NEW YORK — Turn down a side street in the Clinton Hill neighborhood and a strange structure rises above the skyline. It is wooden, and handmade, and -- depending on your angle of approach -- it can resemble a 15th century flying machine, or a warped Gothic cathedral, or a pile of sharecroppers' shacks poised deliriously over Brooklyn.
The building is the work of Arthur Wood, a slight man of 75. For 27 years, Wood's neighbors have watched him climb to the top of his building to begin work on its next level. Wood builds without exterior scaffolding or a harness, and often with no assistance except for his wife, Cynthia. The structure has risen to 108 feet. Wood says it is about one-third finished.
"Broken Angel," as Wood and his wife named the building, is loved by many in Brooklyn, and recently it was the backdrop for the documentary "Dave Chappelle's Block Party." But on Oct. 10, Wood's solitary work ran into trouble when a fire broke out on an upper story. The fire triggered an inspection by the city Department of Buildings, which declared the building "highly cannibalized" and a "deathtrap." When Wood would not vacate the premises, the department ordered his arrest.
Wood's predicament has resonated with other artists, who say that there is less and less space for them in this ever-more-prosperous city. In 1979, when Arthur and Cynthia bought the brick office building at 4 Downing St., it was such a poor neighborhood that "people didn't care what happened there," said Margot Niederland, who made a film about Broken Angel that screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991.
Broken Angel embodies "the ability for artists in a city to create something that goes way beyond these rectangles that we live in," Niederland said. "The only other person I can think of who produced such extraordinary architecture was [Antoni] Gaudi."
Arthur Wood, she said, is "a crazy New York Gaudi."
Life at 4 Downing St. was dominated by Arthur Wood's obsession, said his son, Christopher, 33, who now works as a stone carver. The building was open to the elements, and in the winter, Wood's wife would leave a glass of water on the counter as a weather gauge. As soon as it froze, the kids would go stay with friends, said Christopher, who was 5 when the family moved in. At the same time, he loved the building, which was "sort of like a big playground."
"I always thought my friends were weird because they lived in apartments," he said.
