Let The Children Play

A gentle voice is silenced

Jim Brennan, a long-time West Village activist and staunch defender of Seravalli Playground, died August 26, 2012, in the emergency room at Beth Israel Hospital. He was 77, and had battled disabling heart and kidney problems that impeded his recovery from a hip fracture suffered on August 2.

In 1965, Jim moved to the West Village and was one of the founding members of the West Fourth Street Block Association in 1971. An early member of the West Village Committee, he served for many years as chairman of its Parks Committee. He helped establish the Gansevoort Greenmarket and facilitate its relocation to Abingdon Square in 1994. He was a member of the Village Independent Democrats and served several terms on the Democratic County Committee, most notably during the meeting that selected then-State Assemblyman Jerrold Nadler to run for U.S. Congressman Ted Weiss’s seat after Weiss died suddenly the day before the 1992 primary. From 1993, Jim was a strong advocate of the “Open Park Proposal” for Pier 40. After his life-threatening pulmonary embolism was successfully treated at St. Vincent’s Hospital in 1995, Jim agreed to be featured pro bono in the hospital’s advertising campaign; for several years his resonant voice could be heard in St. Vincent’s radio spots and his picture seen in newspaper ads and on subway and bus posters.

During this period, Jim’s primary focus was Seravalli Playground and the ongoing struggle to keep it functioning and accessible to the public in the face of city budget cuts and the ensuing threat of various privatization plans. As president of Friends of Seravalli he was one of five signatories to the 1996 agreement to allow the Housing Works’ AIDS Day Health Care Center to establish itself in the Seravalli block at 320 West 13th Street and to welcome its clients as playground users. He worked with the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center to relocate their annual Garden Party to Seravalli beginning in 2000. In 2002 he led the fight against a plan to install Field-Turf and privatize the playground’s ballfield for permitted-use only.

Jim was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1934 to James Henry Bell Jr. and Carol Hupp Williams who later divorced. When Jim was six, his mother married Jack Brennan; after Jack died, she had Jim’s last name legally changed to Brennan.

Jim graduated from Tridelphia High School in Wheeling in 1952, and attended Penn State for one year where he made the freshman basketball team as a walk-on and was named team captain. He transferred to West Virginia University in 1953, was red-shirted for one season and then played at forward and guard during the team’s exciting 1954-55 season, when WVU, under its new coach, former New York Knick Fred Schaus, was ranked 19th nationally, won the Southern Conference championship, and made its first NCAA tournament appearance. Injuries from a serious car accident in his junior year ended Jim’s college basketball career, but he continued to play in semi-pro leagues until 1965, and was captain of his General Theological Seminary team from 1957 to 1960. Well into his 60s, Jim was a familiar sight on the Seravalli Playground courts, where he worked out every morning, accompanied by his wife Elaine after their marriage in 1987. It was on Seravalli in late June 1995, under one of the half-court baskets, that he suffered the massive pulmonary embolism that would effectively end his playing career.

Jim was a psychotherapist in private practice in the West Village, a calling that arose out of his former work as a clergyman. After graduating from the General Theological Seminary in 1960, he was ordained in the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia and served as vicar of the Church of the Transfiguration in Buckhannon from 1960 to 1964 and concurrently as Episcopal chaplain at West Virginia Wesleyan College. He was dean of the diocesan School of Religion and a Fellow of the College of Preachers at the Washington National Cathedral. After a year as a teaching fellow at the General Theological Seminary in 1965, he laid down clerical orders and worked for the Chase Manhattan Bank until 1970, initially as director of college relations, and eventually as a speechwriter and special assistant to the bank’s president Herbert Patterson. As a writer and poet, he saw his two dramatic works, “With” and “Adam Arrived,” produced on stage, and a number of poems published in Waterways and Manhattan Poetry Review.

Jim married Jane Taylor Wilson in 1953 and they had two daughters. He married Becky Jene Emch in 1965. Both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife of 25 years, Elaine Luthy; his two daughters and sons-in-law, Elizabeth Williams and Phil Hughes of South Berwick, Maine, and Kristin Taylor and Peter Nelson of Carver, Massachusetts; his four grandchildren, Eliza Jane and Owen Jay Williams-Hughes, Griffin Taylor-Gats, and Mindy Lopez; and his two sisters, Carol Schroeder of Chestertown, Maryland, and Joan Brennan of Charlotte, North Carolina. Jim requested that his cremated remains be buried at sea off First Encounter Beach in Eastham, Massachusetts. The memorial gathering will be held in Eastham next May.