What’s new at NYU? Part II
by Sandy Ikeda
Mon, 12 May 2008
Two protesters stood outside Hemmerdinger Hall, where the fifth open house for "Plan NYU 2031" took place recently, handing out literature from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.
Their objections to the Plan center on (and here I'm paraphrasing from one of the handouts) NYU's not trying hard enough to find locations outside the core Greenwich Village neighborhood to absorb future growth, placing too much emphasis on new construction rather than re-using existing buildings, and targeting the historic Provincetown Playhouse for demolition to make way for redevelopment — all in violation of the "planning principles" to which the University agreed with the "NYU Community Task Force," of which the GVSHP is a member. The Villager, a neighborhood paper, reported on local reaction to the Plan in "Tenants Freak Out at Meeting on Washington Square Village Plans."
As I blogged last week, however, the Plan seems mostly about undoing some (though not the most important) of the gross blunders city planners committed in the 1950s and '60s. The GVSHP's underlying concern, however, is to preserve the scale and character of the neighborhood. But what can preservationists preserve? (I spoke to this briefly in my last post.)
The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is the political authority in charge of stopping unwanted change in the City's built environment. According to its website: "The Landmarks Preservation Commission is the New York City agency responsible for identifying and designating the city's landmarks and the buildings in the city's historic districts." (See the website for specific objectives, many of which are aimed at promoting economic vitality.) It preserves or "landmarks" both individual buildings and entire districts.
The website also provides a bit of the Commission's history: The Landmarks Preservation Commission was established in 1965 when Mayor Robert Wagner signed the local law creating the Commission and giving it its power. The Landmarks Law was enacted in response to New Yorkers' growing concern that important physical elements of the City's history were being lost despite the fact that these buildings could be reused. Events like the demolition of the architecturally distinguished Pennsylvania Station in 1963 increased public awareness of the need to protect the city's architectural, historical, and cultural heritage. So it was created in response to the sort of heavy-handed urban planning that gave rise to the problem NYU's Plan is attempting to undo. Seems to me that that's something the Commission and the Plan have in common. It would be ironic if the former now stood in the way of the latter.
The Sun's Francis Morrone writes in "Questioning the Role of Preservation" that even a Columbia University historian, Kenneth Jackson, has argued that, as Mr. Morrone summarizes it, "the cost-benefit ratio of rampant landmarking puts undue value on the preservation of sometimes obscure cultural relics over a global city's pressing economic needs."
There's an interesting natural experiment in Soho that an article in this Sunday's New York Times, "Not exactly the Wild West," discusses. One side of West Broadway (the east), between Houston and Canal Streets, has been "protected" against unbridled development since 1973 while the other side (the west) has not. The punch line is that today it's very hard to tell which is which.
I do think there's a role for a neighborhood association to command, through persuasion or purchase or bribery, a property in order to preserve a part of its "built heritage." Although the Landmarks Commission does this using political power, I think this might still preserve what the preservationists want to preserve without too much damage (though the real cost tends to be hidden and larger than one might expect) when the scale is very small.
On the other hand, creating or expanding a landmark district through fiat to preserve the "scale and character of a neighborhood" is highly problematic. In my last post I wrote that a living city is always becoming and that you can't preserve something that's still alive. The most we can hope to do through deliberate intervention is to alter the direction of that becoming without knowing exactly where this will lead. We can't simply preserve what we like about a city without creating unforeseen consequences (a "Franken-city"?). Even at the district level, the effective district-scale landmarking is in "preservation," will stifle the spontaneous and the controversial — hallmarks of the old, funky Greenwich Village. Trusting in unplanned emergence is risky, but life's like that.
***
NYU president, John Sexton, has secured a "gift" of $50 million from the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi as part of a deal that includes the compete financing of an identical campus in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. According to an article in New York magazine: Within less than three years, NYU plans to more or less clone itself in Abu Dhabi, thereby becoming the first major U.S. research institution to open a complete liberal-arts university off American soil. … NYU will treat its offshore campus as virtually equal to its New York campus. Now this looks like the exact opposite of landmarking because there's nothing being preserved. Indeed, given the penchant in that part of the world right now for what I've called "giga-projects" (see my post on Dubai), the new campus will undoubtedly go up where there are now no buildings or perhaps even no city. But I think the fundamental issue (and problem) is the same: It's just as hard to re-create a living thing as it is to preserve it. Well, we'll see. In the meantime: Yabba Abu Dhabi!
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