The Kitchen: The couple exposed the loft’s beams. The 12-foot island was crafted from a single piece of English oak, and Charles FitzGerald made the cabinetry for it himself. The hanging lamps are a personal passion: “I always loved green shades. I went after them every chance I could.”
Photo: Annie Schlechter
Charles FitzGerald landed on St. Marks by chance in 1959. After being kicked out of an apartment he had fixed up on Minetta Lane, someone told him to call a guy who could help move his furniture and, it turned out, would also rent him a room at 11 St. Marks Place for $5 a month.
A teacher back then, FitzGerald says he was used to picking up discarded furniture from the street, “as you do when you’re not making a lot of money.” In the early ’60s, much of St. Marks was boarded up, he recalls, but it was “a seedbed where you could rent a store for $25 a month.” And so he did. Several of them. “I went crazy being entrepreneurial,” he tells me, and opened a series of once-prominent shops, starting in 1961 with homeware store Bowl and Board, followed by Grizzly Furs, for secondhand pelts, and El Taller (Spanish for “workshop”), a gallery of Spanish and Colombian art.
In 1967, he bought the building across the street where he and his wife, Kathy Cerick, now live for $120,000. When they moved in, their 1,200-square-foot loft had been a single-room occupancy with seven small bedrooms off a long corridor that went for a dollar a night. “You could have had the whole space for $7 a day,” he says.
Everything in their home today has been made by FitzGerald and Cerick, much of it from salvaged stone and wood, along with a bounty of street finds. Nothing here is new, and everything has a story: FitzGerald covered the kitchen and bathroom walls with recycled barn planks; old iceboxes are used as dressers and cabinets; the coffee table was part of a mill wheel that came from a riverbed in Maine; the dining table was made from wood found across the street and cut up on the sidewalk, and its iron base was purchased on the Bowery (“I don’t think I paid more than $5 for it,” he says). Throughout the space are metal sculptures and art by his friend Juan Luis Buñuel.
Now 90, FitzGerald has no plans to move. The building, crucially, has an elevator. The couple also haven’t stopped their collecting: “We are gleaners,” he says of the ongoing haul. “We look every day. We pick up stuff all the time. We can’t help it.”
The Fireplace: For the hearth, says FitzGerald, “we brought fieldstone down from Maine and then mixed in bricks when we didn’t have enough.” The 17th-century portrait at left belonged to his father. The three line drawings on the right are by Juan Luis Buñuel.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Living Room: The wood base of the coffee table came from a riverbed in Maine. “It was part of a mill wheel,” FitzGerald says. Cerick found the glass top that happened to fit perfectly.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Cabinets: The three center storage units are repurposed iceboxes. The screen behind them had to be cut down to get through the door.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Bathroom: FitzGerald covered the walls and ceiling with wood salvaged from Maine. The tile he found for 55 cents per square foot at a store long gone and used it for both the floor and oversize bathtub, which is so large, he says, that “we taught our kids to float in it.”
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Towel Holder: An old pair of ice tongs was repurposed as a paper-towel holder.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
The Windowsills: Each windowsill has been dug out to hold dirt. Meyer lemons grow in one recess and fig trees in another. FitzGerald didn’t want window boxes: “I just wanted them to be integrated into the walls.”
Photo: Annie Schlechter
Cerick and FitzGerald.
Photo: Annie Schlechter
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