Liz O. Baylen for The New York Times Arthur Wood and Broken Angel in 2007.With the foreclosure process over, and an order of eviction waiting to be executed on Friday, the only thing left to do for Arthur Wood, the owner â€" or rather, former owner â€" of the Broken Angel art house, was to celebrate his departure with a block party.
Hundreds of Mr. Wood’s neighbors and friends in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, are indeed expected to show up on the street outside his house Friday afternoon for a salutatory shindig likely to include bands, barbecue, mutant bicycles and Dadaist piñatas.
“We aim to throw a kid-friendly block party, Brooklyn D.I.Y. style, to give back the love and devotion that Arthur put into his life’s work,†read the Facebook invitation that went out to almost 3,000 people earlier this week. “This will be a day to remember and one full of the love of community and the unique flavor of D.I.Y.â€
Mr. Wood is an accomplished painter, but the life’s work referred to in the invitation is Broken Angel, a Surrealist ziggurat of sorts that he and his late wife! , Cynthia, bought in 1979 when the structure, at 4 Downing Street, was an abandoned four-story brick townhouse.
Employing mostly locally-sourced junk, Mr. Wood, now 81, built asymmetrical, glassy sculptures on the building’s roof, inadvertently creating a landmark on the Brooklyn D.I.Y. artscape. It attracted wider notice when it served as the backdrop for Dave Chappelle’s 2006 film, “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party.â€
In 2006, a fire at the building led to a series of city investigations that revealed that Mr. Wood had not built his structure according to code. The Department of Buildings ordered the removal of some of the building’s key designfeatures and, under order to make expensive renovations, Mr. Wood arranged a partnership in 2007 with a real estate developer, Shahn Anderson. Together they took out a $4 million mortgage from Madison Realty Capital with plans to construct condominiums on the site, and also next door.
That plan was never realized, and in 2009, under complicated â€" and disputed â€" circumstances, Mr. Wood and his partner defaulted on the mortgage. The bank moved in to foreclose and bought the building at auction last April after no other bidders emerged.
Thus, the block party Friday afternoon. By midweek, more than 400 people â€" artists, musicians, bookstore owners, brewers and photographers â€" had signaled their intention online to attend the event. It is scheduled to run from 4 to 8 p.m. and ! revelers ! are encouraged to dress warmly and bring something for the barbecue.
