The Battle for Gotham (13 page)

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 several 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.

And then there was the commission itself.
⁴
Some critics went so far as to say that it was the worst enemy of the work it professed to do. Harmon H. Goldstone, an architect and former member of the City Planning Commission, was appointed the commission’s first paid chairman in 1968. The chair is the only paid commissioner.

In December 1970, the commission declared a moratorium on landmark designations. Meeting in executive sessions, it decided without formal vote that no more designations would be made except when a building was in immediate jeopardy. Four “historic districts” and 54 individual sites were designated before the moratorium. Five proposals were rejected. The official explanation for the moratorium was the lack of “staff, space and money” that commission chairman Goldstone said was needed to administer 360 individual landmarks and 18 landmark districts already designated.

The unofficial explanation—arrived at after an extensive investigation—seemed to be an extreme reluctance on the part of the commission to designate in the face of even mild opposition, a reluctance to designate properties that might stand in the way of anticipated real estate development, and a reluctance to designate sites where property owners simply threatened a lawsuit. This was 1973, eight years after the law was passed. Many notable structures the public probably already thought were protected by landmark status had not been designated.

PROTECTION CAME SLOWLY

Everyone concerned acknowledged that selecting landmarks to designate was not easy. Many observers noted that this dilemma was just one element in the growing agony of many American urban centers where the quality of the built environment often collided head-on with the demands of real estate development. The heart and soul of historic cities were being erased by more than just real estate development; Moses-style highways and urban renewal projects were tearing the economic, social, and physical heart out of cities, taking down both plain and special old buildings and disrupting thousands of lives and businesses. Even the most ardent preservationist agreed that treasures of the past must sometimes be sacrificed for the needs of the present. At this point in time, the balance was nowhere near being struck, and the unspoken mission of the Landmarks Commission was supposed to be just that.

The Woolworth Building, for example, was the only skyscraper ever even considered for designation in the first seven years of the law. A striking Gothic tower built in 1913, Woolworth was called the Cathedral of Commerce and was for a while the tallest building in the world. Today it is filled with high-priced offices and condos. But, by 1973, Woolworth and such other New York icons as the 1929-1931 Empire State Building and 1930 Chrysler Building and 1932-1940 Rockefeller Center—all owned by very important real estate people—had not yet been considered for landmark designation.

The 1965 law was the first glimmer of hope on the preservation scene, and, considering the intense opposition of banking and real estate interest, it was an achievement that surprised the most cynical preservationists. But it was real estate people who spoke most highly of the results of the law. J. Clarence Davies, real estate commissioner under Mayor Wagner and a member of the commission for its first six years, told me at the time, “Opposition diminished because the commission turned out not to be as much a threat as expected. When people saw what was being preserved and understood the law, they were no longer worried.”