New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (1962-1999): Paradigm for Changing Attitudes Towards Historic Preservation
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New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (1962-1999): Paradigm for Changing Attitudes Towards Historic Preservation By Marjorie Pearson, Ph.D. Samuel H. K ress Mid-Career G rant Study Funded by The James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation 2010 Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Landmark Beginnings: The Advisory Commission (1962-1965) 5 Chapter 2 The Commission Established (1965-1973) 28 Chapter 3 Expanding a Mission and a Mandate (1974-1983) 55 Chapter 4 The Commission Under Siege (1983-1990) 91 Chapter 5 The Commission Comes of Age: Growth and Maturity (1990-1990) 110 Epilogue 129 Acknowledgments 135 IN T R O DU C T I O N Historic preservation as an officially mandated government program has been existence for almost fifty years in New York City, but the history of the movement, both before and after the ratification and implementation of the Landmarks law, has been largely undocumented until relatively recently. Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States and Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks are part of an effort to rectify that situation.1 This work, told partly from my personal perspective, covers part of the story told by Anthony C. Wood and carries it forward to the end of the twentieth century. It describes and analyzes the history of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission while setting it within a larger national context. New York had been preceded by several other American cities, including Charleston, South Carolina, New Orleans, and Boston, in the establishment of a local preservation law and an accompanying oversight body, but still it had few models to emulate. The New York City landmarks law anticipated the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 by one year. As a consequence, New York has often gone its own way when it came to preservation matters. It established its own criteria for designation and standards on regulation. Much of this is due to the architectural biases and predilections of those who originated the law. From the 1950s on when the Committee on Historic Architecture of the Municipal Art Society worked with the Society of Architectural Historians and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects to compile an Index of Architecturally Notable Structures in Greater New York, there has been an emphasis on architectural style. Not only did worthy examples need to be discovered and classified, but the public needed to be educated about their importance. New York City Landmarks, the 1963 publication that brought the Index to a wider public, and History Preserved, a 1974 account of the city’s designated landmarks, contained extensive discussions of architectural style and how the city’s landmarks fit into stylistic categories.2 The Commission has also maintained a strong architectural bias among its members. Its founders and early leaders (Geoffrey Platt, Harmon Goldstone, James Grote Van Derpool, Alan Burnham) were trained architects who put their principles into practice when it came to regulating landmarks. The founding of the Commission preceded the Introduction / 1 Copyright ©2010 Marjorie Pearson establishment of the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Historic Preservation by some ten years, so the Commission has never felt the need to be bound by them. It has only regulated interiors, unless specifically designated, to ensure that exteriors are not adversely affected. Over the years the Commission has taken varied approaches to the issues of historicity versus modernity. Particularly in its early years, it encouraged modern architecture that was compatible with the character of its historic districts, even when local activists would have preferred a more archaeological or historically derivative approach. But then the Commission could also take such actions as the approval of a plan in 1990 to expand the Felix and Frieda S. Warburg House to accommodate the Jewish Museum by doubling the plan and facade of the original building. Despite its somewhat iconoclastic ways, the Commission’s actions have resulted in several major lawsuits that have had national implications for historic preservation law and the powers of local governments in upholding such laws. Throughout its history, the Commission has enjoyed public support, which has only increased over the years. The agency has always been small, in comparison to the overall size of city government, and has always been accessible. It has fiercely protected its autonomy over the years, despite periodic attempts to subsume it to the City Planning Commission or some other larger city agency. Moreover, the revisions to the city government in the 1960s that set up community planning boards and the establishment of other quasi-government entities have been conducive to public support and access. Another factor has been the Commission’s desire to be flexible in the implementation of the landmarks law and to encourage new and adaptive uses. The success of the law over the years has been manifest in the large number of buildings and sites that have not only survived, but thrived. Further, the demand for the designation of new landmarks and historic districts has not slowed. Page and Mason comment that Charles B. Hosmer’s account of the historic preservation movement in United States focuses on the heroic individuals and government institutions, which they feel is much too limiting, skipping over the social and cultural shifts that shaped historic preservation.3 This account does not ignore the heroic individuals as it tells the Commission’s story. But it tries to explain some of the social and cultural factors that shaped the Commission. Introduction / 2 Copyright ©2010 Marjorie Pearson The organization is largely chronological, using the various Commission chairmen as focal points. I have taken this approach because at any given time, the Commission chairman has been the visible face, the public voice, the definer and articulator of policy, and the agenda-setter particularly on matters of designation. While the chairman is only one vote among the eleven commissioners, he or she is the salaried agency head and the major mayoral appointee. Tensions between designation and regulation and policies to implement both have been an ongoing part of the Commission saga. Introduction / 3 Copyright ©2010 Marjorie Pearson Notes to the Introduction 1. Max Page and Randall Mason, ed., Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (New York and London: Routledge, 2004). Mason has further expanded his analysis of the beginnings of the historic preservation movement in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century in The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Anthony C. Wood, Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks (New York and London: Routledge, 2007). 2. Alan Burnham, ed. New York City Landmarks: A Study and Index of Architecturally Notable Structures in Greater New York (Wesleyan University Press, 1963); Harmon H. Goldstone and Martha Dalyrumple, History Preserved: A Guide to New York City Landmarks and Historic Districts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974). 3. Page and Mason, 7-8. Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Presence of the Past: the History of the Historic Preservation Movement in the United States before Williamsburg (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965); Charles B. Hosmer Jr., Preservation Comes of Age: From Williamsburg to the National Trust 1926-1949 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1981). Introduction / 4 Copyright ©2010 Marjorie Pearson L A ND M A R K B E G INNIN GS: T H E A D V ISO R Y C O M M ISSI O N (1962-1965) Post World War II losses and redevelopment New York City, like most American cities, experienced a massive wave of new development in the years after the end of World War II in 1945. The constrained economic circumstances brought on by the Depression in the 1930s and prohibitions on civilian building during the war meant that very little private construction had occurred for at least fifteen years. The exceptions were the federally funded Works Progress Administration projects, sometimes massive, for parks, roads, bridges, and public housing, spearheaded by Robert Moses in his position as head of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Moses was later viewed as the nemesis of historic preservation for his role in urban renewal projects and in creating highways through the city that resulted in the destruction of older neighborhoods, especially in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. His proposed slum clearance projects and highways across lower Manhattan and through Brooklyn Heights helped arouse sentiment for creating historic districts in Greenwich Village, SoHo, and Brooklyn Heights. However, his work on parks and parkways led to a group of architecturally impressive landscapes and structures that would become future landmarks. More recent research on Moses has led to a more nuanced picture of the man and his work in New York.1 Charleston adopted the country’s first historic preservation ordinance in 1931 and established a Board of Architectural Review with the purpose of “the preservation and protection of the old historic or architecturally worthy structures and quaint neighborhoods which impart a distinct aspect to the city and which serve as visible reminders of the historical and cultural heritage of the city, the state, and the nation.” New Orleans had established