Landmark Disparity

If you haven't already seen it, the Municipal Art Society web site is host to a great map, developed by the MAS Planning Center, which gives the location of every landmark in the city. The map shows each of the 51 City Council Districts, allowing the user to see which districts host the most landmark sites. After a few seconds, it is easy to see that few landmarks have been designated outside of a select few districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Perhaps the Observer should have reviewed these maps before responding to Tom Wolfe.

The maps can be downloaded here .

Historic Districts and Property Values

In September 2003, the city's Independent Budget Office (a city agency charged with a watchdog role over the budget and city agency performance) issued an interesting report entitled The Impact of Historic Districts on Residential Property Values. The findings confirmed what every preservationist already knows, that landmarks are good for the city's economy.

The findings include:

• All else equal, prices of houses in historic districts are higher than those of similar houses outside historic districts.

• Although prices for historic properties have at times increased less rapidly than for similar properties outside historic districts, overall price appreciation from 1975 through 2002 was greater for houses inside historical districts.

To view the report, click here .

Happy Holidays!

We wish you a Merry Christmas, and a Happy Hanukkah!

Looking for Links

Since last month, we have been slowly adding features to our website, as time permits. Yesterday we added a Report section to the site, and posted a piece by The Women's City Club of New York.Today, we are seeking links to other websites and blogs. These links will be added next week. So far, we plan to add: HDC's Blog , Curbed , Brownstoner and Gothamist . We know there are a lot of great sites and blogs to link to. Tell us about your favorites. Add your site, or your favorite site, by clicking the "Comments" link below, or by emailing us at Citizens@savelpc.org.

Important Preservation Reports

Over the next few weeks, the Citizens Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation will be posting some of the important reports that helped to inform and inspire our campaign. Look for links to these reports in the left column of this page, along with blog posts announcing their "arrival." Today, we are posting a copy of the Report Problems Experienced by Community Groups Working with the Landmarks Preservation Commission by the Women's City Club of New York .

The Report was developed in 2003 in response to frustrations by landmark advocates following hearings on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. After the hearings, the Women's City Club gathered advocates together to find a way to express their common concerns about the Landmarks Preservation Commission and to develop a common agenda for reform.

We hope you find this detailed, well-drafted report as informative as we did.

Access Problems Experience by Community Groups Working with the Landmarks Preservation Commission here .

AMNY: Ten to Save

Generally speaking, the Citizens Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation does not take positions on saving specific buildings from the wrecking ball. Sure, individually we're all preservationists at heart but as a campaign, we are focused on bringing resources, fairness and democracy back to the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission. Still, it was nice to see tens of thousands of straphangers (aka subway riders) reading about preservation in yesterday's AM New York (one of two free newspapers available to subway riders every day). The article, Ten to Save: Endangered NYC , is more a mix of categories ("Houses of Worship") and specific threatened sites (the "104th Street Automat") but interesting nonetheless. It ends with a call for sites and photos from AMNY's readers. Feel free to tell them about the sites you are concerned about! The more places that these sites are mentioned, the better!

You can read the article, in full, here .

We Hear...

Our call for restoring the independence of Landmarks Preservation Commissioners doesn't come a moment too soon. Our sources report that the Mayor has already called City Council Members expressing his personal support for the misguided plans to disfigure the facade of the landmark New York Historical Society building and to mar the skyline of Central Park West with a proposed new tower on that landmark site.

It is even more disturbing to note that it now appears to be the practice of this administration to ask potential candidates for the Commission whether the Mayor can count on their vote. That doesn't seem to us to be the type of question that should be asked. We are polishing up a list of more appropriate questions that we will be urging the administration and the city council to use when exploring the suitability of candidates for service on the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Stay tuned to this site for an unveiling of those questions early in the New Year.

Now The Observer Responds

Author Tom Wolfe continues to stir New York's preservation community and the press that covers it, weeks after his Op-Ed was published in the New York Times . This time his piece served as the inspiration for an article by Tom Acitelli in the New York Observer . The article Preservationists Cry Wolfe; We’ve Got Their Numbers tries to debunk Wolfe's claims that "the Landmarks Preservation Commission has been de facto defunct for going on 20 years" through statistical analysis. How? Essentially he showed that the Commission has been steadily designating landmarks and landmark districts at the same level since 1994 and that the outer boroughs have been equally treated by LPC over the same time period; a direct answer to a couple of Wolfe's criticisms.

Of course, the problem with these statistics is that they only go back to 1994, which was at the beginning of the Giuliani/Raab era (long considered a dark period for historic preservation). In fact, when you look back through the commission's whole history, you find a completely different story. As we recently pointed out in our response to Chairman Tierney's own response to Wolfe , the past 20 years have seen 7,000 landmarks dedicated by the commission (350 per year). The previous 22 years saw 16,000 designations (727 per year). In essence, the commission is 52% less effective than it used to be! Sounds like Wolfe has some statistics on his side.

In addition, let's not forget the problems which can't be easily shown through numbers, such as the commission's Lack of Fairness , and its Lack of Independence . Of course, you can always analyze the numbers associated with the Commission's Lack of Resources, but those numbers don't paint a pretty picture.

Planyc 2030 and Preservation

On Tuesday, December 12th, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city will undertake an unprecedented long-term planning process to become sustainable by 2030 (tentatively known as Planyc 2030). The speech highlighted three major challenges facing the effort: rising population, aging infrastructure and environmental degredation, and proposed some lofty goals to improve housing, traffic, open space and air quality. Missing in his speech at this early time, was any mention of preserving the city's historic assets. In fact, the stated goal "Creating enough housing for almost a million more people, and finding even more creative ways to make housing more affordable for more New Yorkers." sounds a lot like the current development policy which has lead to historic buildings being destroyed in the name of the affordable housing crisis. There is still time to remind the administration that preservation and affordable housing can go hand in hand with a sustainable, livable city in 2030.

Read the Mayor's speech here .

Also, visit the official website of the 2030 planning effort. Even in this early phase, they are taking comments and suggestions. Tell the administration that historic preservation will play a critical role in our sustainable city in 2030 by clicking here .

Looking to the Future

Mayor Bloomberg made a significant speech yesterday which outlined the major challenges that the city will face over the next 25 years. You can read the speech or watch the video via Gotham Gazette here . More thoughts on how the Mayor's speech relates to preservation tomorrow.

Photo via nyc.gov.

Letter from Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation

We received this letter from Andrew Berman, Executive Director of GVSHP. We thought you might be interested in it:

Dear fellow preservationist,

As you may have heard, after finding sporadic cases over the years of landmarked buildings in our neighborhood not being marked as such in Department of Buildings (DOB) records, GVSHP recently conducted a survey of all buildings in the Greenwich Village Historic District. At over 2,200 buildings the Greenwich Village Historic District is one of the city’s largest historic districts, and one of the oldest, having been designated in 1969. We were shocked to discover that about 17% of the buildings in that district were NOT marked as landmarks in DOB records (see www.gvshp.org/landmarkrecords.htm ). This is particularly distressing because without DOB records showing a building as a landmark, it is possible for an owner to get permits from DOB that the LPC would never allow, including demolition and alteration permits, as we have seen happen in our neighborhood.

The response we have gotten to word of this has been tremendous, with many preservationists from across the City sharing similar stories with us about landmarked buildings in their neighborhoods not marked as such in DOB records, and the negative consequences. We have spoken to the LPC at length about this, and they have assured us that the problem has been corrected. However, I know from experience that there are ongoing problems with DOB records not listing a whole range of protected categories that they are supposed to, so I am skeptical that the problem has been permanently fixed and will stay fixed. Additionally, while the DOB records for the Village were being “corrected,” we found that several buildings that were supposedly fixed were not fixed, and several buildings that had been correctly listed as landmarks were “unmarked” as part of this “correction” process. We have asked the City Council to look into this problem, to help ensure that it is in fact permanently corrected Click here for letter .

However, in the meantime, many preservationists and organizations have asked us how we conducted our survey and how they might do the same, to help ensure that their buildings are all correctly marked and protected. I am therefore including below directions from Melissa Baldock, our Director of Preservation and Research who conducted our survey, on how you can survey your own landmarked buildings to see if they are correctly marked as such in DOB records. Please let me know what the results are of what you find, good or bad. If you have questions about how to conduct a survey or check for appropriate listing of your landmarked buildings, please don’t hesitate to contact Melissa at mbaldock@gvshp.org .

Best,
Andrew Berman, Executive Director
Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
212/475-9585 x38
232 East 11th Street
New York , NY 10003

1. You'll need a good map showing the Block and Lot numbers of the buildings within the historic district. The Sanborn maps are probably the easiest, but if you don't have those, you could always pull the maps from www.oasisnyc.net . You have to zoom into the scale of about .35 miles in order to get the block and lot lines to appear, and then be sure to click on the box on the side so that the labels for the block and lot appear on the map.

2. Go to DOB's BIS system online: http://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/bispi00.jsp . At the menu page for the Building Information Search, under #4, select the appropriate borough and put in a Block number for a block that is within your historic district, but leave the Lot number section blank. This will bring you a list of every single structure within the block, including backhouses and other accessory builidngs. The list includes whether or not the buildings are marked with an "L."

3. For those blocks which are all entirely within the historic district, every single building should be marked with an "L" but you may find buildings which aren't correctly marked. I found with the Village, that most of the time the unmarked buildings were on lots on which there were multiple buildings.

4. Repeat this process for each of the blocks in the historic district. It does become somewhat tricky when you are dealing with blocks that are partially in and partially out of the historic district. In those cases, you'll just have to be careful to determine which buildings/lots are inside and which are outside of the historic district.

5. If you are testing individual buildings rather than entire blocks, be sure to check the number of buildings on the lot. Once you're at the main information page for a building/lot, on the top middle is a category "Buildings on Lot ." If there is more than one building, you can click on the numeral and it will bring you to a list of buildings on the lot. BIS gives each separate structure its own Building Identification Number (or BIN) and each BIN within a landmarked lot should have an "L."

6. A list of any incorrectly “unmarked” buildings should be sent to Diane Jackier at the Landmarks Preservation Commission at DJackier@lpc.nyc.gov. We have found that LPC will generally respond to these lists very quickly and let you know when the corrections have been made, though you may want to then check yourself to see if they have all in fact been done correctly.

Help Build Our List

As part of CECPP's advocacy efforts, we have been putting together a list of buildings that have been lost due to LPC inaction and those that have been defaced by incorrect LPC action. Help us to educate the public on the city's landmark emergency by adding your list to ours. Please e-mail us your candidates for the emergency list. We'll soon be adding that list to our site and regularly updating it. In addition, in the near future, the sites will be plotted on a map on our site, using Google Maps . So, if you have photos of your sites, send those as well. Look for it soon!

Our Response to Chairman Tierney

Actually, this is our response to Landmarks Preservation Commission Chair Robert Tierney's Letter to the Editor, which was written in response to Tom Wolfe's Op-Ed in the New York Times. Confused? Here is Tierney's letter if you didn't see it:

Re “The (Naked) City and the Undead,” by Tom Wolfe (Op-Ed, Nov. 26):

Backed by the country’s strongest landmarks law, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has protected more than 7,000 historically, architecturally and culturally significant buildings and structures in the last 20 years alone.

The notion that the commission has been “defunct” for two decades simply doesn’t hold up.

In total, there are 23,000 designated landmarks in New York City. The commission is slated to designate over 1,000 more in the coming year, including the Crown Heights North section of Brooklyn, a historic district that is poised to become the city’s largest designation in more than a decade.

The commission works throughout the five boroughs and in close consultation with communities and other city agencies. This comprehensive approach ensures that we preserve what’s distinctive about our great city for future generations, even at a time of tremendous growth.

Robert B. Tierney
Chairman, N.Y.C. Landmarks Preservation Commission
New York, Nov. 27, 2006

Here's our response, which at this point may or may not be published in the New York Times. That's why we have this blog!

To the Editor:

Landmarks Preservation Commission Chairman Robert Tierney's response to Tom Wolfe's Op-Ed proves Wolfe's point. Tierney notes that in the last 20 years the Landmarks Preservation Commission has protected 7,000 of the 23,000 designated landmarks in the city. The implication is that, during the previous 22 years, greater than double that amount -16,000 structures - were protected. Mr. Tierney appropriately characterizes the last two decades as witnessing "tremendous growth", yet the "country's strongest landmarks law" was used half as much than in the previous decades. The Commission may not be dead but its life signs are weakening. The Citizens Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation has been formed to get the Commission off life support.

More on the Buildings Department

In the runup to filing our lawsuit , we missed this article in the New York Times regarding more troubles at the Department of Buildings (DOB).
The story focused on the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation,(GVSHP) which recently conducted a field study of all of the buildings within the Greenwich Village Historic District. Upon completing the survey, they found that as many as 17% of the buildings in the district were not marked as landmarks within the DOB database, leaving them vulnerable to development.
Other shocking findings:

* 10% of all buildings in the Gansevoort Market Historic District were not listed as landmarks in the DOB system,

* Amoung the 337 buildings not properly listed in the Greenwich Village Historic District, a number of the buildings were located on some the most beautiful streets in the city, like Washington Square North and the Washington Mews,

* A second review of DOB's records found that 79 sites were incorrectly listed after GVSHP had been told they we fixed. In addition, they found that 29 buildings which had previously been correctly marked as landmarks were “unmarked” as such in DOB records as part of the “fixing” process!

Apparently, GVSHP raised these findings at this week's City Council Forum on DOB. Thank you!

Now, of course, these findings are not directly related to our campaign agenda . But it does certainly add to the city's growing landmarks emergency!

Lawsuit Press Coverage...So Far

As you probably already know, yesterday the Citizens Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation filed a petition to force Mayor Bloomberg to reappoint or replace the 8 Landmark Commissioners whose terms have expired.

Coverage has been bouncing around the blogosphere a bit. Thus far it was written about in Brownstoner.com and Gothamist.com. Below we have provided direct links to the articles:

Gothamist: "Preservation Group Sues Bloomie"

Brownstoner: "Mayor Bloomberg Sued By Preservationists"

2:30 PM Update: Curbed.com linked to the Brownstoner piece this afternoon. It's not worth linking to because, well, it will just go to the Brownstoner link above.

CECPP v Bloomberg

Today, the Citizens Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation filed a Write of Mandamus petition before the Supreme Court of the State of New York to force Mayor Bloomberg to reappoint or replace Commissioners of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) whose terms have expired. This is the first step in our efforts to ensure that LPC is more Independent . Why is this important?

1. Delay in re-appointing or replacing LPC Commissioners whose terms have expired has a negative and harmful effect on the Commission’s independence and effectiveness; undermines the lawful functioning of City government; and circumvents checks and balances that are an essential component of popular democracy. At this time, 8 of the 11 Commissioners have expired terms.

2. Holdover Commissioners who desire to be re-appointed are vulnerable to direct and indirect pressures from City Hall and from developers who have made large campaign contributions to the Mayor’s election and re-election.

3. Holdover Commissioners who do not desire to be re-appointed are susceptible to distractions from other interests.

4. Long delays in making appointments or re-appointments to the Commission destroys accountability to the people of the City by thwarting the advice and consent responsibilities of the City Council and, even more significantly, by denys citizens their opportunity to participate in public hearings guaranteed by the City Charter.

Need we say more?

A big thanks to all who signed the petition and joined our efforts.

To view a copy of the petition, click here .

This Day (Yesterday) in Preservation History

On December 3, 1964, some 42 years ago, New York preservationists showed up in force at City Hall to testify in support of the then proposed Landmarks Law. Seven hours later, after 84 people had testified for the legislation and five spoke against it, the historic hearing came to a close. Despite that show of support, New York's landmarks law was still several demolitions and months away from being passed. The same type of intense and overwhelming show of preservation force displayed at that hearing in December of 1964 is needed now to help stop the erosion of the law that New Yorker's worked so long and hard to achieve. Without adequate funding , transparency, and independence, the Landmarks Preservation Commission cannot make the promise of our landmarks law the reality that it needs to be. As we've seen, buildings the law should have saved are still regularly being lost. Like those 84 preservationists at the hearing, we all need to stand up and be counted. Join our efforts!

Reminder: Tonight is the City Council Public Forum on the Department of Buildings. Details are available here .

Important Department of Buildings Hearing!

The Historic Districts Council Blog is reporting that the City Council will be holding a Public Forum on the Department of Buildings on Monday, December 4th at University Hall (110 East 14th Street, just east of 4th Avenue).

Why is this important for preservation advocates? Just think of how many times developers were able to get permits to demolish or alter buildings that were being considered by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Clearly, this is a government loophole that has to be closed and a unified voice from the preservation community at this forum could be a good first step to getting it done.

If you have the time, consider attending the forum and saying a few words.

For more details, click here .