Preservation and Development, Engaged in a Delicate Dance
Preservation and Development, Engaged in a Delicate Dance
The battle lines were familiar. Churning out petitions and clamoring at hearings, hundreds of city residents had mobilized to protest a plan by St. Vincent’s Hospital to replace nine buildings in the Greenwich Village Historic District with a 20-story medical center and condominiums.
On the other side were the Rudin Management Company, one of the city’s largest developers, and St. Vincent’s, which argued that a new building and income from the condo deal were vital to saving the hospital and meeting Manhattan’s health needs.
In the middle, as usual, was the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which was struggling this year to make a judgment call under the klieg lights as city politicians took positions for and against.
Over a decade of whirlwind development, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has repeatedly played dance partner to a potent mix of preservationists, developers and city politicians. It must strike a balance between protecting architecture and accepting economic realities, between a responsibility to history and a knowledge that the city must evolve.
“It’s the way government is,” said Robert B. Tierney, an appointee of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who has been the chairman of the landmarks commission since 2003. “It’s making choices and, without unlimited resources, having to make those choices and being able to do some things and not do other things.”
In the case of St. Vincent’s, the commission initially rejected the hospital’s plan, objecting to the height and bulk of the new buildings and invoking the aesthetic value of the old ones. Then St. Vincent’s reduced the scale of its project and resubmitted an application for permission to demolish the O’Toole building, the likely site for the new 20-story medical tower, citing physical hardship. A distinctive, sawtooth-sided low white 1964 structure on Seventh Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets, the O’Toole is valued by many Village residents and devotees of midcentury Modernism.
Riven on the issue, the commission assented to its demolition last month in a 6-to-4 vote.
Further approval is still needed from city and state agencies.
“This is the real world, where there are pressures,” said Christopher Moore, who voted with the majority and has served as a commissioner since 1995. “And sometimes you have to give squares to get squares.”
Yet some preservationists and politicians assert that, under a mayoral administration that has emphasized new construction — from behemoth stadiums to architecturally bold condo towers — big developers have too often been allowed to lead on the dance floor. Some accuse the landmarks commission, charged with guarding the city’s architectural heritage, of backing off too readily when important developers’ interests are at stake.
“The real estate industry controls the agenda in the city,” said Tony Avella, a city councilman from Queens. “If they don’t want something to happen, it doesn’t happen. They pull the strings from behind the scenes, whether in rezoning reform or landmarking. It’s just incredible how much influence they have.”
“The direction comes from the mayor, and the mayor’s pro-development,” Mr. Avella added.
Patricia E. Harris, the first deputy mayor, who oversees the commission, counters that the administration has been vigilant in protecting the city’s landmarks. “We don’t think about development without thinking about preservation,” she said in an e-mail message. (She agreed to reply only to questions submitted in writing.) “During a time of unprecedented growth, preservation has always been front and center.”
Even as preservationists argue that development has trumped preservation under Mayor Bloomberg, some architectural historians suggest that the traditional divide between the two should be rethought.
Preserving sections of old New York can actually spur economic renewal, they say, citing areas like TriBeCa, where the designation of a new historic district in 1992 accelerated the area’s transformation into one of the city’s most sought-after neighborhoods.
“There hasn’t been enough attention to how new development can work with old buildings,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, the director of the historic preservation program at Columbia University. “That’s the biggest flaw in New York and preservation in the last decade — it’s just ignored. All things considered, a relatively tiny proportion of New York land is landmarked. It’s hardly an obstacle to economic growth in the city.”
Developers tend to disagree. “Landmarking is one of the best tools that anti-development people have in this city — it’s a very long, political process,” said Jed Walentas, vice president of Two Trees Management Company, which as the main property owner in Dumbo has led that neighborhood’s transformation from an industrial district into an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood. Last December the area was named a historic district by the landmarks commission.
Some developers accuse preservationists of routinely fighting development even when the buildings or districts are of questionable importance.
“I am pro-landmark, but I do think it is abused considerably,” said Martin J. McLaughlin, a leading city lobbyist, who has represented developers before the commission. “It’s too easy to say, ‘The big bad developers.’ There are big bad developers, but you’re not supposed to use landmarks to stop development.”
Both developers and preservationists try to enlist their local City Council members in fighting for or against potential landmarks. The council is often a pivotal player, since it must approve any designation and can overturn a landmarks commission decision.
In October 2005, for example, the Council vetoed the designation of the Jamaica Savings Bank building in Elmhurst, Queens, built in 1968 with striking geometry, and Cass Gilbert’s 1913 Austin, Nichols waterfront warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an Egyptian Revival structure that is being remade into luxury apartments.
Often developers and building owners make campaign contributions to City Council members during a designation process. Developers have also spent considerable sums on lobbying the landmarks commission, along with other city agencies.
In 2004 Greenwich Village preservationists enlisted the support of Christine C. Quinn, who represented the area on the City Council and is now Council speaker, in their fight to extend the existing historic district. The original 1969 designation had omitted the far west Village, home to many 19th-century converted loft buildings, row houses and other low-rise structures evoking the area’s industrial and maritime past. Since the 1980s, 16 residential high rises had been built in the neighborhood, and more were in the works.
A formal request was filed in October 2004 with the landmarks commission seeking an extension that stretched to the Hudson River.
But as the commission defined the extension’s boundaries, some village residents were distressed by the omission of two historic buildings: the Superior Ink building, built in 1919 as a Nabisco cracker bakery with twin tall smokestacks, and Whitehall Storage, a four-story 1938 building with ribbons of casement windows — among the last operating factory buildings along the river.
Meanwhile, developers made their own efforts in hearings, private meetings and letters to persuade the commission to leave their properties out or not to extend the district at all. The Witkoff Group was planning to build a 15-story residential tower atop Whitehall Storage; Related Companies wanted to raze Superior Ink and build a condo tower and town houses.
In May 2006 the commission approved the extension of the historic district, but excluded Superior Ink and Whitehall Storage. For preservationists the victory was bittersweet. “The Superior Ink building was really iconic to us, part of a broader complex of factories,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. “We thought it was a really important piece of the neighborhood to hold onto.”
Today a 17-story luxury condo tower called Superior Ink and a row of Neo-Classical town houses are rising on the site at West and Bethune Streets.
Mr. Tierney, the landmarks commission chairman, said that Superior Ink was left out not because of development pressures, but because it “wasn’t contiguous with the historic district.”
“It was a question based on the merits, and how it connects to the rest of the district and what the other competing priorities are,” Mr. Tierney said.
Related Companies and its chairman and chief executive, Stephen M. Ross, declined to be interviewed for this article. The Witkoff Group did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Donald G. Presa, a commission researcher for 22 years, said he and his colleagues do not consider development interests when drawing up boundaries. “That’s not an issue that the staff deals with,” he said. “We don’t consider that at all.”
He added that defining boundaries was a fraught task that staff members approach carefully. “Very few districts have natural boundaries,” Mr. Presa said. “We agonize so much about where to end a district. You have to draw the boundary line somewhere, or all of New York becomes an historic district.”
The commission has occasionally directly stood up to developers; it recently sent the real estate magnate Aby Rosen back to the drawing board with the architect Norman Foster on a proposal to build a 30-story tower over the Parke-Bernet Gallery building, at 980 Madison Avenue, at 76th Street, on the Upper East Side. Residents protested the project, and the commissioners deemed its scale out of character with the rest of the neighborhood. The agency has yet to vote on Mr. Foster’s revised design.
Yet the commission is faulted for refusing to schedule public hearings on some of the most fiercely contested projects, like Ward’s Bakery, an imposing terra-cotta-tiled structure that lay within the 22-acre footprint of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. In 2006 the commission’s staff determined that the building was not eligible for a hearing on landmark designation. Yet it was ruled eligible for a listing in 2003 on the National Register of Historic Places. Forest City Ratner tore down the bakery this year.
“This appears to be a political decision by the landmarks commission,” Daniel Goldstein, a spokesman for the group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, was quoted as saying at the time. “It is deeply frustrating that they have let politics enter their deliberation on a building that clearly deserves landmark status.”
A commission spokeswoman said of the bakery, “There are many other industrial structures like it around the city, and it had several branches throughout the city.”
Most notably, the landmarks commission was accused of succumbing to political and development pressures when it refused to schedule a public hearing on 2 Columbus Circle, the 1964 building by Edward Durell Stone known for its Venetian-style touches, portholes and “lollipop” columns. After a sweeping redesign by the architect Brad Cloepfil, the building reopened in September as the new home of the Museum of Arts and Design.
A Freedom of Information request in 2004 by Landmark West!, a preservation group, brought to light e-mail exchanges between Mr. Tierney and Laurie Beckelman, a former landmarks commission chairwoman who led the museum’s effort to buy 2 Columbus Circle from the city.
The day after Community Board 5 voted in favor of the city’s sale of the building, Ms. Beckelman wrote: “We got the vote 18-8, but I see trouble ahead. Thanks for all of your support.”
Mr. Tierney replied: “Let me know how I can help on the trouble ahead. Bob.”
Landmark West! filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Tierney of collusion and seeking his removal from any decision on 2 Columbus Circle. The case was dismissed in September 2005.
Complicating the dance, the big players sometimes change sides.
Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture and former head of the historic preservation program at Columbia University, for example, was among the most prominent defenders of 2 Columbus Circle. He not only faulted the city and the art museum for their decision, but also criticized Mr. Cloepfil for accepting the commission.
“I find it hard to believe that any architect can’t be a preservationist,” he said in a recent interview. “Picasso didn’t say, ‘I don’t like Goya,’ in fact the opposite: he said, ‘I’m going to learn from Goya and Velásquez and other artists.’ ”
Yet Mr. Stern was also the architect behind the soaring condo developments made possible by the razing of Superior Ink in the West Village and the Dakota Stables on Amsterdam Avenue at 77th Street.
Asked whether he saw a contradiction in his stance, Mr. Stern said: “I’ve made judgments. Some buildings are not worth saving.”
As for the landmarks commission’s judgments about which buildings are worth saving, preservationists suggest that the current economic slump may prompt frank discussion in the city of what was sacrificed in a decade-long boom without a hearing by the agency.
“They really need to look at a way to be more forthcoming, more explanatory, so you could at least understand their reasoning,” Peg Breen, the president of the advocacy group New York Landmarks Conservancy, said of the preservation commission.
Without that, she said, “It opens them to never-ending argument.”