A request for approval for demolition of a designated landmark from the Landmarks Preservation Commission is almost unheard of today. How actual landmarks are handled can be a different issue. In fact, now many developers instead request the official landmark designation they need to qualify for lucrative federal preservation tax credits. The weekly calendar of the commission is filled with applications to restore and upgrade landmark buildings of all kinds in every corner of the city. Many developers seek the zoning breaks available with the restoration of a designated landmark. Restoring a landmark is now a prestigious endeavor. For developers, preservation now pays. The record is clear: no designated landmark has shown to be an economic failure because of its designation; in fact, most are a financial success.
PRESERVATION ACCELERATES CHANGE
To appreciate where preservation in New York and, in fact, the country, is today, one must understand the progression of the past thirty years. New York set the standard for the country. The rescue, and reuse, of Tweed Courthouse is, in fact, a small measure of how much things have changed from the New York City of the 1970s. Considerable mythology has grown up around the background to passage of the law and the history of landmarks preservation in New York.
Few remember—if they ever knew—that the 1965 Landmarks Preservation Law was almost meaningless in its first iteration. The law’s administration was unimpressive for several years after passage, but it lulled the public into assuming significant progress was occurring. Some obvious buildings were being designated landmarks, but important buildings were falling all over town to make way for the postwar definition of progress that only meant new. Amazingly, under the new law, the Landmarks Preservation Commission was allowed to designate for only six months every three years. It is important to fully understand what that meant—six months of designations followed by three years of unstoppable demolition. This became clear to me only, as this chapter will show, while covering what appeared to be a routine protest over a building demolition in the early 1970s.
The actual reasons for passage of the Landmarks Preservation Law in 1965 are misunderstood. It had more to do with Robert Moses than is at all recognized. The common assumption is that it was prompted by the highly publicized loss of Pennsylvania Station in 1963 and was meant to prevent future disastrous losses. This was definitely not the case. In fact, the demolition of Penn Station—universally recognized today as a monumental act of civic destruction—was at the time greeted with limited and polite opposition. The small group of citizens, preservationists, architects, journalists, and historians who picketed in front of the station did not inspire broad protests. Even an eloquent New York Times editorial written by Ada Louise Huxtable—“we will be judged not by the buildings we build but by those that we destroy”—had little impact.
When it was all over, when the last of the incomparable Corinthian columns was carted off to a New Jersey landfill, the full measure of the loss began to sink in. Perhaps the questioning of what is meant by “progress” was accelerated but nothing more dramatic than that. If it was true that the landmark law was a reaction to that loss, the administration of Mayor Robert F. Wagner would have seen passed a very different law, a law with teeth. Instead, the 1965 law can be said to have produced a set of baby teeth; a mature set of teeth came almost ten years later.
The further assumption that New York’s law immeasurably changed the nature of planning and architecture in the city and the whole country, as many suggest, did not really happen for many years. What actually changed everything was the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the city’s 1965 landmark law in the Grand Central Terminal case. Even the city’s fight to save the law might not have happened if city and commission leaders followed their first inclination to give into Penn Central Corporation and remove landmark status from that stellar gateway to the city. Public pressure made them defend it.
New York was early but not first in the preservation game. In the 1930s, due to the advocacy of vigorous women’s groups, New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, were the first nationwide in preserving historic structures and districts of styles that set them apart from most of the country, especially big cities like New York. Determination to preserve these cities’ unique architecture was strong, and protectionist laws were established. In fact, women in Junior Leagues, garden clubs, and similar women’s organizations in several other American cities were the real vanguard of the historic preservation movement nationally. From Providence, Rhode Island, to San Antonio, Texas, women led the fights to preserve their cities.
A PROBLEM GROWS IN BROOKLYN
Weak as it was, this first iteration of the law in 1965 for New York City, perhaps late in the game, was an important turning point, psychologically for the public at least. Most important, it addressed a number of prickly political problems faced by Mayor Wagner in the first half of the 1960s. Urban renewal, highway clearance, and a whole host of Robert Moses excesses had stirred up serious public discontent. The battles were fresh in the public’s mind. Mayor Wagner needed something to pacify a disgruntled citizenry.
In Brooklyn Heights, a new civic battle was brewing over an urban renewal clearance project adjacent to what was to become the historic district. This activist neighborhood already had a track record of taming Robert Moses. In the 1950s, he wanted to plow the Brooklyn Queens Expressway through the neighborhood. The well-fought battle was resolved brilliantly with the expressway going under the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade that overlooks the New York Harbor.
In Greenwich Village, several fights (to be explored in the next chapter) had given Mayor Wagner a black eye: the plan to drive a road through Washington Square Park (1955-1956), the attempt to demolish most of the far West Village for urban renewal (1961), and the fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway (mid-1960s)—all projects pushed by Moses and opposed by Jane Jacobs and others in the movement she gave voice to. Jacobs accused Wagner of still operating under Moses’s rules, even though in 1961 he promised the Village that no “improvements” would happen that were not in keeping with “physically and aesthetically West Village traditions.” And when he said “the bulldozer approach is out,” Jacobs dismissed the promise as “pious platitudes.”
So it is no coincidence that those two historic areas of the city—Brooklyn Heights and Greenwich Village—were the first to be designated historic districts, a move that mollified at least some of the participants in the emerging grassroots community and historic preservation movements.
Other development battles also plagued the mayor. In 1957 Carnegie Hall was scheduled to be demolished and replaced with a forty-four-story vermilion and gold skyscraper surrounded by a sunken plaza lined with cultural exhibits. An elegant rust-colored brick building, Carnegie Hall is internationally famous more for its acoustics than its Renaissance Revival design of 1891, appealing as that may be. But it is clearly architecturally distinctive as well.
Lincoln Center was meant to replace Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera. The city opera and ballet companies were to share a new home at Lincoln Center, moving them out of City Center on Fifty-fifth Street. A very well-publicized protest against Carnegie’s impending loss ensued, led by violinist Isaac Stern, his wife, Vera, philanthropist Jacques Kaplan, and Ray Rubinow, the administrator of Kaplan’s foundation. The public hue and cry was deafening and incessant. But only the combination of the fame and determination of Stern et al., backed by a strong public sentiment, could overcome the formidable combined power of Robert Moses, John D. Rockefeller III (chair of the effort to build Lincoln Center), and Mayor Wagner.
In 2003, Carnegie Hall went through a well-publicized, high-quality refurbishment under the guidance of Richard Olcott of the James Polshek Partnership. Polshek had been the architect for renovations and additions since its rescue in the 1960s. Inexplicably, an exhibit at Carnegie Hall about its rescue and restoration paid little attention to this earliest rescue. I subsequently taped an oral history of both Isaac and Vera Stern to re
cord the story for posterity. Unfortunately, Kaplan was already deceased.2
MOSES INCREASED MAYOR WAGNER’S PROBLEMS
More high-profile development controversies added to Mayor Wagner’s public relations problems. During his administration (1954-1965), huge Upper West Side clearance projects—Lincoln Towers, the Coliseum, Manhattantown (now Park West Village), all Moses projects—saw a lot of historic and reusable urban fabric fall under the wrecker’s ball, despite public opposition. And, quite significantly, in 1956, Robert Moses overreached the staunch editorial support he enjoyed from the New York Times when he tried to bulldoze a beloved patch of Central Park at Sixty-seventh Street to extend the parking lot for the privately run Tavern-on-the-Green restaurant. This was a favorite park location of a potent group of West Siders, including members of the press, along with theatrical and art-world celebrities.
Angry protesting mothers with baby carriages facing down the bulldozer made news. A community group sued to stop demolition. But before the court case was decided, Moses, as he had done elsewhere, had the trees torn down and the patch of park cleared in the middle of the night. Despite the loss, the community did not let the battle end and continued its lawsuit. The well-publicized, extended battle continued. Moses experienced a humiliating defeat, forced to give up the parking plan to resolve the litigation. The Adventure Playground was built on that site instead. The well-publicized Moses defeat was his first big one. It is considered the beginning of Moses’s descent from public hero status.
To add to the administration’s public relations woes, New York Post investigative reporters Joe Kahn and Bill Haddad had been covering Moses excesses since 1956. They exposed corruption occurring in the West Side clearance project farther uptown, known as Manhattantown (now Park West Village, 97th to 100th Streets). Project sponsors, selected by Moses, did one of two things. They tore down buildings with no effort to move new construction forward and used empty sites as commercial parking lots. Or they let buildings stand, collected rents, but provided tenants with no maintenance or basics like heat or hot water. On top of this, only 20 percent of the displaced residents were given relocation assistance. Sponsors were paid handsomely to provide relocation service in full, whether or not those services were performed.
As Norval White and Elliot Willensky say of Park West Village in their AIA Guide to New York: “This large and banal housing development was built in the aftermath of the 1957 Manhattantown urban renewal scandal. Developers had acquired six blocks of tenements at a reduced price from the City under the federal urban renewal program. Instead of developing the site, they sat tight for five years, collecting rents, neglecting repairs, and inventing ingenious schemes to exploit their unhappy tenants. Some say these disclosures marked the beginning of N.Y.C. construction czar Robert Moses’ loss of power.” Mayor Wagner endured unending political problems from the Moses backlash, adding up to a big public relations problem. For all these troublesome reasons and more, the 1965 landmark law had a broader political purpose for the mayor than a preservation one.
Wagner was known for addressing problems by first appointing a committee. So in 1962, before a law was passed, Mayor Wagner appointed a temporary Landmarks Preservation Commission that came up with a list of twelve hundred buildings and two historic districts worthy of designation. While the law was pending, the flamboyant 1890 Brokaw Mansions, on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-ninth Street, that New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable so eloquently immortalized, were demolished in 1964. To no avail, pickets protested in front of the chateaulike assemblage of four townhouses built between 1880 and 1912. This debacle, following so closely the demise of Penn Station, pushed final passage.
A MOVEMENT GROWS
These accumulated political headaches were not at all apparent to me when I was writing about historic preservation for the New York Post in the early 1970s. Certainly, the full measure of Robert Moses’s impact on the city was not in my consciousness, nor the strong civic resistance to his decades of demolition and rebuild policies. Wagner may have had motives only slightly related to preservation, but what he and others did not count on was what was already unleashed—the grassroots preservation movement. It was a rapidly growing civic force, not yet large in numbers but significant in passion and energy.
Preservationists would not be mollified for long with a tepid toe-in-the-water approach to official preservation policy that the 1965 law represented. Satisfaction had lasted for a few years, however, while some obvious landmarks were officially designated. Then, in 1972, one developer, Peter Kalikow, overstepped the mark on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not far from the site of the demolished Brokaw Mansions, a site in a neighborhood bound to gain considerable citywide attention. It became my first major preservation story.
Like many others, I had followed Huxtable’s Brokaw articles and thought subsequent passage of the landmarks law was a real solution. And I was certainly not politically astute enough or even aware of the growing impact of the Moses era and the political challenges then facing Wagner. But when I went to cover the story of the newly threatened Fifth Avenue mansions in 1972, I discovered the reality about the landmark law. It was a charade. Whoever heard of a law that functioned for six months and then went into hibernation for three years? I was stunned. I, like so many New Yorkers, thought the truth was different. I simply could not understand how significant buildings could be demolished with the landmark law in place.
An editor had handed me the press release, just another daily story assignment. That release was written by a tall, articulate preservationist, Kent Barwick, who was director of a then little-known citywide group, the Municipal Arts Society (MAS). The press release called attention to the imminent demise of one of the last remaining rows of low-rise Fifth Avenue mansions, despite the existence of the landmark law. Kalikow’s intention was to replace almost the whole corner, including a townhouse and small apartment house on Eighty-second Street. The law, the release noted, was powerless to stop the demolition of these historic but undesignated mansions. Two of the Fifth Avenue limestone mansions were already down, but the most ornate of the original five still stood at the corner along with the one around the corner. The bulldozer was on site, ready to keep going. Mimi Levitt, a resident and townhouse owner on Eighty-second Street, was the catalyst of this fight. She was like so many fierce defenders of neighborhoods and historic preservation—mostly women—whom I have encountered on stories around the city and country.
Levitt was not previously a civic activist. But the threat to her neighborhood—including her own house—appropriately aroused her defensive instinct. The neighborhood group of which she was part, aided by Barwick’s citywide Municipal Arts Society, invoked a host of legal maneuvers to slow the process in an effort to thwart demolition. The buildings had not had a public hearing at the Landmarks Commission. The commission was on its three-year hiatus, but civic lawsuits stalled the demolition.
The battle continued through the courts for three years when a compromise was struck to resolve the lawsuit. The third mansion went down, but the rest were spared. The ornate mansard-roof Duke Mansion on the corner, built in 1901 for Benjamin N. Duke, director of the American Tobacco Company, was not included in the demolition plan and would have survived alone in the shadow of a banal tower. A conventionally dull twelve-story apartment house with a fake mansard roof went up in 1980 on the cleared site adjacent to the Duke. Actually, the “roof” is just a parapet on top of the facade. As a concession to the protesting public, ordered by the court, the developer had the facade of the new building designed by Philip Johnson with not much noticeable improvement.
For me in September 1972, writing the first of six stories over three years about this fight, it was an eye-opener. The more questions I asked, the more I realized the purposeful inadequacy of the law. The story revealed the major defect in the law as well as a timid attitude on the part of the Landmarks Commission. With my editors’ consent, I spent sev
eral months investigating the larger picture. Out of that came a series of articles highlighting the continuing and severe threat to the city’s historic buildings and parks. Reading those articles today reveals the tenuous state of preservation only thirty-eight years ago.3 The New York then seems like a different city.
The first of those articles, in January 1973, revealed the flaws in the law and its apparent intentional weaknesses. In the world of historic preservation, this was a bombshell. Most people who thought the landmark law was a great achievement and protective of the city’s special buildings had no idea how limited was the commission’s power. Most critically and little known was the provision that the commission could designate landmarks after a public hearing; but it could hold those hearings only every three years! What did people think would happen during the three years between designation periods? Once designated a landmark, of course, a building could not be torn down or externally altered without commission approval. Vulnerable buildings just didn’t get designated and, often, still don’t.
A LOT LEFT UNPROTECTED
The law was interesting for its omissions. For one thing, it did not cover interiors. Thus, if the Grand Central landmark designation, at the time being challenged in the courts, was upheld, Penn Central would still be able to gut the interior so long as it left the facade alone. The law also did not cover scenic landmarks. Thus, Central Park, Prospect Park, and other treasured patches of green were not qualified for landmark protection.
The law was binding only on private owners. A privately owned designated landmark—such as the turn-of-the-century Plaza Hotel—could not be torn down or its exterior altered without commission approval. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also an official landmark, could simply ignore—and had—the commission’s disapproval of plans for its new Lehman wing. If the administration had decided to tear down City Hall, the commission would have had no power to stand in its way. The commission’s judgments on public buildings were not even a matter of public record.
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