group has reached out to the Department of Buildings, the Fire Department, and the city's Department of Housing, Preservation and Development, but said so far they have been unresponsive.

He would like the city to begin to enforce its landmark laws, preventing demolition by neglect.