A Good Move…Why the Open Center Decided to House Hunt and What Transpired

We are, of course, over the moon about our impending move into a magnificent and centrally located new home in the heartland of Manhattan. Recently we sat down with our Board Chair, Walter Beebe, to get his thoughts on the process leading up to the Open Center’s impending  move in early summer.

 

Said Beebe: “In the last 25 years, both the Open Center and Soho have grown beyond anyone’s imagination. When we first came to this neighborhood in 1984, it was quite empty except for artists’ lofts that filled the enormous warehouse-size floors of industrial buildings. Much of Spring Street east of Broadway was still made up of wholesale leather fabricators.  From our windows you could look across the street and see rows of piece workers at sewing machines who quickly dispersed at 6:00. It was pretty grim on Spring Street and we weren’t sure anyone would be crazy enough to come.  There were few commercial or dining possibilities. Asking people to walk through the dark and empty streets at night in those years to attend a Tibetan Buddhist meditation class seemed rather audacious. You had to really want it.

 

“Well, we know what happened. In these last 25 years the Open Center has attracted hundreds of thousands of people through its doors and the surrounding neighborhood has transformed into a commercial mecca for designers, filmmakers, high-end shops, and tourists from all over the world. And the artists? They’re longer able to afford the prices, and most have moved out. In many ways, the Open Center also no longer fits its original neighborhood.

 

“So we came to the questions, ‘Have we outgrown Soho? Or has Soho outgrown us?’ Was it, in fact, time to move to a neighborhood that was more culturally akin to the spirit, intellectual range, and holistic community of the Open Center?

 

“We were also becoming more acutely aware of two basic forces involving the Open Center’s building, which we owned. First, we were constrained for space and found ourselves holding more and more of our programs outside the building.

 

“Second, our building had increased in value and its sale would enable the Open Center to have a larger space designed to suit our work and at the same time solidify the Open Center’s finances for years to come.

 

“So we put our building on the market and, thanks be to a great deal of luck, negotiated a sale in a highly favorable time for the New York City real estate market (summer 2007). As part of the transaction, we were able to remain in our Spring Street location during a long transition period, during which the real estate market, as we know, declined precipitously.

 

“Thus we began our search for the ‘home of our dreams’, one that would double our present capacity with lots of light, have room for a dedicated Wellness Center with two treatment rooms that would be continuously available, large classrooms, a public meditation room, and a ground floor that would house a café where members could gather, as well as our well-known bookstore. After a dogged and sometimes bumpy search, we had the extraordinary good fortune to come close to landing our envisioned dream home almost entirely, in a building at 22 East 30th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and we have entered into a 10-year lease. The Open Center will move in early summer.

 

“What this move represents in the life of the Open Center is, of course, a greatly expanded, beautiful and gracious new home.  But it also embodies a maturing, a coming of age of this experiment in holistic education in New York City. It says that the Open Center continues to offer life-affirming resources that many, many New Yorkers hunger for, more so than ever, and that it has arrived at a new threshold of stability — even in these difficult times — and that it’s totally appropriate to move to a central location that makes the Open Center more accessible and more visible to those who live, work, and visit the city.”