Aby Rosen’s Retreat

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The New York Sun

The Landmarks Commission has gotten New York into another fine mess. Developer and art collector Aby Rosen’s new plan for the Parke-Bernet Gallery at 980 Madison Avenue is the architectural equivalent of retreat. For the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that looks more and more like a mausoleum, the building is a bronze tombstone.

In 2006, Mr. Rosen and architect Lord Norman Foster made waves with a plan for a 30-story elliptical tower to be built out of the limestone base of the Parke-Bernet Gallery, a building that would have contained 18 multi-million-dollar condominiums. Mr. Rosen, who restored Lever House and the Seagram Building, both landmarks, promised a new neighborhood icon.

But neighbors and preservationists came out against the plan in force, complaining of “a glass dagger plunged into the heart of the Upper East Side” and “a palace for plutocrats.” Neighborhood resident Tom Wolfe emerged to pen a 3,496-word op-ed in the New York Times attacking the proposal.

Mr. Rosen fought back. “The galleries are fleeing, the restaurants are not there. Every street has no life. By 7 o’clock it’s dead there,” he said. The Landmarks Commission should enable developers to blend the new with the old. If not, he added, “We will be living in a medieval town in 50 or a hundred years.”

In January 2007, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission found the proposal at odds with neighborhood character, and forcefully sent Messrs. Rosen and Foster back to the drawing board. The pair’s new plan, a shorter and more mundane design, is for what they are now seeking approval. Wrapped in glass and bands the color of polarized lenses, the new addition resembles a Westchester county office park, or on top of its limestone base, a stack of shoeboxes. The old design was set back and allowed more light into the street.

It looks to us like Mr. Rosen is over-conceding to his opponents, but why should he be put in such a position? He bought the five-story Parke-Bernet Gallery for about $120 million in 2005. Like many in the real estate business today, Mr. Rosen is probably feeling the pressure of a slowing economy, the fallout of the subprime crisis, and the drying up of project financing. He needs to get his plan approved.

Several of area’s preservation groups now support the truncated design, but some residents calling themselves New Yorkers for Responsible Development say the five-story addition is too tall and doesn’t mesh with the neighborhood character. Mr. Wolfe made his way Tuesday to a public hearing Downtown to ask the architect “to roam through the great archives of architectural history, or architectural future, and come up with something that has more meaning with the Upper East Side.”

Maybe Mr. Rosen ought to tell Mr. Wolfe how to phrase his next novel. Nowhere in chapter 74 of the city’s administrative code does it say that historic districts forbid development, but not-in-my-backyard enthusiasts and their hired guns on “preservation” groups are employing the law as such. The law requires that the design be “appropriate” to its surroundings. Under this open-ended definition, our plain-language view of the law would suggest that both new and old designs may pass muster.

Surely the new design will be approved, and eventually built, as a glaring example of regulation stifling innovation. The Landmarks Commission, in trying to preserve character, will end up destroying it by promoting grim uniformity over the serendipitous juxtaposition of different forms that help make a city a lively place.


The New York Sun

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