A Crown Heights family has held the brownstone at 964 Park Place since 1951, when Ida Robinson and her husband Ephraim bought it. Their granddaughter, Sherease Torain, says a fraudulent transaction in 2015 took the deed out of the family’s hands. Supporters began a round-the-clock watch on the stoop on November 1, and an eviction blockade was set to begin on November 6.
At a meeting at Citadel Cathedral of Praise and Worship on Barbey Street in Cypress Hills on October 27, attorney Jacqueline McMickens told a room of homeowners and congregations the part that is rarely said out loud. “Some of these cases are dead on arrival,” she said. She also said a foreclosure debt can be overcome, and that the route runs through the bank. “You have to find a way for the bank to let you back in,” she said.
Then she drew the line that matters. “But if you get back in and you can’t afford it, you’re wasting your time,” she said. “You’re only digging a deeper hole for yourself and creating more pain for yourself.” Paying thousands of dollars toward a house, she said, is not the same as holding it. “All you’re buying is a place where you can sleep because you don’t own it,” she said.
Citadel’s own purchase is the arithmetic behind the warning. The asking price on the building rose from $1.1 million to $2.3 million while an initial appraisal valued it at $1.7 million. Congregants raised $1.8 million in cash, and the seller financed the remaining $500,000 as interest-only payments with a balloon payment due after two years. Renovations, missed payments, and pandemic hardship followed; the creditor foreclosed, and the building was sold at auction in April 2025. The congregation has gone to court and is waiting on a ruling.
Evangeline Byars, an activist with the People’s Coalition to Stop Deed Theft, hosted that meeting and came to Cypress Hills to stand with the Citadel members. In Crown Heights, Torain and her mother, Queen Afua, are still inside the house their family bought in 1951.
