135th Street Gatehouse

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Construction is beginning at the 135th Street Gatehouse, built between 1884 and 1890 as part of the New Croton Aqueduct system, to convert the building into rehearsal and performance space for nearby Aaron Davis Hall.

http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/Croton/138convent.jpg

The Gatehouse is located on the campus of City College of New York at 135th Street and Convent Avenue. In the past few days, the overgrown site has been cleared of vines and trees, and a sign has appeared announcing that conversion of the building is underway.

Here's some history about the aqueduct:
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/Croton/croton.html

Here's a brief article on the project:

PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
AARON DAVIS HALL, NEW YORK
http://www.ohlhausendubois.com/civic.htm

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Originally built as the visitor center and public manifestation of the Croton Reservoir system, this 1886 neo-Romanesque gatehouse is being converted into a black box theater and support space for a venerable Harlem arts group. Giant valve structures 70 feet down could be observed from wells in the metal grating floor. Transparency to spaces below will add to the rich character of the structure. Restoration work will include repair and cleaning of ornamental stone and brick, cast iron, ceramics and stained glass.


And here's some more background on the project:

Gotham Gazette, April 2002
http://www.gothamgazette.com/arts/apr.02.shtml
A COMMUNITY-WIDE COLLABORATION

Patricia Cruz, the director of the Aaron Davis Hall performing arts center in Harlem, used to gaze longingly across the street from her office to the enormous--and empty--Gatehouse Building, at 135th Street and Convent Avenue. Once part of the city's water delivery system, the Gatehouse was condemned by the Department of Environmental Protection and filled-in 10 years ago. Cruz imagined that the historic Romanesque building could house some of the artists that use Aaron Davis Hall, which provides a home for the Emerson String Quartet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Opera Ebony, and Boys Choir of Harlem, among many other groups.

Cruz began to convene meetings about the abandoned building, which many felt was not only an eyesore but a danger to students from the nearby school. Cruz talked to people at various city agencies and at City College, and it soon became clear that there was great interest not only in fixing up the Gatehouse building but in revitalizing the surrounding area. At nearby P.S. 161, it turned out, the playground looked more like a prison yard; at Annunciation Park, an abandoned field house also needed attention.

Last September, at a public "visioning" session, City College architecture students, P.S. 161 teachers and parents, Abyssinian Church members, community activists, artists, and others shared their ideas about how to make use of the Gatehouse building and create neighboring green spaces for children and residents. The final plan is still taking shape--and some promised city monies have not yet come through--but the collaborative effort of what has become known as the 135th Street Gatehouse Project is already yielding tangible results. This May, with funding provided in part by the "Take the Field" organization, P.S. 161 will get new playing fields. The renovated Gatehouse will expand available performance space for Harlem-based arts groups and provide a banquet hall and community center.

One art group's effort to expand their physical space has evolved into what promises to be neighborhood revitalization. "It's fair to say that we were a catalyst for this project," Cruz says. "We brought players together to the same table. . . . I'm very, very proud of our efforts."

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The New York Times

The Gatehouse, a Landmark, Is to Be Converted

By EDWIN McDOWELL

Published: October 12, 2003

For years after it was built in 1890, the building with a prominent tower at West 135th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem was used to distribute water from the Croton Aqueduct in Westchester to New York City. Eventually that system became obsolete, and the building, known informally as the Gatehouse, began to deteriorate over time. Nevertheless, in the 1980's it was designated as a historic landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Next Friday, plans for converting the building into a performing arts facility are to be announced across the street from the Gatehouse, at Aaron Davis Hall on the campus of the City College of New York. In addition, a $26 million fund-raising campaign is to formally start, intended to upgrade Aaron Davis Hall and to restore the Gatehouse to its former architectural grandeur. When completed, the building is to have a theater with a 200-seat auditorium, rehearsal space and office space.

Renovation of the Gatehouse, which is owned by New York City, under the auspices of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is expected to cost almost $13 million, according to Kate D. Levin, the cultural affairs commissioner, and could take up to two years to complete. Almost $14 million more is to be used at Aaron Davis Hall, which was built on the City College campus in 1979. It is owned by the college, but is managed by ADH Inc., an independent nonprofit corporation, with the cooperation of City College. Aaron Davis Hall personnel will also oversee and operate the Gatehouse.

The expenditures at Davis Hall will include upgrading the building's technical systems, adding offices, financing its many existing arts programs and adding education programs.

Ms. Levin and Patricia Cruz, executive director of the hall, said that in the last four years the mayor's office, the City Council and the Manhattan borough president's office had given $10.6 million toward rehabilitating the Gatehouse and upgrading Davis Hall.

Rolf Ohlhausen, a principal of Ohlhausen DuBois Architects in Manhattan and the architect for the Gatehouse project, said the assignment involved satisfying two contradictory demands: theater and preservation. The project engineer is the Manhattan architectural firm of Wank Adams Slavin Associates, and PMS Construction Management is the contractor. The City Department of Design and Construction oversees the project.

As part of the Gatehouse restoration, a slate roof will be installed on what was there originally and the arched stained-glass windows will be replicated. But a more significant challenge will be to build a modern theater over what had been a century-old water system.

"When the building was abandoned," Mr. Ohlhausen said, "all of the cavities that previously held water were filled with sand. So a significant part of the project will be the removal of the sand, granite and brick within the building envelope to create spaces below grade that will support the theater function." These spaces will include the performance area, dressing rooms, offices and technical equipment.

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Now the site has been re-cleared of weeds, and it looks like renovations to the buildings are finally about to begin.

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The New York Times
Gatehouse Ushers in a Second Act as a Theater
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: October 17, 2006

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/10/17/arts/17gate_CA1.600.jpg
The renovated Gatehouse, Harlem’s newest performance space.

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An architect’s rendering of a performance space for The Gatehouse, a new 192-seat theater for Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall.

There was a time not so long ago when people would hike to the Gatehouse pumping station at 135th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem just to stand at a railing inside and watch the water rush by below. The water is still there, coursing its way underground to points south in Manhattan, but the building above now offers a different kind of spectacle.

The architect Rolf Ohlhausen set out to evoke the public-works legacy of this rugged 1890 building in transforming it into a brand-new 192-seat performance space for Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall. “Everything below us is functional,” he mused on a recent morning in the remade $21 million theater, the first new performance space to open in Harlem in a generation. “From this point up is celebration.”

The Gatehouse, which has its ribbon-cutting today, is the first real home for the organization, formerly known only as Aaron Davis Hall. Since its founding in 1979, the organization had used a 750-seat auditorium across the street at City College of New York. The college recently reinstated its theater department and plans to use the space more often, although Harlem Stage will continue to book it for big events, like its International Series of performances by artists from around the world.

“We’ve lived with something of a bifurcated identity,” said Patricia Cruz, executive director of the organization. “We needed a room of our own.” The building is owned by the city and leased to Harlem Stage.

The Gatehouse, which distributed water from the Croton Aqueduct in upper Westchester County to New York City, was designed by Frederick S. Cook in the Romanesque Revival style of a castle. The belly of the building is 75 feet deep and surrounded by sloped dam walls six feet thick. In the cavernous chamber where the water used to be, Mr. Ohlhausen has created three levels of new space, with the theater at the top, an entrance in the middle and a cellar below with offices and a green room.

Because the Gatehouse is a historic landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the architects were charged with respecting the past even as they ushered in the future. “I had to balance two sometimes conflicting demands of theater and preservation,” Mr. Ohlhausen said. “It’s the most complex project I’ve ever done in my whole career.”

His firm, Ohlhausen DuBois, worked in collaboration with Wank Adams Slavin Associates.

The building, vacant since 1984, was dilapidated, its heavy iron doors corroded by rust — “touch them and they would crumble,” Ms. Cruz said — and only fragments remained of its stained-glass transoms. The doors, now a side entrance, have been restored and the stained-glass half-moon windows reconstructed.

There was an element of mystery at the outset: the architects didn’t know what they would find when they started digging in 2004. “We discovered mercury down there,” Mr. Ohlhausen said. These days, the water circumnavigates the building, officials say, but some visual elements of the old pumping station apparatus remain. Gooseneck vents, for instance, poke out of the ground in the outdoor plaza area like large periscopes. “We’re going to treat them as site sculpture,” Mr. Ohlhausen said of these relics. “There is a minefield of stuff below us that we can’t touch.” The architects reveled in the building’s history and original architectural flourishes. The existing octagonal tower will serve as a romantic entry point for the top-floor theater; patches of the original brownstone or brick are exposed all along the ascent and throughout the building.

For Ms. Cruz, it was important to leave visible reminders of what was. “I thought it was a sign of the authenticity of the building and the relationship between the old and the new,” she said. “Because that’s what we do in our programming: talk about honoring tradition and nurturing innovation.”

The new theater’s bleacher seats can be arranged in various stage configurations — proscenium, thrust, arena —within the original walls of cream-colored brick. A screen will drop down for the annual Harlem Film Series of independent features, shorts, documentaries and works-in-progress by artists of color. “It’s a totally flexible space that really responds to artists who are working in Harlem,” said Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs. The renovation also includes a lobby, box office and a small concession. The exterior features entry plazas and a south-facing balcony with a stainless steel railing from which visitors can glimpse the Empire State Building.

And there are new programs, of course. The Waterworks season, which opens Oct. 24 and runs through early December, includes work commissioned for and inspired by the Gatehouse, including Roger Guenveur Smith’s performance piece “Who Killed Bob Marley?”; Tania León’s musical tribute “Reflections”; and Bill T. Jones’s dance-music-theater piece “Chapel/Chapter.”

In the spring, a new series called Harlem Stride will pair established jazz pianists with younger players. In the opener, Randy Westonplays a jazz tribute to James Reese Europe, the conductor, pianist and composer whose work provided a foundation for Harlem’s Stride movement in the 1920’s.

Harlem Stage describes its audience as 62 percent African-American, 15 percent Latino, 15 percent white and 3 percent Asian, with the remaining 5 percent from other cultural backgrounds. Many of these patrons live in the neighborhood, but Ms. Cruz said she hoped to draw people from all five boroughs. “I want them to come from everywhere.”

Tickets in the new space will cost $20 to $35, and the space will be available for leasing. “Artists can come in and use that space,” said Linda Walton, executive director of the Harlem Arts Alliance, a service organization that represents 400 artists and arts organizations in the area.

The city financed $18 million of the building project; the rest was raised from private sources. Harlem Stage plans to raise an additional $5 million for endowment, cash reserves, programs and operating expenses. The organization’s annual operating budget is $3.7 million, up from $2.8 million the previous year.

Mr. Ohlhausen said he was particularly proud of the building’s new front doors on Convent Avenue, which he carved out through six feet of stone. A minimalist stainless steel canopy features glowing lights on its underside and footlights beam up from the top of the entrance stair, creating a luminous glass entrance flanked by the original heavy granite.

“It’s the opposite of parting the waters — making this a transparency between these massive dam walls,” Mr. Ohlhausen said. “This is almost like water. You sense it?”

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The New York Times
One New Culture District, Two Powerful Old Friends
By CELIA McGEE
Published: October 29, 2006

FOR weeks, Holly Block and Patricia Cruz have been trying to BlackBerry a dinner date. Friendly from the downtown arts scene, they’re near-neighbors in Chinatown. And now they also have a kind of shared identity: they are the new headliners uptown.

In July Ms. Block, 47, started as director of the recently expanded, architecturally enhanced Bronx Museum of the Arts. Two weeks ago Ms. Cruz, 59, executive director of Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall Inc., opened the Gatehouse, a performing arts space at 135th Street and Convent Avenue, the first new one in Harlem in 20 years.

That means they are poised to become two of the most visible and influential forces in the creative revitalization spanning Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, a movement that has been attracting audiences both locally and, increasingly, city- and worldwide. Joining such other force fields as Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Jonelle Procope, president and chief executive of the Apollo Theater Foundation; Rosalba Rolón, artistic director of the Pregones Theater in the Bronx; and Kate D. Levin, New York’s cultural affairs commissioner (who arranged $19 million in financing for the Gatehouse and $16 million for the Bronx Museum), they stand at the center of northern New York City’s artistic development.

Ms. Cruz and Ms. Block “have worked to redefine what the mainstream is,” Ms. Golden said, “and to do programming that is local and international at the same time. They add to what is a really vibrant scene. I don’t think in terms of geography; New Yorkers are a mobile bunch, and these uptown spaces just bring people to different parts of the city. There are so many things happening up here, and these two are a major part of it.”

Which is why there is no chance the two women can have a quiet dinner for a while.

“We’ve tried twice already,” said Ms. Block, who when not occupied at the museum on the Grand Concourse can be found around town fund-raising, networking and making studio and gallery visits on behalf of an institution that, after several years of drift and turmoil, was without a director for eight months.

“I haven’t had time for anything except getting the Gatehouse ready,” said Ms. Cruz, who originally met Ms. Block through her husband, the artist Emilio Cruz (who died in 2004), after they returned to New York from Ms. Cruz’s native Chicago in the mid-80’s.

On Tuesday Ms. Cruz welcomed the first audience to her neo-Romanesque space, a former 19th-century water pumping station for the Croton Aqueduct system reimagined by Ohlhausen DuBois Architects. It is across the street from Aaron Davis Hall at City College, which Ms. Cruz has run since 1998, when she was recruited from the Studio Museum. The site-specific premiere of Roger Guenveur Smith’s performance piece “Who Killed Bob Marley?,” which opened the Gatehouse, is an example of the innovative, experimental, multidisciplinary programming Ms. Cruz has planned. It is part of a series called WaterWorks that also includes the composer Tania León’s “Reflections” and “Chapel/Chapter” by the choreographer Bill T. Jones.

Gregory Mosher, the director of the Columbia University Arts Initiative, has known Ms. Cruz since their early days in Chicago theater. “As a producer,” he said, “Pat has the quality Joe Papp had: total passion for the art itself but always connected to a sense of community, and I don’t just mean Harlem.”

For her part, Ms. Block will greet the public this afternoon at an open house for the refurbished museum and the sprawling show “Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture.” The event marks one of the first changes she has instituted: openings on Sunday afternoons rather than weeknights.

“It’s the same thing they did at P.S. 1,” she said, referring to the contemporary art center in Long Island City. “It’s much better for people to get here during the day on a weekend, and it also gives them a chance to enjoy other places in the Bronx. A lot of the neighborhood residents, too, are churchgoers, and this is a nice visit to make after church.”

Ms. Block, who was a curator at the fledgling Bronx Museum from 1985 to 1988, returns there from Art in General, the downtown alternative art space that she transformed during her 18-year tenure into a leading showcase for contemporary art. She is known for cultivating and discovering new talent, notably Latino and Latin American artists. Uptown, Ms. Block has even bigger ambitions. She and the new board chairman, Robert J. Perez, a Bronx developer, want to diversify, professionalize and expand the board to 24 trustees from 15, and to require a minimum annual contribution of “between $5,000 and $25,000,” she said.

Madeline Weinrib, for instance, who oversees the Madeline Weinrib Atelier at her family’s ABC Carpet & Home on Union Square, said she had no doubt she would soon join the board. She met Ms. Block when she was a young artist in 1994.

“She put me in my first exhibition, ‘Re-marks’ at Art in General,” Ms. Weinrib said. Lately she has been thinking about how Ms. Block might be able to make use of ABC’s warehouse real estate holdings in the Bronx.

A bigger board is just one part of the plan to put the museum, which has an annual operating budget of $2.7 million, “on a sound financial footing,” Ms. Block said; income-producing partnerships with fellow institutions is another. Eventually, she hopes to undertake a further expansion by Arquitectonica, the firm that did the new wing, which would reconfigure the museum’s older section and build a residential tower above it to create a crucial revenue source.

Finding private sources of income is important. As William Aguado, executive director of the Bronx Council on the Arts, said: “The Bronx has been the stepchild of the cultural funders and policy makers. It’s up to Holly to put it on the map.”

That involves more than money. So in addition to increasing community outreach and educational programming, Ms. Block wants the museum to serve as a home for shows missing from the rosters of New York’s other museums. She is also keen on mounting exhibitions by artists with past or family ties to the Bronx, as well as establishing an artists’ residency program, “with the borough as a map, resource and guide.” Many artists have already passed through the museum’s Artist in the Marketplace career program — “everyone from Glenn Ligon to Byron Kim, Pablo Helguera and Polly Apfelbaum,” she said — “and we should do things” with these alumni.

Two miles away, on a crest overlooking St. Nicholas Avenue on one side and upper Broadway on the other, Pat Cruz’s operation is similarly at the crux of a changing Harlem and its real estate boom.

For decades the area’s illustrious cultural history unfolded “outside mainstream media attention” and the limelight of rising real estate values, Ms. Cruz said. She works closely with Community Boards 9 and 10 and with Harlem Stage’s revived Artists Circle, comprising neighborhood celebrities like the actresses Tamara Tunie and Barbara Montgomery, along with Delroy Lindo, Jeffrey Wright and Hazelle Goodman.

The Gatehouse’s collaborative balance of heritage and hipness appeals to artists emerging and established. The actor and playwright Ruben Santiago-Hudson said: “I’m trying to work with Pat as soon as possible. She’s been very strong at preserving the culture’s dignity and integrity.”

Ms. Cruz’s approach reminds Maurine D. Knighton, who heads the cultural arm of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, of “many African and African diaspora cultures,” in which “there’s no separation between art and life.”

“The Gatehouse is one of the things that’s been missing in Upper Manhattan,” Ms. Knighton added, “an incubator for artists where audiences can experience multiple points of entry into the arts.”

Jonelle Procope understands that approach. “The Apollo also wants to be an incubator for emerging artists,” she said. “Look, I’m just going to say it — I’d love for Pat to use the Apollo, which has that larger capacity” — since the 750-seat auditorium in Aaron Davis Hall is being reclaimed by City College for its theater department. (The Gatehouse seats 192.)

From the Gatehouse, some of the other points of cultural revitalization are visible. Directly opposite is a new building for City College’s School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, designed by Rafael Viñoly. (The new $325 million criminal courts complex going up on 161st Street in the Bronx is also his.) The incipient Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts, currently at a temporary location in the Bronx, will also be relocated nearby, “where our kids could walk” to the Gatehouse, in the words of Richard Kahan, the Urban Assembly’s president.

Mr. Jones, meanwhile, said he was hatching a plan to put the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and a teaching program close by. The Museum for African Art has a site for its new building at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, a spiffy new addition to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is going up, and Albert Maysles is opening a film center on 125th Street near the Apollo, which is also undergoing a renovation.

On his way to a meeting in Harlem with Kenneth J. Knuckles, president of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, the Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., talked about the development happening to the east. With more and more urban pioneers priced out of areas like Brooklyn, he said, “a lot of young artists are moving up here; we’ve created mixed-use zones out of old industrial buildings and built 25,000 new units of housing.”

Ms. Cruz and Ms. Block both said they were excited by the infusion of new cultural enterprises and homeowners mingling with veteran residents, but each was also adamant about maintaining her community’s distinctive cultural identity.

Ms. Block, for example, said she hoped to continue to tap into the surrounding culture — which is flavored by the mix of a Latino majority, African-Americans and Asian immigrants — as a way of providing career alternatives and a civic stake for young people in neighborhoods that are still among the nation’s poorest. To Ms. Cruz, the rapid change “means that it is important to us to see the arts as a kind of glue that can hold a community, and a city, together, and not displace anyone.”

“We honor history and tradition,” she added, “while nurturing emerging artists.”