Mayor Robert Wagner put off the decision as long as he could, but finally, on April 19, 1964, he signed the law creating the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The stated intent was to protect historic and architectural monuments, but almost at once preservation proved a tonic for many more of the city’s ills. Quite simply, and without qualification, historic preservation saved New York City.
In the early 1970s, New York City was plunging toward bankruptcy. With rising crime and declining city services, the quality of life was deteriorating and the city’s population was dropping for the first time in its history.
Writing in the New York Times Magazine in 1976, Roger Starr famously advocated planned shrinkage, a strategic withdrawal from untenable neighborhoods. “Better a thriving city of five million than a Calcutta of seven,” he callously wrote.
Still, some New Yorkers refused to quit. Instead of fleeing to serene suburbs or the Sunbelt, they committed their lives and fortunes to bringing the city back by investing in, and protecting, the city’s older neighborhoods. Some trace the city’s revival to its crime decline, but without our historic districts that would have been an empty triumph.
Beginning with Brooklyn Heights in 1965, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the historic districts that would anchor the historic turnaround — Gramercy Park, Hunters Point, Greenwich Village, Mott Haven, Cobble Hill, Chelsea, Mount Morris, Stuyvesant Heights, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, SoHo, Carnegie Hill, Hamilton Heights, Fort Greene, Longwood, the Upper East Side and more.
Neighborhood by neighborhood, the designations rewarded the courage, commitment and resiliency of the residents who stayed and invested.
The story of SoHo is the most dramatic. In the late 1960s, the fire commissioner called the area of vacant and dilapidated loft buildings “Hell’s Hundred Acres.” With manufacturing fleeing, landlords were desperate for tenants and willingly rented to artists, legally or not.
In 1973, when the Landmarks Commission designated the SoHo Historic District, a cast iron building at the corner of Broome and Wooster could be had for $90,000. Designation created value and demand — and tax revenue — where there had been little.
Times Square was another triumph. The Crossroads of the World was beset by crime; peep-shows and sex shops proliferated, and legitimate theaters remained dark for successive seasons. To save it, most thought, we would have to destroy it.
Enter the preservation community. The loss of the Helen Hayes and the Morosco theaters to make way for the Marriott Marquis Hotel galvanized a movement to designate the remaining Broadway houses.
Against strident opposition, in 1988 the Koch administration’s Landmarks Commission designated the 44 remaining theaters, and at the same time City Planning facilitated new transferable development rights.
The theaters have proven to be the bedrock of the recovery of Times Square. Historic preservation, take a bow.
Today, the city takes for granted the benefits of preservation while refusing to embrace it. Critical voices find a more receptive audience in both city government and among the general public, creating an odd alliance of builders favoring untrammeled development and progressives seeking to advance desired social ends.
But the protection of historic parts of the city is not a quaint idea with no value in the present.
In enacting the Landmarks Law in 1965, the City Council stated that the intent was to “stabilize and improve property value; protect and enhance the city’s attractions to tourists and visitors and the support and stimulus to business and industry thereby provided; and strengthen the economy of the city.”
The landmarks law has done all that and more.
Kroessler is a member of the co-ordinating committee of the City Club.
