Dorothy Miner, Preservation Law Expert
Dorothy was a friend and mentor to HDC. We awarded her with the Landmarks Lion Award in 2001.
From the New York Times
October 23, 2008
Dorothy Miner, 72, Legal Innovator, Dies
Dorothy Marie Miner, who developed legal protection for historic landmarks nationwide in her longtime role as counsel to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 72 and lived in Morningside Heights.
The cause was complications of lung disease, said her brother Dr. Robert Dwight Miner.
She played an important role in the critical 1978 case of Penn Central Transportation Company v. New York City, which upheld the landmark status of Grand Central Terminal and set national precedents.
Intimately familiar with preservation law, Ms. Miner was meticulous when making her case – another way to put it was that she was a fierce, immovable stickler – and could infuriate allies as well as adversaries with her insistence on principle and procedure.
“We spent eight hours arguing over every sentence,” Leonard Koerner, the chief assistant corporation counsel of New York City, said in recalling what it was like to work with Ms. Miner at the print shop on the legal briefs in the Penn Central case.
Eventually, the United States Supreme Court upheld the landmark designation of the terminal against a challenge by Penn Central, which owned the building and asserted that landmark status effectively amounted to an unconstitutional taking of property by the government.
Because of the New York commission’s victory, its “innovations became standard practice for landmarks commissions all around the country,” said Nicholas A. Robinson, a professor at the Pace University School of Law, with whom Ms. Miner taught.
Ms. Miner was born on Aug. 14, 1936, in Manhattan. Her father, Dwight C. Miner, was a professor of history at Columbia University. She received a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1958, a law degree from Columbia in 1961 and a degree in urban planning from Columbia in 1972.
She married James Edward O’Driscoll in 1970. He died in 1993. She is survived by Dr. Miner, of Montvale, N.J., and another brother, Richard Thomas Miner, of Sparta, N.J.
Ms. Miner was named counsel to the landmarks commission in 1975 and helped devise the legal framework under which it designated the 17th-century street plan of Lower Manhattan as a landmark in 1983. That stopped developers from further eradicating the neighborhood’s characteristically irregular blocks.
When the commission voted in 1983 to permit the demolition of the former Mount Neboh Synagogue at 130 West 79th Street because it created a financial hardship for its owner, Ms. Miner wanted it understood that the synagogue had not been stripped of its landmark status.
“There was no finding today or at any other time that this wasn’t a significant building,” she said. “It will be, until the end, a designated landmark.”
She helped defend the designation of St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue against a challenge by the parish, which argued that landmark status unconstitutionally interfered with its freedom of religion and its property rights. The city won in the federal Court of Appeals in 1990.
After 19 years with the commission, Ms. Miner was asked for her resignation in 1994 by Jennifer J. Raab, who was then chairwoman. Ms. Raab said the commission’s regulatory and enforcement work “would benefit from a fresh eye.”
But preservationists took a darker view. Professor Robinson said he invited Ms. Miner to join him at Pace after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani “decided he would accede to the real estate industry and press to remove her as counsel.” Ms. Miner also became an adjunct associate professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia.
Although she had been in the hospital since early summer, Ms. Miner continued to collaborate on a preservation law class with Professor Robinson until a month ago, even planning an annual expedition that begins at Grand Central Terminal.
“I’ll be doing the field trip this Saturday,” he said, “with her tape-recorded voice.”
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