By Megan Messana
Finding records on the building at 14 West 10th Street in New York City, or on the bizarre events that have occurred there throughout history, is about as perplexing as the events themselves.
The location itself is designated as a New York City landmark because its neighborhood, Greenwich Village, is considered a historic district. The National Register of Historic Places, however, is currently digitizing all of its records and has not gotten to those for New York yet.
As for the events of 14 West 10 St., one of the most notable was the case of Joel Steinberg in 1987. Steinberg was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in the death of his illegally adopted daughter, Lisa, after he fatally beat her. His partner at the time, Hedda Nussbaum, was cleared of all charges even though many argued that she was, at best, complicit in Lisa’s death. The Steinberg case, center of intense media coverage at the time, has faded from public consciousness. Perhaps because he was not a celebrity like O.J. Simpson, fewer people today know much about what happened between Steinberg, his partner and their adopted children.
Lucky for us, court records exist. Unlucky for us, some of them existed in a storage unit that burned down.
While court records are open to the public, the clerks’ offices at the New York Supreme Criminal Court only stores cases from 1995 to the present on the premises. Everything before that is stored off-site and takes about a week to obtain, according to the website. What the website does not tell you, but what the county clerk’s office will, is that at some point a fire took place in at least one of the storage units. Some of the files were saved – including those regarding the Steinberg trial – but they are more difficult to get at the moment, since things had to be moved around among the ashes.
With that said, Steinberg seems to still find himself in courtrooms 30 years later, so there is plenty more to look through while waiting for the county clerk to salvage the murder case files.
Most recently is a civil case from 2017, listed on WebCivil Supreme, the online database of New York civil supreme court cases. As usual, he was the defendant. The plaintiff was Michele Launders, the biological mother of Lisa. Not much was said about Launders in the very extensive original coverage of the case. The 2017 civil case files – all 40 of them – date back to 1988 with related actions in related cases and discuss how exactly Lisa came to live with Steinberg.
According to the files, Launders was 19 when she had become pregnant with the baby who Steinberg later named Lisa, and she decided to give her up for adoption. A friend referred her to Dr. Michael Bergman as an obstetrician. Bergman recommended Steinberg to assist with giving the baby up for adoption, as he was a lawyer who, Bergman said, had handled adoption proceedings before. In the interim, Launders stayed with Bergman’s assistant, Jean Liebrader, to hide away while pregnant. Steinberg charged Launders $500 for setting up an adoption for Lisa and assured her that he would be placing the baby in a stable home.
Alas, he did not.
In 1988, Launders decided to sue everyone involved in the adoption, and in the baby’s life from that point on, for a total of $15 million. Bergman had died, so she sued his heir along with Liebrader, Steinberg and Nussbaum, She also went after the Board of Education, the Human Resources Administration, the New York City Police Department, and the Infirmary Downtown Beekman Hospital, claiming that they all knew Lisa was being abused but that no one stepped in to help. In 1999, she accepted a settlement of $985,000 from all the defendants but Steinberg; the suit against him remained open. In 2001 she filed a Note of Issue, seeking a trial on the issue of damages against Steinberg, to request the original $15 million from him plus any interest accrued over time. He was ordered to pay in 2003. A year later he attempted to appeal.
Eventually, in 2007, an appeals court ruled that Steinberg would only have to pay $5 million, and Launders had a subpoena issued along with a restraining notice in 2008 to not only request information about him and his assets, but to halt him from selling any of them.
Launders summoned him to court again in 2014, this time requesting the full amount of $15 million plus any interest accrued. As he had done earlier, he argued that Launders’ had never cared about Lisa when she was alive, so she had no right to damages. The argument failed again, but the court upheld one of his successful appeals, so the now-free man still has to pay out $5 million to Launder.
Crime was rife in New York City during the 1980s, but it was not common to see middle-class residents commit acts of such graphic violence. Greenwich Village was known as a safe-haven for artists and the LGBTQ+ community, so violent acts such as Steinberg’s shook the neighborhood.
The court files – some summaries of which can be found online – from Steinberg’s criminal trial paint the picture of a man who was, at best, mentally unstable. His lawyers unsuccessfully attempted an insanity plea, according to a New York Times article of December 10, 1988. He claimed that he believed 6-year-old Lisa was in a cult, and that she was in a trance and was “staring” at him and “trying to put him in a trance.” This, perhaps, is the link to other stories of people “losing their mind” while living at historic 14 West 10th Street.