Why the hell is this 18th century church in Elmhurst not landmarked?

Jim Henderson/Wikipedia

"St. James Church in Elmhurst is looking to develop its property where the old church (later parish hall) sits.

It was built in 1735 and is the oldest surviving Anglican building in the City of New York.

In all likelihood, it will be necessary to tear down the Old Parish Hall to make the property attractive to developers.

The property is on the national register, but does NOT have landmark status by the city, and could be torn down. The building is probably one of the oldest buildings standing in Elmhurst, and one of a few historical buildings left in Elmhurst." - anonymous

Ok, so if the Landmarks Conservancy and the state paid for a full restoration, then why has this building not been designated, Ms. Mary Beth Betts?

Ecclesiastical architecture is threatened citywide

From the NY Post:

Preservationists are raising hell to protect the city’s historic churches as parishes in desirable areas close and developers snatch up the holy properties.

Chelsea neighbors are fighting a proposed 11-story tower above the 150-year-old French Evangelical Church, which has struggled to pay for repairs and sold its air rights to survive. Residents say the plans are “atrocious” and want the Presbytery of New York City to try a Hail Mary.

“It’s not just about the preservation of this block — it’s about all the city’s historic churches,” said Paul Groncki of the 16th Street Block Association.

“They’re an important part of the fabric of our neighborhoods, and we don’t want to see them disappear. This church will disappear if it’s encased in concrete.”

The New York Landmarks Conservancy surveyed 1,200 significant religious sites across the city and found that more than two dozen historically or architecturally important churches have been shuttered or destroyed in the past decade. And Brooklyn parishes are especially in danger, said Ann Friedman, who runs the conservancy’s Sacred Sites program.

“We are going to see a lot of development and loss,” she said. “We can’t just sit back and wring our hands.”

Landmarking advocates vs. real estate interests

From Crains:

Major players on both sides of the long-running debate over the future of landmarking in New York City repeatedly butted heads at a forum Tuesday morning, but on one thing they surprisingly agreed: The landmarking process itself is in sore need for reform and improvement.

For decades the city's development community has complained about a range of issues regarding the city Landmarks Preservation Commission's operations, including an extreme lack of certainty about timeframes of the decision-making process—some items have been under consideration for decades—as well as the commission's criteria for either designating a building or a district as historic. But since the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has focused on increased housing development—particularly the affordable variety—that process has come under heightened scrutiny. It comes as the mayor's choice to chair the commission, Meenakshi Srinivan, is about to take over the commission, and perhaps suggest changes of her own.

But other than a common desire to make some fixes to the commission, including possibly paying its volunteer commissioners in order to bring a higher degree of professionalism, the forum was largely dominated by drastically different viewpoints.

Ms. Breen and the Municipal Art Society's Ronda Wist argued that far from hindering the city's economic advancement, landmarking is a plus not just for drawing tourists but also new hi-tech firms. Both noted that older, quirky buildings not modern glass-box office buildings are in high demand from young tech companies and their employees.

On the other side, Mr. Spinola along with Kenneth Jackson, a long-time professor of New York history and social science at Columbia University, as well as Nikolai Fedak, founder and editor of New York YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), argued that landmarking can stifle development and economic growth. Mr. Spinola also noted a recent REBNY-commissioned study that concluded that aggressive landmarking was hurting housing development. Among other things, that report found that in the last decade in Manhattan a total of just five units of affordable housing had been constructed in landmarked districts.

Aluminum house to go before LPC

From the NY Times:

This isn’t a case of Nimby, the neighbors in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, say. It’s more a matter of namby.

Some residents are upset about a plan to build a two-story, eight-unit apartment house at 39th Avenue and 50th Street, in the Sunnyside Gardens Historic District.

What has galvanized opposition is a gesture that was supposed to make the project palatable: In the crook of the L-shape apartment house, the architects Frances Campani and Michael Schwarting would reconstruct the vestiges of the groundbreaking prefabricated, all-aluminum Aluminaire House of 1931.

“How can a house that in some ways resembles a spaceship be plopped down in the middle of this neighborhood?” asked City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who represents Sunnyside Gardens.

The proposal is scheduled to go before the Landmarks Preservation Commission on Tuesday.

The heads of two influential preservation groups, the Historic Districts Council and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, said they did not support the Aluminaire House plan. Still, almost everyone hopes it will have another life.

“The Aluminaire House is architecturally significant,” Councilman Van Bramer said. “It should be restored and put on display for people to learn about, enjoy and experience. However, that should be done somewhere else.”

Have landmarking advocates gone too far?

From the NY Post:

In their frenzy to derail the decades-overdue rezoning of the Grand Central district, three esteemed preservationist groups are making utter fools of themselves.

Altogether, The Municipal Art Society, the New York Landmarks Conservancy and the Historic District Council are asking the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to prohibit four dozen East Midtown buildings from ever being demolished or altered.

Worse, the groups can’t agree on which properties are worth immortalizing. In fact, their most recent wish-lists are laughably at odds.

“Save the masterpieces from the bulldozers!” is the rallying cry. We’re told that allowing larger new office buildings in the 78-block area will mean wholesale demolition of supposedly architecturally distinguished structures — or even, God forbid, cast shadows over them.

But the incoherence of the wish-lists exposes the truth: This campaign is really about thwarting zoning changes needed to reverse the Grand Central district’s slide into obsolescence. (Buildings there average 60-plus years old and are increasingly unsuited to modern office use).

The preservationist hysteria is a just handy tool to spook the City Council into voting down the rezoning later this year. That’s clear when you examine the three groups’ recommendations.

Together, they call for 48 total buildings to be landmarked. But of the “inviolable” 48, the organizations agree on just six — that’s how many show up on all three lists.

Sure, we all have our favorites, but wouldn’t you expect somewhat more of a consensus? Landmarking even a single site has profound, permanent consequences and shouldn’t be taken lightly — which is why the Landmarks Commission sometimes takes years to act.

In fact, the all-over-the-map choices illustrate how treacherously subjective landmark-worthiness can be.

Teardown target: Midtown

From the NY Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s push to increase development in east Midtown would threaten some of the very buildings that give the neighborhood its character, preservation groups and community boards warn.

The buildings include the Barclay Hotel, the Yale Club, Brooks Brothers flagship store and the Graybar Building, which many New Yorkers may think — incorrectly — are protected as landmarks already.

The proposal is intended to provide a legacy of the Bloomberg administration by ensuring that the area around Grand Central Terminal stays on a competitive footing with business centers worldwide. It would increase the maximum allowable building density by 60 percent for some large sites near the terminal. Potential density would be increased 44 percent along an 11-block stretch of Park Avenue. Lesser increases would take effect elsewhere in the area between East 39th and East 57th Streets and between Fifth and Second Avenues, although most of the easternmost residential blocks would not be affected.

Such increases in density — meaning higher potential profits for landlords down the road — would give builders an incentive to spend the time and money needed to assemble large development parcels and then empty and demolish the buildings on them. The New York City Planning Department has identified projected and potential development sites in the area (on page 26 of this PDF).

In turn, the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy pinpointed more than a dozen buildings over which the shadow of demolition would most likely fall.

New face for old synagogue

From the NY Times:

Twenty years ago, it seemed that Congregation Tifereth Israel in Corona, thought to be the oldest synagogue in Queens, was headed for a date with a wrecking ball. Its Ashkenazi Jewish congregation — whose early members included the teenager who would become Estée Lauder — had dwindled to just a few. The wooden building, coated in 1929 with an unfortunate blanket of stucco, was in disrepair.

But in the late 1990s, a charismatic kosher butcher and rabbi from Central Asia moved to the area and slowly transformed the synagogue into the spiritual home of a community of impoverished Bukharan Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Soon, the rabbi’s wife figured out that in America, there was a way to save such a historic building.

Esther Khaimov, the rabbi’s wife, called the New York Landmarks Conservancy for help and combed through city records to find the building’s original 1911 architectural plans, according to Ann-Isabel Friedman, who guided the project for the conservancy. After years of work, the building was given city landmark status in 2008 and then raised enough state, city and private grants to pay for a $1.6 million exterior renovation.

On Wednesday, Mrs. Khaimov and her husband, Rabbi Amnon Khaimov, helped preside over a ribbon cutting for their restored synagogue. At 5 p.m. Rabbi Khaimov nailed the final nail into a mezuza, the ritual prayer scroll Jews affix to entranceways, on the synagogue’s front door frame. There is still no boiler in the building — that might have to wait until next year — but the restored siding glows sky blue, and the decorative ornament at its gabled parapet, at one point lost to time, is back in gleaming gold.

St. George to be restored

From the Queens Courier:

The New York Landmarks Conservancy has announced 23 Sacred Sites Grants totaling $294,500 awarded to historic religious properties throughout New York State, including St. George’s Church in Flushing.

“You don’t have to be religious to understand that religious institutions contain some of our finest art and architecture. Many also provide vital social service programs and cultural activities that make significant contributions to their communities,” said Peg Breen, president of The New York Landmarks Conservancy.

St. George’s Church was pledged a $25,000 Robert W. Wilson Sacred Sites Challenge Grant for additional masonry on a wood steeple and spire restoration project atop the stone tower. The steeple was destroyed during a tornado in 2010 that touched down in Queens and Brooklyn.

Preservationists & affordable housing folks both peeved by bill

From the NY Observer:

The organization that represents the state's affordable-housing industry, the New York State Association for Affordable Housing, is displeased with a provision in the revenue bill under consideration in Albany, as are advocates of historic preservation such as the New York Landmarks Conservancy.

The revenue bill offers one of the more blatant forms of what is, by most any definition, borrowing. (Remember: Many in Albany, particularly in the Senate, refused the Ravitch plan because it contained borrowing.)

The bill would defer the payment of tax credits to private firms for things like construction on polluted sites, creation of affordable housing, and historic preservation until 2013—delaying a bill now while adding to the long-term bill later on. This doesn't actually save much money—it just means that the state pushes its bills three years down the line.

With that said, the deferment would likely discourage some investment in the short term, which is the complaint of the preservationists and the affordable-housing developers. The bill restricts payment to $2 million in credits per taxpayer right now, which means any one developer would be restricted to that $2 million regardless of how many properties he or she is working on.

Groups want Tammany Hall landmarked

From The Villager:

Preservation advocates are renewing their 25-year campaign to get Tammany Hall, the Colonial revival-style building on E. 17th St. at Union Square East, built in 1928 for the New York City Democratic Party, designated as a city landmark.

During the past three months, advocates including the Union Square Community Coalition, Gramercy Neighborhood Associates, Municipal Art Society, the Historic Districts Council and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, have written letters to the Landmarks Preservation Commission renewing their support for landmarking the building now serving as the home of the New York Film Academy and the Union Square Theater.

“We’ve been at it, off and on, since 1985,” said Jack Taylor, a member of the U.S.C.C. board of directors and chairperson of the coalition’s historic preservation committee. “In the past few months we’ve also received political support for landmarking the building from Councilmember Rosie Mendez, state Senator Tom Duane and Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh,” Taylor said.

There are also 12 individually landmarked buildings around Union Square, Taylor said, adding, “We want Tammany Hall to be the 13th.”

Hey readers, how many individually landmarked buildings are in your communities?

Landmarking, pro and con

The NY Post published pro and con op-eds regarding landmarking this weekend.

Is anyone surprised that the pro landmarking position was written by the president of a Manhattan-based preservation group and the con position was taken by a Queens lawyer?