When former President Jimmy Carter helped rebuild an East Village tenement building

Photo via Habitat for Humanity 

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, died this afternoon at the age of 100. 

His post-presidency work included lending his building skills to Habitat for Humanity. 

Carter and his wife Rosalynn were among the volunteers who helped rebuild the six-story residential building at 742 E. Sixth St., between Avenue C and Avenue D. In the early 1980s, the property, called Mascot Flats, was a burned-out shell missing a roof. 

Per Village Preservation: 

In 1983, Bruce Schoonmaker, a minister running the Graffiti Ministry Center on East 7th Street, helped convince Habitat for Humanity to start a project at this building; for the previous six years, the organization had focused on smaller home-building efforts in several states and a few foreign countries. That July 1983, they purchased the building from the City as its first large inner-city renovation, with apartments that would be sold at a very low price to the community's poorer residents who also committed 1,000 work-hours to the rebuilding efforts. 

In April 1984, Robert DeRocker, then Habitat for Humanity's New York executive director, persuaded the former president who was in town for a speech to tour the site. Carter had already worked with the nonprofit to build a house in Americus, Georgia, a few miles from his home in Plains. What the ex-president found was a building in total disrepair, with no roof or permanent staircase, and interiors fire-blackened and knee-deep in garbage. 

"There was this old lady — she was 65, maybe 70," Carter told the Times. "She was living in the next building and there was no water, no heat, no electricity. And she was cooking her meal on a trash fire that she built between two bricks. I realized then how much Habitat could mean to a neighborhood like this." 

Three years after renovations began, in November 1986, 19 families moved into the rehabilitated building. 

President Carter revisited Mascot Flats in 2013.

For more on this project, check out "The Rebuilding of Mascot Flats," a 60-minute film documenting the efforts of homesteaders to transform the building.

   

In a statement following Carter's passing, Habitat NYC and Westchester is inviting the public to visit Mascot Flats to share messages and items of tribute for Jimmy and Rosalynn. ("We ask the public to be mindful that this is a residential building and to conduct your visit with consideration and respect.")