The Battle for Gotham (14 page)

What Davies and others also understood is that the commission—by careful avoidance of designation—rarely stood in the way of real estate development, even for worthy buildings. At the same time, most preservation advocates were lulled into complacency. They didn’t know what to expect. Those who did complain went unheard. And the snail’s pace of action was useful to a cautious commission, as my second article, the next day, indicated.

Commission spokesmen liked to point out that they had lost only one of 360 designated landmarks to the wrecker’s ball—the Jerome Mansion, at Twenty-sixth and Madison, the elegant house that was the home of Winston Churchill’s grandfather and later the Manhattan Club. Critics argued that this is an empty boast. The Jerome Mansion could have been saved, they claimed, if the commission hadn’t been anxious to have that one important loss to prove to the real estate industry how small a threat they were. “It’s their only loss,” commented Kent Barwick, “because the commission hasn’t designated buildings that are in danger of coming down.” The old Metropolitan Opera House, the Thirty-fourth Street Armory, the Beaux Arts Singer Building at 149 Broadway, and the old Ziegfeld Theater at Fifty-fourth Street were among those that were never designated and are now gone.

The Metropolitan Opera may have been outdated. The opera company may have needed more space. But the overriding reason for its demise was the new Metropolitan Opera theater included in Lincoln Center. While great nineteenth-century opera houses all over the world have been renovated and modernized, it was not even considered here. The agenda all flowed from the Robert Moses plan for Lincoln Center (more on this later). A forty-two-story combined office tower and street-level school replaced the Thirty-fourth Street Armory. U.S. Steel’s black and glass office tower on Broadway replaced the Singer Building, a masterpiece of renowned architect Ernest Flagg. A fifty-story office building with a new theater adjacent to it replaced the Ziegfeld Theater.

Few people, I noted, were aware of the two-year-old moratorium. One person who actively worked for the 1965 law and knew vaguely about the moratorium noted with a bit of embarrassment: “I think a lot of us felt everything was in good hands after the law passed so we went on to other things. But the fact is, the public doesn’t realize just how weak the commission is. So little is known about the law and the commission that people have the impression it is more powerful than it has been.”

The late city councilman Carter Burden (D-Man.), formerly on the staff of Senator Robert Kennedy and key in the establishment of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, introduced legislation based on a long study by the Municipal Arts Society that would close some of the loopholes in the landmark law—primarily the three-year limitation. That crippling clause had been included after intense, mostly behind-the-scenes real estate opposition to the 1965 legislation. It was the price of passage.

At the time of these articles, many potential landmarks were in imminent danger of loss. There was the row of Fifth Avenue mansions, about to be demolished for a luxury high-rise. A row of nineteenth-century townhouses in the landmark district of Mount Morris Park was left half-demolished by the State Narcotics Control Agency that had once planned to use them. Developers cast an eager eye on the yet unprotected Cast Iron district in SoHo, the largest remaining example of a unique American architectural form. The fate of the Renaissance Revival Police Headquarters on Centre Street was left precariously unresolved as the Police Department prepared to move into its new Pearl Street headquarters.

THE MANHATTAN FOCUS

In the early years of the landmark law, aside from Brooklyn Heights, the focus of both the Landmarks Commission and the preservation advocacy community was Manhattan. The Flatbush Town Hall, as the next article in the series showed, was an exception, but that was due to a persistent local community organization. Brooklyn didn’t have a vigorous landmark advocacy group beyond Brooklyn Heights, and, in fact, the borough still suffered from being overshadowed by Manhattan, an inferiority complex hard to believe considering its popularity today. The Flatbush Town Hall was a small window into rich Brooklyn history.

Built in 1875, it has played a part in Brooklyn life ever since. But it was then to be torn down and replaced by an eighty-car parking lot. The handsome Victorian hall was the center of civic and cultural life for the Town of Flatbush until 1894, when Flatbush was absorbed by the City of Brooklyn and the hall became a police station. It remained a police station until the Sixty-seventh Precinct moved to a new facility three blocks away. In July 1969 it was scheduled for demolition. For almost two years a group of community residents had been appealing to all levels of city government to let the community retain the building for a multiuse community center. The Landmarks Preservation Commission resisted designating because they didn’t want to interfere with another agency. By law, of course, the commission had no power to consider designation of the town hall before June 1973, five months after the article was written. Demolition seemed imminent. The city council, at the time, was considering reform legislation that would eliminate that restriction. “Curiously,” I wrote further, “the Landmarks Commission appears to be the only interested party not actively lobbying for its passage.” Councilman Burden told me, “I very definitely get the feeling that the commission is not anxious to have that power. Any landmarks issue is a nest of vipers because you’re dealing with very powerful real estate interests.” Goldstone had said unofficially that he wasn’t for it because he would have more people wanting designations.

The Flatbush Town Hall is a building of considerable historic interest. It is of the same architectural vintage as the 1876 Jefferson Market Courthouse in Greenwich Village that was rescued through intense and well-organized community pressure before passage of the 1965 preservation law. It was a rare early preservation victory. But Flatbush Avenue merchants claimed more parking space was desperately needed, and the Traffic Department agreed. As the country became more and more car-centric, downtown merchants everywhere thought more parking was the answer to their increasingly diminishing customer base. This is often still true today. In this case, an existing municipal parking lot adjacent to the hall was somehow inadequate, merchants claimed. Teachers at nearby Erasmus High School were allowed to monopolize it. Parking has long been the most common excuse to tear down old buildings of all kinds. This continues today in many cities, towns, and neighborhoods where the actual number of existing parking spaces and how well they are used are rarely known. Parking is just the easiest thing on which to blame a downtown’s woes when, in fact, more fundamental things are usually askew.

The Flatbush Town Hall is not only significant as an individual landmark. It is part of a trilogy of history contained on one square Flatbush block. At the corner of Flatbush and Church Avenues is the 175-year-old Flatbush Reformed Church, which was granted its charter by Peter Stuyvesant, New York’s last Dutch governor, and has occupied its present site since 1654. Next to that, in the courtyard of Erasmus High School, is the 185-year-old Erasmus Hall Academy, a wooden schoolhouse built as a private academy for the Dutch church that remains one of the oldest in the country. All three structures—the church, the school, the Hall—had been named national historic sites by the U.S. Interior Department, making them eligible for matching state and federal restoration and preservation funds. But during the first set of public hearings following passage of the 1965 landmark law, the commission heard and later designated only two buildings in the this historic Flatbush triangle—the clapboard schoolhouse and the church. Eventually, the Town Hall was designated and stands today.

The Landmarks Commission was not just Manhattan-centric, but East Side Manhattan-centric. The West Side still suffered from the image of blight, a slum of little value, an image perpetuated energetically by Moses, however erroneous the slum tag might be. He had declared several West Side areas ripe for urban renewal. Despite this, a vigorous local community took aim at one of the city’s unique landmarks and pushed the Landmarks Commission where it was reluctant to go. The fourth article in this series told the story of saving the Ansonia at Seventy-second Street and Broadway, a landmark of incomparable value today. That the effort was so difficult reflects how little value was ascribed to most of the city’s extraordinary historic architecture.

2.2 An old postcard of the Hotel Ansonia. Once threatened with demolition, it’s now a magnificently restored upscale apartment co-op.

A WEST SIDE LANDMARK

The curving, turreted Beaux Arts Ansonia—built as a hotel—is one of the city’s most obvious landmarks, as well as the heart of its West Side community. Even the local post office is named in its honor—Ansonia Station. The hotel was built in 1904 by William Earl Dodge Stokes, a multimillionaire developer and amateur designer of the Phelps-Dodge family, who was one of the leading developers of Riverside Drive and the brownstone belt of the Upper West Side. It was the biggest and best of its kind, boasting a variety of construction and engineering firsts—including two huge swimming pools, one of them at the time the largest pool in the world. It quickly became a cultural treasure because of its unparalleled facilities for the teaching and practicing of the performing arts.

The seventeen-story chateau with mansard roofs and delicate ironwork is considered one of the most successful marriages of design and function. There are three-feet-thick concrete walls and specially insulated ceilings that allow entire orchestras to practice without letting neighbors hear a sound. A unique method of air circulation made it the first “air-conditioned” structure in New York. Its heyday was the first three decades of the century when just about every great name in music lived or practiced in its elegantly detailed suites—Caruso, Chaliapin, Elman, Pinza, Pons, Stravinsky, Toscanini. Other tenants included Babe Ruth, Theodore Dreiser, and Florenz Ziegfeld. The importance of the Ansonia to performing artists is so international in scope that Italian performers reported that news of the battle to save it was carried on Rome television. In recent years, the building had become more important as an arts center because of its proximity to Lincoln Center—the apparent reason that John D. Rockefeller III, retired chairman of Lincoln Center, had joined the campaign for landmark designation.

The Ansonia’s threatened state was a perfect journalistic subject to demonstrate the impotence of the Landmarks Commission, as the fourth article demonstrated. It took seven years, two commission hearings, more than twenty-five thousand petition signatures, a foundation-financed publicity effort, a sing-in protest on the steps of City Hall, support from Senators Javits and Buckley, John D. Rockefeller III, and other luminaries, and—most crucially—a threatened community lawsuit. But finally the Landmarks Preservation Commission declared the Ansonia a landmark . . . just when the owner was talking about tearing it down.

The citizen effort lasted more than a year with no response. Finally, a community group went to see Goldstone. They told him that foundations were interested in buying but that the owner refused to sell. And, they told him, they were prepared to testify at capital budget hearings that the commission had vacillated and therefore didn’t deserve full funding. They said too that they were prepared to go to court to prove it was the commission’s responsibility under the law to designate the Ansonia. A few weeks later the matter was unanimously approved by the commission.

The Landmarks Commission didn’t actually ignore the West Side. But it turned down the designation of some worthy buildings that in later years would be designated:

• The Central Savings Bank across Broadway from the Ansonia—considered one of the city’s finest examples of Italian Renaissance architecture—was turned down for landmark status after a hearing in June 1966. The
AIA Guide to New York
describes it as a “a Palladian Palace. Wrought-iron lanterns and window grilles by Samuel Yellin are the finest features of this richly embellished limestone bank.” The interior was designated after the law changed to permit interior designations.

• The East River Savings Bank at Ninety-sixth and Amsterdam, which the
AIA Guide
describes as “a classical temple inscribed with exhortations to the thrifty,” was also turned down by the commission in 1966 but redesignated years later.

• Pomander Walk at Ninety-fifth and West End Avenue, also rejected in 1966, was described by the
AIA
this way: “Pomander Walk is a tiny street in the London suburb of Chiswick. It came to New York in 1911 as the name of a stage play. This double row of small town houses is modeled after the stage sets used for the New York production.”
⁵

Big swaths of the Upper West Side had been cleared under urban renewal: Lincoln Center, Lincoln Towers, the Coliseum at Columbus Circle, Park West Village, and the West Side Urban Renewal Area (Eighty-seventh to Ninety-seventh, Central Park West to Amsterdam). The public unrest caused by the sweeping scale of this demolition was part and parcel of the headaches that Mayor Wagner had to deal with.