Patience for Reopening Latino Cultural Space Is Gone

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Two spaces inside the Julia De Burgos Cultural Center, a city-owned building in East Harlem, have been closed for over 18 months.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Eugene Rodriguez, who lives in East Harlem, is part of protest campaign to try to pressure the city into reopening the spaces.

The Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, a city-owned building in East Harlem, has long been an important hub for the neighborhood’s Latino population. Named after a renowned Puerto Rican poet, the five-story building served as a place for local artists to showcase their work and residents to gather to celebrate birthdays, hold funerals, discuss community affairs and dance salsa.

“It was about all of us coming together,” said Marina Ortiz, founder of East Harlem Preservation, a group dedicated to preserving East Harlem’s culture and history. Ms. Ortiz said she used to visit the center regularly for almost 20 years, before New York City officials closed a large multipurpose space and theater there over a year and a half ago for renovation and to find a new operator.

“It was torn out from under us,” she said, adding that her efforts to determine why it was taking s! o long to reopen the two rooms had been futile. Other parts of the center remain in use, but work has not even begun on the renovation.

Having grown frustrated, a coalition of community leaders and artists plan to stage a series of street performances as a form of protest outside the Julia de Burgos center, starting Wednesday, to pressure the city.

“It’s not about one show; it’s about no show,” said Eugene Rodriguez, a playwright and longtime resident of East Harlem who is leading the effort. “Latino artists have no access to Latino institutions in the neighborhood. It kills me. It really kills me.”

Mr. Rodriguez, 65, swallowed, looked away and started to cry.

City officials contend the changes will benefit the neighborhood and local cultural groups. But many residents and activists say they view the delay as part of the marginalization of East Harlem’s working-class Latino population and the city’s disinterest in preserving the Puerto Rican identity of a neighborhoo undergoing a slow but steady gentrification.

“The Julia de Burgos is symptomatic of the larger issue,” said Marta Moreno Vega, founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center and a former director of El Museo del Barrio. “The disparity in the way that culture and art is understood in the city and the way that resources are distributed and attention is given is what you see in the Julia de Burgos.”

The building, on Lexington Avenue between 105th and 106th Streets, that houses the multipurpose room and the theater also contains other exhibition and performance areas and a public school. The city rents out space to various Latino art groups, including Taller Boricua, which had operated the 2,800-square-foot multipurpose space and occasionally used the 160-seat theater.

In September 2010, the city’s Economic Development Corporation announced plans to renovate and reorganize the administration of the two spaces, saying that they were mismanaged and underused.

In November 2011,! the city! selected the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit organization, to operate and maintain the two spaces. But the city and the Hispanic Federation are still negotiating the terms of the lease, and the rooms remain locked.

Responding to neighborhood complaints, City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, who represents the area, has been working with the development corporation, and on Friday she said the city would find a way for cultural groups to rent out the spaces while the lease was being negotiated.

The development corporation said in a statement on Tuesday that “local groups will have the opportunity to rent space” on a temporary basis, but it had yet to work out the fees and other details.

“I hear the frustration but I’m asking for patience still,” Ms. Mark-Viverito said in a phone interview.

Still, some activists are not satisfied.

“Why should we be patient?” Ms. Ortiz said. “Why should we accept vague assurances? I want precise answers: When, where, who, how.â

As to why it has taken so long to hammer out a lease, Jose Calderon, the president of the Hispanic Federal, said renovations promised by the city were yet to be completed. “Any tenants moving into a space want certain things done,” he said.

Ms. Mark-Viverito said that her office had set aside nearly $1 million for renovations, but that the expenditure was only recently approved by the city’s Office of Management and Budget.

Sitting on the stoop of his house on 118th Street, Mr. Rodriguez waited for Ms. Ortiz and a number of other neighbors, artists and friends to arrive for a meeting to discuss Wednesday’s protest. He said he planned to deliver a Shakespearean-style speech: “Friends! Latinos! Countrymen! Lend me your ears! I come to praise La Julia not to bury her!”