The Landmarks Preservation Commission

[londonlawyer]

Beautiful structure.

[Merry]

Possible East Village Historic District Gets A Few Buildings Bigger

Tuesday, May 31, 2011, by Sara Polsky



The Landmarks Preservation Commission set the boundaries late last month for two potential East Village Historic Districts meant to preserve the neighborhood's 19th-century residential buildings. The first version of the bigger of the two historic districts encompassed nearly 300 buildings, but that wasn't quite enough for some preservation-minded East Villagers, who lobbied the LPC to expand its study area.

Victory! Above in pink, the add-ons along Avenue A, East 6th Street, Second Avenue, and East 2nd Street. The specific buildings include 101 Avenue A, a tenement that has been a German social hall and a drag performance art space (er, not at the same time), and the former magistrates court/current film archive at 32 Second Avenue. There's still plenty of room for modifications before the LPC makes an official decision, but things are looking good for Team Preservation.

News: East Village Landmarks Expansion! [GVSHP]

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2011/0...ngs_bigger.php

[Merry]

Downtown Preservationists Fight to Save 1920s Community Center

The historic building at 105-107 Washington St. served the neighborhood's diverse population.

By Julie Shapiro




A 1940 photo shows 105-107 Washington St., center.

FINANCIAL DISTRICT — Preservationists are rallying to save a lower Manhattan building that once served as a community center for a diverse array of early 20th-century immigrants.

Mary Dierickx, a historic preservation consultant, is leading the effort to landmark 105-107 Washington St., the former Downtown Community House, which was built in the 1920s to offer social services to the burgeoning residential population near the Hudson River docks.

"105-107 Washington Street is one of the last vestiges of a vibrant multi-ethnic late 19th and 20th century community," Dierickx said. "The handsome colonial revival-style settlement house is in danger of demolition and deserves protection."

However, the city has no plans to landmark the five-story brick building just south of the World Trade Center site.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission has examined the case twice over the past 10 years and both times found it did not merit designation, said Lisi de Bourbon, spokeswoman for LPC.
"There are other, better examples of the settlement house movement," de Bourbon said Friday. "It lacks certain architectural distinction."

Community Board 1's Landmarks Committee disagreed and voted unanimously Thursday night to ask the city to landmark the building.

"It's a very important [part] of the fabric of downtown Manhattan," said Noel Jefferson, a member of the committee.

The Downtown Community House was designed by architect John F. Jackson, who is best known for designing dozens of YMCA buildings across the country.

Former Gov. Al Smith laid the $300,000 building's cornerstone in 1925, and it opened in 1926 with a health clinic, a library, an auditorium, a nursery and a dressmaking school. It served at least 16 nationalities, including Syrians, Greeks and Armenians, in the diverse neighborhood then known as Bowling Green Village, Dierickx said.

The building later housed government offices, a union and a Buddhist temple. It is now vacant, leading neighbors to fear that a developer will replace it with a more profitable high-rise, as has happened to many of the area's historic buildings in the past 10 years.

"This is a neighborhood that has been decimated…since 9/11," Dierickx said. "I'm so alarmed by all that we're losing here and all around lower Manhattan."

Dierickx and other preservationists had once hoped to create a Little Syria historic district to save a slice of the neighborhood's history, but so many other buildings have been demolished that Dierickx is focusing on saving the few that remain.

Two years ago, the city landmarked 105-107 Washington's neighbor, the former Syrian church at 103 Washington St.

http://www.dnainfo.com/20110610/down...#ixzz1OwtKq46c

[ZippyTheChimp]

"There are other, better examples of the settlement house movement," de Bourbon said Friday. "It lacks certain architectural distinction."

This is such a crock.

[londonlawyer]

Is there any hope that the wangs at the LPC will protect this gem?

[ZippyTheChimp]

If real-estate shows no big interest in it.

[lofter1]

It already has an Approved Demo Permit issued in 2008.

Here's the Owner Info:

Name: SCOTT HELLER
Business Name: THE BRAUSER GROUP
Business Phone: 212-989-5555
Business Address: 17 EAST 12TH ST. N.Y. NY 10003

The Brauser Group is responsible for the deadly black pile of new condos at 100 W 18th at Sixth:



http://avekta.com/100west18.com/ (turn down the sound)

[lofter1]

DOF shows recent activity for this property:

ASSIGNMENT OF MORTGAGE

[londonlawyer]

It already has an Approved Demo Permit issued in 2008.

Here's the Owner Info:

Name: SCOTT HELLER
Business Name: THE BRAUSER GROUP
Business Phone: 212-989-5555
Business Address: 17 EAST 12TH ST. N.Y. NY 10003

The Brauser Group is responsible for the deadly black pile of new condos at 100 W 18th at Sixth:



http://avekta.com/100west18.com/ (turn down the sound)

Horrific.

[antinimby]

It's actually even worse if you see it in full daylight.



Gotta love this city...right?

[Merry]

Death by Nostalgia

By SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN

THE modern historic preservation movement started in New York City in the early 1960s, when a band of locals pushed the issue into popular awareness with their unsuccessful effort to block the destruction of the old Pennsylvania Station.

Now, nearly a half-century later, New York is home to the most high-profile attack on the movement yet: in a recent exhibition at the New Museum, the architect Rem Koolhaas accused preservationists of aimlessly cherry-picking the past; of destroying people’s complex sense of urban evolution; and, most damningly, of bedding down with private developers to create gentrified urban theme parks.

Some of Mr. Koolhaas’s criticisms are on target — but his analysis is wildly off-base. It’s not preservation that’s at fault, but rather the weakness, and often absence, of other, complementary tools to manage urban development, like urban planning offices and professional, institutionalized design review boards, which advise planners on decisions about preservation and development.
It’s that lack, and the outsize power of private developers, that has turned preservation into the unwieldy behemoth that it is today.

Some historical context is in order. As American cities expanded rapidly between 1890 and 1930, urban dwellers and municipal governments realized that developers, who were building ever-larger and ever-taller buildings, would never reliably serve the public interest.

So cities tried to strike back: Manhattan’s hulking Equitable Building, which blocks street-level sunlight practically all day, helped provoke New York’s 1916 zoning resolution that required significant setbacks for tall buildings.

Then, in 1926, the Supreme Court ruled that municipalities could regulate the use of private property based on the broader public interest. Professional city planning was born, but systems to vet building and urban design quality at the federal, state and local levels — common in countries and cities across Europe — were never institutionalized.

By midcentury, professional urban planners were developing and sometimes designing large-scale, long-term regional and urban plans and helping write land-use and other laws to govern urban development’s shape and future.

But without design-review mechanisms, their output of low-quality public housing and ill-conceived megablocks soon turned the public against them. By the late 1960s, an emergent populist, antigovernment sentiment among voters began to shift power back into private hands.

City governments, suffering the economic downturns of the 1970s and ’80s, gave ever more leeway to real estate developers, and ever more voice and political power to hyperlocal community boards; both groups typically focused on their own narrow and usually short-term interests rather than the broader, long-term public good.

As a result, historic preservation laws, which by the late 1970s were increasingly popular in a country bored by modernism and excited by nostalgia, became, de facto, one of city governments’ most powerful instruments for influencing private development.

Tax-starved cities, inspired by earlier preservation projects like Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco and Faneuil Hall in Boston, began to use preservation to create so-called target destinations; New York’s first foray was the initially successful South Street Seaport.

Savvy developers soon began collaborating with cities and preservationists, co-opting the movement for their own interests while capitalizing on the public’s nostalgia for yesteryear. Developers became experts at including just enough of the old — a facade here, a foyer there — to ease the approval process and even win sizable tax breaks on their projects.

In other words, preservation morphed into a four-headed monster: a planning tool, a design review tool, a development tool and a tool to preserve genuinely valuable old neighborhoods and buildings. Today decisions about managing urban development are frequently framed as decisions about what and what not to preserve, with little sense of how those decisions affect the surrounding neighborhood.

Worse, these decisions are mostly left to the whims of overly empowered preservation boards, staffed by amateurs casting their nets too widely and indiscriminately. And too many buildings are preserved not because of their historic value or aesthetic significance, but because of political or economic deal-making.

Instead of bashing preservation, we should restrict it to its proper domain. Design review boards, staffed by professionals trained in aesthetics and urban issues and able to influence planning and preservation decisions, should become an integral part of the urban development process. At the same time, city planning offices must be returned to their former, powerful role in urban policy.

That’s the way things work in Europe, where vibrant contemporary cities like London, Berlin, Paris and almost any city in the Netherlands blend old and new without effacing their normal evolutionary processes.

As these cities demonstrate, preservation should be one of several instruments necessary for creating livable, attractive and vibrant urban spaces and architecture. Otherwise, in the hands of weak local governments, powerful real-estate interests and untrained panels, it is indeed an impediment to the healthy modernization of our cities: a recipe for aesthetic insipidity and urban incoherence.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen is the architecture critic for The New Republic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/op...agen.html?_r=2

[Merry]

Hallelujah!


70 Pine now officially landmarked

by Sarabeth Sanders

As expected, the Landmarks Preservation Commission made 70 Pine Street a city landmark today, and the long-awaited designation didn’t come without the requisite celebrations. In the words of Commissioner Margery Perlmutter, the Art Deco Financial District tower that most recently served as the headquarters of the American International Group is “our other Chrysler and Empire State building.” Or, as Robert Tierney, chairman of the LPC, put it: “This building defies words.” The 66-story building, now mostly vacant, was originally built as the headquarters of the Cities Service Company (now Citgo). It is among Lower Manhanttan’s tallest skyscrapers.

http://therealdeal.com/newyork/articles/70-pine-now-officially-landmarked

[marnegator]

Hallelujah indeed! Hard to believe that this building was landmarked after 1 Chase. (I speak as a fan of 1 Chase)

[lofter1]

One way that the LPC protects a landmarked NYC building:

Destructoporn: Preserving / Gutting 510 Fifth Avenue

CURBED

[Merry]

LPC Seeks Big Landmark Expansions; Wants to Buck Procro

June 28, 2011, by Bilal Khan

The Landmarks Preservation Commission is really on a roll today, they're seeking to landmark or at least progress designations for over 1,700 buildings. That's the most since 1990, when they landmarked 2,020 buildings on the Upper West Side! So what's on their agenda?

The big story of the day is the vote on expanding the Crown Heights North II Historic District. They want to landmark640 buildings in addition to the 472 that are already landmarked. This big chunk of rowhouses, freestanding houses and apartment buildings were built between 1870 and 1920. The area, called Crow Hill, borders Prospect Heights, so a landmark would seriously hinder a lot of new Procro development. The Wall Street Journal did a story on the community's involvement in pushing to get the area landmarked after some fugly construction in the area.

There are also going to be 15 public hearings today to landmark buildings in every borough. The other bigger hearings are in regards to the 300-building East Village/LES district, the 26-building East 10th Street District between Avenues A and B and the 150-building West End-Collegiate Historic District. They've already landmarked some notable buildings like 154 West 14th Street, the Fisk-Harkness House at 12 East 53rd Street and the Hardenbrook-Somarindyck house at 135 Bowery.

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2011/0...uck_procro.php