Editor’s note: Goodbye to Al Sharpton’s House of Justice

The wrecking ball is coming for the Rev. Al Sharpton’s House of Justice. And since the reverend is often called upon to preach at funerals, I thought I’d ask him to eulogize his storefront church on West 145th Street in Harlem.

“We wanted to be accessible to the people. We wanted to have a headquarters where people could come whether they were homeless, or whether they were the governor of New York,” Sharpton told me. “You ain’t got to dress up. Just roll off the streets.”

And that was the beauty of it. The most prominent preacher in New York didn’t bring politicians to a Midtown highrise, or a glamorous megachurch. Instead, he got Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Mike Bloomberg, Chuck Schumer and every single other ambitious Democrat in America to come to his ramshackle one-story hall, next to the Kennedy Chicken & Biscuit.

“I don’t know what was coming out of that rug,” New York City Council Member Gale Brewer quipped about the dingy digs, where she spent countless hours. “If you dropped something, you’d just leave it there,” added Ny Whitaker, a Harlem Democratic consultant.

“I have good memories from the 145th Street site,” Whitaker said. “But it looked like if you blew a sweet breath at it, it would blow down.”

And that’s what’s coming now. The block is getting demolished over the next couple weeks to make way for One45, a development that should bring 1,100 units of housing, one-third of them affordable, on top of street-level retail.

That’s a lot bigger than the humble 250 chairs that filled the House of Justice. But it wasn’t just the seats there, Sharpton said. “We broadcast live from there on WBLS, the only Black FM station. So we’re talking 50,000-60,000 people. People that listen to a rally vote. So if you’re a politician, you’re not doing me a favor coming by. You’re talking to prime voters. There’s no more prime voters than the gathering at our Saturday morning.”

But rising stars like our City & State cover model, Chi Ossé and his fellow LGBTQ+ City Council colleagues don’t need to worry. Sharpton will give them the mic at his new National Action Network headquarters in a converted firehouse on West 124th Street.

“It’ll be a slightly different feeling, but it’s still on the ground, right? It’s in the neighborhood, and you can roll into the rally,” Sharpton said. Critics used to call him an ambulance chaser. “Now I got a firehouse, so my fire engine can take this ambulance chaser where I need to go.”