by Sam Roberts
A RARE VIEW OF THE REAR OF THE TERMINAL AS THE STEEL FRAMEWORK WAS BEING INSTALLED FOR THE PAN AM BUILDING.
The Municipal Art Society intervened as a friend of the court and mustered a veritable who’s who of legal talent on behalf of Grand Central. (Among those who contributed to the society’s brief were former mayor Wagner, and other legal luminaries, including Bernard Botein, Whitney North Seymour Sr., Francis T.P. Plimpton, Samuel I. Rosenman, and Bethuel M. Webster.) A trial was conducted before Justice Irving Saypol, who would take more than two years to deliver his decision. (Saypol was perhaps best known for having prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage conspiracy in 1951, a case in which he had decided the defendants were guilty nearly a year before the jury rendered its verdict.)
Saypol invalidated the Grand Central designation, delivering a second blow to the landmarks law in less than a year (the designation of the J.P. Morgan mansion on Madison Avenue had been voided the previous July by the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals). He declined to address the constitutionality of the statute but ruled that by preventing the railroad from earning rent on the air rights for the proposed tower, the commission created “economic hardship” which “constitutes a taking of property.”
He also concluded that a city compromise, which would have permitted the transfer of air rights from Grand Central to the adjacent Biltmore Hotel site, was uneconomical. Ada Louise Huxtable wondered whether the delay had been a blessing in disguise, given the downturn in the city’s real estate market. “Did Penn Central and the developer really lose all that money they are claiming damages for (that will help sink the city), or did the city’s delaying action perhaps save their shirts?” After two years of “municipal breath holding,” those questions, she suggested, finally would be addressed in an appeal of a case so disturbing because of “the gravity of its effect on the city’s heritage.”
But while Deputy Mayor Stanley M. Friedman said the city was “99 percent sure” to appeal the decision, an appeal, it turned out, was by no means certain. In fact, the city’s chief lawyer was arguing against it. Without ruling on the constitutionality of the law, Saypol had delivered a thinly veiled warning to city officials that designating a landmark did not come without cost. “The point of decision here,” he wrote, “is that the authorities empowered to make the designation may do so but only at the expense of those who will ultimately have to bear the cost, the taxpayers.”
That cautionary note was not lost on W. Bernard Richland, the city’s corporation counsel. With the Penn Central claiming that landmarking the terminal had cost it $60 million so far, Richland was worried that the city, already verging on a fiscal crisis of catastrophic proportions, would be liable for damages. Richland recommended to Mayor Abraham D. Beame that the city not appeal Saypol’s decision.
“Bernie wanted us not to appeal,” John Zuccotti, the former chairman of the City Planning Commission, remembered. “He had some thought that we were exposed. He was very concerned. I remember the Penn Central people coming to see us and they urged us not to appeal, too. We debated the issue in front of Abe and he said appeal.” Exactly what changed Beame’s mind may never be known. But by the time he reviewed the subject with Zuccotti and Judah Gribetz, a deputy mayor, he had received a poignant appeal from Jacqueline Onassis.
THE LEGAL APPEAL—and the threat that the city would fold—galvanized a pantheon of prominent New Yorkers, spearheaded by the Municipal Art Society. Frederic Papert, Ashton Hawkins, and Brendan Gill, all ardent preservationists, figured prominently (Gill was succeeded as architecture critic at the New Yorker by Paul Goldberger, who later wrote that while Gill “alone did not save Grand Central Terminal, he did as much as anyone to establish the climate that made that possible, through his writing and his civic activism and his behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing”). Gill had been Grand Central’s guardian for decades. In 1958, he railed against a “living billboard”—a platform over the ticket windows on which fashion shows were staged—and warned that Madison Avenue’s hidden persuaders “will eventually find a way to make those twinkling constellations spell out your favorite smoke, like a constellation should.” At Gill’s memorial service in 1998, George Plimpton said: “The only things Brendan hadn’t been able to save in his lifetime were the Polo Grounds, Ebbets Field, the Maisonette, Alger Hiss, the Reichstag, the Edsel, and the passenger pigeon.” The preservation movement had other heroes, too, including Dorothy Miner, who was the landmarks commission lawyer.
If Jacqueline Onassis needed any prodding, she got it from her good friend Karl Katz (a board member of the Municipal Art Society, he took her to an exhibit he designed at Grand Central to dramatize the potential demolition of the terminal), and possibly from Babe Paley, whose husband, Bill, had advised Beame’s predecessor, John V. Lindsay, on urban design (Babe Paley’s involvement would have been poetically just; she was a descendant of Commodore Vanderbilt). Laurie Beckelman, who answered the pivotal phone call from Onassis (and would later go on to become chairwoman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission), passed the phone to Kent Barwick, the Municipal Art Society president, at its tiny offices on East 65th Street. “I took the call and it was unmistakably Jackie,” Barwick recalled. Papert, a former Kennedy advance man, later recruited her to the Municipal Art Society board, where she would diligently advocate on behalf of Columbus Circle, St. Bartholomew’s Church, and other preservation projects. (In 1982, she publicly planted a kiss on City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin’s cheek, which was said to have sealed his vote to save Lever House.) Her handwritten plea to Mayor Beame dated February 24, 1975, probably carried the day for Grand Central. She appealed to his nobility, recalled how much President Kennedy had intervened to block a federal office building in Washington’s Lafayette Square, how he loved Grand Central, and added plaintively:
FRED PAPERT OF THE MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY, JACQUELINE ONASSIS, AND PHILIP JOHNSON JOINED TO SAVE GRAND CENTRAL.
Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future? Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters. Maybe, with our Bicentennial approaching, this is the moment to take a stand, to reverse the tide, so that we won’t all end up in a uniform world of steel and glass boxes.
“HAVE I GOT A CASE FOR YOU,” Bernie Richland told Nina Gershon, a senior appeals lawyer in the corporation counsel’s office, once he was persuaded to pursue the appeal. Gershon, who would later be appointed to the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, said that once the decision to appeal was made, the city was gung-ho:
There were some in the preservation community who questioned the city’s resolve to pursue, through appeal, the fight to preserve Grand Central Terminal as a landmark, after a devastating loss in the trial court, which had not only rejected, with derision, the findings of the Landmarks Preservation Commission regarding the significance of the Terminal but found that the designation of the Terminal as a landmark was unconstitutional; ominously, the trial court had also severed and kept open the request for damages for a “temporary taking.” But when Bernie became convinced of the merit of the city’s position, he did not stint in his support of the appeal.
Preservationists made their case before the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court and in the court of public opinion. Onassis joined with Philip Johnson, Mayor Wagner, Bess Myerson (the city’s former consumer affairs commissioner), the author Louis Auchincloss, Thomas P.F. Hoving (the Metropolitan Museum of Art director), Representative Edward I. Koch, and Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, among others, on a star-studded Committee to Save Grand Central Station. “Europe has its cathedrals and we have Grand Central Station,” Johnson had declared, on January 31, 1975, at a press conference. Diane Henry wrote in the Times, “Although the audienc
e cheered Mr. Johnson’s eloquence, it was most fascinated by the presence of Mrs. Onassis, who rarely lends her presence and name to a public cause.”
IN DECEMBER 1975, the Appellate Division reversed Saypol. In a 3 to 2 ruling signed by Presiding Justice Francis T. Murphy, the appeals panel wrote that the only question before it was whether the Penn Central had persuaded the court that the law “as applied to them in this case, imposes such a burden as to constitute a compensable taking. Put another way, while the exercise of the police power to regulate the private use of property is not unlimited, it is for the one attacking such regulation in any given case to establish that the line separating valid regulation from confiscation has been breached.” Penn Central’s burden, the court said, “is to establish that they are incapable of obtaining a reasonable return from Grand Central Terminal operations, not that they are not receiving it.” The court concluded that the burden had not been met.
“Structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal are important and irreplaceable components of the special uniqueness of New York City,” the judges wrote. “We have already witnessed the demise of the old Metropolitan Opera House and the original Pennsylvania Station. Stripped of its remaining historically unique structures, New York City would be indistinguishable from any other large metropolis… The need to preserve structures worthy of landmark status is beyond dispute; and the propriety of the landmark designation accorded Grand Central Terminal is essentially unchallenged.”
ENJOYING LUNCH AT THE OYSTER BAR OF THE OYSTER BAR. NOTE THE VAULTED CEILING, AT RIGHT, AND THE 1974 PRICES.
The judges were more than wary of Saypol’s warning that landmark designations may be made only at taxpayers’ expense: “Such language suggests that any regulation of private property to protect landmark values constitutes a compensable taking. Such holding would surely, as the amicus brief submitted hereon states, ‘eviscerate New York’s Landmarks Preservation Law.’ ”
Eighteen months later, in a case argued by Gershon’s successor, Leonard Koerner, the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, again affirmed Grand Central’s status as a landmark. When times are flush, seizing landmark properties by eminent domain and compensating the owners might be desirable or even required. But, the judges concluded, especially when a city is in financial distress, “it should not be forced to choose between witnessing the demolition of its glorious past and mortgaging its hopes for the future.”
The preservationists’ victory parties were short-lived. Penn Central appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the Court heard oral arguments on April 17, 1978, advocates chartered an eight-car Landmark Express (including Car 120, the vintage Pennsylvania, which played host to first-class passengers at the turn of the century) to make the round-trip from New York to Washington, where they were met by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “A big corporation shouldn’t be able to destroy a building that has meant so much to so many for so many generations,” Onassis said. “If Grand Central Station goes, all of the landmarks in the country will go as well.” She added, “If we don’t care about our past, we cannot hope for the future.”
The stakes were enormous, for preservationists and for property owners. Ada Louise Huxtable was driven to hyperbole by this point, warning that everyone except “the Penn Central and some unreconstructed real-estate types” considered the proposed piggyback tower that would render Grand Central “the filling in a Pan Am–office tower sandwich” to be “architecturally and environmentally revolting.”
PENN CENTRAL TRANSPORTATION CO. V. NEW YORK CITY was the first case in which the High Court considered historic preservation. The Court issued its decision on June 26, 1978. The 6 to 3 opinion by Justice William Brennan affirmed the New York Court of Appeals ruling that landmarking was constitutionally within a municipality’s police powers and that this designation in particular did not constitute an indefensible “taking” of property by the government. “The designation as a landmark not only permits but contemplates that appellants may continue to use the property precisely as it has been used for the past 65 years: as a railroad terminal containing office space and concessions,” the court concluded. Brennan wrote:
The Landmarks Law no more effects an appropriation of the airspace above the Terminal for governmental uses than would a zoning law appropriate property; it simply prohibits appellants or others from occupying certain features of that space while allowing appellants gainfully to use the remainder of the parcel.
The Landmarks Law, which does not interfere with the Terminal’s present uses or prevent Penn Central from realizing a “reasonable return” on its investment, does not impose the drastic limitation on appellants’ ability to use the air rights above the Terminal that appellants claim, for, on this record, there is no showing that a smaller, harmonizing structure would not be authorized. Moreover, the pre-existing air rights are made transferable to other parcels in the vicinity of the Terminal, thus mitigating whatever financial burdens appellants have incurred.
Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the minority that the Landmarks Commission’s refusal to sanction the tower above the terminal violated the Fifth Amendment’s ban on taking private property for public use without just compensation. “The City of New York, because of its unadorned admiration for the design, has decided that the owners of the building must preserve it unchanged for the benefit of sightseeing New Yorkers and tourists,” Rehnquist wrote.
“JACKIE ONASSIS WILL SAVE US,” Philip Johnson had predicted, and no one involved in saving Grand Central doubted that her presence and eloquence contributed mightily to the public groundswell that undergirded the verdict and to subsequent victories by preservationists. “Jackie, the great arbiter of good taste in fashion, food and architecture, raised the consciousness of the nation to the importance of historic preservation,” wrote Roberta Brandes Gratz, an architectural historian. “The implications of Penn Central for advocacy are so great,” the architecture critic Paul Spencer Byard wrote, “that the public perception will shift from seeing preservation as a matter of pleasure to seeing it as a public necessity.”
But the court victory was partly Pyrrhic. After all, as Rehnquist wrote, the city does not “merely prohibit Penn Central from using its property in a narrow set of noxious ways. Instead, appellees have placed an affirmative duty on Penn Central to maintain the Terminal in its present state and in ‘good repair.’ ”
Problem was, the Penn Central was bankrupt.
WORKERS TACKLED THE TERMINAL’S EXTERIOR AFTER MOST INDOOR RESTORATION WAS DONE. LUIS CABRERA FIXED JOINTS IN 2004.
THE RESTORATION
JUSTICE IRVING SAYPOL’S DECISION to void the landmarks designation of Grand Central Terminal could not have come at a better time. “The station is probably in no immediate danger,” the New Yorker noted imperturbably. “Who’s going to start putting up another office building this year?”
In 1975, when Saypol issued his decision, New York City was teetering on the brink of municipal bankruptcy. Public works projects were halted midway, leaving the steel skeletons of new schools to rust. Another landmark—the elegant but disintegrating Tweed Courthouse behind City Hall, which was to be razed and replaced with a parking lot—was spared only because the city could no longer afford to tear it down. Private developers also packed away blueprints and placed planned construction on hold. (William Wilgus’s original plans for a tower over the terminal might have been scrapped because of similar economic qualms on the eve of World War I; he wrote later only that they “fell by the wayside.”)
KODAK’S MAMMOTH 18-BY-60-FOOT COLORAMA, A 15-FOOT MUTANT VERSION OF WESTCLOX’S BIG BEN ALARM CLOCK, AND A MERRILL LYNCH BOOTH DOMINATED THE CONCOURSE.
Three years later, when the Supreme Court saved Grand Central, precisely what had been saved since the landmarking process began must have provided grist for some serious second thoughts. By then, the interior of the terminal had been festooned wit
h advertising and even a Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith investment booth in the Main Concourse; the giant baleful clock, which by now was advertising Manufacturers Hanover; and a Chemical Bank branch, perched obtrusively under the Kodak sign. “Right now, this space looks like—like St. Patrick’s lit up for television,” Philip Johnson fretted. “Grand Central has become honky-tonk, with its extra-dimensional advertising displays and its tendency to adopt the tactics of a travel broker,” E.B. White groused, complaining that “the great hall seemed to me one of the more inspiring interiors in New York, until Lastex and Coca-Cola got into the temple.” Paul Goldberger, then the Times’ architecture critic, agreed, arguing that the concourse should serve as “a discreet background for human movement, not a room with movement of its own.”