Somewhat surprisingly, in recent weeks, the fate of the Plaza Hotel has become a cause celebre. First the impending closure of several of the building’s public spaces led to speculation about changes to the Plaza’s fabled interior. The scheme that the developer, Elad Properties, outlined last week seems to have allayed many of the initial concerns, though in fact it calls for extensive changes to most other parts of the landmark.

In particular, the plan includes the conversion of the majority of the interior space into condominiums, the addition of ground-floor commercial space and the retention of a smaller, 150-room hotel. While the merits of the plan are one thing (and let it be said that street-level shops sound like a bad and irremunerative idea), most commentators seem more interested in the moral dilemma posed by the planned modifications.

The facade of the Plaza has been a landmark for more than 30 years; none of its interiors are. Ought the municipality to intervene and landmark some of them, as it has already done with the exterior and with some 100 other interiors around town? From a purely aesthetic standpoint, is the ballroom on the same standing as the Great Hall of Grand Central Station, or the lobby of the Chrysler Building? And if so, what about the presidential suite?

I am not certain of the answer. As with many calls for preservation – of the Huntington Hartford building at 2 West Columbus Circle, for example – I can think of potent justification both to preserve and to allow alterations to the existing structure. On the other hand, I am enough of a libertarian to share with the proprietors of this paper a basic faith in the free market.

The dilemma before us is one that pits an overeager and often meddlesome Landmarks Commission against the principle that owners should have the right to do as they please with their property, especially the portion that is not visible from the street. While I personally have no deep-rooted philosophical objection to the city’s stepping in, I am well aware – as many who call for preservation are not – that it is very easy for those of us with no stake in the venture to call for landmark status. Would we be singing the same tune if the property were ours?

This is the emotional thrust of the libertarian argument: a well-founded suspicion of the motives of do-gooders in city government, whom it costs nothing to trammel up developers and who seem to do so with an enthusiasm that has veered at times from ideological fervor to perverse sport.

The problem is that you cannot eat your cake and have it, which means, stricto sensu, that once you have eradicated a building, whether on the interior or the exterior, you can never bring it back. For that reason, no sensible person would deny that landmarking and preserving buildings is a good idea to one degree or another.

The libertarian argument, to the extent that it accepts the premise of landmarking, is that while the exteriors are the public faces of buildings and thus impinge upon the public realm, the same cannot be said of interiors. But buildings are, after all, unified and self-consistent organisms (even if, throughout history, better buildings than Hardenburgh’s Plaza have been systematically subverted and betrayed by tactless additions and revisions). To separate interior from exterior may be a practical compromise, but it is an aesthetic error.

The real importance of the Plaza, even more than the imposing manner in which it occupies its highly visible corner at 59th Street, is that it is virtually the only surviving example of the Grand Hotels that were so essential to the life and spirit of New York in the early years of the 20th-century.

Nothing, not even the mansions along Fifth Avenue, proclaimed the imperious fortunes of the Gilded Age as eloquently as these hotels – and all of them, with the exception of the Plaza and the Saint Regis, have disappeared. In virtue of their elongated massings, mandated by the legislation of 1916, the Waldorf, Pierre, and Sherry Netherland, whatever their virtues, simply do not preside as majestically as the mostly vanished hotels of one or two generations before.

In the case of such a building as the Plaza, it seems to me that the interests of the preservationists and the building’s proprietors are ultimately aligned. The plain fact is that the Plaza’s Ball Room and Oak Bar can hardly serve any other function than those for which they were created in the first place. And if they are to be pressed once more into those functions, there is a compelling logic to keep them as they are. (As, indeed, it now seems Elad Properties will do).

The ultimate realty value of the Plaza, especially if it becomes condominiums, stands to be more diminished than enhanced by the alteration or eradication of the building’s public spaces. Realty is such a spectral, immaterial confection of whim, snobbery, and sentiment that any great change would rob the Plaza of the “emblematic” status that is precisely its main selling point.