TTT

Interviewee:  Barry Benepe						                Session #1

Interviewer:  Judith Weinraub					        New York City

Date:  June 25, 2009

Q:  This is Judith Weinraub, it’s the 25th of June 2009, and I am with Barry Benepe in his home in Greenwich Village.
	Good morning.

Benepe:  Good morning.

Q:  I’m hoping we can start, if you could tell me something about when and where you were born, and something about your parents and what your childhood was like.

Benepe:  Well, I was born right here in New York City, and I lived on East Ninth Street off University Place.  In fact, Christopher Gray just wrote a piece about the building this past year, in which he looked up in the records and found out that my family lived there.  So he called me up to get some background on it.
Shortly after I was born, we moved to Gramercy Park, the family did.  I had an older brother, Bruce, who was then six and a half years older.  At the time my mother married my father in 1920, she was an illustrator, an artist, and he worked for a company called Leacock and Company, which was located at 230 Fifth Avenue, so he was able to walk to work.  The business centered around importing of linens, a lot of embroidered linens from places like India, France, Belgium and China.
I went to school at Friends Seminary, and it was a short walk from Gramercy Park  to school on East 16th St.  In the fifth grade I was transferred to Browning School because my dad didn’t think I was paying enough attention in my subjects.  Too many girls in school, I guess.

Q:  Where is Browning?

Benepe:  Browning is still at 62nd in between Park and Madison Avenues.  I spent maybe three years there before moving on to St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, a boarding school.  And about that time, shortly before then, actually, in 1938, when I was ten, he purchased a farm in the Eastern Shore in Maryland.  In my family, my mother had been very devoted to food and cooking.  She spent a lot of time preparing interesting meals for guests, things like jellied aspics and things that didn’t interest me very much.  A lot of the cooking for me personally was done by a maid and butler, [Maria and Manuel], who lived in our house; they were both Portuguese, and prepared fairly simple meals, things like hamburgers and I’m not sure what else, but decent.  One of the things they prepared, [gnocchi]…., they would cook Cream of Wheat in milk and then let it harden and pan-fry it.  I don’t recall many highlights in those meals.  I think my mother was more the one to alert me to interesting foods.
	When we moved to Maryland….  We had our own vegetable garden in the back, as well as the farm itself, [produced vegetables]. Our food came from our back garden; though my mother did a lot with fresh vegetables, although she was mainly interested in flower gardening and did all her work in flowers.

Q:  Did the family live half the time at the farm and half in New York?

Benepe:  Yes.  Exactly.  My dad’s office was here in New York, so he came to the farm a good part of the summer.  Since he was president of the company, he could pretty much direct his own time.

Q:  What made them buy the farm?

Benepe:  That’s a very good question, and I don’t really know, and the reason he chose St. Andrew’s School was because it was halfway between New York and the farm.  He didn’t come from a farm background.  His family came from St. Paul, Minnesota, and he had a lot of brothers and sisters, I think about eight in all, and the brothers tended to gravitate into medicine.  I think he thought he would too, and he went to Columbia, but he said, the way he explained it to me, “I couldn’t memorize all the bones in the human skull, so I gave up on that as a future study.”
He entered the business as a result of World War I and being demobilized in England.  He went to the University of Dublin for a year.  It was something equivalent to a G.I. Bill, and it was while he was in England that he met Julian Leacock, who was looking for somebody to help him establish an office here in New York. The Leacock Brothers were divided into two families, [Julian was] doing the linens and  [Stephen producing wines] in Madeira.  
Why he bought the farm is an interesting question, and I don’t think I’ll ever know.  He was thinking maybe I would go to school in Maryland after he got the farm, if the schools there were really good enough.  I have a copy of a letter he wrote to his mother to ask if she would come and stay there on the farm while I went to school down there, but she turned him down.  She didn’t really want to leave Minnesota for that long a time.  So that’s one of the reasons why he picked St. Andrew’s, and so when they would be going to the farm, they’d pick me up on the way back to drive me.  Trains were still running.  I might have taken the train down there as well at times.
	St. Andrew’s was a boys’ school then.  It was an Episcopal school that was founded by Felix du Pont with an endowment to keep it going to they could take a range of incomes, so that we had a really broad range of students.  But I would say that the exposure to farm food, plus my mother, did a lot to engrain me with the concept of where food comes from, more than any other experience.  As I grew older, I would begin to work more and more on the farm, and as I became a teenager and got my driver’s license, could drive loads of tomatoes to market and other foods to the auction market.

Q:  Where would those markets have been?

Benepe:  Princess Anne [county in Maryland] had an auction market, and I learned quite quickly that the auction market was not a true bidding process, but the two or three bidders who would sit there on the bench would collude with each other and take turns to suppress prices.

Q:  Standard auction behavior.

Benepe:  So farmers were very upset, and the canners weren’t much better.  To take a load of six hundred baskets of tomatoes to the cannery meant sitting in line for half a day, a long line of farmers waiting to unload, and meantime, these were in peek baskets which were stacked on top of each other in a staggered fashion, but the baskets were old and they’d begin to collapse under the weight, and there’d be juice all over the truck.  Canning tomatoes were generally very ripe tomatoes, the kind which were packed for eating were called Climax tomatoes, were picked earlier in the season while they were still partially green and put in these small quart baskets.  And they’d be shipped with a lid and much better protected.
	I tried to find out more about who was canning our tomatoes, and, in fact, I asked somebody [at the plant] what the label looked like so I could look for it in the store; it was some kind of innocuous name like Best Tomatoes, or something like that,  and later I would find  them [on the shelf] in the store so I could know what I was eating.  Campbell’s Soup eventually bought the cannery and they were more sophisticated.  They began to produce stewed tomatoes as well as canned tomatoes.  I went up above in the loft, where the women worked who were chopping peppers and onions and celery to make stewed tomatoes, and see how that process worked.  I was about sixteen at the time.  I had to be that old to be driving the truck.

Q:  So the years were about when?

Benepe:  This would have been—from 1938 through World War II to 1950 when I graduated from Williams College. 
	It was a pretty isolated life.  I had few friends.  When you’re on a two-hundred-acre farm, they’re not many people next door.  I had one friend who lived in the next farm.  He was [Joe Mamo] from Malta and actually he went to the same school.  He went to St. Andrew’s [with me] for a while as well.  I knew a few people on the other farm, on the opposite side, and would occasionally see them.  I bonded with people on the farm.  One of the farm hands’ sons, Leroy, I was kind of really good pals with.  He was younger than me.  I did a portrait of him in oil, one of my first oil portraits, and I won first prize in the student competition at Williams when I was there.

Q:  Were you a fairly serious art student?

Benepe:  I majored in it at Williams.  I switched from an economics major.  I had been majoring in economics at Williams, and that’s sort of jumping right ahead fast, but because I thought I was going to go into my dad’s [embroidered table linen] business like my brother [Bruce] did.  He studied aeronautical engineering…at M.I.T., and went into the Naval Air Corps and served out his service years in the Navy.  He was a pilot trainer.  He trained people to fly [bombers and fighters].  So when he came out [at the end of the war], he went to work at my dad’s office, and he felt my dad really needed him.  I guess my dad made him feel that way, because my dad said to me, he said, “Well, if I hadn’t hired him, I’m not sure what he would have done,” which is kind of a mean thing to say, but he said that only to me.  Bruce did very well in the firm for a long time.  He succumbed to prostate cancer, and he didn’t catch it early and they didn’t have ways of doing it then, and treatment wasn’t as good.  So he died at a fairly young age, in his sixties.
	So the experience on the farm was very meaningful to me, and I became really attached to the soil in a basic way.  I used to spend days after a rain shower looking for arrowheads and found a lot, built up a good collection, and people would bring me things they found, like good-sized ax heads in the fields.  So I became really interested in the history of the land, the archeology, and I was a collector of things.  I had my own little room at the back of the house, and I’d collect roots and things that interested me.  I had a little geology collection.  So I moved with earth things.
So that when I majored in economics [and Spanish], I thought I was going to pursue my dad’s business, and I took Spanish because we had a lot of relationships—the war changed things for the company.  Submarine warfare and so forth meant they lost all their contact.  In a revolution in China they lost their supplies from China.  World War II cut off supplies from Belgium and France, and so that they moved toward the Caribbean to get things made of grass and cork, and he reached out to designers, Russell Wright to design pottery, which he sold and put on exhibit with the linens.  He had cork mats with imprinted paintings by Winslow Homer on it, the scenes he did in the Caribbean.

Q:  So was your father in New York part of the time and at the farm part of the time?

Benepe:  Yes, he was.  And he was an art collector.  He loved art himself, and both he being a lover of art and my mother being a [commercial illustrator]. I remember there was an apocryphal story which someone told me, I don’t know how true it was, but that during a cocktail party they were having after they were first married and living on Ninth Street, that if they were living there then that would have been eight years before I was born, but that my dad overheard someone saying, “How can they afford an apartment like this?”  Because it was a two-floor studio apartment in a new building.  He heard the response, “Don’t you know Marge has this great job designing for Lord & Taylor?”  Not designing, but doing illustrations.  And so he was upset about his manliness, I guess, his ability to support the family, and he persuaded her to quit her job.  I don’t know how true that is.

Q:  Oh, my goodness.

Benepe:  Because obviously when I was born and a child, and this was almost twenty years or fifteen years after they were married, so I don’t know how these stories mesh, but she drew a portrait of me using a photograph and having me pose live, in charcoal and pencil, I think both, and she gave me her set of drawing pencils, sort of like passing them along to me.

Q:  What were your parents’ names?

Benepe:  He was Robert, and my mother was Marjorie.  Her maiden name was Tyler.  Her father was a doctor as well.  So she had lots of things mixing together.
	So their backgrounds, I think, influenced me, their interests.  My dad was always supportive of my choices because I made this shift at Williams to go into an art major, and it happened because I took a trip to Europe in ’49, after my junior year, and it exposed me to the roots of our own western culture in a way that I never could here.  One of the things that stood out in my experience was going up into the Laon Cathedral Tower and seeing graffiti carved on the walls of the stairs, with the date 1597 on the walls, and I said, “Oh, somebody has been around here.”  [laughs]  So just the whole exposure to art history and Europe was amazing.
	So I had taken the Art I, II course under Lane Faison at Williams, and fortunately we traveled by ship then, not by air, so I had five days to reflect on my experience, and it was a little bit like Saint Paul in Damascus; I got the message.  I had time to meditate on what I’d been doing, and thought I should shift my major to art.  I went to see Lane Faison, the head of the department, and said, “Would you accept me as a major?”  And he did, and it was pure bliss because I concentrated on nothing but art courses.

Q:  This was art history and studio, or just plain art history? 

Benepe:  No, studio too.  I worked on engraving, lithograph, other media, and it was in that year that I entered two pieces into the student art show, mixed media, where I mixed some charcoal, watercolor, and a little ink.  I usually [relied on external reality to] paint, like the portrait of Leroy; and I did a painting of a swimming pool.  [laughter]

Q:  That’s great.

Benepe:  Because I liked all the blues in the pools, painted a pool.  And then actually when I painted Leroy, his brown skin and I painted him against a blue background, which was sort of invented.  I had him sit in the pump house because the light there was a cool light, and so his brown skin had a blue highlights on it too.  I liked that combination of the dark brown and that blue.

Q:  And how old were you then?

Benepe:  I was probably—well, let’s see.  If I was in Williams already, then I was nineteen.  The painting had been earlier than the art show.  I brought it to the art show, so I could have been eighteen or nineteen when I did it.  The art show was [in 1949] when I was—let me get my dates straight.  Yes, when I would have been twenty-one.
There was a painter there.  I loved his work, a guy named John Goodrich. I thought he was top rate, and I thought he would get the first prizes.  Well, he got two second prizes and I got the two firsts, and I didn’t expect to get any, wasn’t looking for prizes.  The mixed media piece was the first I did without having a subject in front me, and I had the subject in my mind, which was stimulated by an experience in the library where I saw students listening to music over on earphones, and they were so concentrating.  I don’t know how many were there, but I put three in the picture because I wanted this triangle, and the base of the triangle was some man leaning on his elbows, this formed the base, and the other triangle was a superimposed figure standing above him, and the third triangle was a light coming from a window which I invented, although there were high windows in the library.  So I entitled the piece Silent Music.
One of the judges was James Thrall Soby from the Museum of Modern Art, and I got this story from Lane.  He called me up and invited me to come to this party to announce the winners, which I just ignored, didn’t know anything about it.  So I came over and he told me that I had won first prize, and then he said when Soby came to my painting he said, “I don’t have to go any further.”  Like, “This is it.”  I was really pleased.  I didn’t think that much of myself.
	So at that point, taking the art major was great.  They have a comprehensive exam where you’re exposed for a day to various works which you’ve never seen before and asked to write about them.  The professors, they had Faison, Pierson, Bill Pierson, who taught American art, and the third teacher was Whitney Stoppard who mainly concentrated in medieval art. He and I didn’t get along so well.  I thought there was something a little phony about him, and he didn’t think much of me, I don’t think, either, and they read the exams without knowing who wrote them. [Lane told me that] when they read some of what I had written about some of the paintings there, Faison said, “I think it’s Benepe,” and [Stoddard] said, “No, he could never write anything like that.”  [laughs]

Q:  Had you known that Williams was known to be such a fine place for the study of art and artists?

Benepe:  No.  No, I didn’t know that at all.  My dad picked it because his best friend, Col Brewer, who lived on Gramercy Park, had gone there and recommended it.  I thought I wanted to go to William & Mary.  [laughs]  It had a nicer sound.  I thought Virginia would be a nice place to be.  So I had no idea when I went there what I was going there for, and, in fact, I was really a terrible student the first year.  I was lazy.  I would cook hamburgers in my room and pass them out the window to other students.  When I would study, I’d put a blanket on the lawn, you know.  I was really badly disciplined and I’m wondering how I got through at all.  So it was really a struggle the first three years.  I took courses which were too advanced for me, in physics and chemistry.  They were like 1A course instead of 1, not true beginning courses.
So I was struggling to find myself in college, and I found myself best in things which were extracurricular.  I did advertising for the newspaper because I liked to illustrate, prepare the ad copy.  I organized events.  When we had a party weekend in the house, I would do the decorating and make a big Calder-type mobile of a skier coming down the stairs.  For one of the big spring weekends I planned the Field Day events.  I’d go out to Troy and interview bands, and I would hire an airplane to drop leaflets from the sky.  I was an events person.  [laughs]  I was wasting my tuition at college.
	So in a way, that segues into Greenmarket, because Greenmarket is an event.

Q:  Yes.

Benepe:  I would say for those four years in college, food was not very germane to my existence.  One interesting food story was that I was trying to sell tickets to a concert, and sitting around with some fellow students in the drugstore, and I couldn’t persuade them to buy tickets and I said, “Well, listen.  If you’ll buy these four tickets, I’ll make you a bet that I can eat ten strawberry sundaes in five minutes.”
So they said, “You’re on.”  [laughter]

Q:  Oh, my lord.

Benepe:  I sucked these strawberries, and my mouth and throat were totally numb with cold, frozen, but I did sell the tickets.  [laughs]

Q:  That’s a great story.

Benepe:  So that’s my experience with food, I don’t know how wholesome that is.  So then after I knew I was going to be moving to the art field, but not sure where I wanted to be, one of my teachers recommended Cooper Union, which was in a way stepping backwards because my fellow students at Cooper were coming out of high school and I was coming out of college, and Cooper didn’t give a degree then.  But the great thing about Cooper is it gave you a basic feel for art fields.  One was called fine arts, another was called three-dimensional arts, and the third was architecture and design.

Q:  And it was free, yes?

Benepe:  Exactly.  You took an exam to get in, and that was appealing.  So each time I’d consult my father, and he was supporting my living, my living style all this time.  I didn’t have any way of earning money.  I never really thanked him for what he did.  He was just very supportive, and I think he was supportive because of his interest in the arts.  He had a lot of really good paintings.  In fact, I’m told—he never told me this himself—but he once had a Blue Period Picasso, and he sold it.

Q:  It’s too horrible to think about.  [laughs]

Benepe:  I know it.  But I used to have a De Kooning, which I purchased for $200, and the last time it was sold, it was like 2.4 million.  [laughs]

Q:  It was a full painting?

Benepe:  Yes, it was a pastel.

Q:  Oh, my.

Benepe:  At that time, I’m sure it’s called Woman III, but when it was auctioned at the auction house a few years ago, it was called just Woman, but it was on the face of the catalog.  It was that important.

Q:  How did you buy it?  How did you happen to—

Benepe:  Well, one my teachers, a guy named Delavante at Cooper Union, he said, “You really should go see this painter.” 
	And I said, “Good.  I think I will.”  So I did, and I was really enthralled with the work, and not only that, but he was like a near neighbor of mine.  I had a studio on Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street, and I could look out my window and see him painting in his studio.

Q:  Oh, how extraordinary.

Benepe:  But he was on Third Avenue, I was on Fourth, out the back window, but I didn’t know that, didn’t know much about him.
The other connection I made then was another artist Delavante referred me to was Seymour Lipton.  Lipton was a dentist then.  So I went to see Lipton to be my dentist so I could get to know him as a sculptor, and so we spent a lot of time, and he would show me his maquettes, and he would turn it upside down.  He said, “What do you think of it this way and this way?”  He loved to talk about his work while he was working.  I’m still in touch with his son [Michael] now, who has a lot of his collection in the basement up on 98th St.  [I had done some interior design in that house for Sy in exchange for dentistry. Michael wanted to place Lipton’s work in Central or Riverside Parks]. 

Q:  Get the individual pieces into the park system?

Benepe:  It hasn’t worked so far.  I’ll keep trying.  So you can see I’m moving across history here a lot and not sticking much with Greenmarket yet.

Q: That’s fine.

Benepe:  So that Cooper then gave me the ability to find my way in the arts, and I didn’t feel I had a message to do through painting, for some reason.  I wanted to move more into useful three-dimensional arts that involve people and my surroundings.  In fact, I thought of the idea of store window design.  I want to Lord & Taylor’s to find who their designers were and how they worked, because they did nice work there.  The person I talked to, I think the designer, said, “It’s really not so much design as marketing.  You have to know marketing,” and that didn’t interest me too much.  But it’s interesting how it sort of relates to my mother’s activity, which was to push clothing in a different direction, also at Lord & Taylor’s.
Then I thought of theater design, and, in fact, while I was at Williams I did the sets for a musical written by a classmate [Stephen Sondheim].

Q:  This was a musical at Williams?

Benepe:  Yes.  It was a class musical. It was really wonderful.  I didn’t build any sets.  What we did was I put them on glass plates and we projected them, because we had to move from scene to scene quickly.  So I’d work late at night in the back, painting on glass plates.
	So at Cooper then I was moving to different fields, and I liked three-dimensional design the best of all.  My teacher there was George Kratina, and he said, “Well, you know, you should go on to M.I.T. because you really want to move into architecture.  I can see that.”  Then at M.I.T. my strongest influence was Kevin Lynch, who talked about urban form and wrote some excellent books, and another lecturer there came from Denmark, named Steen Eiler Rasmussen.  Lynch wrote [The Image of the City].  Rasmussen wrote [Towns and buildings].  

Q:  How did you go to M.I.T.?  How did that happen?

Benepe:  Well, George Kratina recommended it to me, and I applied and was accepted, and then told my father, the poor guy.  [laughs]  He said, “How could you do this to me? I’ll be paying tuition forever.”  [laughs]  He was very angry, really, and I didn’t understand why he was angry, but he didn’t pull out the rug from under me.  Then to make matters worse, I met a woman I was in love with, and I wanted to marry her and take her with me to M.I.T., and he said, “Over my dead body.  I’m not supporting her too.”  [laughter]
	So those were good years.  They were difficult years, because I had to take a lot of scientific courses over again, strength and materials, acoustics, things not too interesting.  In fact, I got an F in one of the courses, which meant I had to take it over, and an E in math so I took the make-up exam.  But I lived in a co-op house, and one of my fellow residents was a math teacher, so he drilled me on how to pass the make-up exam.  The other lesson I learned about the strength and materials course—no, it was not that one, it was a different one—Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning.  [laughter]

Q:  Oh, my goodness.

Benepe:  Right.  And I realized when my professor asked me four reasons why radiant heating was an improved method of heating a building, I would just develop my own reasons rather than looking at my notes from his lectures.  So I realized the second year is to make sure to do two things.  One is make sure the answers on assignments are all correct.  The students always worked with each other.  Two, on exams to provide the answers you know he is looking for.

Q:  A very important lesson.

Benepe:  And a third [failure] was something I always failed to do in my subjects, to  keep up with the work.  I took math at M.I.T. from the guy who wrote the book, and I just couldn’t keep up with the course, and so I’d be a third of the way through the book when we were all the way through the course.  [laughs]  He was a wonderful teacher.

Q:  But he really knew the material.  [laughs]

Benepe:  Oh, I took a course in illumination with a wonderful teacher named—imagine this course in illumination, right?  It’s a course in architecture.  It was taught by a man named [Parry] Moon.

Q:  Perfect.

Benepe:  But I did okay, and I moved from almost failing out the first year, getting my methodology correct in the second year, and ended up on the Dean’s List.  I moved from architecture into city planning as my major sort of course, and that’s when Kevin Lynch was big.  The other person who was an artist there—trying to remember who it was—[Gyorgy  Kepes].  I worked in his house helping him paint his ceiling because I wanted to know him better as an artist, and he did work on enamels.  He did the work for the Pittsburgh Library…. 
	So I kept myself really engrained in the arts while I was there, and my major—well, I was moving into city planning, but I graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture.  The other people who were a big influence on me was—geodesic dome, Fuller.  Buckminster Fuller came to lecture and he was a marvelous person.  He would start a lecture at eight and still going strong at midnight.  [laughs] [I worked with him and fellow students building a geodesic dome in Woods Hole]….
           I graduated from MIT in March, in the middle of the year [1955].  Again, with my dad’s help, I got a job in a large architect’s office.

Q:  What year would that have been?

Benepe:  That would have been ’55.

Q:  An architect’s office in New York?

Benepe:  In Manhattan, yes. Eggers & Higgins. It was kind of a run-of-the-mill office.  It did pretty standard buildings.  But there was one man there, an Israeli man who I really liked his work, and I tried to move under him, but I was hardly qualified to work in the firm, even though I’d had a degree from M.I.T.  They really stressed design and engineering, but I couldn’t do drafting.  I didn’t know how to letter.  We never were taught basics of drafting at M.I.T.  So that the head draftsman looked at my lettering and said, “You’ve got to go home and work on this,” and he’d give me letters to copy, and I worked on it and became proficient in drafting.
	Then I was asked to do some design work for the Syosset High Schools, working on some of the interiors.  I went out to see the school, and I was amazed that they actually built what I designed.  I thought they were just giving me work to do. But then I met [Wynaut Van Der Pool], an architect who had a one-man office, and he asked if I would work with him because he had more work than he could handle alone.  So I left Eggers & Higgins, this first firm was called.  [The Israeli architect] there I wanted to work with because he was doing really advanced work, they wouldn’t assign me to him.  Instead I worked on Georgian re-productions for the University of Virginia and things like that, and they would badly site the buildings.  They would take this formal Georgian building and stick it on the slope of one corner, exposed way at the bottom, you know, because there wasn’t room on the site to fit it properly. 
[However, I did admire a silver haired draftsman there who used a very soft but very sharp drafting pencil with such skill and elegance. He would create shadow lines when drawing the multi-paned Georgian windows, simply varying the pressure on his pencil.] 

Q:  But you recognized that it was sited badly?

Benepe:  Well, I didn’t intellectually, but I felt it in my soul, yes, that it was just not good design, and they were trying too hard and they were doing the wrong kind of things for the wrong reason, but I didn’t rationalize this.  Of course, I was exposed to new work that was going on such as Lever House, and also the biggest things once, I think, was Corbusier’s Ronchamps chapel.

Q:  Had you seen it?

Benepe:  No, I hadn’t, but I did see it in ’59 [during a trip to Europe].
When I was at M.I.T. [in 1954], I had designed a housing project.  It was on a hill.  And I thought to myself, “How do I want this project to look?”  And I said, “Well, I want to frame the views.”  It was on the side of the hill.  So I began sculpting the houses in curved forms so that they would be like trumpets facing the view, and then I would have [entered them through] the back.  So they became items of sculpture on the hill rather than houses.
I married in ’55, the year I graduated from M.I.T.  My wife, [Jagna], was the daughter of a Polish U.N. official named Antoni Wojicki, who had worked for the Polish government in exile in London during the war.  But she, my wife, and her brother and mother were left in Warsaw.  They hadn’t left with him to England when the Germans attacked and leveled the city, and their apartment building was one of the few left intact.

Q:  A miracle.

Benepe:  They tried to escape the city, but they were taken prisoner and put on [an open freight] train, and they thought they were maybe on the train leaving for concentration camps in the east.  They weren’t Jewish, but that didn’t probably matter so much if you were Polish.  Her mother bribed a guard to turn his back by giving him a gold wedding ring she had, and they got off the train at night and lay down on the tracks while the train passed overhead.  Then they went across fields, and they were very hungry, of course, but it was summertime, so they found tomatoes and onions. [Jagna] said they’d never enjoyed vegetables so much in their life.  But they were soon captured again, and then they were taken to another prison camp, they called them, not prisons, I think, farther from the border so it would be harder to escape, I guess.  They finally were rescued at the end of the war, reunited with their father and then they came [to the U.S. where Antek worked with the U.N. secretariat in housing], and that’s when they came to this country.
They got Jagna involved with the American Friends Service Committee, and I was [ involved] as well when I was in [Cambridge at MIT].  So we met on a Friends retreat, Jagna and I did.  We married not long after.  This would, again, have been 1955.  Then, after graduation, I worked as an architect in New Rochelle.  It seems like I always lived in places with the word “New” in front of them, [but they were actually] old places.  New York, New Rochelle, Newburgh, and Newcastle on Tyne in England.  [laughs]

Q:  Funny.

Benepe:  And they were all these old historic cities.
So here I am in New Rochelle and we were mainly involved in political things, Jagna and I.  We were very involved in the Peace Movement…[with] the American Friends Service Committee.  We went on retreats.  Bayard Rustin was a big influence.  Have you ever heard of him?

Q:  Yes.  But you were working as?

Benepe:  I was working as an architect, draftsman.  [After Eggers & Higgins] I went to work for [Wynant Vanderpool], and I loved working for him, and he would give me a house to work on and I would just capture that house.  It would be in my head.  I said, “You know, you need a model of this house,” and made a model of it.  At first he would present to me, he said, “My client has a budget,” and he had two designs.  One was obviously beyond the budget, and one was in it.
	And I said, “We’ve got to do the one within the budget.”  He already had his floor plan.  I said, “Let me draw it up and make a model.”  It was a lovely little house I made for him.
There were some other things I worked on with him, and in the meantime, he went to the Caribbean to meet with potential clients [from whom] he was hoping to get more work.  He came back from the Caribbean and he’d gotten no new work.  He said, “Listen.  I have really no work now in the office.  I have to let you go.”  And so for the next few days, I’d be riding in a bus and still designing this house in my head.  It hadn’t left me yet.  It was like an aborted child.  So I never knew if the house was ever built or not.  There was another house he designed.  He was influenced a little bit by Frank Lloyd Wright.  The house was in Morristown, New Jersey, and it was too long and angular and out of kilter, and it wasn’t well organized, whereas the house I designed for him was really simple and basic.
	There was another guy [Jagna and I] was very much involved with [on the American] Friends Service Committee. It was a man named Sheldon Weeks, and Sheldon had a friend at Sands Point named Dana Backus…. He was a fairly wealthy guy, like an attorney, and Sheldon was living in his gardener’s cottage and he wanted to build an addition on the cottage.  So I designed [and helped build] the addition, and what I did was really kind of daring.  I made a bridge out to the room and it was on a slope, so it suspended over the ground.  And I built up these columns of solid concrete blocks, sort of laid vertically, not horizontally.  Then to make it really mannered, the two posts supported on those two block piers ended on finials of brass so there’d be a concentrated weight on the blocks.  A crazy thing to do, but I sort of liked that expression.  It came out of those [Dadaist traditions of the 20’s].  What did those artists do?  They hung [a big rock] on piano wires to show the strength of the piano wire--a big rock on a piano wire, that sort of statement.  This was a building for someone to live in and I hoped it held up okay.  I developed the structural system which I used later in another house. I’m not talking much about food or farming yet, of course, [but I will].
	What was interesting about the house, and maybe unique is it wasn’t supported on the outside, but more toward the center so that it would be basically four [internal] points of support.  These would go up to the mid points to the sides of the roof, and then they’d form [a cantilevered] A-structure to brace it, so that it left the corners free of supporting the roof.  As a consequence, I could take the windows at the corners and treat them like store windows and bevel the glass to meet glass, so there was no [visible] corner support.  Underneath this I used cement stucco, and because this was near the beach in [Sands Point], across Long Island Sound.  This, again, was in the early fifties.  While I was working jobs, I did my own work freelance and that was this was.  I would go to the beach and pick up sea-washed glass, the kind you find on the beach, and I’d embed these into the corners [so the light would pass through, both day and night].

Q:  Oh, it sounds beautiful.

Benepe:  So the light would come through from the inside, and then I would also embed other things like shells and so forth, to express the fact that it was near the shore.  And then also to relate to sailing, the bridge that led out to this building, the two walls were laid, as I recall, I did it in dark vertical beveled wood, tongue and groove planks behind which were closets, both sides.  They needed storage.  So you’d walk through the hallway and closets on both sides, and for the roof over this, I took thin slats and bent them in curves [squeezed] by these walls, so they were in compression rather than the weight of anything on them, and across them I across white nylon canvas, which I laced up and down the sides of the cedar boards so it had a ship feeling in the lacing.  So the house had a lot of interesting things like that, and I’ve always wanted to go back and see how it’s held up.
	Then I did a second house when I divorced my wife Jagna.  She moved with a guy up to New Hampshire and he asked me to design their house, which I did.  [laughter]  This second house embodied both the buildings [I’d designed with sculptured walls] at M.I.T. that were curved and also the structural concept of the house in Sands Point….  In other words, the house itself had the curved walls which faced the view; that was the living area.  It was two levels.  And then there was the wood sheathed service area, which was more boxlike, which contained the utilities, the heating, the kitchen and everything that was mechanical and electrical.  So one was sort of living and yet it was mechanical.  And then the roof was supported like the house in Sands Point.  It went across [internal] third points with [two] long [trussed] beams, and so they were supported independently at three points on this curved wall and the end wall, and so the space between the top of the wall and the underside of the roof was [enclosed by a thin curving] sheet of plastic, [to emphasize the roof floating over, not resting, on the curved masonry wall].

Q:  It’s very daring, these things.  What gave you the sense of freedom to do that?

Benepe:  I don’t know.  [laughs]  It was my right.  I mean, if I don’t, who does, you know.  It just seemed like the right thing to do.  I mean, I always appreciated Frank Lloyd Wright talking about organic, because it was a meaningful word to me, that it grows out of the sense of form and function, really.  The interesting thing about going to Ronchamps is I saw Ronchamps after I had designed the project at M.I.T., and it was the same forms, because Ronchamps had these curved forms.  I did the house up in New Hampshire far after I’d seen Ronchamps.  But I think Corbusier was important to me [as a sculptor]. I liked the Habitation in Marseille quite a bit.  I sort of agree with Jane Jacobs about his planning, that it was not [at] human scale, but then, fortunately, he didn’t build those.  I think the work that Corbusier did in India, in Chandigarh, was interesting, the planning, the roads curving.  He did better work than [Albert] Mayor did there, and I think Mayor took over and straightened the streets out.  I worked for Mayor’s office for a while, when it was Mayor, Whittlesey and Glass.  So, I mean, all of these people were influences.  Julian Whittlesey was a big influence. 
One of the people there became—well, there were two guys who worked there later on, Jim Rossant and Bill Conklin, and they became partners.  In a way, Jim Rossant and I bonded, even after I left there in ’58.  We always kept in touch and I’m still in touch with him today. [Rossant died in Dec. 2009, after this interview was conducted].  He’s in France now, and he’s done a lot of good design work and he’s exhibited as an artist and he sold three pieces in his last show in France.  His wife was Colette Rossant.  You know her?

Q:  Yes, I do.

Benepe:  Of course.  So [we’ve] been close friends.

Q:  They ate well.  [laughter]

Benepe:  Yes.  She ate a little bit too well, I think.  They have wonderful children, and his son Tomas I brought on the board of the Fine Arts Federation, of which I’ve been a member of for over thirty years, [of New York], and he’s been chair of the organization for the last two to three years, and he will be resigning as chair this summer.  So it’s nice to keep the family together that way.  He works with Polshek.  He’s a partner of Polshek’s office just two blocks from here.  So it’s a small world.
	So advancing through my architectural work, I’ve kept things pretty much in chronological context.  I worked in various architectural offices, some which were really not good placements, and I did work for a small firm I’d read about and liked [Perkins & Will].  It did good schoolwork, but I found myself going there as a draftsman.  This was in White Plains. I’m not sure.  You know, this again would have been the late fifties, and I would be doing ridiculous [but fun] things like picking out tile colors for the floors and stuff like that.  Somewhere I began to think I wasn’t made out to be an architect, at least not in that context.
I worked for an architect in New Rochelle named Lee Perry, and he was a nice guy and I got some run-of-the-mill schoolwork to do, and I could walk to work through a park and that was wonderful, I didn’t have to commute anywhere, and that’s why I wanted to work there, so I could walk.
Then when I found my New York planning job, when I first went back to New York, was to work in planning.  It was firm called Candeab and Fleissig, and their main office was in Newark.  I worked in their Newark office for a while, but then they opened up an office in New York City doing urban renewal work here, and that exposed me to urban renewal as a concept, but it was planning and it was working with communities, and at that time the City Planning Department had first prepared (under James Felt) [had initiated] their first comprehensive way of doing urban renewal.  They did what they call conservation, rehabilitation, and rebuilding.  So there are three phases or three ways of approaching one community.  We did the West Side urban renewal area, and I devoted myself to that and I did drawings of how to treat open spaces.  I did a lot of planning.  I planned the Morningside Urban Renewal area, in which I would close streets [to motor vehicles].  I would really develop the form of the city around different concepts to try to shape how things would happen.  In fact, what I was doing then really led to some of the things today’s transportation commissioner is doing today.  What’s her name?  I just met with her a few weeks ago.  Her name will come to me. [Janette Sadik-Kalin]  But she is beginning to reshape streets in that way.  I don’t know if you’ve seen Broadway below Times Square.

Q:  Yes.

Benepe:  This was what I’d been trying to do back then in 1950s and sixties in work here.  One of the things I contributed to the city as more as a volunteer than anything else, because I worked for a group called Metropolitan Committee on Planning as a volunteer, and there was a proposal then to redesign the Civic Center down around City Hall, a proposal that would have eliminated the meeting of the archway through the municipal building, where there are two streets in the back which crossed, and they were going to use these two cross streets as their main access [thereby blocking the pedestrian passage], and I said, “No.  We should be crossing that x with the pedestrian [passage] through the archway, reaching beyond.”  And there actually is a citizen pressure group.  We got them to change that.  We worked with their planners, and that’s when they build their new Police Center and the mall that led to it, and all that design was done by a pretty well established firm uptown.  I think it was Gruzen Associates.

Q:  I don’t know.

Benepe:  Anyway, they adopted it and carried it through.  The only thing I had wanted to carry it further, to make sure the Al Smith housing all the way to the East River, and make the Al Smith housing an attractive place for people to go to do things rather than segregate the housing from the community.  There is an example where that was done successfully in London [near Russell Square].  You may be familiar with it.  I don’t remember the name of it, but it’s a U-shaped court feeling.  It’s not far from Russell Square, and the inside of the U tapers down with all the apartments stepping down to a simple courtyard, and then all the apartments have glazed porches. Then on the ground floor where the shops are, and then the inside of this—so it’s like this, the back being straight up and the front going on the courtyard, there’s this big A-frame.  So you’d have this enormous tall corridor, A-frame corridor, [through which] you can walk and look up.  It’s quite a brilliant design.  There’s a movie theater tucked into it on one side, and they always had the best movies were shown there.  It’s a very successful design.  Designs like this influenced my thinking about architecture and what could be done with streets, and, of course, London had a lot of closed streets.  So I wanted to bring that to New York.
	I got involved with another private client and got in a battle with Jane Jacobs in a way.  The client was—I worked with a guy named Roger Schaefer, who were developers to put in what he called housing for the poor.  He searched out federal programs which would subsidize housing for really low-income people, not middle-income.

Q:  Where?

Benepe:  Anywhere he could get sites, and that’s where I came in.  He said, “Can you find me a site in the West Village?”
	I said, “Well, I don’t work that way, but I will develop a plan which I think might work for the West Village,” because I worked as a planner, “in which housing might work.”  Then I would go around and talk to people.  What my planning approach was, I went in to businesses to see what was going on, how many people they employed, what the condition of the buildings were, and then I went to see Jane Jacobs, but I couldn’t tell her who my client was because I didn’t have permission to do this, but I said, “I’d like your thinking about approaching this.”
At the time I went in there, she was having a meeting with Stanley Isaacs, who was then a member of the City Council, and she was fighting urban renewal.  Stanley said, “Why don’t you come up with your own plan.”
	And she said, “No, because if I come up with my own plan, then they’ll shoot me down.”  [laughs]

Q:  Right.

Benepe:  So when I talked with Jane, I said I’d like her to participate in my planning, but I couldn’t tell her my client.  I said I was just doing this in my own project.  And then Jim Rossant later was talking to her and told her who my client was, and she asked me to come to a meeting at her house where all these people sitting around to attack me.  I came out literally in tears, you know.  They kind of escorted me out of the neighborhood, and one of the guys was walking with me and he said, “Why don’t you cross the street.”  A kid walked out, ran out to catch a ball and was almost hit by a car.
	And I said, “This is the kind of problem I want to deal with, to create streets which are safe for people to be on.”
So Jane and I never hardly talked to each other after that, and I found it very interesting that I should receive the Jane Jacobs Award this year.  [laughs]

Q:  Yes.  I was thinking that, yes.

Benepe:  But the first time I got to know her was when I was working downtown in Lower Manhattan, and they were having these ridiculous exercises to prevent [death] from atomic bomb attacks.  We’d all get under the tables and desks when the sirens went off.  [laughter]

Q:  Right.

Benepe:  And so I met her during one of the demonstrations against this sort of fake protection.  Before that, I wrote to her when she was writing for the Architectural Forum and she had done an analysis of, of all things, a shopping center in Texas, I think, and she praised it, this shopping center, because it reminded her of St. Mark’s [in Venice] and the piazza.

Q:  That’s amazing.

Benepe:  And I said, “I think you’re looking at it too much as a floor plan and not the scale of the thing.”
	And she replied, she said I was looking at it too much from the bird’s-eye point of view, and I don’t think I was looking at it from the ground’s-eye point of view, but at least we got a chance to meet over this, and she responded, and responded to other things.  So I liked the fact her interests were there, and I loved her book.  I mean, I thought her way of approaching Death and Life of American Cities, but on the other hand, I found her conclusions [flawed].  Her analysis was great, but she didn’t draw the right conclusions from the analysis.  She said public housing is bad per se, whereas I revert back to the public housing in Britain I was describing to you.
And it was a very unusual—I mean, it was part of the best design [unclear], whereas that was designed to bring people into it.  I wanted to bring people over into Al Smith houses and make that a place to be.  I maintained that public housing, if you integrated with the community, the community will come into it and vice versa.  The design of the buildings was terrible.  The ground floors were half off the ground and half below, so you couldn’t walk into a house at all.  None of the ground floor apartments had outdoor spaces that were private, or gardens.  So there was no use of open space in a human way, and so everything about the design was purely mechanical.
	Jim Rossant and Bill Conklin worked on a project in Brooklyn which [unclear] she dislikes a lot, I think.  We made an attempt to create a townhouse at the ground level.  I.M.Pei was trying to create something decent in Philadelphia [with Rittenhouse Square].  There was a movement in that direction of [human] scale.
So we’ve gone a long way and haven’t even gotten close to Greenmarket.

Q:  Were you working on your own at that point?

Benepe:  I didn’t become independent until about the time I hired Bob [Lewis in 1979]. We were a two-man office.  At that point I was moving through planning echelons, moving upward, and the last firm I worked for [Hancock Little Calvert, whose NYC office was run by] Robert C. Weinberg [during the early 70’s].  Bob Weinberg—do you know who he is?

Q:  No.

Benepe:  He was my mentor, really, in a very true way, in a way many other people were.  He and I met at the AIA [American Institute of Architects].  I was working on one of the committees, I think it was a committee on urban design, and at that time there was a split within the AIA over the West Side Highway, I think it was about, and I was opposed with the way it was being designed, the whole project, and there were people in AIA who were supportive of it….  I think that was a major project, and I remember the chair at the time was split down the middle himself, and he didn’t know who to support, and we really split down the middle.  We had an executive director then [George Lewis] who was more on the side of what I call the conservatives, who believed in big development.
So Bob got personally interested in me and asked if I’d work in his office and reach out to the smaller communities upstate in Sullivan County to [help prepare land use and zoning plans].

Q:  What was Bob doing then?

Benepe:  Bob Weinberg, he was [working] as a planning consultant, but he also had a radio program, WNYC.  He was an architectural and planning critic.  In fact, one day he gave me the opportunity to participate on one of his [radio talks]—he wrote.  He kind of read an editorial on the air, a commentary.  He reviewed one project for Bryant Park, which was involved in putting a show on in the park, [an enormous spectacle called Orlando Furioso, the predecessor of fashion shows to come] in Bryant Park under a tent, for the entire summer, sponsored, I think, by the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, and I had my office in Bryant Park then.  When I was working for Bob Weinberg, he had his office there, and then I took it over later after he died.  That’s [where] I became independent [consultant working under my own name].

Q:  Where did you say in the park?

Benepe:  On the south side on Fortieth Street, overlooking the park.  So I was very familiar with what was happening.  The show was going on at that point, and I wrote a critique on it for Bob, which he did on the air.  What happened is this show was supposed to happen on one of the piers [in the Hudson River] under a tent, I think, or in the pier building, and a woman named Stephanie Sills was involved in organizing for mayor—I think then it was Mayor Lindsay.  I guess Stephanie Sills might have been a daughter of Beverly Sills.  I’m not sure.  I don’t know; I’m just assuming that.
At any rate, the longshoremen gave her a hard time in terms of what they would demand to help on the pier.  So she at wit’s end.  “Where am I going to hold this show?  I made a commitment.”  Oh, I know what she was putting on.  

Q:  Oh yes.

Benepe:  It was a big Italian musical-type thing, with charging horses.  You know, I believe in shows too, but in the park on the grass?  So she put up this big tent to do it, and I was very critical of it.  Not only did it take over the lawn for the whole summer and destroy the lawn, but it also put up these massive generators to keep the tent full of air, which was going noisily booming away every day.
So Bob prepared this speech for WNYC.  It was broadcast on the air, his commentary, not mine.  And Segal I can’t remember Segal’s first name, was George or Alan, one of the Siegels who was president of WNYC, took his program off the air under pressure from the mayor, because he was so embarrassed by this, and said from that point on he’d have to vet all his programs before he’d broadcast them.  [laughs]

Q:  Oh, my goodness.

Benepe:  Which he agreed to.  I don’t know if he ever told him I did it.
So there I was then in his office and doing this planning work for the town of Rockland  in Sullivan County.  The planning chair I worked under in the town of Rockland was a great guy named Alan Fried, who was very supportive of the planning work I was doing, and I was doing things no planners had ever done.  I worked with contours, slopes, natural resources, farmlands, and tried to develop really meaningful planning.  He was very supportive of everything I did, and I wrote their zoning laws and downtown detailed zoning and development forms.  And gradually at that point I was reaching out for other clients.  Then he died fairly soon after my joining the firm.

Q:  Who he?

Benepe:  Bob Weinberg.

Q:  This was in the late sixties?

Benepe:  It would have to be the early seventies.

Q:  Early seventies?

Benepe:  Yes, probably ’71 or so.  So I’d work on these projects under Bob’s name, and he paid me a salary.  As a senior planner for Hancock Little Calvert. I served as a consultant to Community Board Twelve in Washington Heights to evaluate the impact of the highway proposed along the Hudson River waterfront, and found a thoughtful informed ally in Marcy Benstock, [who fought the Westside Landfill proposals]. I was very much on her side of the issue.
Also I was really pushing for the idea of a surface road rather than the underground road, because the underground road didn’t result in eliminating traffic on the waterfront, because they put a road above the underground road for carrying local service traffic.  So it would have been pretty much as we have today, maybe not as many lanes, maybe four lanes instead of six, and then it would push the edge of the river much further out.  So I wanted to keep the river close to where it is now, and so that’s why we fought to accomplish this plan.  Marcy was a major player to make it work out because of her suit to protect the striped bass.  And other people were involved too.  Al Buteel was a big force, and he still is.  I worked with anybody we could, including the planning boards.  Planning Board 1 was very good on this issue.  Planning Board 2, pretty strong [as well]. … Planning Board 5 in midtown for a couple of years, and I worked on mainly zoning [and park and transportation] issues there for that board.
	So when Bob died, I went out to reach out for clients, you know, to continue under my own name.  The other member of the firm was a guy named Jim Curle, who was a landscape architect, and Jim pulled in the Parks Department work. When Bob died, he left Hancock Little Calvert to work for ConEdison.  This was a [Toronto-based] firm.  They offered to take me up to Toronto with them, and I didn’t want to leave the city.  I wasn’t married then. I was involved with Mary [Frank] then, and didn’t want to leave the city and go to Toronto.
So I decided to just develop my own firm and reach out for work, and I was successful in reaching clients, chiefly in New York state in historic preservation [and landscape planning and zoning]….

Q:  So the focus of your firm was what?

Benepe:  Planning.  I was a planning firm.  So I became really concerned about the farmland loss then, working for the firm, especially in the Newburgh area where I had lived and worked in the late 60s. The County executive [Louis Heimbach] then was buying up farmland.  He wanted to see development and he only saw farmland as land banking issues for future development.  The irony is that he was renting land to one of the farmers in Greenmarket, Don Keller.  So as I saw farming as present and future use, he saw farming as a temporary use.  I sat down next to him at a county dinner of some kind and talked to him about this issue and didn’t get very far with him.
So I persisted in trying to raise the awareness of the importance of farming in the county, in Orange County, and I was talking with preservationists as well.  I mean, many of the best [historic] houses were on farms.
	So Bob came to me then.  I wanted him because I wanted to get some work in Woodstock, New York, [where he had worked as part of a consultant planning team.]

Q:  Bob Lewis?

Benepe:  Bob Lewis.  He had done a program at the University of Pennsylvania and a grant from the…Audubon Foundation. He and a team went to Woodstock from the University of Pennsylvania to do kind of an environmental study of Woodstock, which led to changes in their zoning.  And because he had done such good basic work in Woodstock and I wanted to get work in Woodstock, I hired him, hoping he’d be a good connection, and I liked him.  I don’t know how I met him.  Somebody must have recommended him.
So we worked out of a two-man office, and we began kicking the idea around of a farmers’ market, because we had read the work of John Hess in the New York Times, and he was another mentor, basically.  John had written a glowing piece about the [Farmers] market in Syracuse.  Syracuse really had two markets.  It had the old historic market that went back a hundred years, which is still there, the big market.  It also had a downtown market, which was more of the model for Greenmarket, which was run by the Chamber of Commerce.  The woman running that program had done a study indicating that the market brought people downtown and that they continued to shop downtown.  Using this study, we wanted to advance this concept here [in New York City], so then we reached out for money and Bob went to [Richard Pough, president of the Natural Area Council] … Bob went to talk to him about our desire to raise money to look at Farmers Markets protect farmland.  He offered us a [start-up] grant from his foundation.

Q:  Was that the Kaplan, J.M. Kaplan?

Benepe:  No, before that. …
Bob introduced me to him, and so he gave us this small seed money grant of, I think, $800, which was meant to go out and raise serious money.  So our first thing was to do a feasibility study for the city to run farmers’ markets, and we asked for $7,000 to do this.  We talked to Suzanne Davis of the J.M. Kaplan fund, but more importantly, we talked to the fund for the City of New York.  It was Nancy Castleman who was representing then.  The Kaplan Fund was then directed by Suzanne Davis.  And both of them said, “You know, for what you want to do, you should have an independent group do it.”  The city had no money then in the seventies, and they said [the city] be unable to run a farmers’ market, “So you should find a nonprofit to do this.”
	So then what did we do at that point?  Oh, then we looked for a nonprofit, and I wrote a letter to Margot Wellington, then the director of the Municipal Arts Society but I never heard back from her, and the reason was—I didn’t know it—she was ill in a hospital and not responding.
At the same time, I contacted the Council on the Environment [of New York City].  Barry Samuels was then the director, and so he was the first person I had a chance to speak to face-to-face, and they were really responsive to the idea of a farmers’ market.  We hadn’t developed Greenmarket yet.  So I wrote him a one-page contract where I would raise the money and they would let me direct the program.

Q:  Direct the program once it got up and—

Benepe:  The farmers’ market.  The council would run it [as a non-profit project] and I would direct it for them, and they would pay me a salary or consulting fee.  I forgot how I set it up.  Then I went out to raise money.  I raised our budget from $7,000 to $35,000 to really staff it and pay ourselves salaries to work on it.  The first year we were only able to raise $15,000, but that wasn’t bad.  And I had this other planning work I was doing, so it wasn’t that I needed that only for the money.
	We then immersed ourselves into how do we run a farmers’ market.  [laughs]  I was familiar with some of the farms in Orange County.  We divided it by responsibility.  It was my job to look for sites [in NYC], and his [Bob’s] job to look for farmers, and he went to the nearby counties first in New Jersey and New York State.  He went to Ocean County, and I recall his saying that the Ocean County farmers felt that New York was too risky a place to sell in, that the mafia would rob them at the bridges and tunnels and demand payoffs.

Q:  What appealed to you about the whole farmers’ market idea?

Benepe:  Very good question.  The use of urban space for a more humane use than just parking cars and driving through it, and the recognition of the fact that city streets are virtually our only public spaces.  That’s how we experience the city and the country, for that matter.  Because I’m working, as you know, in Saugerties.  So, shaping and use of urban space is one.  The other was that losing the access to fresh food grown in our region and losing the farm land, that farmland was too essential.  I wanted to keep this symbiotic relationship that comes out of the medieval period of Europe, of village and rural community.  Part of the reason that the rural areas around Rome and London have remained rural is because they’re owned by rich people, or in the case of Rome, owned by the church, and so they didn’t permit developers to come in, they still don’t.  Now it’s become more vulnerable.  I didn’t know the history of that, but that’s why essentially it remained green.  And when you look at the pictures of [many European] cities and towns, they’re always surrounded by green and by farms.
	So there’s a dedication without zoning, and it’s just tradition which kept it that way.  So I was trying to see how to we can keep the same thing here.  We don’t have that tradition of—we do have large estates owned by rich people, but they’re not farmers, largely.  And as the families age and their lands are inherited by multiple children, the tendency is to split the ownership and to seek out other means of sustaining their own personal economics.  So developers are hovering there in the trees, waiting to pounce when one is available.  So I was ready to pounce in [for] the benefit of farms.
Of course, [there was] a third factor, which I had really forgotten, and my father was still living then when I formed Greenmarket, he reminded me of my growth on the farm.  I’d forgotten that and I’d forgotten the connection [I had forged with] the economic experiences of farming, that when somebody came in to pay my father for food they had purchased, one day at dinner he gave out a hundred one-dollar bills.  I said, “That’s a lot of money.”  [laughs]  And then another time he was paid a hundred dollars for something to do with food, and I saw the cash value of food raising, and I saw how the farmers were being basically cheated at the auction stand, and remembering that my brother would drive to Baltimore from the Eastern Shore, which is a long, long trip, three or four hours, to try to get a better price for beans, and once he drove to New York City.

Q:  Oh, my goodness.

Benepe:  A seven-hour drive in order to get fifty cents more a bushel for beans, because the prices were so depressed.  Farmers then were shifting, like my dad did, to feed-stock [Black Angus cattle].  Soybeans were also a big crop then. And so he began raising black Hereford cattle, because truck farming was just not a way to make a living.
So this poor economic experience led to [a realization of] my experience to say, what do we do about repairing the match between city and country, and the economic viability of food from market or from farm to market?  So I was again reaching out to—there were examples out there, both historically and in fact, in Syracuse, NY. And [Marin County] in California, I think, was doing some good work in farmers’ markets about the same time.  We didn’t have much to go on as an example.
Susan Snook was the name of the woman who was running the Syracuse downtown market, and great stories coming out of that, and again it was the writing in the papers by John Hess.  He wrote several articles, and John Hess also wrote pieces about the loss of the traditional Paris markets and other markets in France, and importances that had to do with the distribution of your food, and he wrote about the loss of beer making and cheese making in New York State, and individuality of beers and cheeses.  Of course, you didn’t have all these terrible draconian state laws which we’re dealing with even now, in terms of getting access to good food.

Q:  What kind of laws were there?

Benepe:  Well, [now, in our local Saugerties Farmers Market, which we started in 2002], we can’t, for example, have people come in and cook and sell in the market.  You have to have a kitchen which is approved.  You have to take these exams.  So it discourages people bringing food to the market, homemade foods, and even to make jams and jellies and special things.  For pickles, you need a Class C2 license.  You have to go take a course.  So people who might be good chefs and cooks can’t sell their food in the market.  Gardeners, of course, can, there’s no restrictions on them, and we try to encourage that as much as possible.  But we have a local farmer [John Wrolsen]. My wife Judith has been in e-mail contact with him.  We’ve been courting [him and his wife Denise] for a couple of years.  They have beef; they have lamb; they have veal; they’re growing vegetables.

Q:  When you say local, where do you mean?

Benepe:  They’re in Saugerties.  And they have a farm that’s been a farm traditionally so long that the road is named after their farm, Wrolsen Drive.  John Ralston and his sister Marianne are split up over their philosophy about what to do with farmland.  She wants to see it developed and he wants to see it farmed.  He comes to our what we call Farm Animal Day and brings his draft horses, and they’re just big animals, and brings his other animals.  
We asked the Wrolsens to consider selling in our local market, but we also already have a farmer from Freehold in Greene County, who raises beef, pork and lamb, whom we don’t want to lose.  
[Short passage deleted]
I said to John, “First get an application, and let us make a decision.”  I couldn’t get them to give us an application.
And she wrote back and said, “I think we can do better just selling off the farm.”  [Short passage deleted]
Q:  When you say rules and regulations, what kind were there when you set up the Greenmarket for people who—

Benepe:  That’s a very interesting question.  First of all, what department are we going to work under when we set up Greenmarket?  The Health Department said, “If you work under the New York State Department of Ag and Markets, you can work under their regulations, which were less onerous.”

Q:  Less onerous than the city?

Benepe:  Than the city.  We’re just not used to dealing—because the city clamped down on outdoor markets in the 1930s.  Strangely enough, it was Mayor La Guardia who led to their demise.  Before that time—and I have a book here—the markets in the twenties invited farmers to come across [the East River from farms in Queens into Manhattan at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge].  There’s a big sign in the [1922] report of the Board of Commissioners, there’s a sign there in the marketplace saying “Farmers Only,” not peddlers, in other words.
	When [we] started Greenmarket and [Bob Lewis and]  I [were] out searching for farmers, as well as Bob was, I met a farmer in Rockland County named John Monaghan, I think it was.  He was in his mid eighties when I met him in ’75.  So therefore in 1909, I think, he would have been nineteen when the Queensboro Bridge was opened.  He told me, “I was the first farmer across that bridge.”  But it was on the return trip, because [when] he came across [in the morning by ferry], the bridge hadn’t yet opened, he came across on the ferry with his produce from Queens to the Queensboro market, which then had been established at the foot of the ferry and later at the foot of the bridge, which, interesting enough, is where we put our first Greenmarket, at the foot of that bridge.  He said that when he came over at the end of the day—they would sell wholesale basically to buyers, to stores and shopkeepers.  At the end of the day at five o’clock, they’d ring a bell and the peddlers would run forward with their pushcarts and load the pushcarts, and sell those around the city as basically end-of-the-day produce, not even a day old yet.  I don’t know how much they’d sell that day or the next, and I don’t know how often they came in, whether they came in every day or not.  I just don’t know.
	Then I read the account that at the Queensboro Bridge opening, they just celebrated the centenary in 2009, and they mentioned in that piece about the first farmer across.  I wrote a letter to the Times saying how I had met this farmer, I thought it’d been great, and how this basically led to the forming of Greenmarket, the same principle, farmers only.

Q:  How did that lead to the—

Benepe:  Well, the Times didn’t run the piece. So that the connection [of the Greenmarket] with the [1909] Queensboro market and those early roots is those peddlers out there selling food. [During the 30s] food stores, the equivalent of today’s supermarkets, objected to [the sale of] this produce out in the open.  Oh, it’s dirty and that’s not healthy.”  So La Guardia began clamping down on outdoor sales from pushcarts.  I have a book here put out by Ronni Solbert and Jean Merrill, called The Pushcart War.  It’s a wonderful book, in which the villain here is a tractor-trailer that’s pushing them off the streets.
So that economy of direct marketing or indirect marketing in a certain sense, where there’s farm food coming out of the pushcarts, La Guardia said, “Well, don’t worry.  I’ll treat you guys well.  I’ll build an indoor market.” He created public indoor market halls, which didn’t work because it brought the food—yes, it brought it under cover in so-called healthy conditions, but out of sight, and so nobody shopped anymore at the curb in their street.  The [curbs became dedicated to parking] trucks and cars, and not for people shopping.
So the concept of the last market to survive, which I actually visited and was still in existence, was the Eldridge Street market on the Lower East Side, and it was still an active marketplace, at least in the fifties, when the streets were closed on Sundays and they filled up with  pushcarts, at that time not selling so much food [as dry goods], but there were still some food peddlers here when I first moved here in the maybe late fifties, early sixties in the Village in general.  And even in Greenmarket eight, ten years ago, I was standing there and a couple came through… and she was looking over to reach for the food, and he said, “Oh, you don’t want to touch that.  It’s dirty.”  Isn’t that interesting?

Q:  Yes.

Benepe:  It was still that concept of outdoor food is coated with dirt from the air.  So that concept was going against the grain to bring food out into the open again, really.  It was working against history in that sense.

Q:  It seemed anti-modern or—

Benepe:  Yes.  I mean, it’s certainly going against historical trends.  But I would maintain historical trends were going the wrong direction.  Everything is wrapped in plastic and put in air-conditioned rooms which are too cold to walk into even to shop.  And the source of the food was from anywhere in the world, and treated in any way you wanted.  Nobody knew anything more about it, but it met all the health rules.  It’s sort of like junk mail today.  It was junk food delivered through a mechanism which involved government promoting it, developing rules which promoted food moved [and packaged for optimum distribution], and on top of that, subsidized by an interstate highway system where the truckers didn’t pay the full cost of the highways.  You and I as taxpayers were paying for those highways.  They set up the Highway Trust Fund from fuel we use on… state roads, the city streets, and …even our lawnmowers and on the village roads and on the county roads.  All of that gas tax money went to pay for the interstate highway system, which then subsidized [food] shipments from California to New York at low cost.
So the system set up by government favored large farms, large irrigation projects, mega chemical projects, and, of course, in the cities, big box stores.  The people who wrote the rules were the people selling the produce.  They got into government and said, “This is what we want to make our system work.”  And so the small people were left on the outside, both the consumer and the producer.  So my attempt, as it was with planning, was to link the two together again on public space.

Q:  To link which two?

Benepe:  The consumer and the producer.  In this case, the farmer.  Flea markets didn’t interest me that much.  I mean, that’s another form of producer/consumer, but even the flea market people, for the most part, were not selling their own homemade goods.  They were buying stuff from China and whatever.
	So that’s basically the essence of what our goals were, Bob and I and people that, you know—Barry Samuels was replaced very soon by [unclear] as director, and she was always very supportive of the concept.  Marian Heiskel… as the chairperson of the council [on the Environment of New York City], was always very supportive, and she still actively supports the concept.  So the council was the perfect choice, the Council on the Environment, to run it.
	The word “Greenmarket” I thought I was inventing, until I went back to Newcastle upon Tyne on a visit, where I [had] worked as a planner [during the early 60s].  I didn’t mention that, I guess.  I didn’t mention working in Newcastle for two years as a planner.

Q:  No.

Benepe:  What happened was another personal reason.  With my first wife, Jagna, I took a trip on the Queen Mary in ’59 [with our infant children, Adrian and Jennifer].  She had relatives in London, and we [borrowed their] camper and traveled around Europe.  That was … when we went to see Corbusier’s work and went to Berlin for the first time, saw the work going on in the planning and architectural work in Berlin.  It was kind of idyllic days, and we stayed in the camper every day, every place we went.  So it was cheap.  And had our two children, Adrian and Jennifer.  Adrian was just about two and a half, maybe, and Jennifer was a year and a half.  We would go to Rome.  I don’t know if you know San Paolo Fuori le Muri.

Q:  Yes.

Benepe:  I don’t know if I drove out there or took the train out there, and I’d take Adrian with me.  She would take Jennifer [somewhere else] and I would take Adrian, and I would sort of park Adrian in a park, and I’d go walking around the church and come back and pick him up.  He’d be playing with a pencil I’d given him, as a truck.  He was very independent.  Another case, we were in the museum at the Vatican and [we]] left them alone [again in a garden]… and we’d go upstairs, and we’d come down [later] and they’d be taken care of by some people in the museum.  [laughter]
A third time, we were visiting Auschwitz, and we left them in the car, in the camper, to visit the camp, and we came back out and some of the people who were dressed as guards at Auschwitz were looking after them because they said it was too hot in the camper, they thought.  [laughter]  So a lot of trust there for them.
	So on the way back on the Queen Mary, I met my second wife [Morag].  We weren’t in much touch then, but we were later on.  She was from Scotland.  [After Jagna and I split] … I went to England to get a planning job there in Newcastle upon Tyne [where Morag was teaching art].  My intent was to work in the new town of Peterlee in Scotland, and they had actually hired me after my first visit there, my interview.  I got over there to take the job, thinking I was hired to work in the new town.  I was really interested in the new town of Peterlee.  It was fascinating, and there were interesting architects working on it in design fashion.  It, too, is on the edge of a bluff overlooking the sea.

Q:  Is it near Newcastle?

Benepe:  Yes, Peterlee was southeast of Newcastle, I think—rather, southeast facing the North Sea….
But when I got there, they said, “We couldn’t get approval from our town manager to hire you.  I’m sorry.”

Q:  Because you were American?

Benepe:  I was American, and they thought I wouldn’t stay there long enough, and so they said, “Well, what we suggest you do, go [apply] to the county of Northumberland,” as this was a county too.  I went to the county of Northumberland, which was in Newcastle upon Tyne, their offices, and they said, “We can’t hire you, but you could talk to the City and County of Newcastle upon Tyne.”  Now, Newcastle upon Tyne had an interesting history because, unlike the [other] counties, which were under dukes, every duke [controlled] a duchy, the county was under the Freemen, and it was given—

Q:  I didn’t know that.

Benepe:  —its freedom under I don’t know which king in the tenth century or ninth century, and [the Freeman] inherited this title [and passed it down, father to son], to the present day.  And there is still the town moor in Newcastle, which [is] about a thousand acres, where they still …hold rights to pasture their cattle, which they [lease to other] farmers. Any use of the moor [including the annual agricultural fair] has to be approved by the Freemen.  Their titles were inherited.  They’re not elected….
	So I was hired by the [City and] County [of Newcastle upon Tyne] where I worked as a planning officer from 1961 to 1963, and they hired me for the two reasons, one because I was American and they thought I’d bring experience for [planning] shopping centers and [designing] highways.  [laughs]  They barked up the wrong tree in that.  And so I worked with a guy named John Stabler, who is a marvelous guy.  We’re still in touch all the time.  He became the head of the department later on.  Then I became totally immersed in planning the city, which was so deep in history that I would trace its history by walking the streets, and realizing that it’s a city on a hill, facing down a very steep [embankment] as it approaches the Tyne River.  The historical texture of this city was expressed in the stairs leading down to the river, or the streets were called chares, c-h-a-r-e-s.  One of them was called Pudding Chare, and I loved the names.  Or chares were alleys [that connected streets and steps]… leading to the river.  There was a wharf and woof to the city.  The main streets which lead in one direction and the chares would lead in the other direction across on a level, so that the streets would slope down and the chares level across leading them together, like a spider web.

Q:  How beautiful.

Benepe:  And then it was complex because the historic roads went in different directions, and so two heart shapes would overlap each other.  So it’s kind of a complex form and made it easy to get lost in, and that quality of it gave it very dreamlike form, totally opposed to what Corbusier would do with his cities, and gave it a great sense of mystery which was related to its history, and this intrigued me enormously.  So that rather than—in fact, I was [more] interested in [them than any motorway].  I hadn’t overcome the defects of the highway they were planning.  Fortunately, the highways weren’t built yet, part of it was, and very smartly, after I left [the city] abandoned the highway concept, and brought in rail instead.  [laughter]
What I concentrated on was pedestrian movements, and I would identify the pedestrian routes, and I worked with their traffic engineers to survey pedestrians rather than cars, and found out a large percentage of the people were walking into the city, not driving or taking buses.  I wanted to get an idea of where they walked from and what routes they were taking, and I wanted to identify and protect these routes from road incursions.  One of them was a winding lane which was really an old lane in back of North Terrace where Morag and I lived, which faced the town moor.  And on the other side was Royal Victoria Hospital, and this lane separated the two.  It ran along the backyards through the houses on North terrace and the hospital on the other side, and we preserved it.  I said, “You know, this is important.”  Now it’s a major walkway leading in the city.  That’s why I’m so intrigued with the High Line, which is using historic form to create a pedestrian walkway—you’ve been on it, I hope.

Q:  Yes.

Benepe:  I nominated the Friends of the High Line… to get the Jane Jacobs Award, but they didn’t get it.  I hope they’ll get it one time around in future years because they really deserve it.  I think it’s the greatest concept since Central Park.  Interestingly, Fred Kent doesn’t like it at all.  [laughs]  He says, “It’s not on the ground.  It’s not where it should be,” you know.  I’ve got to take him over, because [Judith and I] were there twice yesterday, and last night it was thronged with people.

Q:  Why last night?

Benepe:  Because the rain stopped.  [laughter]

Q:  Oh, that’s a good point.  Right.

Benepe:  We were there in the rain in the afternoon, and it still had a lot of people, more than on the street below.  It’s fabulous.  I don’t like the way it’s done.  I don’t like the concrete fingers, but I forgive it.  I understand why the designer did it, and having the grass peep up in the cracks and so forth, but it creates a confusing pathway, I think, and that’s why they have to put signs up saying “Don’t walk on the grass.”  They wouldn’t have had to put the signs up if they designed it properly in the first [place].  I’m also feeling ambivalent about the thin rusty steel containers holding the raised planters.

Q:  I have to go see it.

Benepe:  I understand why they’re using steel.  It’s a railway architecture.  But what also relates to it, they do use wood for some of the decks, which they say is imported from Brazil, which is questionable, Brazilian forests and all, but the railroad-tie language might have played a stronger role in design, and might have been used to contain the planting beds.  I don’t know how I would have approached it.

Q:  It’s complicated.

Benepe:  Yes.  The fact is, this is a linear movement for walking, not for trains, and the linear quality is important, and there’s like there’s an ambivalence there.  Those fingers sort of stop you visually, and so you’re sort of avoiding them to keep walking up, and literally those parks are for walking.  There’s not much sitting.  There’s some.  I mean, it’s a nice place to sit and watch the crowd go by, too.  But it’s great charm.  It’s exposure to the sky and to the river, as well as it’s interlacing between the backs of buildings, and looking down the streets below  that glass wall [at the south end stops you] suddenly end where you say, “Oh, I’m going to fall off this edge,” because the edge stops abruptly at the glass.  It’s really a wonderful mannered thing to do.  And the treatments to the railing there, there’s just a little bar joining them and the glass, you wonder what’s holding that glass up.  You look down and it’s embedded in concrete underneath.  There’s no post.  The railing isn’t supporting it.  It links them and that’s all.  So there are certain magical things done about it.
	So Newcastle was an exposure to history, but more importantly, getting to Greenmarket, is when I went back to visit Newcastle with Judith, we’ve been back several times, and I went to see John Stabler, my fellow planner, and he [asked] when [we] went to visit him at the Newcastle Planning Department, “Have you been to see what’s happened to our greenmarket?” 
	And I said, “Oh, that’s where the word came from.”  [laughs]  Greenmarket in England is a generic word, and it means a plant market, not vegetables.

Q:  I didn’t know that.  I did not know that.

Benepe:  And there’s a road sign up in Newcastle with big letters saying “Greenmarket,” pointing down, and it’s near the railroad station.  It’s been moved.  It used to be a big market hall near the road, so a classical market hall.  Now it’s in a more modern building.  That’s what he meant when he said, “Did you go see our new greenmarket?”

Q:  And inside there would be?

Benepe:  Plants and flowers, that’s all.  No vegetables.  They still have the indoor Granger Market.  In Newcastle that is where you would go to buy fruits and vegetables and other foods and other products.  They have dried products there as well.  I was never too happy with the Granger Market because they mixed up foods and dry goods, so you have nice frilly dresses next to chunks of meat.  I didn’t think they worked too well.  [laughs]  It was an interesting statement.  But that’s where you shop for food, in the Granger Market.

Q:  Traditionally?

Benepe:  Traditionally, and there was the—no.  Today.  The Granger Market is still running.  There are other markets.  There is a market, the outdoor market, two famous outdoor markets.  One was on the streets leading down to the waterfront—its name [Bigg Market] will come to me—and they sold foods.  [Bigg, an ancient word meaning grain.] And then the Sunday Keyside market sold foods, but the Quayside market, like the other market I’m not remembering, were sort of open-air markets; they weren’t just food. [The Quay is the stone bulkhead along the Tyne, where the ships have docked since Roman times].

Q:  And you obviously saw those when you were living there.

Benepe:  Sure.  But for me, Newcastle was the history and the tradition going back, and of course, the chance to do contemporary planning.  Why I returned to the United States was I wasn’t making enough money to support my children who were over here, Adrian and Jennifer, [who were] living with [Jagna in the U.S.].  My eleven hundred [pounds (about $5000)] a year wasn’t stretching.
So I came back here to work, and I think that’s when I first began my planning work here.

Q:  As an independent office?

Benepe:  No. During the mid 60s I spent 4 years working for the New York City Housing and Redevelopment Board under Sam Ratensky, chiefly on the West Side Urban Renewal Plan, on which I had worked from 1959-61. I didn’t become independent until leaving Bob Weinberg, and that would have been in the early seventies.  So between coming back here in—that would be—I think I—bringing these dates together—

Q:  We can check that.  But the idea is that you came back and [eventually] worked for Weinberg?
[Answer deleted]

Q:  Were you married when you came back?

Benepe:  Yes.  I married in Scotland.  My [second] wife Morag was Scottish.  Her mother came from Aberdeen.  The reason I went to Newcastle, she was teaching in Newcastle at Kings College.  She was an artist and teaching sculpture and work in clay.  Her mother came from Aberdeen, and she considered her mother being Aberdeen kind of more common Scottish, [while] her father was an architect [from Balloch] she considered more aristocratic who spoke …. spoke better English than the English.  So she was kind of a snob about where she was from in Scotland.
So I thought it was really necessary to come back after we married, to come back here, and get a job where I could [help] support my two children and raise a family here.
When I was married to Jagna, we lived in New Rochelle [during the mid 50s], and that’s where we raised Adrian and Jennifer, and took our trip to Europe from there.  So the trip to Europe would have been in ’59.  [I left my family in 1961 when I moved to Newcastle, returning to NYC in 1963 to work for the NYC Housing and Redevelopment Board]. 
[Passage about where he worked when he came back from England deleted]

Then through the Housing and Redevelopment Board I learned about the opportunity, there was a fellow planner there who told me about the opportunity to work [as Planning Director] in Newburgh, New York.  I was very fascinated with that because the [New York Times] had written a story about Newburgh, showing how deeply it was involved in the urban problems.

Q:  In the New York Times?

Benepe:  Yes, and they showed views of the old city of Newburgh, with these cobbled streets, and I was very fascinated with it.  It was like Newcastle all over again.  Here is this city with a great history being exposed to urban renewal.  So I applied for the job as the head of the Planning Department, and initially I was in charge of both planning and urban renewal, but at that point they were separating urban renewal from planning, and I remained the chief planner and urban renewal was being brought under a man named John [Stillman].  He was very highly politically connected with Hubert Humphrey and the Democrats at that time, and he was independently wealthy, so when they hired him, they probably didn’t have to pay him.  He headed the urban renewal agency.  He hired a consultant in the mid sixties then to develop an urban renewal plan, and I, as a planner, was a little bit alarmed at this plan, because it was wiping out a lot of the historic texture of the town, of the city.  I was involved with a group called the Friends of Newburgh.

Q:  Of course.

Benepe:  We were trying to preserve the historic character.  So as a planning director, I went to testify at the hearing [held by the urban Renewal Agency, chaired by John Stillman] on the urban renewal plan, and I named thirty-three historic properties.  A lot of work there was by A.J. Downing and A.J. Davis both, and [Calvert Vaux, who designed Central Park with Frederick Law Olmsted]

Benepe:  The authority [George Tatum] on [Calvert Vaux] had said this architect’s best house [the Hodge Funeral Home, the former W.E. Warren House] was in Newburgh, of all the work in the country, and this was one of the houses slated for demolition.  So when I went to this public hearing… I gave this list of thirty-three houses scheduled for demolition, which should be saved, and it was the headline of the local newspaper the next day.  When I finished my testimony and I walked behind John’s table, he turned around to me and he said, “Drop dead.”  [laughs]  Wonderful comments.
One of the buildings that was slated to be removed was a church by A.J. Davis, which is an enormous Greek revival [temple].  It looked like the front of the five-dollar bill, just total pure classicism, with very tall Ionic columns and vaulted interior.  It had been abandoned.  It was in really terrible shape.  The church was the Dutch Reform Church, and they had abandoned it and they had built a new church in the suburbs outside of Newburgh.  So it was really important in my mind to save this.
The successor to John, [Stillman] a new man came on named Jack Present, and he said, “I’m dedicated to getting that building down.”  He said, “The last thing I’m going to do is tear it down”
	And I said, “The last thing I’m going to do is keep it up.”  And I managed. Our private group, which we formed a Greater Newburgh Arts Council, we had support from the Chamber of Commerce because they wanted to keep business downtown as well.  We applied for a grant to do a preservation study, and we did.  We did it ourselves, and got the east end of Newburgh put on the state historic district, to protect it.  So that ended up protecting the core of the early Gothic architecture.

Q:  So this was always on your mind, was protecting the historic places?

Benepe:  Right.  But that also exposed me to the farm community outside Newburgh, and at that time, since I was already now doing research in historic preservation, I was hired by a guy on the county level to [survey and photograph] at the county historic resources and help him with his survey, and that led me to looking at farms [in Orange County].  So this sort of broadened my view, seeing things on a regional scale.  At the same time I kept my connections with the people in New York City, I think.

Q:  So when did you return to New York?

Benepe:  Why did I return?  Well, a new regime came on in Newburgh.  Strangely enough, even though I was hired by a Democratic administration, three [Democrats] to two [Republicans], and I worked under a really great city manager who was hired by the Democrats, the new election brought on the Republicans, and [initially] I was a darling of the Republicans because I fought urban renewal, which they were against, too.  They were against it for a different reason than I was.  They saw the east end of Newburgh, which is where the history was, as a place to keep the black population—

Q:  Oh, my goodness.

Benepe:  —which had settled in there.  Meanwhile, I was working also to move blacks into the west end, where we were building new housing.  I was working with another regional group there, [Patterns for Progress, that was] … working on a regional level and they wanted to broaden the concept of public housing and embody the public housing into a larger mixed-income housing project, which I as a [City] Planner wanted to do as well.  So I was supporting them as the head planner and promoting this to our planning board.
We had a really good planning board.  Steve Kent was the chair, and he was very supportive of the work I was doing.  His wife was very active.  We were all sort of an underground movement to champion—he championed what I wanted to do with the preservation and good planning and this new overall plan [for the Lake Street Project] up in the east end of Newburgh around [the Muchatto’s] lake up there.  I wanted to create this lake as a centerpiece for new development.  Again it was the same thing I was trying to do with Al Smith houses [in NYC].  I wanted to pull the community into this new [mixed income] development and create shopping there that people would come to.
	I discovered in the meantime there was a greenway on the western end of Newburgh, which was laid out as a 9A bypass for a highway.  I argued we should keep this as a greenway, not as a highway, and keep 9A where it was, as it was going through the city, which it still is today.  I’m not sure quite what happened to the greenway, but it was again looking beyond and linking the city [to the rural region around it].  There is a bluff at the south end of the city which I wanted to link with the greenway system.  There were railroad tracks I wanted to link with it.  So there are people there now who are still trying to do the same thing.  There was Moodna Creek, which had a greenway leading down to the Hudson River.  I wanted to develop the river access, to the river.
So I was looking at all these broad planning goals, but then when the new administration came in, the Republicans wanted to get rid of me because I was pushing the [mixed income] project [on Muchatto’s Lake] to the west.  They couldn’t fire me because I was civil service, so they abolished my job title.  So they held hearings on the abolition of my title at the same time as they held hearings on this Lake Street plan, called Lake Street, because that’s where it was.  So an enormous crowd turned out to both support keeping me on at the public hearings and to keep the project on the books.  But in the meantime, they did abolish my job, I was fired, and I made a big newspaper story out of it.  They actually had to remove the lock from my door so I couldn’t get in.  The city manager had to do that.  So I had the press come in showing the hole in the door, and me trying to put the key in the hole, you know, making a great story of it.
So when my job was abolished, and I looked for work elsewhere and left [Newburgh to return to New York], the first place I moved to was West 95th Street, and that was where urban renewal area where I had been working on the urban renewal area.  So I was able to be in the area I was working.
I got active in a lot of issues through planning boards.  I was on Planning Board 7 for a while.  I had a co-planner, [Irving] Schwartz…..  We were both co-chairs of the Traffic Committee, and we worked very hard to get cars out of Central Park, which step by step we did.  Tom Hoving was the parks commissioner then, and John Lindsay was the mayor, and he was pretty sympathetic to our goals.  What we did was worked through another group called Transportation Alternatives, which I helped found.  T.A. was advancing the idea of getting cars out of the Central Park drives, and we did it initially by—one thing that was happening was under the blessing of the Parks Department was bike races in the park on, I think, two weekends a summer.  And what we did is we brought our groups together to be at the back end of the bike race and to block off the drives from the cars getting in.

Q:  You wanted to block the cars all the time?

Benepe:  Well… on Sundays to start with.  What we did is we put letters on our backs, which we rode in the right position, that said “SUNDAY CAR BAN,” and then the cyclists got mixed up, so all the letters got mixed up, and that made the papers as a kind of a joke as “SUN CAR BAN DAY.”.
I think we had two demonstrations.  There was a second one which became more formal, where it wasn’t tied into the bike race, but we just went out and did it.  I’m not sure whether we got a permit or not, but we got [Congressman Bill Ryan and City Councilman Ed Koch and] Ted Weiss [and State Senator Mike Seymour] to join in.  We brought in a horse and carriage and an electric golf cart.  I think we put Congressman [Ryan] in the front in the electric golf cart.  We wanted to show non-auto ways of using the park, and kind of cleaning the air.  We brought in the Clean Air Coalition, and they did air-quality measurements. 
So we spearheaded this whole movement, and then I began writing articles in the Westsider newspaper about improving the parks, improving the playgrounds, getting better designs for the playgrounds, better maintenance, that the Parks Department itself was causing damage by driving their trucks on the grass and going off the paths and things.

Q:  When was all this?

Benepe:  This would have been in the sixties, I’m pretty sure.

Q:  Of course.  It was Lindsay.

Benepe:  I also demonstrated against the enlargement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the back.

Q:  Into the park?

Benepe:  Yes.  Although they had sort of title to that land, but it was not necessary to expand into it, but that’s what they had in mind, I guess.  They could have done worse.  They did a good job of it.  They could have done a better job and created an entrance in the park, which would have been nice.  Maybe the Park Department didn’t want that, I don’t know.
	So I was very involved in the park through the Community Board Seven, and I might have been not only on the Traffic Committee, but on the Parks Committee as well.  I lived first on 107th Street and then moved to 95th Street, north side.  At some point I joined Community Board 5 in midtown, and that’s because my office was on 41st Street, when I worked for Weinberg.  So things just started moving forward through those eras.  The two planning boards kept me very … Manhattan-based. …

Q:  Was that all volunteer?

Benepe:  Yes, everything was volunteer.  I did work as a consultant, by the way, to Community Board 5, not Community Board 7.  For Community Board 5 I worked as a consultant on looking at the impact of plazas in the city and how they’re created and what benefits they had, and how they were chosen for location and what impact they had on creating use of open space in the city.  

Q:  Could you describe then how this commitment to useful open spaces in the city related to your desires for how to set up the Greenmarket?

Benepe:  Well, the first sites were selected by gratuitous connection with our [primary] funder, which was the J.M. Kaplan Fund.  [Their Executive Director] Suzanne Davis said, “There’s an empty lot near where I live.  Why don’t you look at that.”  [laughs]  So the empty lot turned out to be a fifty-five-by-two-hundred-foot lot [purchased] by the city, and some tension when the city purchased it was to have built approach roads to the bridge, the Queensboro Bridge, which never materialized because they built the tramway instead.  So it was being used partly by the Police Department to park their personal cars there, under a contract the P. B. A. had to use unused city-owned land.
	They apparently, without my approaching them directly, agreed to this because the Council on the Environment was a fortuitous choice to do this program, because the Council on the Environment’s board was made up of representatives of businesses and city agencies, and therefore the mayor’s office, and the mayor sat as co-chair of the council [with Marian Heiskell].  Abraham Beame, Abe Beame was the co-chair then, and so we were able to go directly to the mayor’s office, and Barbara Reach, who represented the mayor’s office on Council on the Environment to, [obtained permission] to use this city-owned space for a market?  And, of course, being the mayor, the city agencies agreed, even though the Transportation Department really didn’t—then it was the Highway Department—didn’t really like the idea, but agreed.
So we had a fenced-in lot a block from Bloomingdale’s to put in a market, and the fact that it was a block from Bloomingdale’s and fenced in and free of anything inside, the police agreed—I guess the mayor’s office got them to agree on this—to move [their cars] on Saturdays [during the summer]. 

Q:  You mean it was still a parking lot except Sundays?

Benepe:  For the Police Department, yes, and this was Saturdays, by the way, we opened this market, not Sundays.  So we opened the market on Saturday at 59th Street and Second Avenue, where the tram is.

Q:  And the police cars were not there?

Benepe:  They moved them for that day and [each Saturday during the summer].  They probably took them home, because they mainly needed them when they were commuting to work to park them.  They call them unmarked police cars.  [laughs]
And then it was used by contractors for the tramway I think, part of it, half of it, then half the police, so we had to work around them.  I think we used half the lot for a while, and then we got the whole lot, and I think we were there for maybe one or two or three years.
There was a local group [Community Board Six] there headed up by a woman named Joanna Battaglia, who was a member of the board of the—Judith knew her [later as Chair of  the Parks Council, for whom she worked as director]. … She would go to the Hamptons during the summer, but when she came back, she wanted to see that market out of there.  [laughs]  So she would holler and scream about having this market there, and we were only there for the summer as it was, and so we weren’t there too late into the fall.  …
There was a woman who was the head of the 59th Street Association who had come over with cameras and take pictures of our farmers with their empty crates, and say, “Isn’t this terrible, these empty crates sitting here in this lot?”  And take it to the planning board to dissuade the people, this awful use of the lot and how it’s cheapening the area of having this outdoor market. 

Q:  Well, that turned out to be wrong, didn’t it?  [laughter]

Benepe:  And the farmers, when they first came, we didn’t make rules and regulations.  I didn’t, first of all, think any farmers would come in.  I was prepared to send vans out to the farms to bring in the produce, and we gradually learned that the farmers would be willing to come in on their own steam.  Bob Lewis was the one to make these contacts and bring them in, and he also made contacts with the [County] Cooperative Extension Service.  He worked with the county level [in each country in the surrounding region, both New York and new Jersey].
	Then we had no rules and regulations.  All we required was that 25 percent of what they brought in was raised on the farm, and [sold by]…farmers themselves.  But the first week at 59th Street, a farmer brought in bananas.  I said, “What are you doing with these bananas?”
	He said, “Well, I thought I could get them, and bring them in.”  Another week he brought in a load of toys.  He said, “I had them in the attic.  I thought I could sell these toys.”  So we realized we had to begin to develop rules.

Q:  You had to establish rules.

Benepe:  Yes.

[End of interview]








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