Sometimes it seems as if New York City is all about knocking down the old and replacing it with the new. Not so—at least, not while the Landmarks Preservation Commission is on the job.
WAKE-UP CALL
On October 28, 1963, to the horror of many New Yorkers, the demolition of Pennsylvania Station began.
Built in 1910, the iconic railroad station was the largest indoor space in the city—more than seven acres, taking up two whole blocks—and a landmark that anchored the west side of Manhattan. Penn Station had its heyday during World War II, but by the 1950s, fewer people were traveling by train because of the influx of cars and planes.
The Pennsylvania Railroad decided that Penn Station was underused, and that the cost of operating it was too high. In 1955 a real-estate firm bought the station, with an agreement to build a new underground railroad station on the site. But the plans weren’t made public until 1961, when shocked New Yorkers learned that the old Penn Station would be demolished and replaced with the 29-story Madison Square Garden complex and a new station. Suddenly the public realized that without official protection of certain buildings and areas, New York could easily lose even more of its irreplaceable architectural, cultural, and historical heritage. It was too late to save Penn Station, but in 1965 Mayor Robert Wagner signed the Landmarks Law and appointed the first Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to protect important districts, buildings, and other sites in all five boroughs.
ROUGH ROAD
The LPC’s mission hasn’t always gone smoothly: Choosing a site is a long, complicated process that’s often fraught with controversy. Developers, for example, may want to knock down historically significant buildings in order to build new ones. Or residents of a neighborhood may want the city to get rid of something they perceive as an eyesore but the LPC deems valuable. Nonetheless, the serious work of the commission (the largest local preservation agency in the United States) has resulted in the rescue and recovery of hundreds of unique locations.
New York was the first state to require automobile occupants to wear seat belts.
HOW TO BE A LANDMARK
Currently, the LPC is responsible for 24,000 properties that have been deemed landmark. Here’s how a site becomes eligible: It must be at least 30 years old, and can be an office building, church, house, tavern, store, bridge, pier, cemetery, fence, clock, or even a tree. It also has to stand in one of the five boroughs and go through an eight-step designation procedure, which includes an evaluation request, a public hearing, a commission vote, and a lot of waiting. But finally, if the city council approves, the site can become a landmark.
Official landmarks fall into four categories:
• Individual (exterior): properties or objects, such as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage in the Bronx or the old-fashioned lampposts on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village.
• Interior: inside spaces, accessible to the public, like the ground floor of the Empire State Building or the Woolworth Building.
• Scenic: a landscape feature or group of features on city-owned property, such as Prospect Park in Brooklyn or the colonial-era Remsen Cemetery in Queens.
• Historic district: a whole neighborhood or area that represents an architectural style or historical period, and has what the LPC calls a “sense of place,” such as the Soho-Cast Iron Historic District (HD), the African Burial Ground HD, or the Brooklyn Heights HD.
CONGRATULATIONS—YOU’VE MADE IT!
Some interesting and unusual historic sites around the city:
• Bowne House in Queens, designated in 1966. The earliest parts of this house were built in 1661—the kitchen wing is the oldest surviving structure in Queens, and one of the oldest in New York City. In 1662 John Bowne allowed Quaker meetings in his home, defying Governor Stuyvesant’s ban on Quaker worship. Bowne was arrested, tried, and acquitted, a crucial step in establishing the right of religious freedom in America.
The Big Apple nickname was born when sportswriter John Fitzgerald overheard stable hands in New Orleans refer to an NYC racetrack as “The Big Apple.”
• William and Catherine Cass House in Staten Island, designated in 1990. It’s New York City’s only residence designed by famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
• Weeping Beech Tree in Queens, designated in 1966. American landscape architect Samuel Parsons planted the Weeping Beech in 1847, and the tree—which sadly died in 1998—was one of only two tree designations (the other is the Magnolia Grandiflora in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn).
• Sidewalk Clock, Fifth Avenue at West 44th Street in Manhattan, designated 1981. The American Trust Company installed the clock in 1907, and it’s a piece of what the LPC calls “street furniture.” Nineteen feet tall, it cost (at the time) about $600.
• Voorlezer’s House, in Richmond Town, Staten Island, built around 1695 and designated 1968. It’s the oldest surviving elementary school in America—in Dutch, a voorlezer was a teacher or assistant minister.
Artist Melinda Hackett is one of New York’s lucky few: She owns a townhouse in Greenwich Village that includes a small backyard, a little bit of nature in the otherwise crowded city, and in 2005 she built a round treehouse, complete with a circular staircase, in the yard for her three young daughters. The small playhouse seemed harmless enough, but a neighbor complained to the city that the structure was “nailed to a tree,” looked “unsafe,” and lacked a proper building permit. The city sent the police and firefighters, and when Hackett returned home one afternoon a few weeks after the structure went up, they were all waiting at her front door.
The next thing Hackett knew, she was defending her treehouse to judges at the Department of Buildings. It took five years, but finally, in 2010, the city approved the structure—the Landmarks Preservation Commission granted it a landmark permit because it (and the house whose yard it’s in) are in a landmark district. And according to Hackett, the kids still “use it as a clubhouse. They plot. They scheme. They gossip.”