http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/fashion/new-york-secret-garden-anna-wintour-bob-dylan.html 2016-09-28 21:21:55 New York’s Secret Garden A hidden oasis in Greenwich Village that Anna Wintour, Bob Dylan and Baz Luhrmann have called home. === In 2008, the photographer and The house is part of the It’s a secret garden in the middle of the city, hidden from the street. Each home comes with its own small backyard that borders on the larger common area shared by all. Eight doors up from Mr. Carrozzini is the townhouse belonging to his good friends Across the garden, on the Sullivan Street side, is “You could go across the garden to your friends’ house in a way that’s so, so rare in New York,” Ms. Shaffer said. Ms. Wintour’s neighbors include Emanuele Della Valle, the Italian fashion entrepreneur, who bought his house from Richard Gere in 2007. His father, Recently, the Australian film director “The garden,” as residents call it, was created in 1921 as a cooperative community for middle-class professionals who were being squeezed into large apartment blocks. Residents of the Bleecker Street and Houston Street buildings to the north and south overlook the open space from back windows and balconies, but only tantalizingly; they don’t have access to the grounds. If the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District conjures images of “Rear Window,” with its These days, the garden more resembles a fashion-and-art-world Peyton Place. Mr. Carrozzini would drop by the Clementes’ to drink coffee and play the board game tombola, or meet on the rooftops to get filmmaking tips from Mr. Luhrmann, his neighbor. “Baz called me ‘the boy on the roof,’ I called him ‘the man on the roof,’” Mr. Carrozzini said. “We’d meet on the roof and have long chats.” But like Mr. Luhrmann, he is leaving the garden. After an extensive renovation, he Still, he said, there is nowhere else in the city he would rather live. “That backyard is a bit of an island within the craziness of New York,” Mr. Carrozzini said. “It’s magical at night.” The garden has attracted creative, celebrated New Yorkers for decades. “Varèse was the most amazing guy,” said Alexander Rower, known as Sandy, who grew up on the garden. “He used to come by our house, and he’d never ring the doorbell. He’d just hit things with his cane. It was the sonic hello.” The Rowers lived on the Macdougal Street side, in a townhouse that the artist Alexander Calder bought in the early ’60s for his daughter, Mary, who is Mr. Rower’s mother. The parents were village bohemians who kept exotic pets, including, for a time, a baby tiger. John Hammond Jr., the blues musician Like many garden families, the Rowers and the Hammonds socialized together. John Hammond Sr. was a famed music producer and talent scout who championed or discovered Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, among others. In his book, “ “You see your neighbors. Nobody has built walls,” Mr. Rower said of the garden ethos. “It’s about not building walls. It’s about being a community.” For many residents, Mr. Rower’s mother, When the actor Richard Gere built on the roof of his home what his architect called a “penthouse meditation room,” a kind of temple for the Dalai Lama to pray when he visited Mr. Gere, a practicing Buddhist, “it was hated by the preservationists of the community, including my mom,” Mr. Rower said. And when the actor planted, along his portion of the low common hedgerow, a tall privacy hedge, it was unceremoniously chopped down by the other residents. After his mother died in 2011, Mr. Rower, who had been living with his wife and children on Gramercy Park and who is the president of the Another is Sarah Guthrie Melvin, 73, who moved with her parents into a rental floor-through at 82 Macdougal in 1943, when she was a newborn. She has spent virtually her entire life on the garden. Since the mid-’60s, Ms. Melvin, a retired advertising creative director, and her husband, In those days, Ms. Melvin said: “It was mostly professional working people, writers, people in advertising, music people. But it wasn’t the top echelons of money-making like today.” Each spring, the residents held Digging Day, when everyone would help do the planting and serve a potluck lunch. And on Christmas Eve, the garden kids would line up, holding candles and wearing red capes, and sing carols they had rehearsed for the adults. Then everyone, from Rowers to Kelloggs to Cohens, would sing together around a tree. There was a greens committee, a parent committee and a resident-run nursery school for the garden kids, who numbered into the dozens in those baby-boomer years. After school and on weekends, the garden teemed with children running and playing. One winter when she was little, Ms. Melvin said, her parents oversaw the flooding of the garden to make an ice-skating pond, and later when her two boys were growing up, she and her husband with the assistance of other parents did the same. Ms. Shaffer, part of the recent generation of garden kids, said, “The biggest thing for us was In this enclosed world, children had freedom to wander, and parents the freedom to turn their backs. (“Sometime they will disappear,” Ms. Clemente said. “But you know they are in someone’s house.”) With their security, close-knit community and continuity over generations, the garden residents lived like citizens of a small town. “It was an amazing scene,” said Mr. Hammond, 73. “It’s hard to describe to someone who didn’t grow up there or has never seen it. It was a real difference from outside on the street.” On a recent Saturday afternoon, Mr. Elffers, 69, dressed in black pants and a jaunty straw hat, led a visitor on a stroll. He accessed the hidden green the only way possible: by walking through the ground floor of his residence, into his backyard, and opening the gate of a rickety iron fence. “As you know, in real estate, location, location, location,” Mr. Elffers said in Dutch-accented English. “Well, this is pure location.” On either side were the colorfully painted townhouses with their French doors leading out to small yards, some tidily kept, some growing wild. The common garden was a flat lawn stretching for perhaps the length of half a football field, with no flowers or plantings. Here in the density of Lower Manhattan, an expanse of grass and open blue sky was seemingly its own horticultural achievement. Walking a stone path, Mr. Elffers said, “You feel immediately that it is unique, yes?” Undoubtedly. Yet the garden was empty. A jungle gym stood at the south end, and a basketball hoop at the north, but not a single garden kid was using them. There were no midday strollers, no one reading a book under a shade tree, no green thumb tending to a flower bed. Where was the riot of children and families? “That has changed because the houses became so expensive,” Mr. Elffers said, sitting on a bench near Ms. Wintour’s home. “The more money, the families become smaller and smaller.” It was a weekend in late summer. Residents were on vacation or away at their country houses. Ms. Clemente was in Italy, at her family house on the Amalfi Coast. Mr. Elffers and Ms. Steir had recently returned from Vermont. The couple, who have no children, moved to the garden in the early ’90s, after living in SoHo. At the time the houses were selling for $1 million to $2 million. The doctor who had previously owned their home had been there since the 1920s, Mr. Elffers said. Garden residents tend to stay for decades, or move only within the community, or, like Mr. Rower, return to take over their parents’ houses. A covenant in the bylaws gives them first dibs when a property comes for sale, helping to keep the garden a shared secret. As Mr. Elffers put it, “Everybody here believes in the magic of the location.” Indeed, the homes were cheaply and quickly constructed, with small rooms and party walls, and they are now more than 170 years old, so repairs are common. For the going price, around $13 million, someone can live in a larger townhouse or a brand-new triplex with a doorman. But the setting is priceless. And such a cooperatively shared private greenspace would be all but impossible to recreate in Manhattan today. The developer of the garden, a businessman named William Sloane Coffin, persuaded the residents to give up part of their property to create the common court. Even in the ’20s, some Macdougal Street owners didn’t want to give as much land, which is why the yards on the Sullivan Street side are smaller. These days, Mr. Rower said, “There is much less a sense of community.” Digging Day, the annual event that many older residents cherished, hasn’t taken place for several years. Now a landscaping firm does the work. Gideon Gil, the current president of the Macdougal-Sullivan Garden Association, said the springtime ritual is no longer an annual occurence because the garden, with its old-growth trees, has become more complicated to maintain. Still, Mr. Gil, who works in commercial real estate and As Mr. Elffers put it, philosophically, “The nature of the garden over the decades changes.” Alden Duer Cohen is the oldest and most tenured resident of the garden. Her father, Leland B. Duer, a lawyer, was one of the founding homeowners. Her mother, Marjorie, was the first “chairman of the civic committee.” After renting for many years, Ms. Cohen and her husband bought a house on the Sullivan Street side and raised four children there. Sitting in the tiny ground-floor kitchen of that same house, with its pegboard wall organizer, Ms. Cohen said: “We bought for $50,000. And that was the most that had ever been paid for a house in the garden. And I thought, ‘What are we doing?’ That was 1960.’” Ms. Cohen, a retired journalist and literary agent, is guarded about her age but said she grew up on the garden in the ’30s and remembers many of her long-gone neighbors: Dan Fuller, who had two daughters and ran a fabrics company; Richard Kellogg, who lived with his mother and sister and self-published a history of the garden; Mary Rower, who “always made the ham” for the Digging Day potluck. And Ms. Cohen noted with regret the absence of young families, the loss of some of the communal togetherness, the cessation of Digging Day. “All of the cooperation that happened in the garden you suddenly realized happened because people didn’t have the money to sponsor gardeners,” Ms. Cohen said. “Every year, it seems to me, something gets dropped. And I think it’s sad.” Ms. Cohen held her head back and laughed, “But, you know, I feel also like an old crone saying, ‘It ain’t like it used to be.’ ” Still, there are many things that haven’t changed. Mr. Rower has three young children, which marks a third generation of Rowers in the garden. And Ms. Clemente’s own twin boys, now adults, still live in their townhouse, so there are two generations of Clementes. Mr. Gil has four young children, and “much to the dismay of some neighbors,” he said, the new crop of garden kids play soccer and other games like their predecessors. Moreover, through the residents’ dedicated conservation and willingness to live so openly and communally, the garden itself remains an oasis. “We even have fireflies in the summertime,” Ms. Clemente said. “In July they are here. Can you believe: fireflies on Bleecker Street?”