“If you’re over 50 and from Bed-Stuy, Dr. English either delivered you or was your doctor,” Karyn Wyche, a longtime resident of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, often heard at the Stuyvesant Mansion.
Dr. Josephine English moved to Brooklyn in 1956, where she became the first black obstetrician in New York to open a private practice. She gave birth to all six of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz’s daughters as well as an estimated 6,000 babies over the course of her career. Along the way, she also acquired a significant amount of real estate – over a dozen buildings – with the aim of building medical centers, clinics and community meeting places.
Only two of these buildings are still owned by the family today: The Paul Robeson Theater in Fort Greene and Stuyvesant Mansion in Stuyvesant Heights. Now both buildings have been placed under monument protection as part of a court-ordered sale.
The theater at 40 Greene Avenue, housed in a striking 1864 arched-style church, has been dormant for more than a decade, but its circular motifs, peeling facade and blue-and-gold sign have long piqued neighborhood curiosity.
The building was built in 1864 as a Unitarian Universalist church. After Dr. After English bought it in 1980, she repurposed the building as a theater to expand local access to the arts and named it after Paul Leroy Robeson, the black cultural icon and activist. The theater was primarily used for small productions, fundraisers and various community events.
Stuyvesant Mansion, the other building for sale, served as a senior center and space for after-school programs. It was also a venue for public forums with local leaders and guest speakers, including former political prisoners and members of the Black Panther Party. It was affectionately called “The People’s Mansion.”
“The mansion and Dr. English are tied to Bed-Stuy’s Black heritage and the Great Migration,” said Monique Scott, founder and principal of Freebrook Academy, a private school formerly located at the mansion. “And when you walk into a room like this, you are confronted with history rather than having to be reminded of it or learning about it later in a book or documentary.”
Ms. Scott and other community organizers now fear that Dr. English will be lost if both buildings are for sale. “Too many Black institutions are disappearing because of the erasure of Black spaces,” she said.
The properties were listed as a “two-property legacy portfolio” by Anthony T Crews Real Estate on April 1, but the fate of the two buildings has been unclear for several years. Before the court-ordered sale, Dr. English has been in dispute between her heirs since at least 2020, according to court documents. Barry Sheppard, one of Dr. English, and executor, declined to comment.
The total price tag is $8.25 million – $5.25 million for the mansion and $3 million for the theater. The objects are available either as a package or individually.
About five months before the buildings were listed, the local organizations that had used Stuyvesant Mansion — Brooklyn Movement Center, Freebrook Academy and GrowHouse Design and Development Group — were asked to vacate the building. The eviction sparked a grassroots movement to raise money to purchase the mansion and transfer it to a community-managed land fund. The campaign says that if organizers are successful, they will continue to use the building as a center for arts, wellness, small business creation, intergenerational programming and cultural memory “in the spirit of Dr. Josephine English.” Dr. English died in 2011.
According to an interview with the Brooklyn Historical Society in 2008, Dr. English will use their various properties to provide spaces for Black people in Brooklyn to thrive, gather, and receive dignified health care. One of the first properties she purchased in 1957 was a building in Bushwick that she converted into a women’s clinic. “She was always working for the community and coming home late,” said John Sheppard, Ph.D. English’s eldest son. “She told people not to worry and to pay what they could. She was a nice woman. She spent thousands, if not millions, of her own money on black people.”
Shanna Sabio, co-founder and executive director of GrowHouse NYC, one of the organizations formerly based at Stuyvesant Mansion, helped found the BLAC Land Trust to protect historic Black-owned properties like Stuyvesant Mansion and protect them from developers. Community land trusts are nonprofit organizations that can purchase land with or without buildings and give communities control over its development and management.
The group has a lot ahead of them. So far, their crowdsourcing campaign has raised about $6,000 of the $50,000 they hope to raise to cover legal fees and other costs associated with finding backers or donors who could help purchase the building at list price or fair value. “We have some potential considerations for purchasing the properties for shared use, such as providing a deposit,” said Ms Wyche, who attended Freebrook Academy and is now one of the campaign organizers. But the main approach is to find a donor, and organizers say they have some promising leads.
To add to the complexity, developer Pinestone Greene LLC filed a lawsuit in December 2025 asserting a prior legal claim to 375 Stuyvesant Avenue.
The developer claims that Barry Sheppard entered into a legal agreement with Pinestone Greene in 2017 to develop 40 Greene Avenue and 375 Stuyvesant Avenue. According to recent court documents, a hearing on the case is scheduled for May 21, significantly delaying the possibility of a sale. (Lawyers representing Pinestone Greene declined to comment.)
There are also the additional costs for maintenance. Both buildings are subject to strict historic preservation regulations: the mansion is in a designated historic district – the Stuyvesant Heights Historic District – and the theater is an individual landmark. The theater’s listing makes it clear that a major restoration is required as the structure is currently in a “dilapidated state.”
“The cost of renovation, whether residential, cultural or commercial, will be significantly higher than the initial cost,” said Paul Murphy, a real estate agent who is familiar with historic restorations.
Pinestone Greene LLC’s ongoing lawsuit has inadvertently given GrowHouse and the community a longer window of opportunity to raise the potential funds to purchase the mansion.
Beyond saving this particular site, Ms. Sabio hopes the campaign, if successful, could serve as an example of how other groups could use community land funds to prevent buildings from being looted by developers. “Since Bed-Stuy is in many ways ground zero for the gentrification of Brooklyn, it would be amazing to at least have this victory in the neighborhood,” she said.
Kirsten Noyes and Susan Beachy contributed to the research.