The battle lines were familiar. Churning out petitions and clamoring at hearings, hundreds of city residents had mobilized to protest a plan by St. Vincent’s Hospital to replace nine buildings in the Greenwich Village Historic District with a 20-story medical center and condominiums.
Preserving the City
A Balancing ActThis is the fourth and final article in a series examining the workings of New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
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A HOT SEAT, SOMETIMES Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.
On the other side were the Rudin Management Company, one of the city’s largest developers, and St. Vincent’s, which argued that a new building and income from the condo deal were vital to saving the hospital and meeting Manhattan’s health needs.
In the middle, as usual, was the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which was struggling this year to make a judgment call under the klieg lights as city politicians took positions for and against.
Over a decade of whirlwind development, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has repeatedly played dance partner to a potent mix of preservationists, developers and city politicians. It must strike a balance between protecting architecture and accepting economic realities, between a responsibility to history and a knowledge that the city must evolve.
“It’s the way government is,” said Robert B. Tierney, an appointee of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who has been the chairman of the landmarks commission since 2003. “It’s making choices and, without unlimited resources, having to make those choices and being able to do some things and not do other things.”
In the case of St. Vincent’s, the commission initially rejected the hospital’s plan, objecting to the height and bulk of the new buildings and invoking the aesthetic value of the old ones. Then St. Vincent’s reduced the scale of its project and resubmitted an application for permission to demolish the O’Toole building, the likely site for the new 20-story medical tower, citing physical hardship. A distinctive, sawtooth-sided low white 1964 structure on Seventh Avenue between 12th and 13th Streets, the O’Toole is valued by many Village residents and devotees of midcentury Modernism.
Riven on the issue, the commission assented to its demolition last month in a 6-to-4 vote.
Further approval is still needed from city and state agencies.
“This is the real world, where there are pressures,” said Christopher Moore, who voted with the majority and has served as a commissioner since 1995. “And sometimes you have to give squares to get squares.”
Yet some preservationists and politicians assert that, under a mayoral administration that has emphasized new construction — from behemoth stadiums to architecturally bold condo towers — big developers have too often been allowed to lead on the dance floor. Some accuse the landmarks commission, charged with guarding the city’s architectural heritage, of backing off too readily when important developers’ interests are at stake.
“The real estate industry controls the agenda in the city,” said Tony Avella, a city councilman from Queens. “If they don’t want something to happen, it doesn’t happen. They pull the strings from behind the scenes, whether in rezoning reform or landmarking. It’s just incredible how much influence they have.”
“The direction comes from the mayor, and the mayor’s pro-development,” Mr. Avella added.
Patricia E. Harris, the first deputy mayor, who oversees the commission, counters that the administration has been vigilant in protecting the city’s landmarks. “We don’t think about development without thinking about preservation,” she said in an e-mail message. (She agreed to reply only to questions submitted in writing.) “During a time of unprecedented growth, preservation has always been front and center.”
Even as preservationists argue that development has trumped preservation under Mayor Bloomberg, some architectural historians suggest that the traditional divide between the two should be rethought.
Preserving sections of old New York can actually spur economic renewal, they say, citing areas like TriBeCa, where the designation of a new historic district in 1992 accelerated the area’s transformation into one of the city’s most sought-after neighborhoods.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 5, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about competing pressures facing the
