In 1965, as pieces of New York history fell without mercy to the wrecking ball, Mayor Robert F. Wagner created the Landmarks Preservation Commission to stop the destruction. Controversial at the time — conservative commentator Roger Starr once called it “accountable to no one” — protecting the city’s iconic buildings became more popular as the decades passed.
Indeed, 45 years later, Paul Goldberger, the New School’s Joseph Urban professor of design and architecture, says we’re living in the “Landmarks Era,” and that no one any longer has to make the case for the basic value of preservation.
But now we may face the opposite problem: Is too much of the city going to end up landmarked?
This year alone, the commission is considering seven new historic districts or extensions, and 52 individual buildings. Dozens more are being studied. The Bloomberg administration has landmarked more property than any other mayor — 3,515 structures plus hundreds of buildings in 21 historic districts and four historic district extensions.
For the most part, these actions are immensely popular with New Yorkers. Yet as more and more of the city falls under landmark protection, growth and development may suffer. An ardent lover of architecture, Goldberger nonetheless warns about the risks of allowing the landmarks commission to designate increasing numbers of buildings more and more loosely, and turning the city into “some grotesque version of Colonial Williamsburg on the Hudson.”
If you’ve ever lived one of New York’s countless landmarks, you know what bureaucratic hell can result.
I live in a tripled-landmarked building whose residents are delighted to have the accolades, but who have also suffered from intrusive regulatory decisions. A blatant example: After the building installed magnificent custom-made mahogany doors and double-sashed windows to replace the deteriorated 1907 pine originals, commission staff insisted that the outside facings be painted a sickly green. They had found a base coat, which they claimed must have been original. The result is hundreds of ugly green window frames — hiding mahogany. Who cares what they did 100 years ago? No sensible person paints mahogany windows green.
This impulse is what Goldberger calls preservationist fundamentalism — a destructive ideology for a dynamic city to embrace.
Consider a Modernist building, the Paul Rudolph House at 23 Beekman Place in Manhattan, now up for individual designation. Sitting on top of what is otherwise a characteristic Upper East Side, turn-of-the-20th-century brownstone, the Rudolph apartment looks to the untrained eye like a terrible mistake — or maybe a Homeland Security construction job in progress, with great slabs of concrete holding up the penthouse.
Begun in 1977, when Rudolph was a renowned architect (having left behind the deanship of the Yale School of Architecture), his penthouse would almost certainly be forbidden today by the commission as utterly out of context with the neighborhood. If the commission then chooses to designate it — as it surely will — should it not also ponder the possibility that the fundamentalist approach to preservation is destructive? If the Rudolph House is a landmark, then shouldn’t the commission seriously worry that its own work is preventing the creation of new landmarks daily — that its regulations encourage a mimicking of the old while blocking the creativity of the new or the untried?
Or let’s look at one of the more straightforward real estate categories — commercial office buildings, which usually carry less emotional baggage than single-family starchitect homes. Commercial buildings, after all, are built with a profit motive in mind, usually without any complex higher purpose beyond responding to market demand.
The recently designated Springs Mills Building at 104 W. 40th St. in Manhattan fits that bill. Constructed between 1961 and 1963 for a textile manufacturer, the 21-story mid-block office tower is one of only eight Modernist buildings to be designated as individual landmarks during the Bloomberg administration.
Designed by Harrison & Abramowitz — the firm that also designed structures at the 1939 and 1964 world’s fairs in Queens, the United Nations Headquarters, and Albany’s Empire State Plaza — Springs Mills is built on an irregular L-shaped lot that the architects maneuvered brilliantly. The north façade on 40th Street, says the commission’s write-up, “rises from a shallow, limestone-clad public plaza, anticipating the new zoning rules that encouraged slender, free-standing towers.” In other words, the tower is out of scale with the rest of the block.
As a technical response to serious problems, including a weird lot and an upheaval in the zoning code, the design is brilliant. But does that mean the building deserves to stand in perpetuity? The building is certainly handsome, and its deep-green Solex glass exterior alluring, but is that good enough to warrant protection? I personally don’t think so. It’s a nice building, but it doesn’t soar.
And here’s the thing: Some commercial buildings do soar. Compare Spring Mills to the Brill Building, nine blocks north at 1619 Broadway, and landmarked a few weeks earlier. Built on spec in 1930, the 11-story, Art Deco Brill Building quickly attracted music publishers as tenants, followed by what the Landmarks Commission called “an evolving roster of songwriters, booking agents, vocal coaches, publicity agents, talent agents, and performers.” Many of the greats leased offices — performers Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole in the Big Band era, and songwriters Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller and Doc Pomus, among many others later. Brill also held legendary restaurants like Jack Dempsey’s and the Turf, and glamorous nightclubs, including the Hurricane, Club Zanzibar and Bop City. In other words, Brill has it all. It’s both a gorgeous building and the storehouse of New York culture — a landmarks slam dunk.
In precarious economic times, we should be going for the slam dunks. I realize that strategy would exclude a lot of attractive buildings, but some pretty buildings need to be redeveloped for the good of the city.
Meanwhile, New York has been enduring an ongoing loss of some of its loveliest and most crucial buildings — its houses of worship. Nearly every neighborhood in every borough is anchored by a house of worship — a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, usually built by our immigrant ancestors. Many of the most historic ones are crumbling, due to soaring maintenance costs, changing demographics and declining religious attendance. Some — like the church of St. Theresa’s adjacent to Chinatown, built in 1842 — have been saved by brilliant development deals, allowing the church to sell air rights to fund its operations.
But as developer and preservationist Frank Sciame says, “Even with the most imaginative development deal, to save a church as a church requires an active congregation.” Many houses of worship have long ago lost all but a handful of congregants. “What will we leave behind for our legacy, if we don’t preserve our great structures?” Sciame asks.
Of the 52 individual designations the commission has pending for consideration, only nine are houses of worship. What will New York be like stripped of these? Certainly darker, colder, and less beautiful.
Goldberger has thrown down a gauntlet to the commission, saying, “If the Landmarks Preservation Commission is truly successful, its legacy won’t only be in saving things — it will be in inspiring the landmarks of tomorrow.”
Can we keep what’s best of the old while inspiring the new? That will be the test of this century.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is director of the Regional Plan Association’s Center for Urban Innovation.
LEAVING THEIR ‘MARK
Under Bloomberg, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has created more historic districts than any administration since the group’s founding in 1965. The LPC has given landmark protection to 3,515 buildings in New York City since 2002, as well as creating 21 historic districts and extending four others. But that’s just the beginning. The following seven historical districts and extensions, and 52 individual buildings, are up for vote soon. And this list doesn’t include areas being considered but have not yet been scheduled for a vote, such as a potential historic district along West End Avenue between 70th and 107th streets.
DISTRICTS
MANHATTAN
SoHo Extension, 100 buildings
A stretch of both West Broadway and Crosby Street south of Houston Street.
Greenwich Village Extension, 280 buildings
Section bounded by Perry Street, Greenwich Street, Christopher Street and Washington Street.
QUEENS
Ridgewood South, 200 buildings
Blocks along Woodward Avenue and Onderdonk Avenue, bounded by Woodbine Street and Catalpa Avenue.
Addisleigh Park, 423 buildings
Large blocks surrounding Murdock Avenue and Linden Boulevard, among other streets.
Douglaston Historic District Extension, 22 buildings
Lots near Douglaston Parkway, along Willow Drive, 39th Avenue and 234th Street.
BROOKLYN
Crown Heights North II, 640 buildings
Section between Brooklyn Avenue and Nostrand Avenue, north of Eastern Parkway.
THE BRONX
Grand Concourse, 73 buildings
Jagged series of blocks along Grand Concourse, from East 153rd Street to East 167th Street.
INDIVIDUAL BUILDINGS
MANHATTAN
* Van Tassell & Kearney’s Hourse Auction Mart, 126 E. 13th St.
* 57 Sullivan St. (house)
* 177 West Broadway (house)
* 97 Bowery St. (house)
* Hebrew Actors Union, 31 E. 7th St.
* 138 Second Ave. (house)
* Sire Building, 211W. 58th St.
* Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, 580 10th Ave.
* Look Building, 488 Madison Ave.
* Paul Rudolph House, 23 Beekman Pl.
* Union League Club, 48 Park Ave.
* Westbeth (a k a Bell Telephone Laboratories), 445 West St.
* Loew’s Canal Street Theater, 31 Canal St.
* Olivet Memorial Church (now Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin), 59 E. 2nd St.
* Eleventh Street Methodist Episcopal Chapel (now the Father’s Heart Church), 545 E. 11th St.
* Middleton S. and Emilie Neilson Burrill (house), 36 E. 38th St.
* Gramercy House, 38 12th Ave.
* E. Ridley & Sons Department Store, 59 Orchard St.
* Fisk-Harkness House, 12 E. 53rd St.
* 190 Grand St. (house)
* 192 Grand St. (house)
* Haskins and Sells Building, 35 W. 39th St.
* 154 West 14th Street Building
* Japan Society Building, 333 E. 47th St.
* St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Parish House & Rectory, 201 Amsterdam Ave.
* Interborough Rapid Transit Powerhouse (now Consolidated Edison Powerhouse), 840 Joe DiMaggio Highway
BROOKLYN
* William Ulmer Brewery Complex, 31 Belvedere St.
* Child’s Restaurant Building, 1212 Surf Ave.
* Coney Island Theatre (Later Shore Theater) Building, 1301 Surf Ave.
* St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, 306 Rodney St.
* Lady Moody-Van Sicklen House, 27 Gravesend Neck Road
QUEENS
* Bowne Street Community Church, 143-11 Roosevelt Ave.
* Lydia Ann Bell and J. Williams Ahles House, 39-26 213th St.
* Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, 89-31 161th St.
* Jamaica Savings Bank, 146-19 Jamaica Ave.
* Grace Episcopal Church Memorial Hall, 155-10 90th Ave.
* Queens General Court Building, 88-11 Sutphin Blvd.
THE BRONX
* 6 Ploughman’s Bush Building
* Haffen Building, 2804 Third Ave.
* Greyston (William E. and Sarah T. Hoadley Dodge Jr. Estate) Gate House, 4695 Independence Ave.
* 65 Schofield St. (house)
* Percy R. Pyne-Elie Nadelman House, 4715 Independence Ave.
* Noonan Plaza Apartments, 105 W. 168 St.
* Union Reformed Church of Highbridge (now Highbridge Community Church), 1270 Ogden Ave.
STATEN ISLAND
* 3833 Amboy Road (house)
* 6136 Amboy Road (house)
* 5466 Arthur Kill Road (house)
* Staten Island Armory, 321 Manor Road
* Reverend Isaac Coleman and Rebecca Gray Coleman House, 1482 Woodrow Road
* 565 and 569 Bloomingdale Road Cottages
* Rossville A.M.E. Zion Church, 584 Bloomingdale Road
* Christ Church, 72 Franklin Ave.