John Leland

The final film to show there was Ron Howard’s documentary “Pavarotti,” a fitting coda for the theater: a prestige movie, flattering to a well-heeled audience, that offered a certain demographic’s idea of a cultured night out.

“That’s terrible,” said Duncan Hannah, a painter who loved the theater on 58th Street by Fifth Avenue for the French movies and the quality of New York gossip you could overhear in the plush seats.

“It looked like the fancy cinema on an old ocean liner,” Hannah said. “I crossed the Atlantic to France when I was 14, in 1967, and they had a cinema that looked like the Paris.”

The causes of death are the usual suspects: the internet (streaming video); real estate (expired lease); changing demographics; shorter attention spans. Which is to say: life.

This week the Beekman 1 &amp; 2 theaters, also owned by real estate mogul Sheldon Solow, closed, too; last year it was Landmark Sunshine in the East Village; the year before, Lincoln Plaza.

“The Paris Theater is closing?!” wrote filmmaker John Waters in an email message. “Oh no! Where will old art movie fans go to see rarefied foreign films in the safety of a rich neighborhood?”

Waters could not recall the last time he went to the Paris, but added, “If I remember correctly, at some point they didn’t even have a candy counter — too common, I guess?”

British writer V.S. Pritchett once noted, “The past of a place survives in its poor.” In New York in 2019, it seems the past survives in the hand-wringing of the people on the wrong side of the real-estate juggernaut, in the seductive transformation of memory into grief. You didn’t have to have been a recent patron of the Carnegie Deli or Pearl Paint to mourn their erasure. There is community in the mourning, and in a time of rapid change, community is a comfort.

Memory becomes folklore, a form of group identity. We are they who remember CBGB or the Brasserie.

Hal Willner, longtime sketch music producer of “Saturday Night Live,” remembered taking a date to see the sexually explicit Japanese film “In the Realm of the Senses” at the Paris in the late 1970s, having no idea what they were getting into, then walking her out in the middle. The Paris had showtimes later than other theaters, and Willner said he was often one of the few people in the 581 seats.

“It was one of those great comforting things we thought would never go away,” he said. “But of course it will. New York has always been that way. The ghosts will always be there.” Nearby were the flagship FAO Schwarz toy store and the original Playboy Club, he said. Closed and moved.

He added, “More than thinking, ‘I’m going to miss it,’ I’m thinking, ‘I wish I had gone there more.’ ”

Howard said the Paris sold more tickets to “Pavarotti” than any other theater, but that change was inevitable.

“I feel nostalgic for the idea of art house theaters, but viewing patterns are changing,” Howard said. “That’s been happening since the last hand-cranked nickelodeon. This is still a young art form.”

New theaters have opened. Jake Perlin, artistic and programming director at the Metrograph theater downtown, called the Paris an “enormous inspiration” for being “part of a grown-up world,” and “a place that people would always associate as where they saw a particular film.”

You might remember seeing “Avengers: Endgame,” but not where you saw it. You remember seeing Marcel Carné’s “Children of Paradise” at the Paris.

At the rapidly expanding Alamo Drafthouse theater chain, people can watch ambitious movies and eat and drink at the same time. “They can’t expand fast enough,” said director Alex Scott Perry, whose work is described on the Metrograph website as “a series of woundingly articulate films, by turns sad, self-flagellating and scabrous.” Though Perry lamented the closing of any theater, he said the Paris’ business model was outdated and unworkable.

“If your business model is getting people to travel to Midtown to see a documentary on Pavarotti, that’s a very narrow demographic,” he said. “That’s the hill you’ve chosen to die on.”

Dennis Lim, programming director of Film at Lincoln Center, said that he, too, would miss the elegance of the Paris, especially as more theaters are carved into small, faceless boxes. But he said he did not feel it was a place he needed to go. The demands of having just one screen, and having to fill all those seats made for programming that was risk-averse.

For adventurous, edgy, surprising films — for the unsettling kick of the new — the city’s cinema junkies had other theaters.

Or their favorite streaming service.

“All these people lamenting the loss of the Paris,” Lim said. “I would be curious about the last time they set foot there.”

This article originally appeared in

The Last Single-Screen Theater in New York Goes Dark

NEW YORK — The Paris Theater had its concession stand in the basement and a purple velvet curtain in front of the screen, and when it closed last week after 71 years, it was the last single-screen theater in New York City.

Charities like Ford, he realized, owe their existence to inequality, and they reproduce it: they extend rich people’s influence, with no accountability, and they take money from the public tax rolls to do so. If a foundation gives a million dollars to a donor’s favorite pet cause, part of that gift is whatever tax the donor or foundation would have paid on that million — and neither you nor your elected officials has any say in the matter.

Perhaps people should be able to give away their money as they see fit, but this is not the full story: because of tax breaks, they are also giving away your money. By one estimate, these subsidies cost U.S. taxpayers more than $50 billion a year.

Things nagged at Walker. He’d attend conferences where plutocrats who opposed tax reforms or labor unions earnestly trumpeted their efforts to reduce poverty. Often he was the only African-American speaker at a conference, or the only one who had ever been poor. And often his presence was used as proof of the group’s bona fides — “Look,” he described the reaction, “Darren’s here, so we’ve done diversity.” As Ford funded indigenous people trying to reclaim their lands from developers, its biggest resource — an endowment of $13 billion — invested in industries that mined or logged that land.

Walker, who will turn 60 next month, is also one of the best-connected people in New York, a city that runs on connections. Why, he wondered, were there so many more foundations for clean rivers or cancer cures than for prison reform or sickle-cell disease?

He spent two years considering how a philanthropy could do better. He was, he said, “a man who sets out to save the world.”

Think about how power moves in New York. There are the blunt forces like Wall Street, real estate, government and the arts, each operating in its own sphere — each under scrutiny, and contested. Then there is another channel of power, where philanthropies operate, moving billions of dollars around the city, functioning as connectors. Foundations connect billionaires on Wall Street with food banks in East New York, Hollywood celebrities with inner-city literacy programs, starving artists in Jackson Heights with the Whitney Museum.

Darren Walker, a gay black man from Texas in a realm created by old-money elites, is the connector of connectors. In a new Gilded Age, he believes that wealth can be made to do more good.

In 2015, he wrote an essay called “Toward a New Gospel of Wealth,” calling out “a system that perpetuates vast differences in privilege and then tasks the privileged with improving the system” — foxes minding the henhouse. The old gospel of wealth, as articulated by Andrew Carnegie in 1889, took inequality as a mark of progress, and called for its winners to give back in charity. Walker argued that this formula no longer worked.

At Ford, he made changes. He sold the foundation’s blue chip art collection and used the money to buy 320 newer works, many by female artists or artists of color. He integrated two sides of Ford’s work: its support for the arts and its grants for social justice. Declaring himself a proud capitalist, he called for a capitalism that spread its wealth rather than concentrating it. In place of charity, he promised a push for justice.

Putting that into practice has been a challenge.

On a recent morning in his office, Walker teased out some of the contradictions of this job. Ford’s offices, renovated last year, reflected his vision: where past Ford leaders had occupied a suite big enough to seat 40, he converted this to three conference rooms, moving his desk into a smaller glass-walled room visible to anyone.

In the building lobby, the first thing visitors see is a regal portrait by Kehinde Wiley of an African-American woman named Wanda Crichlow, from the public housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn.

“Are there contradictions?” Walker asked of his work. “Let’s start very explicitly with the fact that the Ford Foundation is a product of capitalism. Henry Ford never imagined that a black gay man would be president of this foundation, but that’s what’s great about American philanthropy, that it continues to evolve.”

To spend time with Walker is to feel enveloped by his attention, which has been a factor in his success. Some sources make you think they find you interesting. It’s a talent. Darren Walker greeted me as the most interesting person he had ever met. When I observed him among strangers, I saw a similar effect on them. We should all have this superpower.

“There are asymmetries in my life,” he said. “When I get a call from my mother who says, ‘Cousin Buster died and his wife doesn’t have the money to bury him, and we’re all pitching in,’ I could be going to a black tie event that night at Lincoln Center, and probably I’m the only person in the room who’s on the phone talking with his mother about her cousin whose family didn’t have the money to bury him. I deal with those contradictions by trying to as candidly as I can call them out in those rooms. It’s important when you’re in the rooms, bringing that perspective to the room and asserting it.”

Walker’s focus changed the conversation among his peers, said Ben Soskis, a historian of philanthropy at the Urban Institute. “It’s hard to overemphasize how little inequality had been a philanthropic concern over the last half-century,” Soskis said. “He took on a huge challenge. There’s been no figure with greater influence in the sector than Darren Walker.”

At the heart of this is the unlikely character of Walker himself, a serious man and demanding chief executive who can whip up blender drinks and gumbo for 50, and says things like, “If the roux does not smell like burnt tires, you haven’t cooked it enough.”

Something else about him: “Darren Walker knows more people than anyone we know,” said Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who has known Walker since the 1990s. “Darren is the ultimate connector. He’s at the center of this vision of the world as he sees it and the world he makes possible. Without it I don’t know how I or many of us would have the broad communities that we have.”

Walker grew up in Louisiana and East Texas, with a single mother who worked as a nurse’s aide. His life changed when he was recruited in 1965 for the first preschool class of Head Start, a new federal program aimed at reducing poverty. It set him on what he calls a publicly funded “mobility escalator” that continued through state college and state law school, and that he fears no longer exists for young people trying to get out of poverty.

At the University of Texas, he thrived both academically and socially: head of the student union and the elite Friar Society, where a university regent once mistook him for a server. “Even then, as a college kid, he was polished, polite, brilliant, warm, really kind,” said Paul Begala, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, who was a class behind Walker at UT. “People were really drawn to Darren.” He engaged frat guys and student government nerds and arty types, and “could bring them together,” Begala said.

He was also willing to challenge them. At the student union, he brought the Pilobolus dance company to campus, without telling anyone that they performed naked. “People were scandalized,” Begala said.

When New York beckoned, Walker worked as a corporate lawyer and then as a bond trader, but quickly jumped off to volunteer full-time at the Children’s Storefront school in Harlem. Around that time, in 1992, he met a downtown art dealer named David Beitzel, and soon they were living together, with the first of two English bulldogs, named Beulah, after Walker’s mother. (Beulah’s successor, Mary Lou, is named for Beitzel’s mother; when Walker wants to leave one of the nightly events he attends, he sometimes says, “Mary Lou is calling.”)

He traveled uptown and downtown, collecting bankers, lawyers, activists, pastors, art patrons and bureaucrats, building alliances as he went. He was doing what he did in college and would later do at Ford: connecting traditional power brokers with less obvious players, extending his influence by force of his personality.

He was intersectional before his time.

“My theory in life right now is that there are all kinds of gifts,” said Anna Deavere Smith, the actor and playwright, who is both Walker’s friend and a recipient of Ford grants. “He has the gift of being able to make friends and keep them.”

In the neglected Harlem of the late 1990s, one dynamic player was the Abyssinian Development Corp., a nonprofit offshoot of the powerful Abyssinian Baptist Church. Harlem then was littered with abandoned buildings that had been repossessed by the city. The development corporation, led by the Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, leveraged city and private money to restore these shells, then used the profits to acquire and rehab more buildings. Walker became the organization’s chief operating officer, working out of a basement office to help bring a Pathmark supermarket to 125th Street, the anchor for what would become a thriving commercial corridor in a neighborhood that had been given up for dead.

“Working for Calvin Butts, you saw the power of the black church, the shrewd political instincts of a power player, and the dynamic at the intersection of race, power, geography and culture,” Walker said. “It gave me tremendous insight into how power at that intersection plays out, and who benefits and who doesn’t benefit.”

Walker’s time at Abyssinian also taught him what it was like to rely on foundation grants, begging the mighty patron for favors. When he left to join the Rockefeller Foundation and then Ford — and as Abyssinian boomed and busted in a new Harlem — he vowed to change this relationship.

“He’s brought a breath of fresh air,” said Rob Reich, a director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University, and the author of “Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better,” which explores philanthropy’s contradictions.

“He is an amazing politician of straddling the world of old money and directing it for causes that speak to the current moment of inequality, while attempting at the same time to speak the language of social justice. It’s a high-level carnival juggling act that he’s attempting to pull off. It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone doing it with 100% success.”

Here is how Walker extends his influence.

When Anna Deavere Smith sought backing for her next play, the Ford Foundation offered support. But Walker also arranged a get-together with Smith and other potential funders and theater directors, throwing the foundation’s endorsement behind her. “You can’t put a dollar sign on that Good Housekeeping seal,” Smith said.

Then when Sherrilyn Ifill, who runs the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wanted to meet artist Mark Bradford, whom she’d just seen on “60 Minutes,” she called Walker.

“And Darren says, ‘Of course, I know him quite well,’” she said. “‘We’re very good friends.’”

Walker also connected her to a major philanthropist she’d wanted to reach.

“Simply to be around Darren is to meet other people,” she said. “He will offer up his Rolodex to you. He always is willing to think about, ‘Who could connect you to that person?’ If it’s not him, he knows the conduit. He’s kind of the mayor, in his own way.”

Walker worked with philanthropist Agnes Gund to create a $100 million Art for Justice Fund. Then he introduced Gund and Ifill. The art fund, in turn, brought light to issues argued by the defense fund’s lawyers.

“That’s my job,” Walker said of connecting Ifill. “Why wouldn’t I introduce her? I want her to succeed. It’s in the interest of moving justice forward in this country that Sherilyn Ifill succeed, and I can help her to do that.

“To me the question is, How do we as the Ford Foundation, and I as its president, leverage the foundation’s and my networks, and on behalf of whom?”

Last year he used that influence for an art exhibit called “Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today.” It had been rejected by museums throughout the city. With $500,000 in grants from the Ford Foundation, the show ran to glowing reviews at Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, and then moved on to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

“Here was a brilliant black curator who couldn’t find a job, but who just needed a foundation to believe in her idea,” Walker said. “These ideas can make mainstream institutions uncomfortable, in part because they have never fully embraced diversity. Have never fully embraced a narrative where they aren’t at the center.”

He added: “I’m not interested in tokenism. I’m interested in transformation. How can we be allies in an idea that might fundamentally change your world, and might make you uncomfortable? Because not everyone in the room is going to look like you when this transformation is complete.”

Walker has been careful to avoid picking fights with other philanthropists. But he drew criticism in 2016 for accepting a lucrative position on the board at PepsiCo, whose products contribute to poor health in low-income communities. Walker argued that he can be a force for good on the inside, and that the company was “increasingly focused on the environment, on health and well-being of consumers.” Such arguments, in an era of rampant obesity and diabetes, have not assuaged his critics.

On a rainy night in May, Walker looked around the Whitney Museum and said, “This is why boys from small towns dream of coming to New York.”

It was opening night of the museum’s Biennial exhibition, a showcase for emerging artists — this year heavily female, African-American and oriented toward social justice issues. With Walker were Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem; artist Glenn Ligon, one of whose neon sculptures is in the Ford collection; and Elizabeth Alexander, who last year became the first African-American woman to run the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest humanities foundation. A few years ago it was Walker who recruited Alexander out of academia to Ford, her first job in philanthropy.

“Darren Walker changed my life,” Alexander said.

The group moved through the museum like a gravitational force. If there is a new art establishment forming in New York, it might look like this group and this show.

“Having Elizabeth Alexander at the helm of Mellon is something you can attribute to Darren,” said Tom Finkelpearl, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, who teamed with Walker on a program to bring greater diversity to New York’s arts institutions.

“His influence on the way that arts and culture operate in New York is going to have a major long-term effect, and the influence is around diversity, equity and inclusion, and around the idea that art and social justice can be intertwined,” Finkelpearl said. “Ford has always been involved in the social justice issue and the arts issue, but they haven’t been intertwined this way.”

“Are you beyond proud of your brilliant daughter?” Walker asked the parents of Rujeko Hockley, the Zimbabwe-born co-curator of the exhibition. Then to Hockley: “We’ll have brunch or something.”

Many people were seeing Walker for the first time since the memorial for Beitzel, who died of heart failure in January. The couple never married — they were always too busy, they told friends — but Walker often referred to Beitzel as his husband.

“David was a better human being than me,” Walker said.

There were more galleries to walk through, more artists to meet. If Walker didn’t know them when the night started, he did before it was over. From old friends, there were condolences.

“We had 27 years,” Walker told one couple. “I’m so lucky.”

He photographed paintings he wanted to revisit. It was getting time to go.

“Mary Lou is calling,” he said.

Around the time Walker wrote “Toward a New Gospel of Wealth,” Anand Giridharadas, a former New York Times columnist, challenged the world-savers gathered at the Aspen Institute in Colorado with a more pointed critique, accusing them of trying “to market generosity as a substitute for the idea of justice,” using their philanthropy to justify their self-enrichment — a challenge he expanded last year in a bestselling book, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.” Walker is presented in the book as sincere but too entangled, trying to address the contradictions of philanthropy from within rather than taking down the mighty.

Walker acknowledged this critique. “They call us on our hypocrisy,” he said. But change, he added, “for a privileged group of people and institutions is much harder to do than people think.”

Walker’s gospel is unfinished. He plans a book-length expansion of “The New Gospe of Wealth” to come out this fall, and a memoir next year. He committed $1 billion of Ford’s endowment to investments that serve the foundation’s goals, not simply generate returns.

The contradictions in his work are still there. Reform is slow; capital has its own oceanic momentum. He lives in an apartment built with massive tax abatements, at a time when New York lacks affordable housing, an inequity he calls “unconscionable.” He works with the Koch brothers, whose anti-regulatory politics he opposes, on a project to reduce prison sentencing. Ford’s endowment still includes stocks that work against the foundation’s mission.

“It’s a journey,” he said. “I hope I’ve brought a sense to the organization that we have to walk more humbly, that we actually don’t have the answers, the answers are in communities and in the people we are investing in. They are the key to unlocking solutions.”

In a changing city, this is what power looks like. As Walker said, “I have the best job in the world.”

NEW YORK — From a tidy glass office in Midtown Manhattan, Darren Walker gives away $650 million a year of other people’s money, and is paid nicely to do so. When he got this job in 2013, as president of the Ford Foundation, he set his sights on tackling inequality.

The man with the $13 billion checkbook

<h1>NEW YORK — Lots of people say they love their hometown, but no one hearts NY quite like Milton Glaser. A native of the Allerton section of the Bronx and a graduate of the Cooper Union, Glaser, who turned 90 last week, has created a whimsical, optimistic, mildly trippy visual language for the city and state since 1954. There are 3,600 of his designs — for consumer products, logos, restaurant interiors, book covers, magazines and more — accessible to the public in his archive at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he taught for almost 60 years until 2007.</h1>

New York, of course, is a visual cacophony, where everyone clamors to be seen, but Glaser’s illustrations create a quiet around themselves, giving viewers space to think, even to dream. Many of his designs dart playfully between visual and verbal language. The I (HEART) NY logo, for example, requires viewers to read the drawing of a heart as the word “love,” which in 1977 was a rather clever logical leap. His promotional posters for the Catskills pun visually on the word “cat.” His Bob Dylan poster, soaked in the psychedelic colors and hair of 1966, riffs on a self-portrait by Marcel Duchamp in which the artist’s hair is out of the frame.

If you see a logo for New York magazine or a Brooklyn Brewery beer, for the Rainbow Room or Grand Union, you’re living in Milton Glaser’s New York.

None of the images began with a premeditated plan to sell products, Glaser said the other day from his studio in the East 30s, where he still goes to work each day. Instead, he trusted their purpose to arise from the process of making them.

“Art and making things — particularly making things — are essential to our salvation,” he said. “I come to work every day and I sit down and I feel so happy, because I’m capable of taking something that exists in my mind and making it a physical thing. Whether it’s good or bad or art or not is irrelevant. But the act of doing it has kept my brain intact. I always say that retirement is this horrible conspiracy to prevent people from being alive. My God, who invented that?”

What he wanted viewers to take away from his designs, he said, was a simple message about life: “That making things keeps you alive.”

And that for Milton Glaser, being alive keeps him making things.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/04/nyregion/why-this-famous-graphic-designer-at-90-still-ny.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Why this famous graphic designer, at 90, still loves NY

If you see a logo for New York magazine or a Brooklyn Brewery beer, for the Rainbow Room or Grand Union, you’re living in Milton Glaser’s New York.

They are long-timers who anchored the buildings through some rough years and newcomers paying top dollar during the good.

They have come to share their sense of home and belonging.

You’re like Donald Trump, a woman yells at the co-op president, a 52-year-old financial planner in a plaid shirt.

A pen raps on a table for order. It doesn’t come.

“It was very disrespectful,” a woman recalled.

This is a story about change in the new Brooklyn, where gentrifiers and social activists are often the same people, and the threats to a neighborhood’s charms can be the people who move there to enjoy them.

The dispute at the Clinton Hill Cooperative apartments, a sprawling complex of 12 red brick buildings where people say they know their neighbors, involves a single apartment and a beloved handyman who lives there. But it is also about the narrative of a community in rapid flux: amid the upheaval, is a free apartment a glitch from the sketchier past, something to be rectified in the name of progress? Or is it a strand of continuity that people might yearn to call home?

The Clinton Hill Co-ops were built for Navy Yard workers during World War II, and still bear maritime-themed tile mosaics over the doorways. On a recent weekday morning, a few women pushed strollers by a security stand in one of the inner courtyards. One change: there used to more benches for hanging out, said Dolores Gilliard, 73, who moved to the complex in 1979. She pointed to an adjacent laundry that no longer offers self-service, in response to the neighborhood’s churn.

Gilliard drew a line. “Gentrification is not going to change who we are,” she said. “We have the biggest block party in Brooklyn. We have seniors, millennials, gay people, kids of all nationalities. The best block party.”

When the co-op board announced last month that it planned to take away the apartment of Hector Caballero, a handyman who had lived there with his family for 19 years, it hit residents as an affront. Many thought that in their turf — a progressive enclave in a progressive part of Brooklyn — they had figured out a formula for harmonious gentrification, even as other parts of the city split apart.

“This community was always a community,” said Barbara Abrams, 74, who has lived in her 10th floor apartment, with views of the Empire State Building, since the 1970s. “People say hello. You hold the door for each other. It’s just nice.”

Now, suddenly, there was a victim.

Caballero, 55, started working as a handyman in the Co-ops in February 1990, and he was given an apartment 10 years later, with the understanding that he would be available for emergency repairs at all hours.

The neighborhood had a rougher image then, and the Co-ops were coming out of financial distress, with apartments going vacant. Myrtle Avenue, the complex’s northern boundary, was known as Murder Avenue.

Caballero, who has an easy demeanor, became a favorite of residents, as were his two children. “He’s smiling all the time,” Abrams said. “I never saw him make an evil face.”

Seven hundred residents signed a petition urging the board to keep Caballero and his family in place. When residents demonstrated outside a board meeting in February, carrying signs that read “Worker Justice” and “Hector Stays,” someone called the police. An officer from the 88th Precinct told the crowd to disperse. “The eviction,” she announced, “is a done deal.”

This only raised the anger in the complex.

“I didn’t think it was radical to say, We want to keep the community the way it is,” said Helen Yentus, 38, who bought her apartment 3 1/2 years ago. “As a gentrifier, as a new person, I moved here for this.”

Where the protesters saw a board driven to maximize revenue at all costs, the board’s president, Timo Lipping, looked at the same complex and saw something entirely different: a dark secret, unknown even to the full board.

Lipping, who led what he calls a “wave election” in late 2015, saw himself as a reformer in the Co-ops. He fought to reduce the number of board seats held by the co-op’s initial sponsor, and to replace old board members who had become “stagnant,” he said.

When he stepped into his position, he said, “the head of security pulled us aside and said there was a serious crime ring in the maintenance staff.”

The security chief, who has since died, outlined a range of criminal activity by a handful of maintenance workers, said Lipping and another executive board member, Peter McGuigan. The group did not include Caballero, whose work was considered good.

“We didn’t know whether to believe any of this,” Lipping said. “I knew the guys were lazy and needed to be reformed.”

A law enforcement raid fizzled when someone inside the building administration tipped off the staff, the two added.

“They were shaking down guys who delivered paper products,” McGuigan said. “All these street-level cons.”

The executive committee quietly hired two outside investigators, at a cost of about $30,000, who confirmed the security chief’s allegations, Lipping and McGuigan said.

“When we got their report, it ranged from the guys just not doing their job up to full-blown criminal activity — mainly drugs, but maybe guns, too,” Lipping said. “That’s terrifying.”

Asked about this account, Caballero said, “That’s news to me.” He added: “That has nothing to do with my apartment. Why are they bringing all this stuff up now?”

The committee did not inform other board members or residents about the investigation, Lipping added, because it was a personnel matter, and “because we didn’t want to scare anybody.” The investigators’ report remains in a lawyer’s office, where no one can see it.

Lipping declined to share the report. For many residents, this article will be their first word about the investigation.

“It was scary,” McGuigan said. “You walk your kid to school, and you say, ‘There’s that guy the FBI was watching.’”

The investigation also showed mountains of work that was not getting done. “We were paying people overtime, and we had 350 work tickets that were backed up,” said Audrey Churchill, a board member who moved to the Co-ops in 2004, after growing up in public housing nearby. Poor maintenance of asbestos led to an abatement cost of nearly $1 million, McGuigan said. Some workers spent days watching DVDs or taking side jobs for extra pay, including work for which residents were supposed to pay the co-op, Churchill said. Caballero was not among those implicated.

But amid the scrutiny of the maintenance staff, his apartment raised a red flag, Lipping said. Though the co-op had formal agreements granting apartments to its two live-in supers, as stipulated in the union agreement and required by law, it had no such agreement for the four handymen who had also been given apartments.

In a staff of close to 40 maintenance men, giving free housing to a few struck board members as unfair and fiscally imprudent, especially as the apartments rose in value. After negotiating with the union, the board decided to take back two of the four apartments.

On January 15, the complex manager informed Caballero that he would have to give up his apartment in three months. Another resident handyman had gotten a similar notice and left quietly. Caballero chose a different route.

“You’re going to give me 90 days to leave after 19 years?” he said. “I want to be treated with dignity and respect.”

Caballero complained to his union but got little action. When he told Neil Donnelly, a shareholder who had been active in a previous effort to stem evictions within the complex, Donnelly gathered neighbors in support.

“I was stunned,” Donnelly, 41, said.

Neighbors who had been tepid in the earlier effort to prevent evictions were incensed about Caballero, said Iben Falconer, who is married to Donnelly. “The fact that this happened to Hector, this was an affront.”

Told of the board’s investigation, Falconer said: “You’re going to hear me vent a little bit. We were not told any of this. They’re using it as an excuse that they’re trotting out when they want to get somebody out of his apartment.”

She added: “That doesn’t seem like the way to create the kind of community that we all want to live in. We want to have resident handymen who understand our buildings. They haven’t addressed that.”

Residents accused Lipping of putting “curb appeal” over the needs of a neighbor and his family.

“Curb appeal is when you want to sell something,” said Dunton Black, 73, who bought his apartment in 1984 for $13,500. “My next step is the cemetery.”

Someone told Lipping to watch his back.

“So I’ve been threatened over this whole thing, too,” he said.

It was such a small matter, one apartment in a complex of more than 1,200. But in the heated real estate market of 2019, it became a litmus test of values.

For the board, which ran on promises to clean up past negligence, the apartment was a legacy of a “culture of corruption,” Lipping said.

“I’m a financial planner,” he said. “I’m not a politician or a public speaker. I was not mentally prepared to have a bunch of people who I have spent countless hours working on behalf of call me these horrible names.”

For the residents, Caballero and his apartment were ties to a softer market that valued stability and continuity, because the alternative was decline. Caballero had been a steadying force when change was tilting toward social disorder. Now that every change brought neighbors with more resources and fancier jobs, did stability and continuity still matter?

With board members not communicating well about the decision to remove Caballero from his apartment, speculation about the reasons behind it ran unchecked. Maybe they were hiding a financial hole. Or somebody in the original sponsor’s organization was pulling the strings. Or Lipping cared only about raising the value of apartments, so he wanted the money to add amenities. Maybe it was just a heartless management company, telling the volunteer board that they knew best.

Residents aired their grievances in the media and to elected officials, complaining that they got no response from the board.

“We don’t know who made the decision to take back the apartment,” Gilliard said. “It has rallied the community to tell the board: ‘We’re not just shareholders. We care about the maintenance men.’ It’s made us closer and stronger.”

She added: “We can’t let you get away with any slight, because we don’t know what you’re going to try to get away with tomorrow.”

Black said he was suspicious that the board suddenly needed money.

“I’ve been fighting for 30 years with these people,” he said. “They’re pushing too hard against us, who they’re supposed to be representing.”

To many in the Co-ops, the injustice was clear. Even local politicians lent Caballero support, with Clinton Hill’s City Council member, Laurie A. Cumbo, and Hakeem S. Jeffries, a U.S. congressman from Brooklyn, urging the board to keep him and his family in their home.

Finally, the board announced a reprieve of sorts. Caballero could stay until July, rather than leaving in April.

As articles about the conflict came out in the Daily News and Gothamist, the board members kept silent. Their underlying story — of criminal activity among some now-former maintenance men — was too inflammatory, bad for both community peace of mind and co-op reputation, Lipping said.

The one neighbor to whom Lipping had confided, Michael Grinthal, had rejected it as reason to evict Caballero.

Grinthal, 45, a housing lawyer, said he had sensed that something shady had been going on. “I knew there were things I didn’t know,” he said. “This felt like, Ah, this is what that all was.”

But he added, “I don’t think that should be brought to bear on the question of whether Hector, who didn’t have anything to do with it — why is that being raised to color this decision?”

Lipping said he hoped the furor would die down as people got on with their lives. In the meantime, the board hired a publicist to help tell its side of the story.

“I want to make sure this gets done right,” Lipping said. “It’s my home, too. If people don’t like me, whatever. But it’s important for me that we do this right. In the beginning we made some missteps, misjudging the reaction. But we’re not professionals. We’re just volunteers.

“I feel like telling people, this is the United States, you have the right to express yourself, but we only have a limited amount of bandwidth.”

For Caballero, the next step is unclear. “I wasn’t expecting that much love from the community,” he said. He arranged to meet with a lawyer and looked into a couple of jobs in other buildings — without the free apartment, he cannot stay at Clinton Hill Co-ops, he said.

“I’m 50-plus,” he said. “I was trying to retire here with honor. I came here on my own, and I would like to leave on my own.”

For him and for the others, there remained a lingering question, of home and neighborly obligation. As he put it, “My kids say, ‘If we don’t belong to this community, where do we belong?’”

A Handyman, a Sudden Eviction and a Gentrification Battle Royale

NEW YORK — Here is a vision of New York the way many people dream it: a packed room of neighbors on a Saturday afternoon, diverse in age and race and class, talking about community.

A handyman, a sudden eviction and a gentrification battle royale

<h1>When the testosterone started to flow through her system, Jessica Sunderland felt the changes immediately.</h1>

“I had to do stuff to deal with the anger,” she said. “Working out and meditating, and trying to breathe. I did anything to try to not focus on the anger.”

She was an Army veteran who had served in Iraq, but at that moment, in fall 2012, she was in the Suffolk County Correctional Facility in New York on charges of burglary, kept in a cell 21 hours per day, in a body at war with her conception of who she was.

She wanted medication to make it stop, and she wasn’t getting it.

On a recent afternoon in her lawyer’s office, Sunderland presented a new phase of her life, including life as a blonde, with long braided hair extensions that she flicked away from her face. She had two prescription medications to lower her testosterone and another to provide estrogen.

And she had a court ruling against two doctors at the Suffolk County jail for denying her hormone therapy, causing her to start what her lawyer described as an involuntary sex change. The jury found that the doctors had violated her constitutional right to necessary medical care and awarded her $355,000 in damages, plus a slightly larger sum that went to her lawyers.

Advocates for transgender rights say it is the first time a jury has awarded punitive damages in such a case.

For Sunderland, 32, who filed the original complaint under her given name, Jeremy, it was vindication for a long, often solitary battle.

“I started the lawsuit back in 2013, and in the beginning it was just me by myself,” she said. “Just hearing the verdict, it means that I got what I had to say across. It shows that they can’t do what they’ve been doing without some kind of punishment.

“It makes me think there are people who understand what happened and that it was wrong.”

If you want to explore the fault lines of gender in the 21st century, you might devise an experiment like the criminal justice system. What does it mean when a person is two years into a transition and assigned to a facility that knows only male and female anatomy?

Tensions that exist on the outside become viscerally exaggerated behind bars, where privacy is limited, sexes are segregated and force is unequal. How does an institution built on order accommodate the gray areas of gender diversity?

Transgender people are several times more likely than the general population to spend time in jail or prison and, once there, to face harassment, assault and denial of prescribed medical care. Discrimination at home, school, the job market and the court system all funnel people toward jail or prison.

“Transgender folks are criminalized in our society,” said Mateo De La Torre, a racial and economic justice policy advocate at the National Center for Transgender Equality. “They get kicked out of their home, they engage in the underground economy for survival. And law enforcement profiles transgender women of color as sex workers.”

Like Sunderland, transgender women are routinely held in male facilities, subjected to strip searches or pat-downs by male guards, and are often held in near solitary confinement, ostensibly for their protection, but it can feel like punishment. In 2018, the federal Bureau of Prisons reversed an Obama-era guideline that considered inmates’ gender identity when assigning them to male or female housing. The new guideline calls for housing inmates by “biological sex” except “in rare cases.”

Sunderland’s award of damages may be a break in that pattern, advocates say.

“We see this as a significant win,” De La Torre said. “The fact of a unanimous jury decision sends a clear signal to correctional facilities that the general public understands that this is necessary treatment, and stands by transgender people.”

The decision came one month after a transgender woman in Massachusetts was transferred to a women’s prison after suing under the Americans With Disabilities Act — a potentially landmark case because it applies disability protections to people whose sex at birth clashes with their sense of self.

Representatives for the doctors did not respond to requests for interviews. Chief Michael Sharkey of the county sheriff’s office, which runs the jail, said policies had not changed since Sunderland’s time there but guards had “more awareness of transgender people in general.”

The jury cleared the jail on charges that its policies denied prisoners necessary care.

Sunderland likened her experience to the plight of the characters in Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air,” which she read in jail, about a doomed climbing expedition on Mount Everest. The book spoke to her.

“Sometimes people have an inborn, personal vision where they must do something, and they’ll risk everything to accomplish what they want,” she said. “People would say, ‘Why would someone do all this just to climb a mountain?’ But to the climbers, it meant the world to them. Who I am in life — people say that’s not something someone should want to be. The way I see it is, that’s who I am. I’ll do whatever I can to achieve that, as strange as it seems to some people.”

Sunderland felt as early as age 4 that she was born into the wrong gender (she prefers feminine pronouns even in references to her childhood). She wore her sister’s dresses in private and worried about what other children thought of her. She liked her female self — “It was a good feeling,” she said — but felt a lot of anxiety and depression at home.

Her father, she said, was intimidating and critical, with a short temper she feared setting off.

By adolescence she thought she might be gay but did not have any gay friends; with her straight friends, she felt she didn’t belong.

“I wished I could just go someplace away and be who I want to be,” she recalled, “but not here.”

Like the climbers in “Into Thin Air,” she felt compelled toward something, but did not yet know how to get there. She dropped out of high school and used drugs to deal with the tensions in her body and at home. When that did not work, she took enough pills to blackout and woke up in a hospital.

“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said in court, “and I didn’t see any other way of getting out of myself.”

Her life at home was stifling. She was in the wrong home, the wrong body, feeling increasing desire to transition, “like a weight” she was carrying around.

Several times she tried returning to high school, but it did not stick. “The people I knew weren’t the best of influences,” she said.

The Army looked like a way out, maybe a path to a career. In 2007, with the war going in Iraq, she enlisted, following her grandfather and father. The Army represented everything her life on Long Island in New York was not. It offered clarity and opportunity.

“I had to do stuff to deal with the anger,” she said. “Working out and meditating, and trying to breathe. I did anything to try to not focus on the anger.”

John Leland

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