After a number of weird stories—hoarding? check; dead finches? check—related to the National Arts Club, the Gramercy Park organization has announced its president Aldon James is stepping aside. Well, basically the board of governors, as DNAinfo puts it, "decided James, their president of 25 years, would take some time off." The NY Times reports that acting president Diane Bernhard said "that he had told the board 'he would be willing to take a leave of absence and take a vacation.'"
She added, "We’ve had a barrage of newspaper articles, complaints from board members, members, tenants, staff neighbors. We had disgruntled employees who were fired, and this last episode of the birds in the park. We felt like there was so much information out there that we didn’t know which was fact and which was fiction, and we needed to get to the bottom of it."
The finch episode, which was publicized last week, involves dozens of dead zebra finches found in Gramercy Park—some believed that James, the Birdman of Gramercy Park, was to blame but he told, "I don't know how they got in the park," saying it was "an Agatha Christie mystery." (Let's hope a spinster from St. Mary Mead or a Belgian man with the "little grey cells" can figure it out.)
James and the club have been in the middle of other scandals—for instance, DNAinfo reminds, "The club also faced a Manhattan District attorney investigation that resulted in a 2003 guilty plea of his twin, John, for using the club's nonprofit tax status to buy jewelry he sold for personal profit. John James served five years probation and three months in a psychiatric hospital, and agreed to pay more than $500,000 in restitution and fines."
