History
A House With Memory
In 1977, the city closed Public School 64. The building did not close.
Two neighborhood organizations—CHARAS, a Puerto Rican collective born out of the Real Great Society, and Adopt-A-Building, a Lower East Side homesteading group—took the keys from a city that had largely given up on the neighborhood. In 1979 they formed a new corporation to hold the lease and gave it a name: El Bohío. A hut. A friendly, public space for community use.
Inside those walls, CHARAS/El Bohío built one of the city's most remarkable cultural ecosystems: a gallery for artists, rehearsal rooms, a theater, community gardens, a film series that screened John Sayles, Todd Haynes, and Spike Lee before New York knew their names. When the Lower East Side was being written off, El Bohío wrote it back in.
In 1998 the city sold the building. In 2001, CHARAS/El Bohío was evicted. The doors have been closed ever since.
The Building Before the Building
The walls CHARAS inherited were already doing civic work. P.S. 64 was built in 1906 by C.B.J. Snyder, the master architect behind more than 140 New York schools. He believed public buildings should be beautiful—that a grand facade in a crowded immigrant neighborhood was not an extravagance but a civic argument. He gave this one his signature H-plan and the first street-accessible school auditorium of its kind in the city.
By day, a school. By night, a theater, a lecture hall, a town square. Franklin Roosevelt campaigned from its stage. Yip Harburg — who would later write the lyrics to The Wizard of Oz — won his first prizes for recitation here. For seventy years, it educated the children of Little Germany, then the Italian and Jewish Lower East Side, then Puerto Rican Loisaida.
CHARAS did not break tradition. CHARAS continued it.
The Return
El Bohío Inc. exists to open the doors again.
We carry the name forward deliberately. The 1979 corporation held the lease; together with the creative and civic community, we hold the future. A home for the artists, educators, nonprofits, and neighbors who make this city what it is — short- and long-term affordable space for organizations being priced out, apprenticeships that connect creative practice to economic mobility, and the same civic logic Snyder built into the walls: that a great city takes care of its own.
The Living Blueprint
El Bohío is a collective work in progress, and the journey is just beginning. We invite you to glimpse the life within the walls through these evolving designs. They are the heartbeat of our mission: to create a home where we move to the beat of discovery and spark a collective flame in New York City.
Stay tuned as our vision grows—more is coming soon—but for now, let's find our center together in the sketches of our future.