Charles Fitzgerald: The Accidental Force Behind St. Mark’s Place
In the beginning, Manhattan real estate was cheap. Dirt cheap. And this gave anyone the opportunity to shape its future. Charles Fitzgerald seized that opportunity and helped turn St Mark’s Place into the corridor we know today. The following account is based on Charles’ recollections of his life and work on this block.
He came to St Mark’s Place by happenstance in 1959. A recent college graduate teaching English composition at N.Y.U. and the New School, he rented a place on Minetta Lane only to discover that his lessor was himself a lessee and, worse, not paid rent for two years. Charles was kicked out before he moved in. The friend helping out with his moving truck offered to let Charles stay with him at 11 St Mark’s. Rent was only $5/month. But you got what you paid for. Charles describes St. Mark’s at the time as a desolate corridor, with more boarded up storefronts than trees and stores combined. To get to this apartment, you had to transverse an empty storefront and then enter through the bathroom. Nonetheless, desperate times call for desperate measures. And Charles took the deal.
A short time into Charle’s tenure, two events transpired that would have an unexpected impact on his career. First, his roommate woke up one morning to find a rat sitting on his chest eating crumbs off his beard, exclaimed, “That’s it! I’m out of here!,” and moved out. Second, Charles was offered the commercial space that led to his apartment, as a package deal, for $25. Despite the location’s shortcomings (he once unwittingly held the door for someone in the process of burglarizing his place), Charles took that offer as well and now had the entire place to himself.
Charles was one of those college graduates who vowed never to go into business. So that is precisely what he did. He had always loved woodwork and had the idea of complementing his income by turning his storefront into a woodenware shop. The store, Bowl & Board, launched in 1961, becoming one of the only stores on the block other than Gem Spa at the corner. Charles would open it for just a few hours a day, after coming home from teaching. Soon, however, the opportunity presented itself to open another store on the block. He jumped on that as well and launched Grizzly Furs, where he would sell for $20 raccoon furs that he would purchase as overstock from Brooklyn warehouses every morning at 5:00am for $2 a piece. Before long, Charles had given up his teaching job and become a full-fledged serial St Mark’s Place entrepreneur.
Over the next fifteen or so years, Charles opened seven businesses along this stretch of St. Mark’s Pl. He ran Hindu Kush out of #5 and a shop devoted to crushed velvet out of #20. He opened a bar, Grassroots Tavern, and an art gallery, El Taller, with his friend John (Juan Luis) Buñuel, the son of the great director. Through these efforts, Charles joined the ranks of the creative entrepreneurs who, as he remembers, were drawn by the area’s affordability and were gradually transforming the block into one of the most dynamic in the neighborhood.
Charles’ business footprint soon expanded well beyond the block. Not only was he importing handmade goods from Haiti, Afghanistan, and India; he had also acquired a tannery in Greenpoint to supply his stores with sheep rugs and had launched a woodworking plant in Maine to produce his wood products. By then, Charles had opened several Grizzly Furs branches and franchised Bowl & Board at a national scale. By his own admission, however, Charles lacked the disposition to pursue the path followed by his contemporary Crate & Barrel. Management at that scale held little appeal to him. He preferred getting his hands dirty—spotting an empty storefront with his wife Kathy, deciding on the spot, “let’s open a store there,” putting it up in 24 hours (using a system of barrels and planks [no nails]), and then running it until it made sense to shut it down, as he started doing with all his stores during the 1980s.
Charles never wanted to be a landlord. But that is also precisely what he became, after a fashion, along the way. He says he was offered numerous buildings on the block for purchase; but he only bought a few that he felt were special, like #9 and #12 (which he requested to have declared a landmark). He recalls being approached by all manner of potential tenants, including deep-pocketed chains; but he only leased to businesses that intrigued him. And then, once he offered a business a lease, he took an active interest in their flourishing.
Charles describes his approach succinctly:
[Chains] are rubber stamp businesses that do not recognize the individuality of each neighborhood. There’s no creativity to that. Ideas are everywhere. And if [someone] came to me with ideas that seemed workable, that was enough to interest me. I am always meeting people with creative ideas. That’s how I learned to work with tenants with an eye to make them successful, because that’s my success.
Over the years, Charles has had numerous tenants. Some have succeeded; some have failed. But they have never failed, according to Charles, because of his refusal to help them pull through. He remembers occasions when he has temporarily cut rents by as much as a third in order to give a struggling tenant room to right the ship. More significantly, during the pandemic, he suspended rents altogether for months. And he’s glad he did:
That’s how I kept them! I have the same tenants over there. And I’m glad I do, because they know their business. Anyone could be forgiven for not succeeding under COVID. That was not the result of lack of creativity. That was circumstances.
Charles’ tenanting approach has brought an unexpected and much welcome recent addition to the block, our March 2024 Business of the Month, Village Works bookstore, which keeps trying to let Charles have books for free only to be rebuffed: “Full price! I’m going to make you pay for the rent; you’re going to make me pay for the books!” This admonition notwithstanding, Village Works freely admits that they could only have opened at 12 St. Mark’s Place thanks to the flexible terms offered by Charles, who, Amazon-be-damned, wanted to bring back to the space a bookstore and the clientele and energy that those can entail. (This had been the location of our February 2016 Business of the Month, St. Mark’s Bookshop, until it moved to a storefront owned by The Cooper Union. When a rent hike forced them out, Charles lent them $50K to help them succeed at their subsequent spot.)
No overview of Charles’ impact on St. Mark’s Place could be complete without mention of the trees down the corridor. He and Kathy planted the first one, right in front of #9. They drove it down in a Fiat in 1974. Charles also conducted fundraisers at his stores to bring more trees to the block, which now has a dozen. If you want to enjoy Charles’ forestry efforts at a larger scale, however, you’ll have to go a bit further north. Much of the profits from Charles’ business enterprises have been channeled into a foundation that, since the 1960s, has been assembling a nature preserve up in Maine. By now, the assemblage comprises 130 pieces of land amounting to 15,000 acres and contains marshes, upland forests, tributaries, and a canoeable stream that goes through peat bogs. Charles is currently in the process of building a 25-mile trail system. “When it’s completed” he says, “it will knock your socks off!” In the meantime, you can always get your socks knocked off at St Mark’s Place, a street that owes its excitement, uniqueness, and shaded canopy, at least in part to Charles Fitzgerald’s unflagging devotion, dynamism, and determination.
