As Village Preservation has documented, the Landmarks “Preservation” Commission has come to the end of the road. In fact, it might now be described as the place where NYC landmark preservation goes to die.
Requests for designation are now met by Landmarks with a hailstorm of derision and denial, in which they try vainly to question indisputable facts of history. It’s difficult to take a stroll in Manhattan without encountering the now-vacant site of a designation-worthy building.
Waking east on 57th Street today, I saw four huge empty development sites, one of which formerlly contained the original1912 Henri Bendel department store. In 2017, Manhattan Community Board 5 recommended that Bendel’s be granted landmark status, but the LPC, then run by the completely discredited Meenakshi Srinivasan–Mayor De Blasio’s first pick to destroy the Commission–refused.
Furthermore, the old brick house that stood just west of Bergdorf Goodman has been torn down and replaced with a medium-sized tower. It had a plaque on it designating its historical significance; I don’t know if it was an official NYC landmark.
Taking a bus down Fifth Avenue, I saw that the unique 574, an 1890s holdover about which I wrote in 2018, has now been demolished as part of an enormous block-wide clearance.
Mamdani better wake up soon and realize that mammoth luxury redevelopment is the enemy of an affordable city. And he needs to appoint a legitimate preservation officer as LPC Chair to replace the disgraced Sarah Carroll, who succeeded Srinivasan and then presided from 2018-2025 over the darkest, most shameful period yet in the history of the LPC. Designations fell to an all-time low, and Carroll starting signing off on the demolition of officially-designated landmarks, colluding with developers to rob the public of its history, its cityscape, its architectural and cultural inheritance.
You can be sure that the corporate media will give these essential issues only the bare minimum of coverage, since their executive boards are made up of finance and development personnel.