THE LAW CHANGES, BUT THE COMMISSION DOESN’T
For seven years, a complacent, slow-moving Landmarks Commission had not come under fire in any major way, and City Hall was not feeling much heat. Putting the issue in the spotlight of the press, as the Post articles did, surprised a relaxed public, accelerating the momentum for reform and providing ammunition for key advocates. Ten months later, in November 1973, the city council amended the law. The changes were significant and form the backbone of the commission’s strength today:
• The three-year limitation was eliminated.
• Designation of publicly owned scenic landmarks was permitted.
• Designation of private interior spaces was permitted, if accessible to the public.
• Commission reports on city-owned buildings were no longer to be kept secret and were made binding.
But the commission was still reluctant to change its pace of operation, even with newfound authority. The commission wasn’t moving any faster than City Hall under Mayor Wagner would permit. Then came the lawsuit against the city over the fifty-six-story office tower proposed to be built over the 1913 Grand Central Terminal, owned by the Pennsylvania Railway Company. The proposed tower, designed by esteemed modernist Marcel Breuer, was turned down by the commission in 1969. Describing the terminal as “overpowering in its timeless grandeur,” the commission noted at the time that “to balance a 56-story office tower above the flamboyant Beaux-Arts facade seems nothing more than an aesthetic joke. Quite simply, the tower would overwhelm the terminal by its sheer mass” and “reduce the landmark itself to the status of a ‘curiosity.’”
After that proposal was rejected another was put forth that would demolish the terminal, except for the main concourse. That too was rejected. Penn Central then sued to overturn the landmark designation and to declare the landmark law unconstitutional. The case moved slowly through the courts. Expecting to lose, the commission and other city officials were even more gun-shy, preparing in fact to pull the rug out from under their newly achieved powers.
In November 1974, I wrote an article revealing that the city was considering withdrawing the landmark designation of Grand Central Terminal after receiving indications it may lose a multimillion-dollar lawsuit challenging that designation. Although New York Supreme Court Justice Irving Saypol had not issued a written decision, he had made a number of statements from the bench that indicated he was leaning heavily in favor of the plaintiffs. If, as was then anticipated, the city lost the five-year legal battle, it faced the possibility of paying upwards of sixty million dollars in damages. Judge Saypol appeared to be leaning toward ruling only on the specific application of the law to the Grand Central situation without ruling on the overall constitutionality of the law.
Settlement discussions had been going on for several months between representatives of the plaintiff and the city. And the justice was asked to defer judgment in the hope the case could be settled beforehand. One of the proposals under discussion was a withdrawal of the damage claim if the city were to withdraw the landmark designation. This would have allowed the owner and developer to build the skyscraper the Landmarks Preservation Commission disallowed.
JACKIE KENNEDY ONASSIS MAKES THE DIFFERENCE
Civic groups, led by the Municipal Arts Society, expressed outrage and gathered a delegation to meet with Mayor Abraham Beame, who had succeeded Wagner. That was when Jackie Kennedy Onassis famously stepped in, writing a letter to Mayor Beame, pleading with him to save the terminal.6 Her letter helped raise the alarm in the city and the nation. Historic preservation was now in the headlines. Jackie, the great arbiter of good taste in fashion, food, and architecture, raised the consciousness of the nation to the importance of historic preservation. The mayor was persuaded to continue the court fight after the first court ruling in Penn Central’s favor. The case lasted until 1978, when it reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the years following the 1973 law change, under relentless and very public pressure from vocal preservationists, the commission responded to its new authority, gained a series of new chairs with each new administration, went beyond its emphasis on individual landmarks to focus on historic districts, took a stronger interest in all five boroughs, and wrestled with the City Planning Commission to finally take its place as a peer agency instead of being Planning’s stepchild. In the early 1990s, as part of a city-charter revision effort, an attempt was made to bring the Landmarks Commission under control of the Planning Commission. It failed. Originally, the Landmarks Commission came under the Parks Department jurisdiction and was considered subservient to the Planning Commission.
Recognizing landmark preservation as an integral part of citywide and neighborhood planning and as a politically attractive issue took time, but it did take hold, even if not always applied consistently. But, more than anything else, it took the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Grand Central case in 1978 to gain expanded acceptance of and appreciation for historic preservation. The impact was profound also on planning and architecture in the city and in the whole country, giving the New York landmark law the substance that many people today assume it had when first passed in 1965.
In the five intervening years between the 1973 amendment and the 1978 Grand Central ruling, more significant buildings were threatened and significant landmark battles undertaken. But all of this ensued in a new atmosphere in which the significance of preservation was not dismissed. But even after the Grand Central case and the celebrated participation of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, it was at least another decade or more before widespread public acceptance of preservation took hold.
SIGNIFICANT LANDMARK BATTLES WERE MANY
The 1970s was a decade of continual battles to save important buildings taken for granted today. Pier A (1886), Police Headquarters (1905-1909), Grace Church Houses (1883-1907), SoHo, the Flushing Town Hall (1862- 1864), Empire Stores (1869-1885) on the Brooklyn waterfront, the Villard Houses (1884), and Radio City Music Hall (1931-1932), to name a few, were all threatened with demolition. Each one of them could have been lost without battles to stave off the wrecking ball. Pier A, the city’s oldest covered pier, still standing regally on the Lower West Side waterfront, has been in limbo ever since its rescue, due to be a restored public space. The grand old Police Headquarters was elegantly renovated into high-end condominiums. Grace Church Houses, due to come down to build a gymnasium for the Grace Church School, instead have that gymnasium on the inside. SoHo is SoHo, the ultimate chic former industrial neighborhood. The Villard Houses provide a grand entrance to an otherwise pedestrian hotel along with a restaurant in one of the city’s most extraordinary interior spaces, plus a wing of offices. And Radio City Music Hall? It is still amazing to think the attempt to tear it down really happened, but it did. I covered all these threats and more, believing that the unique historical, cultural, and aesthetic character of the city was under assault. Clearly, it was.
TWEED COURTHOUSE: AN OLD CONTROVERSY
In this context, the fight over what to do with Tweed Courthouse in 2003 seemed like a petty squabble after what had transpired in the 1970s. Given the state of preservation in the early years of that decade, Tweed’s near loss at that time is understandable. I wrote five articles over three years on Tweed’s doomed future. The first was June 14, 1974. In that and subsequent articles, I reported on the administration’s determination to replace the undesignated landmark building with a redbrick mock-colonial structure. The decision, I wrote, threatened to “turn into the biggest architectural controversy since the demolition of Pennsylvania Station.” Civic groups rallied in opposition and called on the administration to restore and reuse all the historic city-owned properties near City Hall. They included:
• The 1846 Sun Building (corner of Broadway and Chambers Street), a subdued five-story Italianate structure built to house A. T. Stewart Dry Goods Store, the first department store in America. The city eventually restored it and occupies the upper floors with retail on the ground floor.
• At one point in the 1960s, those two significant landmarks and the old Police Headquarters were due to be replaced by a new civic center.
The 1970s fight over Tweed Courthouse was a pivotal moment. But as then City Club trustee William Hubbard noted, “There’s a predisposition in the city toward demolition. . . . There’s a lot of rethinking being done in this field but it hasn’t yet caught on in municipal construction.”
My last report on the eventual rescue of Tweed was the last one I wrote on any preservation issue before leaving the Post in 1978. The editors under new owner Rupert Murdoch saw no news value in the issue of landmarks preservation. I wrote that the Tweed Courthouse—described by one architectural historian as “the finest public building in the Italianate style in the country”—was coming back to life.
Under the cunning guidance of city council president Paul O’Dwyer, the high-ceilinged, spacious rooms were gradually being stripped of layers of dirt and rows of old file cabinets to make way for O’Dwyer staff people. Glass doors with graceful etchings of the city’s seal were clean and glistening once again, milk-glass fixtures were being rescued from piles of debris and rehung, fireplaces long blocked with cartons now served as elegant ornamentation, and well-carved plasterwork had been stripped and repainted.
Clearly, the determination of O’Dwyer and his staff saved this well-known monument to civic corruption. But the economics of renting office space for city use and the then fiscal crisis were what made using it acceptable to bureaucrats. The 90,000 square feet of Tweed office space was rent free, saving $630,000 yearly. O’Dwyer was an old hand at fighting for preservation of the city’s heritage, and he had long advocated making the civic center area around City Hall more of a tourist attraction. O’Dwyer’s achievement was to rescue this storied landmark from destruction, to get the roof repaired, the building modestly upgraded, and, most important, get it back into use. It was not designated a landmark until October 16, 1984.
Twenty years later, during the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, under the determined guidance of Landmarks Preservation Commission chair Jennifer Raab, Tweed Courthouse underwent a three-year, $90 million full restoration. Little support existed within the administration for Raab’s dogged determination to make this an achievement of her tenure, until, that is, the idea of using it as a relocation site for the Museum of the City of New York. The high-quality restoration job was led by one of New York State’s preeminent restoration architects, Jack Waite. Nothing like this quality of restoration would have even been considered thirty years earlier. The current use of this venerable landmark by the Board of Education will be debated among partisans for years to come, but the miracle is that it still stands.
The most compelling argument for use by the museum was that the public should have full access to the extraordinary interior, with its sky-lighted five-story rotunda and modestly elegant rooms. The most compelling reason for use by the Board of Education was as a signal that Mayor Bloomberg considered public education reform the highest priority of his administration and that bringing the board next door to City Hall underscored his determination to give education major attention and to demand accountability.
As it turns out, something of a combination of the two is the result. Offices of the Board of Education are comfortably ensconced, and some of the small-scale public spaces around the rotunda on the different floors are well used as meeting places. Two kindergarten public schools now occupy space here.7 And the main floor of the rotunda is used for some public events.
RAISING PRESERVATION AWARENESS AMONG STUDENTS
Bringing public school children to Tweed for any length of time is probably the most significant use of the building. Most public school children live in neighborhoods where the value ascribed to old buildings is almost nonexistent. Little of the reverence for historic buildings so evident in much of Europe and other foreign places is true in New York. Most often, the potential of the historic fabric in many neighborhoods is appreciated primarily by new relocating residents moving in. Many current residents whose landlords are loath to perform more than minimum building maintenance think only new construction should be aspired to. This is often true even if the new is flimsy, as it usually is, compared with the neglected old.
When I was writing the story about Flatbush Town Hall and the trilogy of history of the former village of Flatbush, I discovered a wonderful gem. In the courtyard of Erasmus High School, a Gothic confection typical of many of the city’s public schools, is a little-known historic treasure—the 1786 Erasmus Hall Academy, a wooden schoolhouse built as a private academy for the Dutch church that remains, one of the oldest in the country. It’s in the courtyard, yet no mention or use of it made its way into the curriculum of the high school surrounding it.
New York City schools, like most public school systems around the country, have been remiss in giving students reason to appreciate their own neighborhoods, especially their historic fabric. Is it any wonder these kids grow up with the idea that upward mobility means moving out to a suburban tract house? Only a new appreciation of where they now live can change that and, in turn, advance the stability of their neighborhoods.
To my mind, then, if use of the Tweed Courthouse by the Board of Education does that for the current generation of public school students, it will be a worthwhile achievement. If they can see the value in something old, they may not be deceived into equating new with better. Equally important is the assurance of the intrinsic and lasting value of this stately edifice. The Board of Education will probably not be located there forever, but the building at least exists to accept an unpredicted future use.
The days where buildings like this one could be considered deserving of the garbage dump are over—at least in New York. Many American cities lag far behind New York in this evaluation, even though in New York vulnerable buildings still don’t get landmarked if a well-connected real estate owner wants an area of the city redeveloped.
The fundamental dilemma of the Landmarks Preservation Commission is the conflict between preservation and new development in a city where real estate ownership trumps all else in access to power and influence. How well preservation has prevailed over the years from administration to administration often depends on which prominent owner is involved. But when a site does get put on the commission calendar to be considered for designation and when owners seek permission to alter a landmark, the public hearing process is quite admirable. The public is not just heard. People who testify are really listened to by the commissioners. The measure of the commission is not just what gets designated a landmark or a landmark district. The key is what the commission avoids doing.
Opponents continue to argue that preservation is about freezing the city—embalming is the favorite word—about stopping change or stopping progress. Facts to the contrary make no difference in the public debate. Notable new buildings exist in many historic districts. An endless array of additions to historic buildings exist all over the city. The historic preservation movement rescued cities from the bulldozer of urban renewal and cataclysmic change, thereby rescuing urbanism itself. Preservationists first fought to preserve not only buildings but the urban fabric itself, all those elements now extolled by mainstream planners and urban designers—importance of density, real mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhoods, walkable streets and community gathering spaces. Through preservation, everything is connected.
For the most part, preservationists are too defensive. Once and for all, the time is now to acknowledge that preservation is about city building in the most expansive way, about enhancing the new by preserving and adaptively reusing the old, about moving forward an
d looking back at the same time. Preservation is about building anew on assets that exist, about Urban Husbandry at its best.
3
GREENWICH VILLAGE
Jacobs, Moses, and Me
The Village is amorphous; I can shape it into any place. . . . Everything in the Village . . . seems haphazard, accidental. When we first moved there, the old-timers told us the Village had Changed. The Village does not change, not really. The Village—the real Village, the one bounded by Fifth Avenue on the east and the Hudson River on the west—remains an accident.
MARY CANTWELL,
“Manhattan When I Was Young”
I was a four-year reporter in 1969—almost a “veteran”—when I was one of nine Post staffers sent to the neighborhoods of their youth to write a series of articles meant to dramatize the changes wrought by time. Anthony Mancini went to the Northeast Bronx, Judith Michaelson to Flatbush, Timothy Lee to Park Slope, Jerry Tallmer to Park Avenue, Lee Dembart to Jackson Heights, John Mullane to Kingsbridge, Carl J. Pelleck to the Lower East Side, Arthur Greenspan to the Grand Concourse, and I to Greenwich Village.
For the most part, except for Park Avenue, the neighborhoods retained their working-class character. The Northeast Bronx, the Grand Concourse, and Kingsbridge, along with Jackson Heights (“the poor man’s Forest Hills”), were already on the upward-mobility route. The Northeast Bronx had not lost its rural feel, although the not-so-distant Co-op City, then in construction, was looming large. Park Avenue had already been transformed into mostly cooperative apartment houses with only twenty rental buildings left. And the Grand Concourse had not yet lost its “insular, isolated existence” primarily for Jews.
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