New Episode: #14. April Gornik on The Church, the Sag Harbor Cinema incident, and the Allure of Strange Weather Conditions
Season 3, episode 5
Hello subscribers:
New episode! A candid chat with community activist and artist April Gornik. Here’s to episode #14 [season 3, episode 5].
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Full transcript edited for reading:
LuLu: [00:00:00] Okay, episode number 14, April Gornik. Hello and welcome to another episode of Winners Only Club: the podcast. Today it’s a privilege, honor and pleasure to have April Gornik with us. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs, business owners, and people who are making a change, carving a path in society. Now, April, I've known you for a long time but I remember first reading about you in an article when I was in Boston about how you were saving the Sag Harbor cinema. Today we're at the church in Sag Harbor. Would you like to introduce yourself?
April: Well, I'm an artist, first and foremost. I'm always, and I have been an artist for, you know, since I got out of school and moved to New York and started showing the gallery there. You’re sort of born an artist. And I've had many consecutive one person shows and [00:01:00] we'll be having one next September, actually 2023. So I'm working very hard on that. But I also have another full-time job that's self-imposed, which is as a community activist. I ended up being given the opportunity by fate. I ended up chairing the effort to buy and rebuild the Sag Harbor Cinema, which was a very old cinema in the center of the little village that I remember it was adjacent to.
It is historic- it has a historic facade from 1938, an old art deco facade when people who designed cinemas were actually using cheap materials to do so. And that's because it was taking place immediately after the depression. So one of the problems with the fire is that when the fire came through, the cinema did not start in it. It actually devastated [00:02:00] it quite severely. And because there were no outside walls of the lobby, it had just been built against adjacent buildings.
So just a curious, historical fact for your listeners and viewers that it was, it was actually something that I had been asked to spearhead by the owner the previous summer before the fire happened, but the fact of the fire- bad as it was also mobilized the community because it was. After the fire, it looked like a horrible missing tooth and otherwise healthy enough that people were anxious to fix and make better and save.
So, that was about four or five year process of not only getting people to support it financially. And Eric, my husband, Eric official, God bless [00:03:00] him, was the first person that stepped up and said, what about if I, if we gave a million dollars, just kick this off and make it happen? And I was really against it because, I mean, obviously that's so much money, but he was perfectly willing to dip into our savings and get the whole project going. And that was inspirational for a lot of people. So, and then not to make this sound as if it were my thing, right? I had tremendous help from all these people who, for example, a woman that I know for a while from another community activist thing, who is a lawyer and worked incredibly hard on it. Other members of the community from different disciplines, people with good hearts and money came from very wealthy donors, and then also from a little girl who came to us when we were sitting at a table at [00:04:00] a festival that was happening down at the harbor and, you know, gave the people who were working the table trying to raise awareness about this effort, 35 cents.
It all mattered, like literally everybody who contributed made a difference. And that's the way I've always felt about this community and the importance of how to acknowledge a community and also how to knit it together by acknowledging it as this place where everybody counts. And it was a very hard thing to do and it was fraught with a lot of crises as things like this always are.
There were problems with the construction of the cinema that needs to be repaired, extra expenses. I mean, without this, this woman, we had the great good fortune of having a woman named Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, [00:05:00] part of an original community actually that tried to buy the cinema years previous to the fire, like, I think it was previous to the fire and she and I were on that committee together.
So she had come over and helped reconstruct the cinema and she gave invaluable advice about- making sure that each theater in the cinema, which had only one big screen- now we were building three: a small earth screening room, a medium sized theater, and the large kind of premier state of the art: that’s theater one, and she insisted on making a state of the art.
Each one has an extraordinary sound and screen that offers people not only of this community who deserve it, 'cause there's tremendous amount of cultural appreciation within this population, [00:06:00] but also anybody else who comes to the theater will be blown away and they'll see movies as the directors and cinematographers and writers would've hoped that movie could be seen. So we're very, very proud of the way it turned out, and it was a huge, huge, huge, huge thing.
LuLu: I can tell by how knowledgeable you are on the subject how involved you must have been in the restoration process. I am wondering: if it wasn't a historical building, if it wasn't a historical landmark- Would you be as eager to have contributed your time, energy, and money and so much of your effort into rebuilding the cinema?
April: The cinema is an odd and very specific feature of the town because the art deco sign that's in front of it that says 'Sag Harbor’, it's very art deco. It's very classic art deco. And that [00:07:00] sign is, never mind the history even, but that sign tends for most people to represent both kind of the quirkiness, and the..specific unique quality of.. (Sag Harbor).
LuLu: Whimsical?
April: Whimsical, yes, it’s also “home.” I mean, I know I've talked to many people who say that when they go on a trip, even if they're coming back from J F K or something, when they get back Sag Harbor, they just like to go down main street 'cause they just wanna see the sign. They feel like they're really back. So all of those things are history. And I love the history of Sag Harbor, which is quirky and bizarre. There’s crazy stories associated with it actually. I can tell you some amazing stories about the history of this place, which I got very, very absorbed in and actually did a walking [00:08:00] tour of Sag Harbor which is just a free app that you can go and kind of peruse.
But running into all these crazy things about how Sag Harbor survived many booms and busts. It has one of the first integrated communities in America, and I really mean integrated. It's Native American, it's African American, and it's principally white Irish immigrants at the time that it first formed, but it's remained an integrated community for all this time since the 1830s and 40s when people came here: some to escape the potato famine, of course, in Ireland, but a lot of the members of black and native American community there became great whalers and traveled the world on whaling ships and, you know, [00:09:00] were some of the first people to be in the Pacific. So it's, it's just, it's a remarkable, remarkable place.
And the cinema and its sign and for a lot of people here after 1978 when the owner from whom we bought the cinema had first purchased it himself, they started showing like European, what we call European art films. So there is a whole history of that. So it was seen as an a kind of an eccentric anchor of the village, and it's, it's just really, really part of something that says Sag Harbor and needs to be held onto.
LuLu: When I was doing some field research for the six year anniversary of the cinema coming back, someone said that a homeless man set it on fire. What's the story behind [00:10:00] that?
April: Homeless man?
LuLu: Set it on fire.
April: No, it is, it was, it was not arson. It was definitely not arson. I've talked to many members of The Sag Harbor Fire Department and police department about this. It was not a mere accident, it was most likely, somebody had suggested that it was a tenant in an adjoining building that was smoking a bed or something of that nature.
But what had happened was there had been work done on some wiring, some electrical wiring on a pole outside that was from the cinema back to the parking lot, and the work was not completed. There was very high wind. There may have been sparks generated. It came from most likely that, but, and it went, it went through the corner of the block where the cinema's situated and it, if [00:11:00] you were, if this is the cinema’s corner, the pole was here and there's a direct line partly from the wind direction.
It was, it was very cold bad day. It was like way, way, way below zero. Firemen were fighting a fire and we had like hundreds of people from all over the island come and show up. Many fire engines, many different firehouses from all over. There are notorious photos of firemen fighting with fire, with icicles, literally hanging from their appliance.
It was insanely cold and they just toughed it out. No one was hurt. And there was also a great opportunity for loss of life from not only for the couple of residents that lived where the fire had passed through, [00:12:00] then there was a young, there were a couple of young, less experienced firemen that actually could have died. But for a fire person, familiar, and noticed that a floor was about to collapse and rushed them out. We have, we're very blessed to have one of the oldest volunteer fire departments in the country.
It's really significant and these people are so brave. It was just unbelievable the work that they did to make sure that no one was hurt and they continue to be like that.
LuLu: You were also behind the Affordable Housing Project, and last April you held- Woah, last “April”, “April”, held a convention about the Affordable housing project.
April: We did. I'm not behind any particular affordable housing project, just need to add. But I am [00:13:00] definitely concerned like everyone else in this village about affordable housing and the future of both workforce housing and also housing for people who've lived here all their lives because we're being priced out by a certain amount of overdevelopment, which has been galloping and I hope it's slowing down.
A lot of people who spent the pandemic here have gone back to New York. But Sag Harbor became very, very popular during that time. And there were efforts to buy people out of homes that were- some of those people I’m pretty sure receive less money than their homes were actually worth by people offering them cash.
And there was a lot of opportunity seen here, so that coupled with rising rent- because of the popularity has threatened the fabric of [00:14:00] this village and there was a very moving, I mean, profoundly moving letter that was written to The Sag Harbor Express, which is our local paper by a man named Tom Gardella, who is a fireman and is now the deputy mayor and works as a liaison with the police.
He was actually in the cinema and he’s told me stories about it- harrowing. But he also had written a letter to the Express saying that he was afraid that his children couldn't stay in Sag Harbor even if they wanted to, because they couldn't afford to live here. And that made me insane. I just thought it was one of the most moving, sad things I'd ever read.
So one of the reasons, one of the inspirations for the housing conference day that we held last May was to bring people [00:15:00] together so we could talk about the problems that this village faces and also the problems that communities internationally are facing 'cause of the disparity between haves and have nots.
LuLu: So keeping the cinema is to preserve historical landmark. At the same time, building a workforce housing destroys historical landmark. Does that make sense?
April: No one is talking about building something on a historical landmark for affordable housing. I don't know where that idea came from, but that's not part of the plan.
LuLu: Like the trees are being chopped down. There's a problem with clear cutting in this village, but that's separate of that. There has been a problem with clear cutting all over the East End. A lot of developers who come in, and I won't name names, but a lot of [00:16:00] well-known developers will go to a lot- completely clear cut old growth trees and will just absorb the minor penalties that are on the books for that kind of law breaking by fitting it into their construction costs and ignoring it. And that is something that not only has North Haven just passed a law about that, but the Sag Harbor village government, just last night actually the village meeting that I attended, said that they were trying to enact new cutting laws that would at least try to mitigate that, and it remains to be seen how they do that. I think that there need to be big fines to do that, but that that has nothing to do with affordable housing and historical buildings. We can have it all.
LuLu: Oh, awesome.
April: We can have, [00:17:00] we can preserve our history. We can make affordable housing.
LuLu: So affordable housing will not cause the destruction of historical landmarks at Harbor?
April: No. because there's, there's various areas in the village that I actually, the same person that I just referenced to Tom, Gardella, the deputy mayor, recently made a proposal that he had researched and worked out with the people and organizations that this idea would principally impact and has spoken to, there's a nature preserve that has land that's village owned by the village government, and he's proposing shifting some property from where the extent largest firehouse is in main firehouse is. Moving some stuff over there, [00:18:00] making therefore affordable housing.
We feel that we can arrive at creative solutions most people, and I feel that we can arrive at creative solutions to the housing crisis and historic preservation in their need not be a false choice between those things. But it takes a lot of transparency and it takes a lot of conversation so people understand what the needs are, what the problems are and how the solutions can be beneficial to everybody. I certainly wouldn't want, personally, I wouldn't want there to be like a, some sort of congested area where you'd expect all the people that serving dinner at restaurants to squish in.
LuLu: You wouldn't want a shopping mall. That makes no sense.
April: Absolutely not. There's, there has been talk- part of a previous mayor- about there being a second Main street [00:19:00] behind Main Street. Our Main Street is very, very unique. We have a five and dime. We have a few large buildings, but principally small quirky stores that have great merchandise. Some of it’s very expensive and some of it's very affordable and it's that variety, that kind of unique and sustained variety. For instance, the Five and Dime is 100 years old as of last year, 2022 as a Five and Dime.
So we have this really fantastic mix of stores and there's no reason that we can't, you know, keep that going. But people have to be able to afford their rent. Yeah, landlords have to not go look crazy-
LuLu: But $2,000 is still not really affordable.
April: $2,000. Where, where are you getting that?
LuLu: It's from like the community survey. I did some survey [00:20:00] with the residents and they are saying it's $2,000 for the lowest level of housing.
April: Yeah, we, we have to deal with all of that. But no, we are just really starting to seriously tackle this- and I'm not at the Village Government official.
LuLu: Oh, I know you're not. You're definitely not. But you are a pillar of the community. Actually I don't know the politics too much, to be honest. So Adam Poller, he's a friend, or No? Is he a friend or is he a friend of Bay Street?
April: I don’t.. I don't know whose friend he is. I'm just going to leave it as that.
LuLu: You are from Ohio.
April: Yep.
LuLu: One of my clients is also from Ohio, and he was the one who said that there is a huge Ohio community in Sag Harbor. What do you think about that?
April: Huge?
LuLu: Yeah.
April: Everywhere I've ever lived outside of Ohio, there's always people from Ohio there. I mean, certainly when I was, you know, living in New York and [00:21:00] Manhattan full time, there were always a lot of people from Ohio, but there are always are a lot of people from Ohio. A great place to be. It's a great place to leave.
LuLu: What are some characteristics of Ohio people, not to generalize because that's not fun, but when people say New Yorkers there are like XYZ. What are some traits or ideas people say about Ohio?
April: I think they're generally considered friendly. Maybe a little too friendly, maybe compared to people in Manhattan. They're a little more, you know, friendly, but they're fine with me.
LuLu: Tell us how you got from- by the way, those clients are Grindstone. The entire Grindstone team are from Ohio.
April: Are they really? I didn’t know that.
LuLu: Yeah. Do you do the social media for the church?
April: I don't. We do. I mean, we do some stuff. We actually, [00:22:00] one of the things we did for the cinema to raise money was to go and talk to shop owners and say like, what does this mean to you? But no, I mean, we have, we have a social media presence, principally instead.
LuLu: Do you have a marketing strategy?
April: Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent. You know, we're, we're less than two years old, so we're still kind of working on how we're doing this, where we're putting most of our efforts. We're a building and we're a place for actual physical interaction.
So we tend not to be making our principal efforts be towards social media. You have a different job and a different goal and you know, for you, social media is part of the message. For us it's just an adjunct thing, [00:23:00] like a principle. So for
LuLu: So for you, social media is to bring awareness to the church or establish a social media presence.
April: Yeah, but I mean, we also love, for instance, the first thing that we had at the church ever was one of the Graham dance company who came, that wasn’t the whole company. It was like six of them. And in sort of two batches. But they came and rehearsed and they were working on a lost piece that North Graham had choreographed.
They were trying to reconstruct it as a new piece, and it was successful. It was great. But we streamed rehearsals and streamed some interviews about that. And you know, we try to expand our reach by using social and then we have a YouTube channel that has talks and whatnot, some performances we've given.
We understand people are busy, [00:24:00] so we try to allow them to see things.
LuLu: How did you go from Ohio to Canada to here?
April: I had gone to the Cleveland Institute of Art for Art classes and the Cleveland Institute of Art is a five year college and I actually got tired of being there and wanted something more.
There was an article in Art in America Magazine, which I think still, it says called, “Is this the Greatest Art School in North America?” And it was about the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which I'd heard about because it was a famous, at that time it was a school famous for conceptualism. That was like in 1976 and I just kind of jumped ship the last year. 'cause I thought, I don't wanna stay here anyway. And I got my B F A from there. That's where I met Eric. And it was pretty impulsive when I think about it 'cause I [00:25:00] applied in June. I was like, I'm outta here. And then ended up there and it was a big adventure. And then from there I ended up staying a little bit longer, waitressing and whatnot.
Then moved down to New York. Ultimately with Eric, although he was not inclined to make that move originally. And we've been in this section of the country ever since.
LuLu: Why Sag Harbor and not another Hamlet of the Hamptons?
April: Well, Eric after we'd been living in New York for I guess like five or seven or eight years. He was just feeling so antsy and really wanted to place outside the city. I mean, it is, you know, Manhattan. In the summer. It's sweaty and sticky and we just wanted to get out of town and he wanted to buy something. So we ended up buying a small house [00:26:00] here. We rented a little bit before then, and the house we found was in Sag Harbor and it was a sweet old farmhouse not far from here and we subsequently, just to like kind of fast forward, we would, you know, spend at first like two months here in the summer and then it was three months and then by the time we ended up moving out here full time, it was like at least six months we were spending here and not in the city.
We were renovating our loft to be more like the house that we subsequently built out here. The new house that we built in 1999- It had a great studio set up and we realized that we prefer to be here than there, so we decamped quietly. We just told our friends, oh yeah, we'd be back normally in May, but [00:27:00] you know, the loft was finished being renovated in March, and we just said, oh, we'll be coming back out of there anyways. We're just gonna stay here. We'll move back next year. And then we never really did. I mean, we spent time. That's how we ended up living in this house full time in 2004.
LuLu: The name of this podcast is called Winners Only Club. What's your definition of a winner and what's your definition of a loser?
April: My definition of a winner would be someone who's happy with their life. And I don't, I don't care how that manifests itself, but it's not about things that you get or whatever. I think a winner is like things that you get, like you get acknowledgement of something.
Loser. I would think of Donald Trump. He's the absolute definition of a loser. But as far as you know what [00:28:00] the other factor when you ask that, that I think about is, you know, if you're a winner in the art world or a loser in the art world, that's much more complicated. 'cause everybody, all artists I know are, well, I'd say 99% of the artists that I know are hard on themselves.
Like you're your own worst critic. So it's hard to be a winner in your own eyes entirely, but, just to be able to be an artist and make a living wow: WIN. You know, so it's, to me, winner and loser is just way too much of a sliding scale and a fluctuating denotation to, you know, think about it seriously.
But not that, it's not a good question 'cause it begs all of those things.
LuLu: What makes you the best at what you do?
April: I the- best what? [laughs]
LuLu: The best April, who likes to make social changes and [00:29:00] is the person behind the church and paints landscapes- specifically of strange nature settings.
April: Like, what makes you do that?
LuLu: Like what makes you the best at- for instance, what makes me the best at being LuLu? What makes you the best at being you? What makes you the best at doing it is that you do? Because if you weren't the best at what you do, you wouldn't be a guest here.
April: I think that the thing that's, I won't say best, but I will say that I think that the thing that's most important is trying to keep my perspective always changing and flexible and that I think of things in different ways all the time and try to see issues: art and spirituality. Try to push myself to think of things differently, constantly. Like look, [00:30:00] try to find an angle that I hadn't seen something from before. It's just to be, in other words, to try to be expansive and I mean that practically and also spiritually, if that makes sense.
LuLu: Art banter. You paint landscapes. Why not portraits?
April: You know, I, it's something that I include into, it felt accidental, but I clued into it in 1978 or 1979? I started painting landscapes and immediately thought, oh no, I'm doing something that's so unpopular and so and so retarded, and you know, like wrong for the time. Bcause in school I'd always try to be really responsive to what was trending like that was really, really important to [00:31:00] me. But I actually loved painting light and space. And landscapes, things outside of myself so much that I look for excuses to do it or you know, somehow or another I let myself keep doing that.
And then it evolved into something for which I got some good responses and then I think that landscape for me represents something that metaphorically can hold a spiritual state and something that, that allows other people to reflect themselves, but in a very A flexible way. Like many people can look at the same work and have an entirely different reaction, hopefully an emotional reaction, and not just a, “this is pretty, this is that.” I mean, I try to make work that hold a certain amount [00:32:00] of questions, feel into it. So by questions I don't mean like a literal question, but that would invite a certain perusal of tension and release and something that's grounded and heavy versus something that's very light, just like holds a lot of potentially contradictory things within it. To me, that's kind of a, a sense of spirituality, I guess, because that's what I do.
That's, that’s what my works says to me.
LuLu: What's the difference between spirituality and religion?
April: Well, I think that religion ascribes to a certain- tends to ascribe spirituality as a certain formulation, and oftentimes rule making. Sometimes really great rules like “do one to others”, and sometimes less great rules like “you won't get into heaven unless you're a, whatever the religion is.”
So [00:33:00] religion is for nervous people who are scared that people won't stay in their religion and spirituality is for people who seek to find their soul reflected in a world outside themselves. I don't know, I don't way to describe it, but it does not have to do with having to do things a certain way. And I, I mean, contradictions are the spice of life.
LuLu: April.
April: LuLu.
LuLu: What about strange weather conditions interest you?
April: You know, I think that there's something really sensual and physical and enormous about weather and weather behavior and being able to stand in front of a two dimensional surface and take that in from such a small size compared to what it's depicting.
Just has like a, [00:34:00] I mean, it’s deliciously physical and moving to me. It's always been, I mean, as a little kid, I would always go outside before storms and hope to see tornadoes as a child. This is a really long interest of mine. I can't really, I mean, whether like apocalyptic weather or threatening weather or even just an eerie kind of weather situation, I think talks about mortality.
And mortality is something that I like to work with as a subject matter, a metaphorical subject matter, but it's in a lot of the work that I do, very obviously, you know, ominous. Is the storm coming or is the storm going? I mean, it’s just like this long, long, long, long meditation that I'm having about [00:35:00] my place in the world and the way that I see it outside of myself.
LuLu: How old were you when you picked up your first paintbrush?
April: Oh, I don't know. I think I was, you know, I had probably what they called Prang watercolors. They were just really simple watercolors that I probably had when I was really little. I always like to make things.
I draw and paint and you know, just make things out of- I draw animals on cardboard and then you cut them out and we can make them play together- it was very animal centric. And I think that for that was sort of like an entity that I was comfortable with as a child. And then the older I got, the more it was like the, the world outside of myself in general. It became a kind of a larger [00:36:00] context.
LuLu: Really bad weather conditions bring me comfort.
April: Hmm. How so?
LuLu: It makes me feel at ease.
April: Oh, interesting.
LuLu: What do you feel about that?
April: I, it makes sense to me just because it's like I, I don't know what your childhood was like at all, but I had a lot of anxiety as a child and I had a very tense home life.
And I think I relate to what you're saying in that. I would say that for me, seeing a storm coming is like finally the storm's coming, instead of it being like this kind of impending life that was everywhere but not happening. And then an actual downpour is like letting emotion out. So, then something with the downpour and an impending whatever, like making multiple kinds of opportunities like that.
[00:37:00] And, It's a great sense of release of expression. I relate to what you're saying.
LuLu: Anticipation is often scarier than the actual event, isn't it?
April: Yes, absolutely.
LuLu: Cool. I am wondering when it comes to painting- because this podcast is going now towards the direction of entrepreneurs and business people. And last time when we met in person with Almond being the presenter, I asked her afterwards, “do you think artists are entrepreneurs?” And she said: “of course.” So I guess some advice for people, because your paintings have been to so many places, I can't even list- How do you get started if you are an artist in today's world without having shown anything in any show yet? How do you do that?
April: Boy, what a question. I'm really not sure [00:38:00] because I think that the social media universe has completely changed the way artists direct themselves in the world, get their work shown. It really is through, I mean, JPEGs used to be useful. Now JPEGs are practically the art. One thing that I really love about having the church here and doing shows like the one that we're sitting in, is that people can have the experience of the physicality of a work of art. And I think it's really, really important that children learn to use their hands, that are given art classes. They learn to make that connection between their hand and their eye and are allowed to fulfill something using their bodies.
I think that the physical experience of art is extremely important and I've, I have even a [00:39:00] little essay that should be on my website still. I think it is about visual literacy and how important it is to see the scale of something in relationship to your body because people are all about, adults are all more or less the same size.
So a work of art in proportion to you is meaningful and an art in choosing a certain scale of work is meaningful. And then the physicality of the way that it's been touched by a hand with a brush or a hand with a pencil or a hand in clay, like all of that transmits, especially if you have any kind of art experience yourself.
And I don't, I don't think it needs to be elaborate. I think you can convey a lot of that by just giving children stuff to do with their, and stuff to make through those kinds of mediums. But I hope that, you know, as much as I love my computer for sketching, I don't want that [00:40:00] to go away. I think that that's really critical.
So young artists today who are forced to convey what they're doing with JPEGs, and our reading of JPEGs as a community has probably improved a lot because we're forced to and people are probably better and better at doing it, and that's significant. But to completely lose the experience of seeing work and real- I mean, I can't tell you how many shows I I look at online and they look really great and if I see them in person, I'm really blown away. It's just a different- imagine seeing Kerry James Marshall's show. At the Met only in JPEGs, that would've been like such a loss because his touch and his surfaces are so important.
So I worry about artists [00:41:00] having to do things through social media completely and not being able to have that backup. But artists still do shows, obviously, so it's not like galleries are abandoning everything in terms of making everything online.
LuLu: You named the church, the church, was it because of convenience or other reasons?
April: This church was named the church because it was deconsecrated like 12 or 14 or something years before we bought it. And the Methodists who owned it ran out of money and a congregation basically. So they felt that they were forced to put it on the market, and they did. And then what happened subsequently was that it was owned by three different people during which time, [00:42:00] at various times, most of the time there was a hurricane fence up front with some green, you know that green plastics that they put on it. And then the church loomed over the street with tarps in the windows. And when we first saw it, bits of snow was seeking through and it was just a really sad sight. And every single person in Sag Harbor would, when they wanted to talk about it and say, do you know what's happening with the church? When are they gonna finish the church? It. Did they sell it again? I can't believe the church sold again. The church. The church. The church. So when we bought it, people went, I can't believe you bought the church. And I said to Eric, I think we just have to call it the church because everybody calls it that.
And not really for any particular reason of hoping that there would be some spiritual impact or anything. But I think it kind of has, if there's like some fundamental [00:43:00] spirituality in people being in a space and bonding together, having a shared experience. And as you know, most churches are not doing as well as they used to. But this hunger for a community at the moment is pretty significant. I mean, maybe it's, not a bad name, but not that we want to tread on anyone's religious experience or the importance of an actual religious church to them. In no way, shape or form are we making light of that. We respect, period.
LuLu: Was it in service before you bought it or no?
April: It was an active church for like years and years. It was built actually in 1835, and it was moved here in 1864 and it was added onto ironically. It [00:44:00] had been built in Greek revival style about five blocks away up a big hill on High Street because it was high. And then the parishioners or the people decided that they wanted us to be in a more central location and not of a steep, icy hill for the winter, I think was a little bit part of it. And they moved it to down here, as I said, 29 years later. And by the time they moved it down here, Greek revival style was so over like no one was building Greek revival. That was just to say the Italianate was very popular. So two it was added, the stone foundation, which looked more Italianate and then they also added the cupola tower. And to have a clock tower was more like, you know, Italian, the way you would imagine an Italian church. So it, it had Italianate hybridization I would say.[00:45:00]
And in fact the clock tower because it had been an addition when we bought it was leaning out like six degrees into the street, meaning at the moment that we bought it from the last owners who had it, they put in a lot of steel reinforcement, which was great. Like a piece of luck for us actually.
LuLu: What does that do?
April: Well, you put in steel, reinforcement, something like that because you want to not only stop it from leaning into the street, you want to pull it back to the rest of the building. So they had to do that with a lot of steel. There's, if you look at some of the the beams up there. [hand gesture]
These beams in the church are like 50 feet long. They're made from 300-year-old pine. It's really pretty amazing. And then the steel girders that you see, which we've painted a very aquatic color to kind of blend in are the things that are-you can see- on brackets [00:46:00] where they join and stuff.
That's all stuff that made the church properly before, so we could have a lot of people in it. We had to Sister Joyce the floors. I know a lot about building because of the cinema and the church.
LuLu: If you're watching this video right now, you can see exactly all the brackets that April is talking about. So what are your future dreams for you and the church?
April: Oh, well, one very immediate thing is we definitely want to have more programming for the Spanish speaking people who live here. We have a very large population of people from everywhere in Central and South America, and in Puerto Rico as well.
So we need to make sure that we have better access for them. That's a longstanding goal. You'll see that the wall tags for all pieces have Spanish and [00:47:00] English, but we haven't gotten far enough. We need to do our website in Spanish. We wanna redo the website anyway.
I think that we have started on the path that we envisioned. So a lot of it's just becoming more expansive- it’s not about finishing something or arriving at something. It's always going to be expanding and serving the needs of the community.
That's changing too. So that, I mean, the Spanish thing is something that I just wanted to say 'cause it's been a goal of mine since we started talking about the church. But I think that the fact that we have so many different kinds of representations of creativity here is very much what we always wanted and dreamed of.
And [00:48:00] we have been pretty successful considering the length of time we've been open and I think the impact on the community. I think people feel that the Church helps shore up. What one of the great things about this community and one of the great things is that there have always been people who made things in Sag Harbor.
We manufactured robes for ships. We made silverware. You know- it's a working town and it's a town that's proud of its work. And art is part of that. Writing is a big part of that because we've always had tremendous amount of great writers here and the people who've been attracted to this place, including George Balanchine was one of the portraits on the window, for instance.
There's just a really broad range of creatives and one of my particular interests too is to have these creativity conferences at [00:49:00] least once a year, that include programming with people whose work also involves creativity that are not always acknowledged as such. Like scientists, like entomologists, like dream researchers.
Our first creativity conference and last one involved a woman who did pandemic dream research as well as what you were doing. She research and charted the effect of the pandemic on the culture. Through that, we had a doctor who is an extreme weather condition doctor, climate condition doctor, who has been to Everest many times, has been the bottom of the sea with astronauts.
Since people who do interesting things like that, we want to bring them forward. To show, because I think through them, anybody can realize like how creative you have to [00:50:00] be throughout your day. I think people have, people have an opportunity for more satisfaction in their lives that they realize how much creativity they can call on, and that they're being called for, even if they’re not really aware of it.
People need to give themselves credit for creative solutions in their own lives.
LuLu: The Church: a place that is nourishing creativity.
April: Yes. Yes. I think so.
LuLu: Thank you so much for joining us on another episode of Winners Only Club, and thank you April for coming on the show.
April: Thank you LuLu . Thank you very much for having me. Thanks to your audience for listening.