In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.

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By James Maher
Name: Gary Bell
Occupation: Martial Arts Teacher, Boys Club of New York
Location: 3rd Street between A and B
Date: 6:30 pm on Thursday, July 31st

I have lived around here for 35 years. I grew up in Harlem and was raised in South Carolina. As soon as I got out of the military I came down here and took up certain courses. I must have been 22 or 23. At first, I was working in the Wall Street area, for Solomon Brothers. I was doing a receptionist job and one of my co-workers asked me what would I want to do on the side. I told him that I’d teach martial arts, so he got me an interview at the Boys Club.

I started off as a volunteer and ended up working for the Boys Club for 30 years. I was the martial arts teacher. I noticed that most of the kids I dealt with had single moms. A lot of the kids were being bullied. I’m a big advocate of kids not being bullied, so I put my hand in that and I got a couple of kids really standing up for themselves. They had self-esteem, honor, dignity. Most of the kids became policemen, lawyers. It was amazing.

All in all I’m very proud of the work that I did. The best is when they came back to me and their parents would say, ‘By the way, George is playing baseball for a high school team and he’s the top pitcher in the nation.’ I said, ‘This kid was so nervous.’ He had a problem, but he came out good. If I walk just a couple of blocks I’ll see a kid and they’ll say, ‘Hey sensei, how you doing?’ Some of them left and came back and brought their kids.

Another thing that brought me down here was homesteading. I renovated an abandoned building right here on 2nd Street. I started in 1986 and finished it up in 1991. I’m a veteran and I was thinking about buying a building off of my VA Bill and I ran into this and it was a dream come true.

It was an organization run by the Archdiocese. Koch was the mayor at that time, What they’d do is find an abandoned building and squat in it and take it over. There has to be at least 12 homesteading buildings in this neighborhood. So they’d put you on a trial basis working on other people’s buildings and in return they’d give you your own building, abandoned — totally, totally abandoned.

It gave me a lot of respect for construction workers, because I had to do mostly everything — putting up sheetrock, putting in a new roof. Everything you did you were like an apprentice, but the big time stuff like electricity and plumbing, the government gave you professional people to come down here. They started us off with $300,000 to fix the building, but they gave us a time restraint. So they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you this money and this will pay for all the professional people, but you’ve got to finish it off in seven years, because if you don’t, the day before your time limit is up the city can just take the building.’

My building started off with like 12 people, and I guess the work wasn’t going fast enough because a lot of people quit and a lot of new people came in. We’ve got actors, accountants, carpenters. We’ve got all kinds of people.

The neighborhood was rough in the beginning. I was thinking of backing out of the deal because this neighborhood was rampant with crime and drugs. I was here when Tompkins Square Park was literally just homeless people. If you would have looked at it back then you would have never believed this transformation. It had me fooled too. There were no banks around here at all and hardly any restaurants. Now you’ve got them back-to-back. I never thought that would happen. It was very risky. I’m really proud of this neighborhood because a lot of people stuck with it and stayed strong.

The red tape was the biggest problem — the politics behind it. With every building, the Cardinal blessed the abandoned building before you got into it. At that time Mayor Dinkins came by and gave a little speech. Of course the politicians came by and wanted to take pictures of us. We had to put in 20 hours a week.

The whole deal cost me $225 dollars. There are some pictures that will scare you. You would go, ‘Oh my God.’ I said, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘Nah, I can’t do this,’ but as time went on, plus at the time my girlfriend was pregnant, so my son needed some space. So I was focused. I think it took me six years to complete it. It was Christmas Eve 1991 that I moved in. I have a duplex, parquet floors, a rooftop garden, and it’s beautiful man. You wouldn’t believe it.
James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.