In all of Lower Manhattan, there is probably no one more committed to awakening young children to the potential of music and art than Lisa Ecklund-Flores. When Church Street School for Music and Art opened in 1990, Tribeca was just beginning its transformation from a sleepy spice and food warehouse district occupied by artists and musicians drawn by cheap loft spaces, to a trendy sought-after zip code just north of the Financial District and the newly built Battery Park City.
Teaching music and art is Ms. Ecklund-Flores’s passion and throughout the past 27 years, thousands of Downtown children (before Downtown was spelled with an upper case D) have taken lessons of all sorts from the dedicated teachers hired by her at Church Street School. She recalled one student who signed up to take piano lessons but was a little afraid of the piano. For a few weeks, Ms. Ecklund-Flores and this student had their lesson under the piano, tapping its legs with drumsticks, until he was comfortable approaching the keyboard. Today, conductor/pianist Oliver Hagen is a master musician. Recently, Mr. Hagen performed John Zorn’s “…do what thou wilt…” for solo piano at the Stone in NYC, and Boulez’s Douze Notations and Carter’s 90+ at Miller Theatre.
So it was on January 4, that Ms. Ecklund-Flores shared a stage with Michael Dorf, of Knitting Factory-fame (and now of City Winery and City Vineyard), actors Eric Bogosian and Ed Burns, Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth), D.J. Spooky and Jennifer Nettles. She thanked the crowd for their support in raising the funds needed to help the School move on to its next stage in life.
She also spoke about the School, its mission and current predicament, which consists of a soaring rent bill that consumes $560,000 every year, out of an annual operating budget of $2 million. “You do the math,” she said, observing, “we are in between a ‘rock and a very hard place.’ We’re hanging by our fingernails between the old Tribeca and the new Tribeca.”
As Winsome Brown, a board member and Church Street School parent, took to the stage, draped in gold, and helped raise thousands of dollars from the audience, Ms. Ecklund-Flores shared a glimmer of hope: the Church Street School’s value to the Downtown community is recognized by Community Board 1, which has recommended that the City allocate $4 million for the bulk of the acquisition, construction and renovation of a new space for this non-profit gem. Council member Margaret Chin has thrown her support behind this initiative and is working to make it a reality.