The Battle for Gotham (15 page)

The first seven years of the new landmark law seemed to be serving the mayor well, giving the public the erroneous impression that landmark protection was in place. “So after 10 years,” Evelyn Haynes observed in my final article, “out of 5000 miles of streets in this city we have 360 landmarks. That’s not a grain of sand in the desert. What is that, 30 a year? That whole list is as phony at a $3 bill because it’s overloaded with public buildings over which the commission has no power and lots of churches which are nonsavable anyway if they are unused and falling apart. All you really have is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on some nice buildings.”

Eight years after the law was enacted, preservation battles were no longer primarily in fashionable neighborhoods, mostly in Manhattan. The disputes crossed all borough and income levels. “Landmark designation has become one of the most potent forces stabilizing community life,” Goldstone noted. “The demand for it far outstrips our potential.”

Unquestionably, the preservation movement had already outgrown the expectation of the 1965 landmarks legislation. As long as the economics of land use dictates that high-density new structures, whether commercial or residential, were more valuable than character, quality, and open space, there was little doubt that the movement would continue to grow.

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.
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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.

• Next door to the Sun Building, on Chambers, the 1912 Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, an ornate mixture of Beaux Arts and Art Nouveau built for the bank to serve the city’s Irish Catholic immigrant population. It was once America’s wealthiest savings bank, according to the
AIA Guide
. The city eventually restored and occupied this too.

• 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.
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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.