Will old Bronx courthouse find new life?
Photo by Jeanmarie Evelly
By Jeanmarie Evelly
motthavenherald.com
The former Bronx Courthouse, the enormous, stately building at the corner of East 161st Street and Third Avenue, has been empty for 31 years.
Now, there’s been a flurry of activity, as its owner seeks a tenant. He’s enlisted a local blogger to help publicize the effort, and says he’s ready to rent part of it to a health club, if more grandiose ideas for the entire building don’t come to fruition soon.
The building was once the only bustling courthouse in the borough. Today, it’s beautiful but abused. A chain-link fence seals it off, but graffiti artists have still managed to deface it. Just under an ornate statue of Lady Justice, someone has spray-painted the word BRONX in pink block letters.
The city closed the doors of the courthouse in 1978 and allowed it to fall into ruin.
For years, the neighborhood nonprofit Nos Quedamos fought to acquire the property to convert it into Melrose’s town hall–a community center with a library and even an office for the Bronx Borough President–that it envisioned as an emblem of the neighborhood’s rebirth.
Politics got in the way. The Giuliani administration, at odds with Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, turned its back on Nos Quedamos, which had raised millions earmarked for renovations, not for purchase.
Instead the city auctioned the courthouse off to developers—twice. The current owners, Henry Weinstein and his business partner Benjamin Klein, bought the building for $300,000 in 1998.
Now, they say they are once again looking for tenants to occupy the old courthouse and that they hope it can be turned into something to serve the neighborhood.
“We really had our hearts set on community use for this building, but somehow we’re finding it difficult to identify a substantial enough user,” said Weinstein in an interview.
Yolanda Gonzalez, the head of Nos Quedamos, said that while the group hasn’t reached out to Weinstein directly, it remains very much interested in the building.
“We’re still looking to see how we can work with the current owner, making sure we can bring the building back to its original purpose–to serve the public,” Gonzalez said in an interview. “It was built with public dollars.”
She’s approached almost daily, she said, by members of the community who want to know what’s going on with the building and who are frustrated by the fact that it remains derelict.
But Weinstein insists the years of vacancy are not the result of neglect but of waiting for the right tenant.
“I always could have turned it into self storage, but I felt it was such a nice building, it would be a crime,” he said. “I bought it for a cheap price, so because of that, I thought I could really afford to wait.”
Several businesses have expressed interest, Weinstein said, including a medical group and a health club.
But he’s still hoping a school or a nonprofit will come through to rent the space, he said, adding he does not object to setting aside a portion of the building for community use, possibly in the form of a daycare center or an afterschool program.
Last year, the building was slated to become the home of a new charter school, the Bronx Academy of Promise, but the school pulled out.
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