It is a Potemkin-like sop to local landmark laws, all that remains of two brownstones from an earlier Gilded Age that were leveled unceremoniously last summer.
A few years from now, this remnant will be grafted onto a mansion that may well cost $100 million by the time it’s finally finished. But for now, all they’re doing is digging.
Every morning at 8 o’clock sharp, the jackhammering begins. All day long, the drilling and banging and beeping go on. Only on weekends and the holidays of the politically potent — Christmas and Rosh Hashana, for example, but not Martin Luther King Jr. Day — does it cease. It was supposed to end last December, then in February, then this month. Now, they say, it could last all summer.
Manhattan has countless monuments to outrageous wealth, most recently and glaringly the $238 million penthouse that hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin just bought at 220 Central Park South. Lacking famous owners, a prestige address, a brand-name architect or coverage in tabloid real estate blotters, 48-50 W. 69th St. has thus far been a study in inconspicuous consumption. But it reflects extravagance of a different sort.
Behind that green wall lies an astonishing and incredibly expensive chasm.
It is as if a meteor, of the sort that killed off the dinosaurs, has struck — and the hole keeps deepening. They’re going down 37 feet, 11 1/2 inches, every bit of it through Manhattan’s famously stubborn schist. Recently they hit quartz, which may become the subterranean floors and stairs. The finished mansion will have an underground theater, a recording studio, a Jacuzzi and a sauna, free-floating elliptical stairs (whatever those might be) and a wall of sculpture depicting trees, animals and birds of the jungle.
But to neighbors whose lives have been upended over the past year — by the noise, and vibrations, and fumes, and dust, and traffic, and wires, and Port-a-Potties, and rats — another accouterment captures the spirit of the place. The neighbors think of it every time a miniature dump truck emerges from the gorge and, with a bone-jarring rumble, deposits heaps of rubble into the dumpster on the street. It’s as if stone that sat intact and undisturbed for millenniums beneath what would eventually become Manhattan is shrieking, “And all this for ... a swimming pool?”
That pool will measure 10 by 60 feet. It will be clad in marble, and surrounded by columns, and softened by recessed lighting. For those living nearby, its self-indulgent elegance makes all the accompanying tsuris that much harder to take.
“It’s not as if they’re building an orphanage,” said Andrew Resnick, the musical director of “The Cher Show,” whose apartment abuts the construction.
Ever in flux, the Upper West Side is changing yet again. What was once one of the nation’s densest neighborhoods is emptying out, as single people, often without children, reclaim and reunify buildings born as luxury housing more than a century ago, then atomized into flophouses, then reconstituted as apartments. Founded 50 years ago this September partly to fight crime, the 69th Street Block Association now finds itself taking on supergentrification.
For much of the past year, most residents simply smoldered: the price of living in New York, they told themselves. But it turns out that the good neighbors of West 69th and its environs have their limits.
In February, after eight years at No. 44, only a short hop from her gigs at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Gabrielle Fink, a 36-year-old violinist, reluctantly moved out. Her nerves were frazzled, and she was worried about her health (her family has a history of pulmonary problems). The move cost her $5,000, money she hardly had.
Tamar Gongadze, whose third-floor apartment at 51 W. 68th St. was directly above the pit, also fled. Her law firm lets her work from home, but the continuous drilling and pounding made that impossible. Sure, she could have worked out of Joe’s on Columbus, as her landlord suggested, but how could she spread privileged documents around an espresso bar?
But many others, especially longtime residents like Nick Jordan, a philosophy professor at Queens College, can’t just up and leave. For one thing, he’s 80 years old. He has lived at No. 51 since 1971. There’s a memorial plaque for his wife that he installed on the lamppost across the street. It’s now part of the construction site and caked with mud.
“‘Noise’ isn’t strong enough,” he said of the din, by which he must now read exegeses and grade exams. “‘Mindless hell and chaos’ would be better.” I asked him whether any of the great philosophers had something useful to say on what he’s enduring. “Schopenhauer argued that the higher your tolerance for noise, the lower your intelligence,” he replied. So was he getting stupider? “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “I hope to outlive this. I may not.”
The permits on the gate list the owner as “Erzuli Corporation.” For months, rumors and stray factoids about the married couple said to be behind that corporate veil ran rampant. Residents furtively did Google searches on “Pierre” and “billionaire” and “fifth” or “sixth” “wealthiest man in France” for him, and “jazz” or “pop” or “cabaret” “singer” for her. Some cut the two some slack: Whoever they were, surely they didn’t know what was happening.
They even had their champions. “It may be loud and bothersome, but they have every right to complete the construction,” Mailis Pustrom, who lives at No. 64, posted on the block association’s website. “They are a lovely couple who will be a wonderful addition to 69th Street!! Have patience.”
Pustrom may not be representative. It was her husband at the time, Philip Widlanski, who in 2012 sold No. 50 to Erzuli for $13 million, thereby making the double-wide project possible. A year earlier, the corporation bought No. 48 for $11.5 million. (And the spending hadn’t ended: In June 2015, it shelled out another $14 million for still another brownstone, at 36 W. 71st St. That’s where the owners moved two longtime tenants at No. 48 and have parked themselves during rare visits to the city.)
But in recent months, as the emotional and physical toll has mounted and pleas to the owners’ on-site construction manager to curb the noise proved fruitless, the rage has intensified.
“I’m like, ‘Look, yay, you have all this money and you can build your dream house and that’s fabulous, but you have taken nobody else into consideration,’” said the block association’s president, Eileen Vazquez, who has installed a decibel meter on her cellphone and consults it often. “They should live here for a week and listen to their house being built.”
Several months ago, she put out the word to neighbors, friendly real estate agents and others for help identifying the people behind Erzuli LLC, all to no avail. Nor would the construction manager, Brian Caffrey, out them. But in late February — the same day sound pads were installed around the compressor in the street in a stab at noise abatement — she was gripped by a new sense of urgency.
It was then that she spotted Deborah Brown, a retired editor at House and Garden and House Beautiful who lives at No. 42, walking home.
Brown now wears $400 Bose Noise Blockers around her apartment. (Others favor headsets of the kind used on rifle ranges, or earplugs — when the closest Duane Reade has them. “They’re out of them all the time now,” lamented Steven Gilbert, who lives at 45 W. 68th St. and now orders them in bulk from Amazon.) Brown, who has lived on the block since 1969, blames the cacophony in part for her new $5,000 hearing aids.
Her miniature poodle, Dorian Gray, has been even more affected: He’s taking Trazodone, a tranquilizer. (“One tablet orally up to three times daily as needed for calming during construction,” the bottle helpfully directs.)
Vazquez’s probe cracked open only when an unidentified neighbor slipped a small card onto the floor of her vestibule. “Malou Beauvoir,” someone had scratched on it, in what looked like an elderly hand. Vazquez’s sister and upstairs neighbor, Kara Kelly, started searching online, and the mystery was soon solved.
Beauvoir is a Haitian-American jazz singer. She’s married to Pierre Bastid, a 64-year-old Moroccan-born Frenchman who made a fortune in energy and recently dabbled in Alpine hotels, restaurants and pharmaceuticals. He has also been a trustee at Juilliard and has endowed a scholarship there for struggling jazz musicians. In 2015, the couple, who live primarily in Brussels, helped produce “Living on Love,” Renée Fleming’s short-lived Broadway debut.
Beauvoir has described herself as a mambo, or voodoo priestess; her life and her music are infused with her faith. “Erzulie,” it so happens, is a family of voodoo spirits. “We believe that all things around us have a soul, have a spirit, and participate in this world, so the tree, the wind, the air, wood, stones, animals, people — all of us share this Earth,” she told the jazz podcast “Straight No Chaser” last fall. “And what’s difficult is when things get knocked out of balance because man believes he’s above everything else and refuses to respect the environment around him.”
But along West 69th Street and stretches of West 68th Street (where I live and work and am also serenaded by the drilling, including at this very moment), the elements for which Beauvoir expressed such concern are faring poorly indeed.
— Wind and air: Fumes from diesel compressors befoul the atmosphere.
— Wood: Antique fixtures restored or installed only a few years back in No. 48 were destroyed during the demolition, while the Japanese pagoda tree in front was chopped down to make way for construction machinery. (It cost the owners $16,000, payable to the parks department, to do so.)
— Plants: See above. Also, last summer’s yield from Jonathan Effgen’s elaborate balcony garden at No. 46, directly over the pit, was halved.
— Animals: Kelly’s dog, Lola, now shakes even when the jackhammers are idle. The cat living at No. 66, Titania of the Greil, is “overgrooming” and fighting irritable bowel syndrome, while Meadow at No. 51 is a “nervous wreck.” Birds on the block have stopped singing, one resident complained.
— Stones: Dislodged, dumped and exiled to New Jersey, where they are reincarnated as concrete. After James Tormey, the tenant relocated from No. 48, died in 2016, his wife, Deborah Tormey, returned to sprinkle his ashes around the pagoda tree. A good thing, too: Had she strewn them in the backyard, he, too, would have landed in Piscataway Township in New Jersey.
On March 1, Vazquez and Kelly finally contacted Bastid and Beauvoir. “We are writing to you on behalf of ourselves and your neighbors on West 69th Street who are suffering because of the construction of your home,” the note said. “The noise, vibrations and pollution caused by the construction are taking a toll on our health and livelihoods.” It described lost rental income, residents diving into bathrooms for telephone calls, and windows taped shut on stifling summer afternoons. It also told of the elderly man at No. 42 who’d spent “his final days with the sounds and emissions from your construction project filling his home.”
The letter, copies of which went to assorted local politicians, did the trick: Beauvoir soon called Vazquez. “She sounded very nice and genuine,” Vazquez said. A letter from her and her husband quickly followed, pledging remedial measures, like an expert on noise reduction, and continued vigilance.
It partly allayed the fear that all this tumult was for another expatriate pied-à-terre, one of those places, so common in New York circa 2019, whose lights are forever off. “You point out the special history of the block and the neighborhood,” the couple wrote. “These are the very reasons we chose this street: we plan to make this house our main home, and we found that this block is the best possible in Manhattan, probably in all of New York City.”
Suspicions nonetheless linger that Bastid plans to turn the premises into another of his boutique hotels. After all, so rarely did the two visit No. 48 before tearing it down that Vazquez had labeled them “The Christmas People.” In the past few weeks, she said, the making nice has stopped. “I mean, they were here in March and she didn’t say, ‘Let’s go to Le Cirque and have dinner, Eileen,’” she complained. “It’s not like she doesn’t know where I live.”
Going forward, Vazquez said, “we have to find a way to make sure this never happens to anybody again.” She added, “We should be the last residential block this ever happens to.” That the couple followed the law, she said, proves only that the law must change.
But at some point, maybe three years from now, Bastid and Beauvoir will be neighbors. And how that goes, she said, depends on what happens now. “I think it’s going to be fine for us,” she predicted. “It might be a bit awkward for them.”
Bastid and Beauvoir declined to be interviewed for this article. “Pierre and I deeply regret the inconvenience caused to the neighborhood, despite our efforts to limit it from the onset,” Beauvoir wrote, in a statement forwarded by her construction manager. “Unfortunately, we have all experienced the disagreeable aspects of construction and the unpredictability of the process.”
Block organizers admit they napped as the project won approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Buildings Department. As Penny Shaw, a retired dancer and longtime resident of No. 106 put it, no one anticipated excavations out of Jules Verne. “They just talked about putting two buildings together, and we just said OK,” she recalled. “No one thought they were going to be jackhammering into the center of the Earth.”