Alex Vadukul

A decade later, Stowe is raising a family in suburban North Carolina and driving a 2005 Chevy Malibu. But he has also obsessively been making giant abstract paintings, most of them using the weather-beaten sails that carried his schooner across the globe. He was recently back in New York to visit the Chelsea gallery that is showing his art.

“All this time later, I’m still trying to tell the world the story of what I went through,” said Stowe, 67, during his recent stay in Manhattan. “I’ve departed the touch of earth longer than anyone else. All my paintings carry the vibrations and significance of that journey.”

Tall and blue-eyed, Stowe has chased adventure his whole life. He crossed the Atlantic twice on a tiny catamaran when he was 21; he sailed through icebergs in Antarctica; he was kidnapped by pirates on the Amazon River.

But in the 1980s, Stowe was a striving artist in the downtown New York art scene, hanging out in the same circles as Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel. Jean-Michel Basquiat painted a portrait of him, but Stowe later sold it to fund his expedition. (He accepted $20,000 in 1993; the painting sold for $94,000 at Christie’s seven years later.)

Stowe was in a couple of small group shows in the East Village, but he was always returning to the sea. He hopes this show, at the Paul Calendrillo Gallery, might be his second chance at the art world.

“I was painting on giant canvases before Schnabel was,” he said. “Warhol’s dealer told me I could be big, but he’d say, ‘Well, Reid’s going off on another trip again.’”

Stowe became obsessed with embarking on a 1,000-day journey at sea in the 1970s. His intention was to simulate a round-trip to Mars, and he spent years preparing for it.

His father was an Air Force lieutenant colonel, and he grew up on military bases around the world, but he seemed to show little interest in regimentation after that.

As a young man, he visited the South Pacific, and he later carved the figureheads of Polynesian spirits into his 70-foot schooner for protection. (His ship, which he built himself, is named Anne, for his mother.) He studied Taoist philosophy, and he claims that energy harnessed from tantric sex has powered his long-distance voyages.

In St. Barts, he was a pot smuggler (he spent nine months in jail), and in the 1990s, he lived rent-free on a boat moored to a dock in Chelsea. His three marriages to young women — two artists and a model — all ended in divorce because they wouldn’t commit, he said, to the 1,000-day trip.

Soanya Ahmad was different. She was a 23-year-old photography student when she met Stowe, who was then 55, and one of the first things he asked her was: “How’s your health? Can you spend a long time at sea? It’s important I know.”

In 2007, they departed from Hoboken on a boat stocked with 6 tons of nonperishable provisions and a sprout garden. On Day 15, a freighter hit their schooner. Around Day 300, Ahmad started feeling sick, and a boat picked her up near the coast of Australia. Communicating by a satellite phone, Stowe soon learned that she was pregnant. On Day 457, Ahmad gave birth to Darshen in New York. Stowe met his son for the first time when he arrived on the Hudson two years later.

Since returning to land, Stowe has embraced something close to domesticity. He now lives in the suburbs of Greensboro, North Carolina, at his father’s house with Darshen, who is now 11, and Ahmad.

He mows the lawn, and he likes watching thrillers on television. He takes care of his father, who has Alzheimer’s. Stowe said they all get by modestly on his father’s retirement funds and from his painting sales. Ahmad home-schools Darshen, and Stowe hopes to take his son sailing this winter to Haiti. “He was braver when he was younger,” Stowe said. “He used to laugh at storms. Now he doesn’t like mud. He likes playing a computer game called Fortnite.” Stowe’s schooner is moored on the North Carolina coast and requires serious repairs.

Stowe still thinks about his trip constantly, but he doesn’t miss the spotlight.

As his voyage gained international coverage, he became the subject of derision in a corner of the sailing community. Users of a website called Sailing Anarchy, which caters to regatta racers and yacht owners, started mocking Stowe as a narcissistic hippie with a knack for self-promotion. Still, they followed Stowe’s trip obsessively, and one message board reached over 30,000 comments.

“I guess Stowe is still bobbing around, people continue to give him enough stuff to get by, and he manages to lure in another young thing,” read a typically caustic comment. After Ahmad became pregnant, their scorn intensified. One commenter tracked down Stowe’s federal conviction for pot smuggling, and he also posted a report that Stowe once owed more than $11,000 in child support to the mother of his daughter from his first marriage. (Stowe insists he wasn’t behind on payments).

When the trip ended, the trolls faded away, but Stowe said he lost valuable sponsorship opportunities as a result. Since then, he’s also been trying to publish a memoir.

“They wanted to paint me as this guy who took a young woman to sea, got her pregnant, and abandoned her,” said Stowe. “The truth is I did something no one else had ever done, and I got to go do it with a beautiful girl, and they didn’t like that. They all wanted to be me, but they were stuck behind their computers.”

While Stowe made the trip to New York for the gallery opening, Ahmad, who is now 36, remained in North Carolina to take care of Stowe’s father. “People judged Reid for not being with me, but I supported him being out there,” she said over the phone. “He needed to get that trip out of his system so he could come back. All this judgment came down on us, but we’re all still together, and there’s nothing anyone can say about that.”

She said that suburban life has been an adjustment for him. “He’s had to get used to living in a house,” she said. “It’s difficult sometimes for us to relate to neighbors. They Google us and conversations can be awkward.”

But soon after settling down, Stowe felt compelled to start painting seriously. Every day, he works in a studio in his backyard, and the giant sail canvases he paints on hang from trees with pulley systems. “When a storm comes through, I hear the sails flap, and it makes me feel alive,” said Stowe. “When people see my art, I want them to feel the trip. I want them to walk into the unknown.”

At his gallery show in Chelsea the other day, Stowe reminisced about his days in the downtown New York scene. He was living in a loft on Broome Street, he partied with Keith Haring at Danceteria, and he got written up in a Japanese art magazine. And then there was the Jean-Michel Basquiat portrait session in 1985.

Stowe was in St. Barts on his boat, he recalled, and Basquiat joined him while he was there on vacation.

“He visited me and I showed him my studio. He asked, ‘Can I paint, too?’ I gave him some prime white plywood, and he painted me standing there. You know how he leaves eyes blank? He told me we were looking at each other through those eyes.”

Stowe doesn’t regret selling his Basquiat. “I needed to cut my ties to the earth,” he said. “I had to sell my Basquiat because I wanted to merge my spirit with something as high as God.”

“Art Transformations From the Longest Sea Voyage in History”

Through Oct. 31 at the Paul Calendrillo Gallery, at 548 West 28th Street.

This article originally appeared in

He Sailed the Longest Ocean Voyage in History and Turned It Into Art

NEW YORK — Along a Hudson River pier in 2010, a sailor docked his battered schooner as a crowd watched in quiet anticipation. When he wearily stepped onto land, he had finished a remarkable human journey: Reid Stowe had been at sea for 1,152 days, the longest nonstop ocean voyage in recorded history.

As McGrath shook their hands, he sometimes paused to massage his legs. “I never like sitting when I’m preparing for a run,” he said. “Got to keep the blood moving.”

Posters around the bar illustrated with shamrocks, Irish flags and a photograph of him in jogging shorts indicated the cause of his well-wishers: He was flying to Ireland the next day to participate in a marathon, but it wasn’t going to be any ordinary run.

McGrath has been a publican in New York for 50 years. He has also been a star of the extreme long distance marathon sport known as ultrarunning, jogging alone for days over hundreds of miles, testing the very limits of human endurance.

In 1977, as a 27-year-old bartender, he broke a world record when he ran across America in 53 days, and he was a torch bearer for the 1996 Summer Olympics. He has been called the “Irish Forrest Gump.”

His four-day solo run through Ireland and Northern Ireland would last 100 miles, starting in Belfast and continuing through the countryside of Burren, Dundalk and Drogheda, before ending at a football stadium in Dublin where crowds would cheer him during a halftime show.

But the spectacle would commemorate something else: For McGrath, this would be the final long-distance run.

“I’m running against age,” he said. “My body has changed. I never thought it would happen, but it did, and I want to stop while I’m still ahead. With God’s help, I’m going to walk over that finish line if I have to.”

It has taken McGrath a long time to reach this finish line. He grew up on a barren farm in Northern Ireland, he has owned 10 pubs in New York, and he has run more than 200,000 miles. He struggled with alcoholism for decades, very nearly dying, and he found salvation on asphalt.

At one point, McGrath slipped away to the pub’s second floor, which is lined with jerseys and news clippings from his running years, and he retrieved a faded batonlike object: his Olympic torch. “They let me keep it,” he said. “When I called them to ask how to light it, they told me: ‘You can’t do that. It’s sacred. You can keep it, but if you light it, we’ll come back for it.’”

McGrath grew up without electricity or running water on a farm in County Fermanagh. He had 10 siblings, and their breakfast typically consisted of a salted potato with a glass of milk to dunk it in. He left home when he was 11 to join a clerical brotherhood. “Growing up in the kind of poverty I did,” he said, “that’s how my discipline as a runner all started.”

But he was passionate about sports, and in 1969 he enlisted in a summer program to play Gaelic football for Irish amateur leagues the Bronx.

“When I landed at JFK, everyone seemed in a hurry to go nowhere,” he said. “I’d never seen bigger people in my life. The cars were huge, and I’d never seen a highway.” He resolved to settle in New York, and in 1974 he started running a bar in Queens.

One summer night, his friends didn’t show up for a football match at their local park so he started jogging around the field, and he didn’t stop until three hours later. “That’s the moment I got the bug,” he said. “They call it the ‘runner’s high.’”

McGrath became fanatical about running, and he started jogging seven hours a day. When he discovered that a world record existed for crossing America by foot, he was inspired to beat it.

At the time, Ireland was in the midst of the unrest known as “theTroubles”, so when his Irish friends and bar patrons learned that the record was held by an Englishman, they encouraged McGrath to break it as a matter of patriotic principle. That August, McGrath jogged across the George Washington Bridge, trailed by a Winnebago carrying a three-person support team that included his wife, whom he had married the day before. He arrived in San Francisco 53 days later, breaking the record by 12 hours.

At the finish line, a reporter asked him if he’d ever felt like quitting, and McGrath replied, “Every five minutes.”

When he returned to New York, he was a local hero. His feats accumulated: In 1988, he ran a 1,000-mile marathon in Flushing Meadows Corona Park over 16 days, and a year later, he circled the Central Park Reservoir 740 times, sleeping at night in a trailer beside the track.

But upon finishing these runs, McGrath began celebrating to excess. It became common for him to consume 15 pints of beer in one sitting and to finish his own bar’s vodka supply. He started drinking gin from a mug with a Lipton tea bag on its side, and he sometimes woke up on the floor of his pub at 5 o’clock in the morning.

“When I wasn’t running, I was drinking, and when I wasn’t drinking, I was running,” he said. “My brain was swimming in alcohol. My mind was a fog.”

McGrath swerved between periods of athletic discipline and spiraling episodes of alcohol abuse for years. In 2010, his wife and daughter found him nodding off, his eyes were yellowing over, and he was eventually arrested for driving while intoxicated. Doctors told him he was at imminent risk of liver failure.

The diagnosis rattled McGrath, and he embraced sobriety, immersing himself into long-distance marathon running with ardor. He said he has been sober for nearly a decade now, and his recovery has become central to his identity as an athlete.

In 2016, he published an autobiography, “The Black Sheep: The Fittest/Unfittest Bar Owner in New York,” and his marathons have benefited charities aiding those who struggle with addiction.

McGrath still wrestles with those years. “If I could turn back my clock, I would change a lot of things,” he said.

A short documentary about him features a scene in which he arranges a meeting with his daughter, Kelli. Seated opposite her on a couch, McGrath thanks her for visiting him. “I want to apologize to you,” he says. “I hurt you and Mom, and I’m so sorry.” He asks, “Can you give me a hug to that effect?” McGrath leans across the couch to embrace her.

He lives with his wife, Mena, not far from his pub in Midtown East. He started running the Black Sheep in 1998. The contradictions of a recovering alcoholic tending a bar aren’t lost on him. “I realize I sell alcohol for a living,” he said. “I do my best to make sure people drink in moderation.”

“I say hello to the bottle every day when I go to work,” he added. “But I never forget it is my enemy and that it nearly killed me.”

On the day of his flight to Ireland, McGrath took one of his routine jogs in Midtown. He bounded down Third Avenue wearing an orange T-shirt, neon green track shorts and a fanny pack. Bus drivers waved to him as he ran against traffic, and he stopped to stretch in phone booths.

On 14th Street, he stepped into an old church. He dipped his fingers into holy water and he knelt beside a statue of the Virgin Mary to pray. He said he visited this church every time he took his morning jog. Outside, he began loping back uptown to finish packing his luggage at the Black Sheep.

“I was asking God for the strength to complete this last run,” he said. “He’s known about it for the last six months now.”

Last Saturday, from the hills of Drogheda in Ireland, McGrath reported over a phone call that God was looking out for his right leg, which is prone to injury, and that cars were honking encouragement to him as he jogged along country roads. The next day, he would successfully reach the football stadium, and the crowd would roar as he ran onto the pitch.

But at the moment, the station wagon trailing behind him with food and water had unexpectedly faltered.

“The car broke down before me,” he said. “It broke down. I didn’t.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/nyregion/tom-mcgrath-ultramarathon-ireland.html" id="859f0603-0ac3-3bbf-a08b-76f5780f22eb">The New York Times</a>.

The End of Loneliness for This Long-Distance Runner

NEW YORK — The Black Sheep pub in Midtown was crowded as usual on a recent Friday night, but there was a sense of urgency in the air. Regulars periodically put down their beers to go and wish good luck to the bar’s owner, Tom McGrath, 69, who sat wearing a tracksuit and drinking coffee from a mug.

But he was more than an interloper in Harlem all those years ago. He was the harmonica player in a blues duo called Satan &amp; Adam that started off playing on the sidewalk of 125th Street and then went on to tour the country, make a record that charted, and even appear briefly on a U2 album.

“Back then,” he said, “everyone used to tell me, ‘Don’t go to Harlem.’ I would say, ‘Why not?’”

It was in Harlem that he met Sterling Magee, the guitarist he would play with for the next 12 years. Gussow was in town for the New York premiere of a documentary about the band. The movie, “Satan &amp; Adam,” opened in theaters last month, and it starts streaming on Netflix early this summer.

“I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I’ve finally woken up, and now everything is different.” He turned reflective: “I wonder if anyone still remembers Sterling.”

Long before Gussow’s arrival in Harlem, Sterling Magee had been a neighborhood eccentric who called himself “Mr. Satan.” He was the bluesman of 125th Street, wailing on electric guitar, singing soulfully, and stamping out a rhythm with a pair of high-hat cymbals. He had a Moses-like beard, and rumor was he used to play in the bands of Ray Charles and Etta James and had performed with James Brown at the Apollo.

As the story goes, Gussow was getting over a bad breakup, and he wandered up into Harlem one day and encountered Magee. Feeling the blues in his bones, Gussow took out his harmonica and started jamming with him. Passers-by were riveted by the unlikely pair, and Magee’s tip jar filled up quickly, so he said Gussow could come back.

Racial tensions in the winter of 1986 were boiling over in New York in the wake of the Howard Beach attacks and the massive protests that followed. The duo’s image of musical harmony was soon picked up by the media, and they became a local news sensation. They played Central Park SummerStage, appeared on U2’s “Rattle and Hum” album, toured with Bo Diddley, and performed at the New Orleans jazz festival.

“They were playing the kind of Chicago blues I don’t think anyone was playing anymore much less in New York,” said David Fricke, a writer for Rolling Stone. “Here was this guy who did his time in the trenches, and this other guy who could play in that school and galvanize him.” He added, “The fact that they united at a time of racial tension is something important that should be paid mind, but if they sucked, no one would have cared.”

Gussow is 61 and lives in Oxford, Mississippi. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton and he teaches English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi. After his flight into town for the premiere, he was eager to retrace his footsteps in Harlem. Magee did not make the trip. He is 82 and lives in a nursing home in Gulfport, Florida. He doesn’t play the guitar much anymore and his thoughts about the documentary were scattered during a phone interview last month.

“I’m still Mr. Satan,” he said. “I’m Mr. Satan all the way. There’s no explanation. I am truly Satan. The message I’m giving is the truth, and the truth shall set me free.”

I asked if he liked the documentary. After some silence, his caretaker spoke.

“We’ve shown it three times here,” he said, addressing Magee. “Your family saw it at a big showing. Then here at Boca Ciega. Don’t you remember all the fan mail, Sterling?”

“I miss Harlem,” he said. “My music reflects the energy of Harlem because it is my home and she was pretty. Maybe Harlem has changed but I haven’t.”

The tale of two musicians from different walks of life is the familiar heart of the documentary, but as a roiling national conversation about race is taking place in 2019, it’s hard not to wonder how their story fits into New York today. In the film, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who rose to prominence as the organizer of the Howard Beach protests that winter of 1986, considers as much. “To see two people that came from two diametrically opposite existences in the streets of Harlem,” he said, “even if it violates tribal code, takes a lot of self-confidence, a lot of courage, or a lot of ignorance to the environment that you’re in.”

The documentary focuses heavily on the myth of Sterling Magee. Born in 1936 in Mount Olive, Mississippi., he grew up attending a Baptist church and worrying his mother when he discovered the blues. He served as a paratrooper in Germany before recording hits for Ray Charles’ Tangerine label in the 1960s. In the 1980s, he radically reinvented himself in Harlem as Mr. Satan. Eventually, Magee suffered a nervous breakdown and disappeared and is later found by the filmmakers living in Florida.

Gussow’s origins receive less screen time. Born in 1958 and raised in Congers, New York, Gussow’s father, Alan, was a celebrated landscape painter, and his mother, Joan, is an influential nutritionist who The Times once called the “matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement.” A 2010 article in the Home section of The Times visited his mother’s house overlooking the Hudson River, and his uncle, Mel, was a theater critic for The Times. He discovered the harmonica in his teens and he dropped out of graduate school in his 20s to busk on the streets of Paris.

“It’s funny, I think about my class position now sometimes in regards to all this,” Gussow said. “My parents had no money. We grew up poor in a big house. My grandfather was Lithuanian and grew up dirt poor.” His grandfather, he said, later founded a successful publishing company that printed trade magazines. “I had rich grandparents. But they never gave us any money. They lived in Sutton Place, but the world of Saks Fifth Avenue was not my world. I grew up raising chickens.

“The first time I ever felt class was at school,” he continued. “All the kids would go on ski vacations, and my parents got me oversize ski shoes. I’m not complaining, but that’s when I got my first real sense of class. I had a real chip on my shoulder after that because I realized there was this whole world of privilege I didn’t know about. I went to Princeton, but I also cleaned bathrooms at Princeton.”

He added: “Sterling was colorblind to me. I needed mentoring, and he provided that.”

In 2019, this kind of racial imbalance is seen in a much less forgiving light. But Magee said such comparisons fatigued him. “When we get together, I’m Mr. Satan and he’s Mr. Gussow,” he said. “I want to put the message out that Mr. Satan is in love with this person, and that I don’t give a damn about all that stuff.”

Some might say Gussow has grappled with the blues, its appropriation, and privilege in his work as a scholar. In 1995, he wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine about his experiences with Magee, and he later published a memoir, “Mister Satan’s Apprentice.” At the University of Mississippi, according to his faculty page, he has taught courses like “The Blues Tradition in American Literature” and “Cotton, Slavery, Travel, and the Blues.”

V. Scott Balcerek, the film’s director, started documenting the duo in the 1990s. “I guess it always occurred to me Adam might be considered problematic even when I first met him, but I knew his heart was in the right place and that’s what mattered,” he said. As the documentary tours the festival circuit, he said, he’s gotten a few critiques of “white lens,” but he added, “It’s honestly only white people who bring it up.”

As the afternoon progressed, Gussow stopped at a patch of sidewalk on 125th Street. It was his old busking spot with Magee. But the block was unrecognizable to him, and so he moved along to Magee’s old apartment building. No one there remembered much. Magee’s favorite stoop, where he displayed his street art, had become part of a hotel. But at Paris Blues, the dive bar on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Samuel J. Hargress Jr., its owner, remembered the duo and was pleased to see Gussow. “Yes, I remember a good-looking white boy who played the harp,” he said.

Hargress, 83, stepped outside in his three-piece suit and pointed to where Magee used to hang out. He opened the bar in 1969, and he said that Harlem’s gentrification has been good for him. Business is lively and his building’s property value keeps rising.

“I stayed in Harlem because I couldn’t leave,” he said. “I never thought any of this would end up happening.”

“It’s like winning the lottery,” Gussow said.

Hargress then gestured proudly to his bar’s live music schedule.

“Got some rich white boys playing here tonight in fact,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/nyregion/satan-adam-harlem-blues.html" id="8944bcad-81ab-30da-a899-6cc9a6fceb87">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — “I can’t believe how many white people are in Harlem now,” Adam Gussow said. He was strolling around the neighborhood, marveling at how much the place had changed since he was a Columbia University grad-school dropout in the 1980s. “I was the only white guy in Harlem at the time. I just saw a white guy jogging. You never used to see that.”

How Will Satan & Adam Play in 2019?

At the end of a recent Sunday Mass, the Rev. Boniface Ramsey reminded his congregation of this latest crusade. “I just want to talk to you all again for a moment about the wall of St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum,” Ramsey said. “The wall is now in danger of being obscured again by the Spence School. This is a big deal for our parish because there was a relationship between that orphanage and our parish all those years ago.”

As his congregants at St. Joseph’s Church were aware, the neighborhood drama started after a parking garage on East 90th Street was demolished to reveal a forgotten artifact: an eight-story neoclassical facade that was part an orphanage that cared for thousands of children over a century ago.

The orphanage was founded in 1857 and closed around 1920. Today the building is a condominium, its eastern facade improbably untouched, hidden by the garage for decades. But its resurrection will be brief: The lot belongs to Spence, the elite all-girls school, and construction is underway on a facility that will feature nine squash courts and an ecology center. When the building is completed next year, the orphanage facade will be hidden again.

In a statement, Spence said: “The fact that the site will once again serve children, after a hiatus of over a century of connection with St. Joseph’s, should rightfully be honored.”

It added, “While we will never know whether any young girl’s path passed through both our institutions, the inspiring possibility cannot be excluded and should be considered by all.”

A sense of obligation has also motivated Ramsey’s cause. His church and the orphanage were affiliated, and they both tended to the German immigrants of the Yorkville neighborhood in the late 1800s. Several weeks ago, after the garage came down, he started mentioning the wall during sermons and in church bulletins, and he recently wrote to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Before a recent Catholic youth league basketball game, Ramsey walked three blocks north to the future Spence site. “My aim is to make a fuss about this, and I will continue to make a fuss about this,” he said. “What frustrates me is that Spence should have consulted with the neighborhood. All I want is a plaque. Something that will show what was here. That way the privileged children of Spence can know that children who had no such privilege came before them.”

Crusading against Spence is not quite as daunting as speaking out against the diocese. Outside his parish, Ramsey, 73, is best known as a whistleblower in the sexual abuse case of Theodore E. McCarrick, a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington. But the private schools of Manhattan can be formidable institutions to meddle in the affairs of. Ramsey is unfazed.

“I’m intimidated by the cardinal,” he said. “Not the Spence School.”

Spence was founded in 1892, and it sits a block from Central Park on East 91st Street. The school’s tuition, according to its website, is about $52,000 per year, and its alumnae include Gwyneth Paltrow, Kerry Washington and Anna Wintour’s daughter. The future athletic facility, which is known as Spence 412, will feature a regulation basketball court and a dance studio. Spence purchased the site for $26 million in 2011.

An email from the school’s real estate lawyer viewed by The New York Times suggested concern as Ramsey’s cause gained notice. “We should talk,” the note began. “I have been watching this grow from a cute little story to the sprouting of a public campaign.”

“Apparently, one of the Good Father’s options,” it continued, “is to request that LPC” — a reference to the Landmarks Preservation Commission — “begin the designation process for landmarking the building. You can’t make this stuff up. Call me for more and a few suggestions.”

Although the orphanage wall is now at the center of a distinctly New York drama, part of its facade had been visible to perceptive pedestrians for decades. But most knew little about its past, including Ramsey, who recognized the structure only from a book about St. Joseph’s history. Urgency about the wall’s fate accelerated last month after the weekly community newspaper Our Town ran a story about Spence’s plans for the lot.

“We don’t think of ourselves as the Upper East Side,” Ramsey said. “We’re Yorkville. So, when I found out one of the last real parts of old Yorkville was about to disappear on the account of people not from here, who didn’t even ask anybody, I had to do something.”

A kind of preservationist fever has since spread around the neighborhood.

“When the girls who go to Spence grow up, I think they will be disappointed to find out what the parents did to the orphanage wall,” said Zora Szemenyei Silber, 62, a retired elementary schoolteacher and part of St. Joseph’s congregation. “Children don’t forget.”

Jim Sidebotham, 68, expressed disdain when he visited the facade. “Like Spence needs more space,” he said. “Squash courts? Just what the girls need. That’s got to be the height of effete, elite snobbery.”

Ben Kallos, a City Council member who represents the Upper East Side, has been trying to temper such passions. “The wall takes us back to the roots of Yorkville, and it harkens back to ‘Oliver Twist,'” Kallos said.

But, he added, Spence lawfully secured its rights to the site long before there was interest in the orphanage. “I’m hopeful Spence can come up with a solution, but I’m also not sure how much can realistically be done now, and how fair it would be to the school so far into their project.”

This month, Ramsey appeared resigned to the fate of the facade. “It looks dim,” he said. But last week, as news of the cause spread, Spence agreed to hear Ramsey’s complaints. Kallos organized a meeting in his offices.

Spence was represented by its head of school, its architect, a member of its communications team and its lawyer. Ramsey arrived alone and brought with him a large book containing baptismal records of the orphanage, its tattered pages filled with rows of cursive handwriting.

Spence proposed ideas: creating a permanent exhibit to honor the site’s past, having Ramsey talk to students during an assembly, starting a scholarship named after the orphanage. “It seemed like they really wanted to accommodate me,” Ramsey said afterward. “I don’t know how many of those ideas will ever go further than that room.”

The school did agree to his main request: a commemorative plaque.

Back at his church, Ramsey reflected on his quest. “I feel I went to bat for the orphans,” he said. “Now I won’t have to go marching up and down the building site with a placard to protest the whole thing. But if that ends up being necessary, I’ll come back.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/nyregion/spence-school-orphanage.html" id="5c1d1f7b-6af3-311b-ab5d-c67b5d36f9f8">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — It sounds like something out of Dickens: A wealthy private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side wants to build a multimillion-dollar athletic facility that will shroud the remnants of a 19th-century orphanage that was uncovered during demolition. The only thing standing in its way is the local priest — the same man whose accusations led to a cardinal’s being defrocked by the pope.

The Private School vs. the Priest

Radiators hiss in its cracked tile floor lobby. Dusty, unused keys hang behind a reception desk. Dark halls are lined with hundreds of boarding rooms empty except for worn mattresses. A few of these cubicles are occupied,stuffed with clothes and belongings. Steam rises from a shower stall. Light flickers behind doors. And a lullaby can be heard through the building when a 70-year-old poet and artist who calls himself Sir Shadow draws at night.

Sir Shadow is one of six men who are the final residents of the Whitehouse Hotel. The crumbling four-story building is one of the last of the cheap single-room-occupancy hotels that lined the Bowery a century ago alongside brothels and saloons and defined the area as a symbol of urban despair. While rooms across the street at the Bowery Hotel cost around $400 a night, the men pay no more than $8.50 for their cramped cubicles, although they pretty much have the run of the place.

Sir Shadow hums for inspiration, as his slender hand strikes a sketchpad with a silver marker and swirls deliriously, never leaving the page, as though he were signing a signature. The elegant silhouette, formed with one continuous line, depicts a saxophone player. He blurs through more: a jazz ensemble featuring a trumpet and upright bass; a drummer in the flurry of a solo. His musicians are faceless abstractions.

“I’m a doctor and this is the medication for my patients,” he said one afternoon. “My medicine is positivity. Every line is based on what’s in my heart.”

Sir Shadow arrived at the Whitehouse Hotel around 1995, and he has become a kind of Bowery folk hero since then. At 6-foot-4, he sleeps diagonally to fit into his windowless cubicle. Rarely without his fedora, he gets around on a red electric scooter and draws his blues and jazz musicians across the neighborhood. He calls his one-line style Flowetry, which can be found in the calendars he sells. Quincy Jones, Lauryn Hill and Diana Ross are said to be fans.

But his masterpiece might be the Whitehouse Hotel itself. Nearly every hallway and boarding room contains a Sir Shadow mural. Even the keys behind the reception desk are marked with his musical silhouettes.

“This building is my canvas,” he said. “These drawings are my warriors. They bring me my peace.”

But serenity is a privilege in New York. Sir Shadow’s sanctuary seems destined to meet the fate of every other flophouse.

Lodging houses like the Whitehouse Hotel, which sits at 340 Bowery and opened in 1916, were all over New York’s Skid Row. Dozens of these buildings date back nearly to the Civil War. The Alabama Hotel, the Grand Windsor Hotel, the Providence Hotel — their cell-like stalls had chicken wire rather than ceilings, and they cost pennies per night. They became the primitive dwellings of desperate men who gradually saw no benefits to ever checking out.

In the 1990s, change came to the Bowery, and most of the old flops were developed into restaurants and hotels.But the men clinging on in the remaining hotels were protected by housing laws that gave them the rights of permanent residents. Eviction became a complicated procedure, and real-estate developers have had to contend with these holdouts ever since.

Sir Shadow and his fellow holdouts are in their 60s and 70s: Wayne, Roland, Rob, Bobby, and Charles (there’s also Louis, but he’s in the hospital and I’m told he’s not coming back). They pass by one another with grumbled greetings and take showers in a fluorescent-lit basement bathroom. Chess is played in the lobby. Two men have a bitter grudge and have hardly spoken in years.

I met Rob in a dark hallway. Heavyset and missing teeth, he said he had good reasons to withhold his full name. “Shadow is a great artist,” he said. “I’m an artist, too. I’m a shoe shiner. This is an old hotel. I think of myself as a survivor here.”

Roland spends hours in a chair overlooking a sparse backyard.

In the lobby, a handwritten note reads, “Wayne, your sister called.”

One afternoon, Sir Shadow’s philosophical musings were interrupted when a yell rose from another cubicle: “Hey, I’m trying to sleep over here!”

“We all live in our own little worlds here,” Sir Shadow said. “I might not see even someone else for days. They’ve tried to get us to take deals. We’ve all wondered: take the money or not? Leave or stay? Now we’re the last men standing.”

But Sir Shadow’s artistic life is entwined with the building. “I might have this little room in the Whitehouse Hotel,” he said, “but this room keeps me free. I can’t be at some job. That would ruin my flow. A man with a million dollars doesn’t have what I have.

“All that matters to me is the next poem,” he added. “The next drawing. And I have to be ready to receive it. All the other stuff? That’s someone else’s problem.”

One afternoon last summer, Sir Shadow composed his one-line drawings for tourists at his regular spot in Washington Square Park. He hummed his lullaby as he drew in his sketchpad.

“Those who try to be great are cursed,” Sir Shadow said. “They have to worry about failure and perfection. No true artist says, ‘I’m great.'”

A young woman said she liked his abstract style.

“You must narrow down to your inner peace,” he offered. “Find that time you were in the trees and floating in the breeze.”

In fact, the artist deflected nearly every comment about his work into philosophical musings. Especially questions about his life.

Did he grow up in New York? “I’m from the universe.”

How long has he been an artist? “I started today.”

Why does he draw jazz musicians? “I never said they were musicians.”

Then there’s Sir Shadow’s least favorite question: What is your real name?

Sir Shadow can lose his temper when pressed about his past. His mood darkened when I told him I found clues about his life in old newspaper articles, a student documentary he’d forgotten about, and within a self-published book of his early poetry at a library in Harlem. I knew who he was before he became Sir Shadow.

The artist was born Thomas Allen Paxton in 1949, and he grew up in Queens. He was raised in a sprawling housing project, and he was an artistic child who wrote poetry about life in his neighborhood. He dropped out of Jamaica High School. He declined to discuss his family.

In the 1970s, he told me, he heard about the countercultural movement in San Francisco, and he boarded a cross-country bus.

He instantly embraced the city’s vibrant creative energy and resolved to stay there. He started sleeping on the beach, hanging out with artists, and devoting himself to his poetry. His idyll ended when he heard that his brother died in Queens. “He died for some stupid reason on the street,” he said. “I tried to show him the way but he wanted to be tough and do drugs. Prison changed him. That was hard for me.”

The tragedy triggered a spiritual awakening. “I got the calling after that,” he said. “I realized my mission is to spread positivity through my art. I couldn’t help my brother, but maybe I can help others with my energy.”

He also retired his birth name, a topic he avoided for weeks until we visited a facility in Harlem where he archives his work, and I noticed a label attached to his unit: “Thomas Paxton.” He was brief when I asked about it. “That’s for legal things,” he said. He visibly winced when a receptionist at the storage space addressed him as “Mr. Paxton.” Reluctantly, he offered: “People always ask me about the name my mother gave me. I say, ‘She gave me a name. Then I picked another name.’ Everything that’s real in life has a shadow. And I’m dealing with the shadow of us all.”

He soon returned to New York and he was homeless through the 1980s. He said he lived in subway tunnels and wrote his poetry on underground walls. At the height of the crack epidemic, he served a short sentence in prison for larceny. He insists he was wrongly accused and calls this period his “kidnapping.” Idling in his cell, he kept writing.

“One day I read my poetry out loud,” he said. “Then everyone wanted to hear more.” He recounted how his writings inspired inmates, and they started trading cigarette packs for his poems. Guards privately asked him to critique their own artwork. “I was touching people, and they were touching me,” he said. “They had to kick me out of that prison. I had more work to do.”

After his release, he shed his past, and sobriety became a theme of his poetry. Some years later, while studying for the GED, he suddenly felt compelled to draw in the margins of his coursework: long, flowing lines. “The gift discovered me,” he said. “The line happens and I start to feed it. People say I draw fast but each line has taken me my whole life.”

His metamorphosis complete, Sir Shadow started falling into the city’s black arts scene in the 1990s. His art hung in the homes of Isaac Hayes, Oprah Winfrey and Whitney Houston, according to the New York Amsterdam News, and it was displayed at soul food institutions like Sylvia’s and Londel’s in Harlem. Choreographer Rod Rodgers let him sketch dancers at his company in the East Village, and he designed the art for Gil Scott-Heron’s album “Spirits,” in 1994. “He was my brother,” Sir Shadow said. “We used to talk philosophical.”

André De Shields, who played the Wiz in the 1975 Broadway musical “The Wiz,” described a decadeslong spiritual kinship with the artist. “Shadow’s true power is that he doesn’t explain what he does,” he said. “I once told him, ‘People are impressed with you because you’ve done something they’ve failed to do their entire lives. You are free.'”

But if Sir Shadow’s artistic devotion is all-consuming, it can also be abrasive. Displeased once with a question I asked, he warned: “I created you. I can write you off my stage at any time.” Of a lover, he said: “She wanted me to stay. I said: ‘My work is all that matters. I don’t need anybody.’ I took my shoes and shirt and left.” I later asked if he ever got lonely. “It’s not lonely,” he said. “It’s overwhelming. I have to let the world know this energy exists.”

Sir Shadow hasn’t had a job in decades, although he can leave from a session in Washington Square Park with a tidy sum of $20 bills. But he also relies on patronage. One afternoon this fall he took a bus uptown and parked his scooter outside an office building on 42nd street. He approached the security desk with a portfolio of his work. “Tell them it’s Shadow,” he said. The artist was there to visit his friend and patron, Anita Durst.

Another surreal accent of Sir Shadow’s life is his connection to the Durst family, one of the oldest and most powerful real estate dynasties in New York, owning properties like One World Trade Center. Durst is the founder of Chashama, a nonprofit arts organization, and Sir Shadow became her first artist in 1995. She honored him with a gala at 4 Times Square (a Durst-owned property) last year. “She’s very good to me,” he said. “She lets me use her penthouse whenever I need it. If I need to eat or sleep or use the computer or if I need to meditate. She once sent a butler, a masseuse and a cook to my hospital when I had a bad leg.”

In a room on the 32nd floor, a sea gull flew past the window. He fetched a plate of food in the office kitchen, where a poem of his (“The Inner You”) was taped to a wall, and he spread his drawings across the table. Durst arrived, and they greeted each other with smiles.

“His work connects to me on an emotional level,” she said, considering his latest drawings. “It sings to me. His love for life is what comes through in his poems.” She expressed concern that his hundreds of thousands of drawings and poems, heaps of which are stored haphazardly around the Whitehouse Hotel, need to be archived. “We’ve tried some things but they haven’t worked for him,” she said.

“I’m leaving it all to her,” said Sir Shadow. “My job was to bring it into the world, and now I’ve done that. Like the birds and the bees, she’s part of my life.” Sir Shadow gave her a copy of the 2019 Flowetry calendar before she returned to work. An assistant slid his kale salad into a takeout box, and he lumbered through the quiet corporate office.

By the time Sir Shadow arrived at the Whitehouse Hotel in the mid-90s, the flophouses were grim decaying dwellings filled with stories of men with hollow stares who never left their beds. Housing reformers won a landmark decision that led to many of them being closed, and developers set their sights on the neighborhood. But as the Bowery changed, the Whitehouse Hotel endured, and in 2000, it became a hostel. Thirty holdout tenants remained, and while some despised the young backpackers, Sir Shadow welcomed a new audience for his art. The lobby became his gallery, and he composed hundreds of drawings in rooms across the building.

The hostel failed in 2014, and the Whitehouse finally became a phantom building stuck in time. A slow-moving drama regarding its future has been occurring for a decade. In 2007, a hotelier named Sam Chang bought the property for $7.8 million, but shortly after that, 340 Bowery was unexpectedly included in the NoHo Historic District, hampering development. In 2014, the property was sold to the Renatus Group, but development has been hindered by Sir Shadow and his compatriots. A few residents have died, and buyouts have lured away others. The men who remain have refused these deals. The Whitehouse Hotel’s future appears to now hinge on a grim but simple waiting game.

Curiously, a few custodians maintain the building, some having worked there since it was an operational flophouse. “They say everyone has their price,” one of the custodians, Will Gens, said during a night shift. “But I don’t know about these guys. I don’t think some of them would take half a million dollars. It comes down to fear. Fear to leave the womb. They are comfortable here. And the outside world is an unknown.”

Gens considered Louis, the holdout in the hospital. “He was offered a good deal just recently,” he said. “But he told me: ‘Not yet. I’ll take it in a few years.’ He got sick a few weeks later.”

Worrying about the future is a primitive concept Sir Shadow doesn’t indulge in. But he will readily admit he’s concerned about the legacy of his art. He mentioned his hope that the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture might one day recognize his work. But his diabetes is getting worse, and he receives dialysis several mornings a week. He laments how brunch crowds in the Bowery are more interested in mimosas than supporting a local artist.

“Sometimes I think maybe the mission is over,” he said. “But I think I’ve helped the world become a better place. I did what the universe asked me to do.”

We were playing chess in the lobby of the Whitehouse Hotel one night when a family entered the building. Somebody must have let them in: a well-dressed man with slicked white hair and his wife and two college-age children. They had eaten dinner nearby and the man wanted to explore the property. His wife cheerily explained that they owned some buildings upstate and claimed that her husband had become obsessed with the Whitehouse Hotel. Apparently it wasn’t his first visit.

The man eagerly studied the crumbling lobby in his leather loafers as he thumbed out some $20 bills for Sir Shadow. Soon, he would tour the dark halls upstairs. But Sir Shadow wasn’t interested in the reasons for his visit. He reached for his sketchpad.

“So tell me,” he asked. “What’s your favorite instrument?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/nyregion/sir-shadow-maestro-of-the-last-of-the-bowery-flophouses.html" id="24230355-8f7e-3728-a97c-6bf3b31d3393">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — There’s a ghostly old flophouse on the Bowery. Rowdy brunch crowds stumble past its stained-glass windows and locked double doors. It’s lonesome but not empty.

Sir Shadow, the Maestro of a Bowery Flophouse

Only days before the Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village, a mob of some 20 local men descended on the southern edge of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Using power saws and axes, they leveled a grove of trees that was known as a gay cruising spot.

According to a New York Times report at the time, “15 dogwood trees, 11 London planes, a number of wild-cherry trees and other greenery” were felled. The parks department estimated the trees would cost $15,000 to replace — more than $100,000 today. All while police officers reportedly stood by.

By the morning of June 21, all that remained were heaps of severed trunks and tree stumps oozing sap.

A number of the “vigilantes,” as they were referred to in the press, lived in an apartment complex near the park. A few weeks earlier they had formed a committee and started harassing men who met among the trees. The locals patrolled the area nightly, using walkie-talkies to communicate with one another. When they would find a couple, they shined flashlights on them and rousted the men — who were often closeted, married or both — from the park. Eventually, they razed the site.

An eyewitness to the destruction of the trees, Joan Luxenburg, told The New York Times some days later that she had reported the vandalism to the police in the area and offered to identify at least one of the men, but that the officers ignored her. According to her, the police said that the men “were doing a job which the police were not able to do to the satisfaction of the community.”

Another man, who declined to give his name, said the police chatted with the men responsible and left without making an arrest. The police denied witnessing the crime.

One of the so-called vigilantes, a 26-year-old lawyer, told a reporter from The Times, “Admittedly it was against the law, but we had police consent,” adding that his group was “concerned for the safety of the women and children.”

A woman interviewed at the time, however, said: “They say they were protecting mothers and children? Nonsense. What mothers and children are out at 1 o’clock in the morning?”

A subsequent letter to the editor by a Brooklyn man named William J. Primavera argued: “The excuse of protecting their wives and children is absurd. Homosexuals are not in the park looking for wives and children. Besides, I’m sure that a woman would rather share a park with some homosexuals instead of 30 or 40 vigilantes, running around with walkie-talkies and flashlights, scaring people.”

One gay rights group that brought attention to the incident was the Mattachine Society, which started a fund to replant the trees. Randy Wicker, 81, who is one of its last surviving members, recalled what happened in a recent phone interview. “People were always trying to destroy these areas where men would gather and frolic,” he said. “But Queens was another world. There weren’t even any gay bars there yet. And this case was unusual because it was an organized vigilante incident with the approval of local people. I’m sure those men just wanted to cut the trees that night, but what if it had gotten worse?

“The story is just so suburban,” he added. “Chain saws? In Manhattan, you couldn’t go into Central Park with chain saws to chop down a cruising spot like the Ramble. We don’t do that here.”

Queens was known as a fiercely conservative borough at the time, said Brendan Fay, a longtime gay activist in Queens, and public parks served as vital meeting places for gay men. “People think of sex when they think of cruising, but these were places we went to hold hands, to touch, to embrace. These men were usually married and closeted, and this vigilante group taunted and shamed these men who were meeting to fulfill a basic human need.”

Today, the park is near a lonesome train yard near 78th Avenue and Grand Central Parkway. A sitting area near the site is dedicated to Ilse Metzger, an Austrian woman who escaped the Nazis in World War II and settled in Forest Hills. Last month, an Irish pub a couple of blocks away had hoisted a gay pride flag across its entrance, and a Black Lives Matter poster hung in the window of a nearby house. At the apartment building where members of the vigilante group lived, which is now known as the Forest Hills South complex, a doorman said he’d never heard of the incident. “I’ve been here for over 20 years and I talk to all the old-timers,” he said. “I don’t think anyone involved is still around anymore. Not once have I heard of anything like this.”

After Stonewall, the Village became even more of a haven for gay life, but change came slower to Queens. In 1990, the borough experienced a turning point when Julio Rivera, a gay bartender, was beaten to death by three men in Jackson Heights, resulting in public demonstrations. In 1993, Queens held its first pride parade, and in 2009, it elected Daniel Dromm, who helped organize the parade and is openly gay, to the City Council.

Dromm, 63, who has been an LGBTQ activist in Queens since the 1980s, was accustomed to getting calls from men about harassment in cruising areas across the borough. “I’d always have to say, ‘You need to get me somebody who is willing to let me use their real name.’ But I could never get names so there wasn’t much I could do,” he said. “This was typical of cruising areas because these men were usually married, and no one wanted to challenge the police. But those cruise areas aren’t really around anymore. Now everyone goes online or they cruise on Grindr or at the bar.”

Dromm was familiar with the case of the trees being cut down in Forest Hills, however, and he remembered that he still occasionally got calls about late-night activity in the park years later — despite the neighborhood vigilantes of 1969.

“Well,” he pointed out, “the trees grew back.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/automobiles/when-an-ax-wielding-mob-leveled-a-gay-cruising-spot-as-police-watched.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

When an ax-wielding mob leveled a gay cruising spot, as police watched

(Past Tense): NEW YORK — In 1969, Forest Hills was a long way from Christopher Street, and a bizarre incident of vigilante tree chopping showed just how far.

Alex Vadukul

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