The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission case: When the gummint goes into superstealth mode, there's often an unsavory stench (with an update)

Update: LPC strikes de-calendaring
from Tuesday's calendar (see below)



Built to last? Sure, but it didn't. Now you saw it; then in November 1963 you didn't. When New Yorkers discovered that McKim, Mead and White's magisterial Penn Station, a fixture of the city since it opened in 1910 (we see it above from the inside and out), could really just go bye-bye, the trick became harder to work quite so easily. By the turn of Grand Central Terminal came for demolition, there was already a Landmarks Preservation Commission, created in 1965, and New Yorkers were prepared to fight back. And even win -- even if the fight had to be fought all the way to the Supreme Court to be finally decided.

by Ken

The word "unprecedented" is turning up in most of the expressions of civic outrage that began erupting today. Apparently nobody can find any precedent for the stunt pulled by New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) over the Thanksgiving holiday.

What they did was to sneak out an announcement, with just the required seven business days before the LPC's next scheduled public meeting on December 9, of its intention to wipe nearly 100 sites (including two districts) currently "calendared" for landmarks consideration off its rolls. And it's to be done by administrative fiat. Although such an action can only be done at a public meeting, this "meeting" emphatically won't be a "hearing." The LPC intends to allow no one to be heard, and in fact doesn't seem to think there's anything to discuss. The commissioners will simpliy vote those 96 applications off the island.

Without prejudice, mind you. New applications can be made for any or all of those sites, but make no mistake, they will have to be new applications. The old ones will be officially dead.

When you have such drastic action being taken so stealthily, it's hard not to feel that your sense of smell is being violated. Anyway, here's the story:

Nearly 100 Sites Quietly Being Removed From Landmarks Consideration

By Jeff Mays on December 1, 2014 12:20pm



MANHATTAN — The Landmarks Preservation Commission plans to remove almost 100 sites and two historic districts from consideration for landmark status without formal public input, despite most being on the agenda for decades, officials say.

It's a move preservationists fear clears the path for the possible destruction of dozens of architecturally, culturally and historically significant buildings in neighborhoods across the five boroughs because it removes the preliminary protection that they were afforded while under consideration.

Among them are the iconic Pepsi sign in Long Island City, Union Square Park, the Bergdorf Goodman building in Manhattan and the more-than century-old Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

"It's going to be death by bulldozer. That's what people who want to take these buildings off the calendar want to do," said Susan Nial, a board member of Landmark West, a group dedicated to preserving buildings on the Upper West Side.

Critics of the plan say Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration is being less than transparent because the move will be made at the LPC's Dec. 9 meeting without a hearing to allow for public input.

Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for the mayor, said the process is aimed at helping LPC function better by clearing its "backlog" of items, many which have languished on the LPC's calendar for decades.

All of the sites and historic districts have been on the LPC calendar since at least 2010.

Of the 95 sites and historic districts, 31 have been calendared for 40 or more years, 25 have been under consideration for 30 to 40 years and 24 have been up for consideration for 20 to 30 years. Fifteen items were calendered between five and 20 years ago.

"Cleaning up that backlog will ensure the LPC can much more effectively fulfill its mission of responding to the landmarking issues of today in real time," Norvell said.

Under the city's landmarks process, a building or historic district can be nominated by the LPC or the community for consideration. Once the LPC staff studies the request and meets with the building's owners, the building is placed on the calendar and a hearing is held if the property or district is deemed worthy.

If no decision is made after the hearing, the project is considered to still be "calendered."

Being on the LPC's calendar provides the building with a modicum of protection because the Department of Buildings notifies the commission if building or demolition permits for a site with such a designation are requested. The commission then has 40 days to make a decision on a site's landmark status.

SO WHERE'S THE HARM? THESE ARE ALL
OLD, "INACTIVE" APPLICATIONS, RIGHT?

That's what the actual announcement says. These are all old, inactive applications -- calendared for at least five years, many of them for much longer.

Proposed Administrative Action

The Commission will be considering a proposed administrative action to issue "no action" letters for buildings and sites that are inactive and have been calendared for five years or longer (96 buildings and sites, 80 of which have been calendared for 20 years or more).

This proposed action is without reference to merit, and does not prevent the Commission from re-calendaring these buildings and sites in the future. Calendaring is an administrative action that places a building or site on the Commission's calendar for a public hearing or discussion. The buildings considered for this action were placed on the Commission's calendar, public hearings were held, and they currently remain inactive. This action is currently scheduled for the December 9th Public Meeting. See the link below for more information on these sites.

Items Calendared Prior to 2010

The thing is, though, that the official justification for this "administrative action" (doesn't that sound like the teensiest little technicality?) is that:

(1) These applications are really old -- all at least five years, many much more than that -- and "currently remain inactive."

(2) Clearing out this backlog will enable the LPC to attack its mission with renewed efficiency and vigor. In fact, this is just what a spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio (the chairman and the other 11 commissioners are all appointed by the mayor), Wiley Norvell, said: "Cleaning up that backlog will ensure the LPC can much more effectively fulfill its mission of responding to the landmarking issues of today in real time."

Two things, though: First, that "currently inactive" sounds pretty weasely to me. There are 96 different stories here. Second, and this is my point, if these 96 cases are all "currently inactive," how are they impeding the LPC's effective operation? It seems to me you can have it one way or the other -- the 96 cases are dead anyway, or the 96 cases are millstones around the LPC's neck -- but not both.


WHO BENEFITS FROM THE "ADMINISTRATIVE ACTION"?

Well, off the cuff, each of those 96 sites presumably has owners who, as long as their sites are calendared, are limited in what they can do with the properties; any application for a building or demolition permit has to be reported by the Buildings Department to the LPC. This, by the way, isn't a theoretical precaution. The range of things property owners have been known to do to properties, or things like fires that have simply happened to properties being bruited as potential landmarks is long and grim. Bad things have been known to happen even to properties that are calendared, but from that point there's at least some accountability.

Another trick often favored by landmark-resistant property owners is stalling, and one has no way of knowing how many of those 96 cases are "currently inactive" by this route. In fact, since the "administrative action" expressly precludes any consideration of any individual cases, we're clearly meant to know as little as possible about them. Assuming the "administrative action" is administratively enacted on December 9, it will be interesting to see how many of those properties fall into the hands of rapacious developers how quickly.

Yes, the city certainly needs economic development. But not "anything goes" economic development. We have things like zoning and landmarking precisely because officially we believe that there are competing social and economic interests among the city's residents which have to be balanced to serve the best interests of all.


SO WHO DECIDES WHAT'S "GOOD" DEVELOPMENT?

This sounds like one of those impossible-to-resolve-definitively questions. And yet decided, relying on infallible judgment. Not surprisingly, considering that despite the infallibility of his judgment, there were a lot of ungrateful natterers nipping at his heels, the emperor-mayor tried to make his imperial decisions as much as possible -- as much as the law allowed, and often more -- in the highest degree of secrecy. To make them, in other words, as much as possible "administrative actions."

It's hardly surprising, then, that the emperor-mayor hated the whole landmarking business, because it interfered with the prerogatives of developers, and only he could do that, because he knew that he would be doing it correctly. For the same reason, by the way, the emperor-mayor hated the Superfunding of Newtown Creek and especially the Gowanus Canal. He saw no reason why developers shouldn't be building luxury housing as fast as they wanted along the odoriferous banks of what may be the most toxic body of water on the planet. And if he didn't have a problem with it, by definition there wasn't any problem.

Even Emperor-Mayor Mike lost a lot of those battles. Of course he fought so many of them, and so many of them in secret, that I'm told we're going to continue find out as the years roll on just how many of those battles, including battles we didn't know about, he won.

All the same, when it comes to such issues this isn't the same city it was in 1963, when Penn Station was lost, or even in the '70s, when Grand Central nearly was. Already today, just from the e-mail lists I'm on, I received calls-to-action from established groups that fight the preservation fight in Greenwich Village, on the Upper West Side, and on the Upper East Side. And an outcry is being heard from all over the city. Maybe the outcriers can be persuaded that the "administrative action" is no big deal, and will merely enable the LPC to do its job more efficiently. Then again, maybe not.


SO IS THE PEPSI-COLA SIGN ENDANGERED?


Could be -- who can say, in the event that it should turn out to be in the way of somebody important (i.e., rich)? The Brooklyn-Queens East River waterfront is in the process of fortification with a wall of stratospheric apartment high-rises like the six nestled behind the iconic Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City, Queens. The developer actually worked around the sign, but it's one of the "calendared" landmark sites now slated for stealth de-calendaring by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, so don't hold your breath for its survival. (In case you're curious, the last of the six buildings in this development, the one directly behind the sign, 4610 Center Blvd., is a 584-unit rental that began leasing in April and by August was said to be 70 percent rented, with studios reportedly starting at $2395, one-bedrooms starting at $3180, and two- and three-bedrooms starting at $5500 and $5725.)


UPDATE: De-calendaring is off the calendar for Tuesday

It's still not clear what this action actually means, but in response to the vociferous outcry, the LPC has stricken the mass calendar purge from the calendar for Tuesday's meeting. Still, as Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, one of the most vociferous of the outcriers, put it in an e-mail announcing the "wonderful news": "This does not necessarily mean this is the end of the story." His excellent statement also makes clear that he and other preservationists don't oppose closing out such of those old applications as actually warrant closing out, but only through individual consideration:

While the plan has been withdrawn for next Tuesday, we do not know what the LPC plans to do from here about buildings and districts which were calendared years ago but about which they have taken no further action. We agree that sites and districts should not remain "calendared" (i.e. formally under consideration for landmark designation, with a 40 day delay period before demolition and alteration permits can be issued) for unending periods of time without a final decision about landmark status of the site.  But we believe that such decisions should be made individually and based upon the merits of the site in question, and we are willing to work with our fellow preservationists and the Commission to make that possible.

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