Echeverri's Palace

For the past several years, I've spent a few summer weeks in the Lower East Side working on a festival for Clubbed Thumb theater company. Around the corner, at Avenue B and East 4th St., stands this distinctive building. I finally got around to drawing it this summer, and then discovered the great story behind it.

This Village Voice article by Jess McHugh from 2016 tells the story. The building is owned by Antonio Echeverri, a Colombian immigrant who worked numerous jobs including maintaining buildings and saved for 20 years before purchasing this property in 1992. It was dilapidated, infested with vermin and drug dealers, and close to being condemned. Echeverri rehabilitated the building himself. "Now it's a palace. It's a paradise," he says in the article. Echeverri repaints the facade every five years, and is continually working on the building. Even the tree encasements on the sidewalk are in this distinctive style. “Every mind is its own world. I like to see things that are different from my everyday surroundings. I don’t like plain brick.”

Not only did he do the renovation himself, but he even mixes the paint himself, and casts the concrete ornamental sculptures himself, as seen on the East 4th Street entrance.

This creative attention to detail extends to the interior, a bit of which you can see in that Voice article. I'd love to get a look inside someday. 

“It gives me joy to see that people come by to admire the building, especially the door,” Echeverri says. “The door has stars, the sun and moons on it. We’re all part of the same universe, and the door is where I capture mine.”