I live “far east” on the Lower East Side, by the river. Before the city embarked on a much contested resiliency project, which resulted in extensive park closures, my neighbors and I would take the short walk from our homes to the river, and snake up and down East River Park. If we were feeling leisurely, we’d make our way up to a brutalist housing complex called Waterside Plaza. The “plaza” is on the other side of the FDR highway, so it’s only accessible by pedestrian bridges or the park, and the complex has its own amenities like a grocery store, nail salon, gym, and an indoor pool with a 1980s greenhouse enclosure. A series of tiered brick platforms with impressive views of the river and adirondack chairs are in the center. Think Barbican Centre in London, but much less central or stylish.
My Waterside Plaza story is from September of 2000— my first week in New York City as a freshman at NYU’s film school— but it started earlier. As mentioned on the “About” page, I was an overachieving gay teen activist, and my history teacher Stephanie would rent me esoteric queer cinema VHS tapes from the storied Le Video shop in San Francisco. There was also the hip school librarian Steve who took a liking to me, and when he learned that I was an aspiring filmmaker, he generously bought a Mini DV camera for the school and let me do an “independent study.” That’s where I made my first videos, which got me a scholarship to NYU.
This was the era of AOL, and I had been making penpals online for several years. When searching for “gay film,” I came across a listserv for queer film festival programmers and professionals called Popcorn Q. It was a year after Matthew Shepherd was murdered, so being an openly gay teenager was both a hot button issue, and in my case, a novelty. I wrote to the members of Popcorn Q, “I’m a gay teen and I made some short films. Does anybody want to see them?” Needless to say, I got quite the response. I went to Fry’s Electronics and bought a stack of VHS tapes to start dubbing copies, for what I hoped would be my future New York queer film community.
One particularly bold listserv member, who I’ll call Larry, asked if I would be in New York City anytime soon. I replied with delight that I was moving to the city in a week, and he suggested that we get a drink. I had never gotten “a drink,” but I was overeager and accepted Larry’s invitation to his Union Square apartment. When we sat across the couch from each other awkwardly sipping cosmos next to his lava lamps, I quickly realized that Larry wasn’t just interested in watching my bad high school video art. As I excused myself, he said, “You should come to my friend Gene’s house later this week, a group of gay people watch movies together.”
Back at school, I was looking for friends. NYU had a visiting filmmaker series, and on my second day, I went to an incredible screening of Ratcatcher with a baby-faced director Lynne Ramsay in attendance. NYU is a horrible film school, and the audience was cold and asked almost no questions. I was blown away, so I introduced myself to the organizer of the series, Jeremiah. The next day I was walking aimlessly around the school hallways, and when I saw Jeremiah’s office, I boldly stuck my head in to say hello. It was crammed full of stuff, but I noticed a few photographs on the wall of the Warhol superstar Candy Darling. I said, “I love Candy,” and clearly surprised, Jeremiah responded, “She was my best friend.” Years later I found a rare copy of Jeremiah’s memoir about their friendship, which is designed like an old fashioned 1950s teen diary, and includes incredible photographs of lanky Jeremiah with a mop of long black hair.
Back at my dorm, I had a message from Larry, who followed-up with an address at Waterside Plaza for the gay film gathering. I asked my brand new boyfriend, David, a photography student, to come with me and I printed the directions out from Mapquest. It was a very windy night, and as we trekked further and further east, across the pedestrian bridge to enter the complex, it felt otherworldly. We ran across the plaza to the tallest tower, and took the elevator to one of the highest floors. When we knocked, Larry opened the door.
David and I followed Larry down the hallway, which was lined from floor to ceiling with stacks of film cans. When we turned the corner into the living room, we were greeted by Gene, who was perched amongst hundreds of film prints and mountains of film paraphernalia. Gene was a very large man in a wheelchair. He was flanked by a gaggle of gay men in their fifties lying on oversized pillows and couches, including Jeremiah. I could tell that Jeremiah was a bit taken aback to see two 18-year-olds at this gathering, let alone a student from school. As David and I awkwardly settled in, one of the members of the club pulled down a screen. Gene sat behind the projector and began to screen his personal 16mm copy of Cocteau’s Orpheus. It was quite a special “Welcome to Gay New York” experience.
A few years ago, I was in a cab with my friend Jake Perlin, a film programmer, distributor, and an avid collector of film prints. As we drove past Waterside Plaza, I started to tell my story, and Jake said, “Oh that’s Gene Stavis. You don’t know about Gene Stavis?” What he told me next, though I’m probably embellishing, blew me away.
Gene was in Paris in the late 1960s working for the legendary Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, and godfather of cinephile culture. Langlois was a charismatic but sometimes divisive pioneering archivist, who believed that cinema should be collected, preserved, and screened in museum-like settings. The screenings he organized in the 1950s were seminal for the directors of the French New Wave, and he’s often credited with the emergence of auteur-theory. I didn’t know it then, but the centerpiece of Gene’s living room was an oversized portrait of Langlois in front of a window overlooking the East River.
By 1968 Langlois had plans to open the American Cinematheque, and he saw Gene Stavis as a viable American protégé, who could attend to the project alongside its backer Tom Johnson (a film loving scion of the Carnegie family). What happened next is a bit unclear to me, but Langlois planned for the cinematheque to be under the Queensborough bridge (not far from where Waterside Plaza was later constructed) in an elaborate building designed by I.M. Pei. Yet when Langlois entered the New York cultural scene with a somewhat cocky proposal, he was met with much resistance by the Museum of Modern Art, who had their own film collection and didn’t want a competing repertory program in town. Through a variety of institutional machinations, Langlois’ American Cinematheque was crushed before it ever launched.
Gene’s entrée into the highest echelons of cinephilia were cut short, so instead, he began to amass his own collection. Then in 1977, the year his mentor Langlois died, Gene embarked on his own project. Alongside fellow producers Frank O’Dowd and Steve Bie, Gene launched the first ever gay-themed television show, Emerald City. The show aired on Manhattan’s community access Channel J and was syndicated in San Francisco. For two years, Gene and his fellow producers booked guests like raconteur Quentin Crisp, painter David Hockney, and many other early gay cultural luminaries. The show was interspersed with commercials for local gay bars, bathhouses, and restaurants. While he was collecting essential cinema, Gene was also producing what would become an important archive of gay life in New York City.
After Emerald City ended, Gene started teaching film studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and would have that job for the next thirty-five years. His legacy there is the SVA Theater on 23rd street, which occasionally hosts film festivals and special events. I think of Gene and Jeremiah as gay liberation pioneers, who were at the center of seminal cultural moments, but whose wisdom went unappreciated in the dusty corners of New York film schools. Gene and Jeremiah were both legends in their own rite, but hidden in plain sight.
I heard that Gene was one of the first residents of Waterside Plaza, and that during Hurricane Sandy he was stuck inside his apartment with limited mobility for weeks. After that his health quickly declined, and like many private archivists, Gene hadn’t planned for a permanent home for his collection. Jake caught wind that Gene was trying to sell prints, so he went to Waterside Plaza for a visit. But when he went inside the apartment, there was an overpowering smell of vinegar.
For those that don’t know, “vinegar syndrome” is a condition that results from the deterioration of cellulose acetate on film prints. It causes the prints to turn pink, to become brittle, and to shrink with an acidic odor. It’s also highly contagious and begins to destroy any prints stored nearby. Not to mention, the bulk of Gene’s prints were 16mm, the equivalent of owning celluloid laser discs in a collectors market that covets 35mm prints. Gene’s situation was the archivist’s greatest fear— that their life’s work was for naught, and that their knowledge and curatorial predilections might be lost forever. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I have a feeling that Gene’s film collection was thrown away.
Several years ago, I found this sweet graphic novel-style tribute to Gene on instagram. I have a deep soft spot for the “outsider archivist,” who collects and preserves on their own terms, when bigger institutions fail to include them. I’ve benefited countless times from those collectors’ insights to save ephemera that others consider trash. Gene’s story is both inspiring and poignant, and my brief encounter with him was certainly an incredible introduction to queer film life in New York City. Hopefully anytime you walk past the SVA Theater or drive alongside Waterside Plaza on the FDR you’ll think of him.
Fascinating! Thank you for sharing. FYI, I read your dad’s reviews and went to NT where your mom went…I’m a few years older.
Fantastic story, Matt! always wondered about that Plaza, while waiting for the ferry nearby...