Date: 3/31/2005 7:45:27 A.M. Eastern Standard Time
From: kitchen@hellskitchen.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
From: "Kate Wood"
Subject: Citywide Initiative to Improve the Landmarks Preservation Commission
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 18:34:54 -0500
FYI - Building on the support already gathered from preservation groups like yours, we are trying to get more organizations to join in efforts to improve the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Please help by circulating this email to any of your colleagues who have not already signed on (list of supporters is included in the attached Word document, "Problems Experienced by Community Groups Working with the Landmarks Preservation Commission").
Nearly 40 groups citywide have endorsed the findings of this report. With your help, we can work to ensure that preserving our historic neighborhoods is up-front-and-center in the minds of our city's leadership. THANK YOU!!
Dear Colleague:
Now that the 2005 election year is upon us, it's time to make sure our elected officials understand the importance of preservation to New York's historic neighborhoods.
Because of your demonstrated concern about landmarks preservation issues, we wanted to invite all preservation groups to join in an effort to improve the responsiveness and transparency of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).
As you may know, in October and November 2004, the City Council held oversight hearings on the LPC in response to concerns raised by a coalition of community groups (speaking, we believe, on behalf of many groups citywide) about the LPC's effectiveness in protecting our landmarks (both designated and as-yet undesignated). As part of this process, several preservation organizations working together with the Women's City Club prepared a report entitled, "Problems Experienced by Community Groups Working with the Landmarks Preservation Commission." The report was mentioned in Robin Pogrebin's terrific New York Times article, dated March 24, 2005. A copy of the article is attached, along with an abbreviated version of the report, which includes a list of nearly 40 preservation groups that have already signed on to endorse the report's findings.
We ask that you sign your group on in support of this report and its recommendations for improving the LPC. Please do not hesitate to contact LANDMARK WEST! for more information or to discuss this initiative. And please contact us immediately to sign on!
Kate Wood
Executive Director
Landmark West!
45 West 67th Street
New York, NY 10023
O: 212-496-8110
F: 212-875-0209
katewood@landmarkwest.org
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New York Times
March 24, 2005
In Preservation Wars, a Focus on Midcentury
By ROBIN POGREBIN
rguing that significant buildings are not getting their due, advocates of midcentury architecture are stepping up pressure on the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission to hold full public hearings on proposals to raze two movie theaters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Plans have been announced to convert Cinemas 1, 2 & 3, a 1962 International-style theater on Third Avenue across from Bloomingdale's, into retail space. The Beekman, a 1952 late Streamline Moderne design at Second Avenue and 66th Street, is to be replaced by a breast and diagnostic imaging center run by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The theater is scheduled to be closed down this summer.
On another front, a lawsuit was filed against the city last week in New York State Supreme Court seeking to prevent reconstruction of 2 Columbus Circle into the Museum of Arts and Design. The marble-clad building with a "lollipop"-motif facade by Edward Durell Stone once housed Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art. The landmarks commission has never held a public hearing on the future of the building, on which demolition is expected to begin in late May.
These two different battlefronts represent a larger argument on the part of preservationists that the commission has generally neglected postwar architecture and been unresponsive to their concerns about Modernist sites.
"The commission ought to hear the arguments and let them be debated in a public forum - that's democracy," the architect Robert A. M. Stern, who is active in preservation issues, said in an interview.
But Holly Hotchner, director of the museum going into 2 Columbus Circle, said, "There are no landmarks hearings on many buildings."
Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, a group that is spearheading opposition to the alteration of the movie theaters, said in a statement: "These insensitive and destructive actions highlight the urgent need to protect the Modern architecture on the Upper East Side and across the city. The Landmarks Preservation Commission has designated some important Modern buildings, but most remain at risk."
John Jurayj, co-chairman of the Modern Architecture Working Group, an advocacy organization, said at a commission hearing last week on the Jamaica Savings Bank in Queens, itself an example of mid-20th-century architecture: "Modern preservation is in a major crisis in our city, a crisis that is shortly going to get worse unless the Landmarks Preservation Commission starts to act more aggressively."
At the same meeting, Kate Wood, the executive director of Landmark West, a community group focused on preservation on the Upper West Side, reproved the commission for not putting the fate of 2 Columbus Circle before the public. "If the Landmarks Commission held a public hearing for 2 Columbus Circle, literally hundreds of people would attend and testify - both for and against designation," she said. "The question is, what more will it take?"
Diane Jackier, a spokeswoman for the commission, said: "All of the preservation advocacy groups say the commission is slow to respond. The commission balances the concerns of advocacy groups across the city with our own interests."
Robert B. Tierney, the commission's chairman, was traveling out of the country this week and unavailable for comment, Ms. Jackier said.
To be sure, the commission's work has been hampered in part by a low annual budget - $3.5 million - and staff cuts over the past decade. The Modern Architecture Working Group acknowledges these handicaps but has urged the commission to step up designations of sites as landmarks. Last year, the commission designated 12 individual landmarks and 3 historic districts, which Ms. Jackier said amounted to a total of 220 buildings, compared with 25 individual landmarks and 2 districts amounting to 261 buildings in 2000.
The group has also asked the commission not to give building owners too much advance notice of hearings on their landmarks. Otherwise, the preservationists argue, owners may pre-emptively alter the buildings.
Preservationists had repeatedly asked for hearings on the 1961 Summit Hotel on Lexington Avenue and the 1949 Paterson Silks Building at Union Square, both designed by the Miami architect Morris Lapidus. Hearings were finally scheduled, but not until demolition had begun on the Silks Building.
The fight over 2 Columbus Circle has intensified since the city agreed to sell the nine-story building to the Museum of Arts and Design in June 2002, for $17 million. The museum, now on West 53rd Street, plans to reconstruct it for about $30 million according to a design by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture. Construction is expected to begin by the middle of this year and to be completed in mid-2007.
Some call 2 Columbus Circle ugly and say they would just as soon see it go. But many Modernists argue that the 1964 building is an important example of postwar architecture. "It is a building that should be saved; it's still not too late," said Mr. Stern, the architect. "Under any definition of what a landmark is - culturally, physically and geographically - this is a landmark."
The lawsuit filed last week was brought by property owners in the Parc Vendome Condominiums near Columbus Circle and by Landmark West. It aims to block the sale on the grounds that it was conducted without due process in violation of the New York State Constitution, the New York City Charter, the General Municipal Law and New York's public trust doctrine.
Ms. Hotchner said in an interview yesterday that the lawsuit "in no way affects our interest in going forward" with the museum and called it "an example of abuse of the legal system to subvert the public process."
Preservationists opposed to the building's renovation have already been to court on the project. Supported by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the plaintiffs challenged the environmental review of the project and the failure by the landmarks commission to hold a public hearing on it.
In February, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court unanimously upheld an earlier dismissal of that lawsuit.
Landmark West argues that its recent lawsuit would not have been necessary had the landmarks commission held a hearing as requested. "It's because they've refused to deal with this that we've had to resort to the courts," said Ms. Wood of Landmark West.
The commission's designation committee has said that no public hearing was ever held because it determined in 1996 that landmark status was not warranted for 2 Columbus Circle.
But several people who work in architecture or preservation have continued to appeal for a hearing, arguing that the commission was wrong to shut off public debate.
Last October, in testimony before the City Council subcommittee responsible for landmark preservation, Beverly Moss Spatt, a former chairwoman of the commission, described the commission as "totally isolated and in total disregard for public opinions."
Anthony M. Tung, a former member of the commission, told the subcommittee that the public was "being barred in numerous improper ways from a process which the council in its wisdom designed to be open and participatory."
In November, a coalition of civic organizations produced a report, "Problems Experienced by Community Groups Working With the Landmarks Preservation Commission," that detailed their complaints and suggested areas for change.
Friends of the Upper East Side describes Cinemas 1, 2 & 3 as the first "piggyback" duplex movie theater in the United States - "a significant milestone in the development of movie theater design."
The group cited the glass corner on East 66th Street and the ribbon windows on East 65th Street as examples of the International-style design "enlivened with a tilted glass facade and sloping streamlined lounge ceiling that refers stylistically back to the Moderne style of the 1930's."
But it also noted that the theater had already undergone extensive alterations of its exterior, including the replacement of Venetian tiles with a white stucco wall. In addition, the Upper East Side group says, important artworks in the interior have been removed, including an abstract oil painting by the Russian-born artist Ilya Bolotowsky, a geometric mural by Sewell Sillman and copper leaf-shaped chandeliers from Denmark.
Friends of the Upper East Side says the theaters are two of the few remaining art film houses in Manhattan. "We've lost almost all of them," said Seri Worden, the group's executive director.
Mr. Stern, the architect, said the issue was not merely the theaters' architectural value, but their contribution to the neighborhood's character. "They provide a layer of the past in relation to new things," he said.
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REPORT:
PROBLEMS EXPERIENCED BY COMMUNITY GROUPS WORKING WITH THE LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COMMISSION
The Arts and Landmarks Committee
of the Women's City Club of New York, Coordinator
33 West 60 Street, New York NY 10023
Phone: 212-353-8070 E-mail: info@wccny.org
First Issued: 17 November 2004
Compiled by the Following Groups:
Women’s City Club of New York (Coordinator)
Defenders of the Historic Upper East Side
Hamilton Heights-West Harlem Community Preservation Organization
Historic Districts Council
LANDMARK WEST!
Morningside Heights Historic District Committee
Society for the Architecture of the City
Endorsed by the Following Groups
as of 30 March 2005:
Association of Neighbors on the Upper East Side
Beachside Bungalow Preservation Association
Brownstone Revival Coalition
Carnegie Hill Neighbors
CIVITAS
Clinton Special District Coalition
Coalition for a Livable West Side
Coalition to Save the East Village
Committee for Environmentally Sound Development
Ditmas Park Association
DOCOMOMO US—New York/Tri-State Chapter
Drive to Protect the Ladies’ Mile District
East 78th Street Block Association Park/Lex.
East Harlem Historical Organization
East Village Community Coalition
Greater Astoria Historical Society
Historic Neighborhood Enhancement Alliance
Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America
Modern Architecture Working Group
Murray Hill Neighborhood Association
Preservation League of Staten Island
Prospect Park South Association
Queens Historical Society
Queensborough Preservation League
Richmond Hill Historical Society
The St. George Civic Association
Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association
Union Square Community Coalition
Vinegar Hill Neighborhood Association
List in formation
CONTENTS
How the Report was Compiled 1
Summary 2
NINE PROBLEMS
Problems in the Designation Process:
I. Lack of Transparency and Responsiveness 4
Problems in the Regulatory Process:
II. Pre-Hearing Disposition of Certificate Of Appropriateness Applications 6
III. Lack of Public Hearings for Substantially Altered Certificate of Appropriateness Applications 7
IV. Absence of Leadership in Protecting Landmarks Administered by Other Agencies of Government 8
V. Need to Provide Enough Information for Informed Public Hearing Comment 9
VI. Need for Public Access to Staff-Level Permit Records 11
VII. Need to Ensure Community Board Participation 12
VIII. Need for an Improved Sound System in the LPC Hearing Room 12
IX. Lack of Consistent Standards in Regulation 13
Recommendations: 14
I. Public Participation in the Appointment of Commissioners
II. Adequate Funding for the Necessary Staff
III. Regular Public Hearings to Address Designation and Regulatory Issues
How the Report was Compiled:
During the September and October 2003 City Council hearings on the proposed designation of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine various questions were raised about the propriety of the procedures being followed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (“LPC”), crystallizing doubts that many organizations had had for numerous years about LPC procedures. Afterwards, members of preservation groups who had testified at the hearings were looking for a positive, constructive way to express their mutual concern that the integrity of the LPC was in jeopardy.
The Women’s City Club of New York is a multi-issue, non-partisan advocacy organization, celebrating its 90th year working to influence and shape public policy decisions affecting the city.
An important part of our work is to partner with other organizations on specific issues.
The WCC’s Arts and Landmarks Committee therefore gathered representatives of several preservation groups to identify recurrent problems experienced in dealing with the LPC, and to suggest possible solutions.
Recognizing the excellence of New York’s Landmark Preservation Law, we had two over-riding concerns. First, securing an adequate budget and increased staffing for the Landmarks Preservation Commission to fulfill its mission of identifying and protecting the City’s cultural and architectural heritage. Second, improving the relationship of the LPC with the preservation community.
Represented at meetings held throughout the year were the Historic Districts Council, Landmark West!, The Society for the Architecture of the City, Defenders of the Historic Upper East Side, Morningside Heights Historic District Committee and the Hamilton Heights-West Harlem Community Preservation Organization. All of these individuals and groups have extensive experience, over numerous years, in monitoring the work of the LPC in various parts of New York.
Together we drafted a list of issues needing to be addressed entitled, Memo: Outline of Problems Experienced by Community Groups Working with the LPC, which was presented to members and staff of the City Council. The City Council Subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Siting and Maritime Uses subsequently held an oversight hearing on the administrative practices of the Landmarks Preservation Commission on October 20, 2004. The outpouring of people wishing to testify at that hearing could not be accommodated and the Subcommittee had to adjourn the hearing with a promise to reconvene it at a later date in a larger room.
This document, REPORT: PROBLEMS EXPERIENCED BY COMMUNITY GROUPS WORKING WITH THE LANDMARKS PRESERVATION COMMISSION, reproduces the full text of the original Memo, which is carried over and appears in italics. The REPORT expands the description of the problems identified, presenting them in a new and clearer format.
Summary:
Since its establishment by the City Council in 1965, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has saved many elements of the City’s history and beauty. Through its open and participatory procedures, it has given innumerable New Yorkers a voice in shaping the environment that has such impact upon their daily lives. Indeed, as Robert A. M. Stern observed in New York 1960, the application of the Landmarks Law has become “New York’s most proactive form of planning.”
Nearly forty years later, the LPC has had an excellent overall record, encompassing the designation of 1,101 individual landmarks, and more than 22,000 properties in 81 historic districts, according to the Mayor's Management Report: in total about, 2.3 percent of the entire city. But, it still has important work to do.
The conservation of these 23,000 properties requires countless acts of stewardship, both large and small; it is an ongoing task that would be impossible to achieve without the help of citizen-preservationists across the five boroughs. The LPC administers the statute, but it is the involvement of the city’s inhabitants that makes its application a political reality.
Landmarks and historic districts simply cannot be designated without broad community support, nor can the LPC supervise 23,000 properties without the aid of well-informed individuals who live in the neighborhoods involved and know the principles of sensible conservation practice.
It is out of this necessity that, in step with the LPC’s work of designation and regulation, groups of local activists have formed with every new historic district. By now there are more than 100 such societies in the city, learning the Landmarks Law, monitoring the LPC’s practices, testifying in regard to new construction, alerting the LPC to violations, warning the city when unprotected parts of our patrimony are endangered, and so spreading the ethic of preservation among their neighbors.
Yet New York’s success in preservation over the past decade has brought with it a serious challenge. Over the course of several Mayoral administrations, an increasingly understaffed and underfunded LPC has confronted the prospect of an enlarged regulatory workload along with each new designation.
Bit by bit, during this period, public access to the LPC's decisions has been hindered, making it hard to discern how, when, and on what basis the LPC is exercising its authority. A participatory decision-making process has become an administrative maze.
The early years of the LPC's existence were marked by lawsuits brought by litigants who sought to overturn the Landmarks Law. But more recently, we have seen lawsuits brought by those who believe the LPC should have taken stronger measures and applied higher standards to protect the historic city. For instance:
· 67 Vestry Tenants Association v. Raab
· Maxtone-Graham v. Landmarks Preservation Commission
· CitiNeighbors Coalition of Historic Carnegie Hill v. NY City Landmarks Preservation Commission
· Save the Cottages and Gardens v. The City of New York et al.
· Historic Districts Council, Inc. et al. v. Eliot Spitzer (re Poe House)
· Landmark West v. Burden (re 2 Columbus Circle)
· Beresford Apartments v. City of New York, et al. (re Planetarium).
Meanwhile, the current administration has received at least one extensive document complaining of procedural problems at the LPC—not from the real estate industry, but from the Historic Districts Council, a citywide organization representing dozens of neighborhood groups concerned with historic preservation.
The resulting climate of conflict seriously endangers the cause of historic preservation.
Thus, late in 2003 the Arts and Landmarks Committee of the Women’s City Club invited neighborhood preservationists from across New York to meet and attempt to resolve this dilemma. After almost a year, nine distinct problems were identified—which are elucidated in the following pages.
The City Council has the power to affect reform in several important ways. In addition, many of the problems described in this report can be ameliorated via the administrative authority of the LPC.
The following three recommendations were formed.
1) We hope that opportunities for public testimony will be reinstated at the confirmation hearings of LPC commissioners. This will help revive the dialogue and bridge the current gap between the public and the municipal guardians of preservation policy.
2) Most importantly, the LPC requires increased funding to sustain its programs and achieve the full range of necessary reforms the public is seeking. Under-funding gravely impairs the LPC's ability to fulfill its mandate.
3) Public hearings should be held on a continuing basis to gather comment in regard to the designation and regulatory functions of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. These hearings would serve the particularly important purpose of providing a forum for the concerns of owners of historic properties, neighbors affected by LPC decisions, and community-based preservation groups. This would enable the LPC to better evaluate the impact of its actions on the city.
The landmarks of our city can never be irrevocably secured, only passed on from one generation of stewards to the next, with each generation required to meet its own particular challenges. Our purpose in producing this report is to make positive and constructive suggestions as we seek to improve the procedures followed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. It is our goal to support the LPC and to improve its interaction with the individuals and communities affected by its decision-making process.
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