St. Ann’s Warehouse Scrambles to Find New Home

St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Brooklyn theater whose versatile and cavernous playing space has become a magnet for New York and overseas acting troupes, is now confronting a likely fate that its leaders had worked years to avoid: homelessness.

Scheduled to lose its 14,000-square-foot home next May because of commercial development, St. Ann’s thought its long-term future was secure after the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation approved the theater’s plans to move across the street after renovating the old Tobacco Warehouse on the Dumbo neighborhood’s waterfront. But some Brooklyn civic groups oppose handing over that landmark ruin — a shell of a 19th-century building, mainly walls but no roof — to any single organization, and in April the groups won a court decision on a technical issue that probably will preserve the Tobacco Warehouse as an open neighborhood site for the next few years, at least.

All of this leaves St. Ann’s with little more than an inch-thick prospectus of ambitious artistic dreams: its submission to the park corporation, titled “The Future Tobacco Warehouse: Where Global, Regional and Local Communities Converge.” That appendices-stuffed proposal included maps for a 7,000-square-foot public garden and a 2,100-square-foot community hall intended to house some of the concerts and dance presentations that are now held intermittently at the Tobacco Warehouse.

The proposal’s centerpiece was a 10,250-square-foot theater that would have sustained St. Ann’s reputation as a rare New York City space that allows ensembles to configure a high-ceilinged, column-free and technically sophisticated room to their needs. Among the renowned companies that have played St. Ann’s in recent years are Kneehigh Theater from England (“Brief Encounter”), the National Theater of Scotland (the Iraq war play “Black Watch”) and the downtown Wooster Group (“The Emperor Jones”).

After the artistic staff and board members of St. Ann’s fixed their sights last year on the Tobacco Warehouse, they gave up developing a Plan B for a future home. Like other arts organizations in New York recently — the theater company Performance Space 122 and New York City Opera among them — St. Ann’s is facing a nomadic future until a permanent site can be found or a new home can be built, options that could take years.

“Our vision was to turn the Brooklyn waterfront into a cultural center by transforming the Tobacco Warehouse into both a theater and a public arts space,” said Susan Feldman, artistic director of St. Ann’s. “It leaves us maybe having to leave Dumbo. Perhaps even leaving Brooklyn. None of us want that, but the theater we do at St. Ann’s doesn’t easily fit into pre-existing spaces that we’ve seen, and we want to continue to do that work.”

Ms. Feldman founded Arts at St. Ann’s in 1979 at a historic church site in Brooklyn Heights, then opened its current home in an old spice-milling factory in 2001. The owner of the space is now developing it, with plans to construct an apartment complex and a middle school. Well known as a blunt-speaking, strong-willed artistic programmer, Ms. Feldman did not self-edit at first in discussing the opposition to St. Ann’s plans.

“When we won approval to move into the Tobacco Warehouse, you had a few people in Brooklyn who felt such defeat and anger that they are now fighting all-out to keep this space as a ruin, an urban ruin,” Ms. Feldman said. After a pause, she spoke a bit more diplomatically: “Well, I know everyone is fighting for what they believe in. I can respect that. We’re just heartbroken. And a little desperate.”

Jim Walden, a lawyer for the Brooklyn Heights Association and others fighting to keep the Tobacco Warehouse as is, said the neighborhood groups admired the work of St. Ann’s and supported keeping the theater in Dumbo. At the same time, the groups wanted to maintain the Tobacco Warehouse as the kind of site that has featured photo and art exhibitions, hip-hop and food festivals, and even a memorable “Macbeth,” presented by St. Ann’s in 2008 on a two-story, roofless set.

“We don’t think it’s a good idea for governments to just give away national landmarks to organizations that they like, if those are good organizations, because eventually there will be a person in charge who is giving landmarks to an organization that you don’t like,” Mr. Walden said. “What you need is the same standardized process that has integrity and is followed in all decisions like this.”

In April a federal judge ruled that the National Park Service broke the law when it redrew the lines of the old Empire Fulton Ferry State Park without public hearings — a process that led to the Tobacco Warehouse and another building’s being left outside of the park’s borders. (The Empire Fulton Ferry State Park has since been subsumed by Brooklyn Bridge Park.) The park service and New York City, defendants in the case, argued that the two buildings had been put within those borders by mistake, and that neither building was eligible for inclusion in the parkland, anyway, because they were not suitable for outdoor recreation.

But the judge, Eric N. Vitaliano, found evidence that the two structures were intentionally included in the park map early on, and ruled — in favor of Brooklyn neighborhood groups and others — that the proper process was not followed.

Regina Myer, president of Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, said that the Tobacco Warehouse is now used less frequently for recreation than other parts of the park, and that St. Ann’s proposal “was far and away the most exciting we received, and had so many opportunities for neighborhood groups and arts organizations to continue using the space.”

During a recent interview Ms. Feldman leafed through her prospectus and read aloud from the two dozen letters of support from Brooklyn cultural and arts groups for St. Ann’s occupying the Tobacco Warehouse. Almost lovingly, she traced her fingers over the outlines of the maps for the renovated space, including diagrams of how different acting troupes had each reconfigured the open floor plan of the current theater.

“There is something so special, we found, in having this sort of warehouse space that can be refashioned with every production to suit a different artist’s dream,” she said. “We could have made that work at the Tobacco Warehouse. It would have worked so well. And now you just feel hopeless.”

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Captive’s Own Account of 18 Years as a Hostage

Such are the scenes that emerge from testimony released this week in the case of Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and held against her will for 18 years.

On Thursday, Phillip and Nancy Garrido were sentenced to lengthy terms for Ms. Dugard’s kidnapping, rape and imprisonment. After the sentencing, Judge Douglas C. Phimister of El Dorado County Superior Court released a redacted version of grand jury testimony Ms. Dugard gave in September, revealing new details about her captivity.

It also offers a glimpse into the twisted thinking of Mr. Garrido — a convicted sex offender on parole for a 1976 attack on a Nevada casino worker — and his justification for his crime.

Ms. Dugard says, for instance, that she was raped shortly after she was kidnapped, and repeatedly thereafter during sessions that Mr. Garrido — who used methamphetamine — described as “runs.” But Mr. Garrido told Ms. Dugard that she was simply “helping him” with a “sex problem.”

He said “he got me so that he wouldn’t have to do this to anybody else,” Ms. Dugard recalls.

The accounts also include a chilling description of the morning of Ms. Dugard’s kidnapping — June 10, 1991 — near her home in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. Ms. Dugard said she had been walking to a bus stop when she was spotted by the Garridos, who had been hunting for a young girl.

“This car comes up behind me,” Ms. Dugard said in her testimony. “I didn’t feel it was weird at the time, but it kind of pulled in close,” adding she thought that the person was going to ask for directions.

Suddenly, however, Ms. Dugard said she felt a shock through her body — the Garridos used a stun gun — and she fell into a bush. It was then she saw Phillip Garrido for the first time.

“He gets out and I stumble back into the bushes,” Ms. Dugard recalled.

She was thrown into the back seat and covered by a blanket. “And then I heard voices in the front, and the man said, ‘I can’t believe we got away with it,’ and he started laughing,” Ms. Dugard said.

Later, Ms. Dugard describes being taken to the Garridos’ home outside Antioch, Calif., a Bay Area suburb, where she pleaded for her release.

“I just wanted to go home,” she said. “I kept telling him that, you know, ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this. If you’re holding me for ransom, my family doesn’t have a lot of money.’ ”

“I didn’t know his purpose,” she said.

When the Garridos were arrested in August 2009, the authorities discovered a hidden backyard compound made up of ramshackle tents and sheds, including a small, sparsely furnished two-room building where Ms. Dugard said she was held.

Ms. Dugard spent most of the first year alone — except during Mr. Garrido’s sexual assaults — though Mr. Garrido gave her a cat to keep her company. (He eventually took the animal away after the smell of urine got too strong in her room.)

Ms. Dugard was eventually introduced to Ms. Garrido, who took over feeding their captive, and the Garridos moved into the shed themselves. “Basically, we were all sleeping in the same room,” she said. “We watched TV together. I didn’t feel as lonely anymore.” They also gave her Barbie dolls to play with.

But there was also intimidation from Mr. Garrido, including attack dogs and threats to use the stun gun.

“He would turn it on and say something like, you know, ‘You don’t want it to happen again. You should be good.’ ”

In 1993, Mr. Garrido returned to prison for a short time for an unspecified parole violation, a period during which Ms. Dugard remembers asking Ms. Garrido where he was. She said “he was on this island for a little vacation,” Ms. Dugard said. “And he came back with an ankle bracelet.”

Ms. Dugard was glad not to suffer any more sexual attacks during that period, and the rapes were less frequent after Ms. Dugard got pregnant at age 13. She gave birth to a daughter in 1994 in the building where she was held, with Ms. Garrido helping with the delivery.

“He knew I was really scared about getting pregnant again,” Ms. Dugard said. “He said he just couldn’t help himself, but he was really trying to stop.”

Ms. Dugard did eventually get pregnant again, giving birth to a second daughter in 1997, a result of a final attack by Mr. Garrido. “That’s the last time he had sex with me, was when she was conceived,” Ms. Dugard said.

Soon after, they just started “acting like a family,” celebrating birthdays, and “just trying to be normal, I guess.” There was a backyard pool and a family printing business.

At one point during her testimony, Ms. Dugard was shown a journal she kept, including entries in which she called herself a coward for not trying to escape, though longing for freedom. But, she said, “I couldn’t leave. I had the girls.”

Near the end of the testimony, Ms. Dugard describes the final days of her ordeal, in August 2009, after Mr. Garrido had been brought in by parole officers for questioning after a campus officer at the University of California, Berkeley, had raised their suspicions.

Ms. Dugard, who went with Mr. Garrido to the meeting, had been told to lie for him and to give her name as “Alissa,” but parole officers soon began peppering her with questions about her identity, flustering her.

Moments later, an officer came in and said Mr. Garrido had confessed to the kidnapping.

“I started crying,” Ms. Dugard said. “And she said, ‘You need to tell me your name.’ ”

“And I said that I can’t because I hadn’t said my name in 18 years,” Ms. Dugard said. But then, she said, “I wrote it down.”

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