NEWS: In her own words, Commissioner Gratz on designating PS 64
MEMO from Christabel Gough (who monitors the Landmarks Commission for the Society for the Architecture of the City):
Yesterday (June 20, 2006) the Landmarks Commission designated PS 64 CHARAS/El Bohio. Commissioner Roberta Brandes Gratz explained her vote in these words:
The designation of PS 64 will be one of the most significant decisions of the Landmarks Preservation Commission in recent years. For the first time, the commission will be recognizing a building not only of enormous architectural merit but one of unique cultural significance that for the first time acknowledges and celebrates the contribution to the robust regeneration of our city made by community-based efforts.
First as a newspaper reporter and then as a book author, I personally observed and wrote about the birth of the community revitalization movement in this city and the country that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While landlords neglected, abandoned or burned-for-profit their properties in poor neighborhoods, groups of local residents took over deteriorating buildings, cleaned them out, made them habitable and repopulated neighborhoods that the experts said should be torn down and land-banked. City officials turned their back on these neighborhoods as hopeless.
Local residents knew better.
Some of the earliest and most significant efforts of this grass roots, self-help movement took place on the Lower East Side and PS 64 was central to this activity. After the city closed this architecturally-eyecatching French Renaissance Revival brick building, it served as a unique incubator for the community-based programs that saved the neighborhoods and, in turn, the larger city. Adopt-A-Building, CHARAS/El Bohio and a multitude of smaller efforts anchored the local population, engaged their energy in “sweat equity,” gave them hope and in so doing created the revitalization momentum that professional planners and politicians had no clue how to do. Eventually, the city responded positively with a multitude of reinvestment policies that aided and built upon local successes.
PS 64 was the physical and symbolic center of the local activity that reclaimed and restored both ordinary tenements and historic buildings. It was sheer folly of the last Administration to auction off this building, cutting short its productive life as a focal point of community innovation, energy and growth.
These grass roots efforts to rehabilitate, re-inhabit and revitalize city neighborhoods from the Lower East Side to the South Bronx spread across the country. The empowerment of local residents of blighted neighborhoods to improve their own buildings and communities evolved into the urban homesteading movement credited with saving more communities than the experts dreamed possible. Thus, PS 64 is not only a New York City landmark in the broadest and most unique sense of the term, it is a national landmark in the post-World War II struggle to save American cities.
The draft designation report does a thorough and fascinating job detailing the many levels of historic and architectural significance of PS 64: the inclusion of community-engaging features, such as the auditorium; the importance of the H-Plan; the classically-inspired ornament such as keystones, rustication, bracketed sills and pediments over the dormers that emphasize its dominant focus in the neighborhood; and the crucial role this school played in helping generations of immigrants make the transition into American society. But it should be noted that no amount of stripping away of the architectural detailing, such as the white terra cotta trim, can diminish its importance. From the red brick walls to the mortar in its joints, the importance is secure.
The historic preservation movement has come a long way from its beginnings when only the most precious buildings were thought worthy of designation. Since the city’s very limited landmarks law was passed in 1965, first residential and then industrial neighborhoods were recognized as worthy of preservation. Not till the 1970s did interiors and landscapes join the designatable list. And through most of the 1980s, it was difficult to save many extraordinary Art Deco buildings. The Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center were not designated until the 1980s. More recently, the cultural significance of historic buildings has gained recognition as being of equal value to their architectural merit. And currently, attention is increasingly focused on the landmark value of Post-War modern buildings.
With the designation of PS 64, recognition of the importance of the grass roots community and historic preservation movements comes front and center. It is long overdue.
Designating PS 64 won’t by any stretch of the imagination stop development on the Lower East Side; it will, however, stop inappropriate development and make the appropriate and beneficial possible. And, as I said following the public hearing, the outpouring of that community was the strongest and most amazing expression of local concern for the preservation of a landmark in an ethnically and economically-mixed community that I have witnessed.
No professional, outside expert can define better than the local resident what is significant in a local community.
Ironically, property owners and developers across the city are today reaping great profits from the early preservation efforts of the very residents and local businesses now threatened with displacement. Officially, the city has been slow to recognize and honor this history. Designation of PS 64 would be a step in this long-overdue direction. This is a shining moment for the Landmarks Commission and I’m pleased to be part of it and to vote aye.