Bosses at the nonprofit Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side have turned the national landmark into their “own personal country club” — while fighting to kick out two dozen child cadets from the nation’s oldest afterschool program in its building, The Post has learned.
The nonprofit running the space – the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy – has been using the 145-year-old building to host exclusive affairs like fashion shows by Giorgio Armani, Marc Jacob and Oscar de la Renta and after-parties attended by the likes of Beyonce, Victoria Beckham and Orlando Bloom.
While nonprofit executives rub elbows with boldfacers, they’ve neglected their mandate to preserve the historic site and, critics allege, fudge numbers to score public funding as it bleeds money.
In 2006, the Conservancy secured a 99-year state lease on the valuable property — a cavernous building that spans an entire city block bounded by East 66th and 67th Streets and Park and Lexington Avenues — which was once used for military training, drills and storing weapons.
At the time, it said it would model its conservancy after the one that cares for Central Park, which was recently exposed by The Post for doling out sky-high executive paychecks.
Restoration was supposed to be the first priority under the lease from the state, which owns the land, but in 19 years the Conservancy has managed to fix up just four of the building’s historic rooms. A dozen others remain in disrepair, sources told The Post.
Instead, it’s hosted posh high-society galas with cocktails, performances and dinners going for $10,000 a plate, attended by the likes of Julianne Moore, Anna Wintour and Jeffrey Epstein madam Ghislaine Maxwell.
It even hosted the wedding celebration for its event coordinator Liz Bickley in September 2022 — on the nonprofit’s dime.
“We’re very close to our staff . . . we’re a family,” the Conservancy’s CEO Rebecca Robertson said in defense of the wedding during a 2024 deposition in the cadet-eviction case. She admitted their inner circle got to use the space for free for private functions.
Such policies have raised questions about how the $19.8 million the conservancy has received in taxpayer funds since 2020 is being used.
“They say they have this mission, but what they’ve created is a private social club. This is not about culture or history or anything,” slammed Upper East Sider Jay Stallard.
What’s enraging the community even more is the deep-pocketed group — led by real estate heavyweight Adam Flatto and holding $160 million in assets, much of it offshore in the Cayman Islands — could easily afford the restoration it promised.
“There’s an arrogance there,” said Alida Camp, an Upper East Side resident. “They ought to show some more respect for the fact that they have a lease with the state, and it’s on state land. It’s not private property for them. I just I find their attitude, that behavior, very offensive.”
The Conservancy received $1.4 million from the federal Paycheck Protection Program in both 2020 and 2021, claiming it would allow it to preserve 189 jobs during the pandemic, according to public filings.
But nearly half of the $2.8 million it received went to CEO Rebecca Robertson over those two years. She pocketed $645,104 in total compensation in 2020, and $623,813 in 2021.
It’s not known how many jobs were preserved with the remaining $1.5 million. The deposition revealed that the nonprofit only had dozens of people on staff, not hundreds, before the pandemic.
And despite the massive public funding it’s raked in, the conservancy has still managed to run a deficit almost every year since 2016. It was $12 million in the red in 2023, the last year for which tax filings are publicly available.
Meanwhile the conservancy has been fighting tooth and nail to evict the Knickerbocker Greys, the youth cadet group that’s been meeting for an hour per week after school since 1902 in a small room in the Armory’s basement – in defiance of a bill signed last year by Gov. Kathy Hochul that prohibited the group from kicking out the Greys.
Despite the bill and a Manhattan court judge ruling in the Greys favor last month, the conservancy has told the children they were only allowed to come by the Armory to retrieve their belongings, according to a source in the group.
In the Aug. 20 ruling in Manhattan civil court, Judge Jeffrey Zellan shamed the execs for being “unable or unwilling” to let another non-profit use a space of “less than a thousand square feet in a building occupying an entire city block.”
But the nonprofit execs wasted no time filing an appeal by Aug. 25. In court filings, the conservancy maintains evicting the children is necessary “to further its public goals.”
“These kids should be honored and not treated like second class citizens,” Stallard said. “It’s disgusting. . . . the audacity is just right in front of you, it’s just impossible not to see.”
In response to inquiries by The Post, the nonprofits execs had the audacity to call Hochul’s bill “illegal.”
“We are challenging this unlawful bill which would set a precedent that allows the state to seize and assign legally leased spaces to another party,” a spokesperson said. “The bill is a result of cronyism and machine politics.”
The conservancy also said it raised and invested more than $174 million in the renovation and restoration of the building, but did not specify how many rooms that represented – or answer questions about the use of the space for parties, or the number of people it has on staff or how many jobs besides Richardson’s were saved with the pandemic relief funds.
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