Advocacy group selects areas in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island as meriting preservation attention in 2013. The Historic Districts Council announced its “Six to Celebrate” list of preservation priorities on January 3, 2013. The areas identified by HDC consist of the Bronx Parks System, Manhattan’s East Village/Lower East Side and Tribeca neighborhoods, Brooklyn’s Greenpoint and Sunset Park neighborhoods, and Harrison Street in Staten Island.

The six areas were chosen from applications submitted by neighborhood groups around the city. The selected preservation targets will be commemorated at an event held by HDC on January 29, 2013. (more…)

Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council

Since its adoption in 1965, the New York City Landmarks Law has been amended several times. In 1973, the Landmarks Preservation Commission was allowed to designate landmarks as part of its regular schedule rather than having to wait three years between designation hearings, as had previously been the case, and also gained the ability to designate publicly owned parks and publicly accessible interiors as landmarks. In 1997, the agency gained the ability to enforce the law with civil fines, and in 2005, this ability was extended to cases of demolition by neglect. All these amendments extended the powers of the Landmarks Preservation Commission and strengthened the agency. The same cannot be said of the many reforms proposed by the City Council earlier this year.

On May 2, 2012, the City Council held a joint meeting of the Housing and Land Use Committees to deliberate on eleven previously introduced and brand new bills, ranging from the benign to the emasculating, all related to the workings of Landmarks. The hearing lasted almost five hours and over 50 people from neighborhoods across New York testified on the bills, almost unanimously in opposition. The only people testifying in favor of the bills were representatives of the Real Estate Board of New York, who had recently organized the “Responsible Landmarks Coalition,” a gathering of real estate and development interests whose “Proactive Policy Agenda” closely mirrors the most damaging of the reform proposals. For the purposes of summation, I have divided the eleven bills into three sets.

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Carol Clark

Carol Clark, Assistant Commissioner for Land Use and Local Governmental Affairs with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, serves as one of the agency’s vital ambassadors to the City Council. The Council must review HPD’s affordable housing development initiatives that involve the disposition of City-owned properties or the grant of tax exemptions. Clark arrived at HPD ten years ago with an extensive background in architecture, historic preservation, planning, and real estate development.

Architectural base. Clark grew up in the suburbs outside Detroit, Michigan. As a child on family trips to the city, she was captivated by the architecture of downtown Detroit’s skyscrapers. Clark’s interest in architecture led her to study architectural history at the University of Michigan. As an undergraduate, Clark became aware of the emerging efforts to restore and adaptively reuse historic buildings. When Clark learned that Columbia University offered the nation’s first graduate program in historic preservation, she knew a move to New York City would soon follow. Columbia accepted Clark, and she moved to the City in 1975.  (more…)

Fran Leadon

Fran Leadon, architect and professor at City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture, coauthored the fifth edition of the American Institute of Architects Guide to New York City along with Norval White, who passed away prior to its publication in 2010. The Guide, published by Oxford University Press, is a comprehensive, and compulsively readable, handbook to the City’s architecturally significant buildings and spaces. It was created in 1968 by former Landmarks Preservation Commission Vice Chair Elliot Willensky, and architect and professor Norval White. The Guide offers opinionated descriptions of important buildings spanning architectural styles, interspersed with historical tidbits, editorials, and advice for the reader. Sitting on the Brooklyn promenade with a view of the Manhattan skyline, Leadon spoke with CityLand about the Guide, historic preservation, and his concerns about development trends in the City.

Involvement with the Guide. Leadon describes the Guide as “taking a snapshot every ten years of what the City is like.” He became involved in the Guide through mutual acquaintances of Norval White at City College, where White had chaired the architecture program, and where Leadon teaches design studio and architectural history. Although White retired two years before Leadon joined the faculty, many of Leadon’s colleagues had been former students of White.  (more…)

Parks intends to preserve community gardens under its jurisdiction. There are more than 600 community gardens participating in the City’s GreenThumb Program. Since 2001, gardens on City-owned lots have been administered pursuant to practices memorialized in a 2002 agreement between the City and the State Attorney General’s Office, which expired on September 17, 2010. Prior to its expiration, the Department of Parks and Recreation published a new set of rules that codified and strengthened the agreement’s practices and established formal regulations for administering the 283 gardens under Parks’ jurisdiction.

The new rules require Parks to renew the license of any community garden as long as it satisfies the registration criteria. If a garden fails to comply with the registration criteria, or the garden is abandoned, Parks will attempt to identify a new group to take over the garden. The rules also increase Parks’ responsibility for identifying alternate garden sites in the event that an existing garden’s lot is transferred or developed. The 2002 agreement’s Garden Review Process required Parks to provide the garden’s representative with a list of available vacant City-owned land within a half-mile radius, if any existed. Under the new process, if no vacant lots are identified within a half-mile radius, Parks will extend its search to the entire community district. According to the new rule’s statement of purpose, Parks intends to preserve all active gardens that are in good standing. Parks will only apply the transfer provisions to abandoned or persistently noncomplying gardens and only if it has been unable to identify a new group to care for the garden. (more…)