No one ever said New York City was paradise, but within the cityscape are places that lend solace to those of us drawn here by passion or necessity. Girding ourselves against the smell of piss, the push of crowds, and the cost of living, each one of us seeks our own small paradise in which to hide away. To lovers of design, fashion, art, architecture and all things beautiful, Rizzoli Bookstore was one such Eden. For 29 years, celebrities, book worms and heads of state have rubbed elbows and found inspiration under the bookstore’s delicate ornamental ceiling and graceful chandeliers, making Rizzoli a veritable cathedral to the book. But forces are at play that threaten to cast us from this paradise.
Looming over this sacred secular space is the great beast of development. Voracious in its appetite for profitable square footage in any form, this amorphous creature stalks New York City’s noteworthy townhouses, old churches, public buildings, and anything it can repurpose to its own material ends, gobbling up icons of our past. The scourge of unchecked development takes many seemingly benign forms, often lulling the public’s civic representatives into a compliant stupor with the Faustian bargain of job creation and an increased tax base in exchange for our city’s very soul.
Last November, the beast reared its head in the form of the Lefrak and Vornado Real Estate Trust. (I dub the monster: Fraknado). Rizzoli, one of the last remaining independent bookstores in Manhattan—a borough well-known for its literary pedigree as the home of America’s publishing industry—is facing eviction and its building had been marked for demolition by Fraknado, the owner of the property. Specializing in the kind of bland luxury commercial and residential real estate that is homogenizing skylines everywhere, Fraknado is poised to score a decisive victory against New York’s unique character and hasten its metamorphosis into a cemetery of steel and glass headstones.
Fraknado began its infernal project under the pretext of performing renovations. Like a funeral veil, the contractors draped black netting over 31 W 57th Street and its neighboring buildings (also considered worthy of preservation by preservation experts) and began posting construction permits innocently describing the work as “alternations.” But when crews commenced jack-hammering at the façades, Rizzoli employees knew something was amiss.
By means of an unscrupulous exploitation of a legal loophole, which allows developers to circumvent the city’s safeguards against unchecked development, Fraknado attempted to curtail the inevitable outcry that would arise once the public understood what was happening to these beloved low-rise buildings. Seeking to destroy any trace of architectural and aesthetic significance, Fraknado used the legally permissible, but ethically reprehensible, practice of pre-emptive demolition to ensure that these structures could not eventually be protected by a “historic landmark” designation, a legal classification that keeps historic buildings like Grand Central Terminal from being bulldozed into oblivion (don’t think it hasn’t been tried).
“These [low-rise] buildings do deserve to be preserved. They give us a sense of history, they give us a sense of space. And it’s very important to keep New York in its context. What is tragic is that there is no opportunity for a public review of what type of development is coming….Is air and sunlight being protected in Central Park and other open space? Unfortunately our zoning code does not allow for public input.”
-Layla Law-Gisiko, Community Board Five Member and Chair of the Preservation Committee
The body that bestows these designations, the Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC), was born out of the public outrage that stemmed from the excruciating mid-century razing of such buildings as the old Pennsylvania Station and the Brokow Mansions. For decades after its creation, the commission, which is composed of mayoral appointees, wielded sufficient power to check developers’ greed and ensure a healthy balance between development and preservation. In a speech given in 1990, former Mayor David Dinkins praised the landmarks law, stating that during the last half of the 20th Century the LPC succeeded in “preserving our municipal identity.” However (cue ominous music), under former Mayor Guiliani this began to change.
During the first decade of the 21st century the LPC, which had been loaded to the rafters with pro-business Guiliani appointees in the 1990s—a strategy continued by former Mayor Bloomberg—began to stumble in its efforts to protect historical or aesthetically significant buildings in the face of profitable development. According to a New York Times editorial:
“The Landmarks Preservation Commission…has become a bureaucratic black hole, the place where requests for evaluation — the formal nominations of buildings or districts to be landmarked — go to get filed and forgotten.”
Applications for landmark designation—which can be filed by anyone wishing to nominate a building for protection—languished for years before the LPC reviewed them, and by then it was usually too late. The LPC claimed that it was doing the best it can, but after repeated lawsuits were filed against the commission for dragging its feet, New York State Supreme Court judge Marylin Shafer ruled that the LPC had been acting in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner.
The failings of the LPC can be blamed on several key factors. It’s an understaffed and overburdened city agency that receives hundreds of applications a year—some of them of dubious merit—and it does not help that the commission members are unpaid and the budget for their activities is small. However, chief among the causes of the LPC’s questionable performance can be blamed on the organization’s top-down structure, where the first and final say belongs to one man: the commission chairman. The current chairman, Robert Tierney, is a product (and agent) of the pro-development mentality of the Bloomberg era.
“This particular street is being run for the real estate barons of the present day. They are legitimate 19th Century robber barons.”
-Simeon Bankoff, Executive Director of the Historic Districts Council
Without a stronger mechanism protecting our landmarks, “the cost of preservation is eternal vigilance.” While the LPC might fail us, we as citizens retain options. Thanks to the efforts of CB5, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and preservation groups, Rizzoli has become a “line in the sand,” a symbolic refusal to allow developers to dictate preservation policy and subvert the democratic process. Chairman Tierney’s tenure is up, and Mayor de Blasio must appoint a new chair soon. The hue and cry of the public working in unison with their elected leaders can refocus political will on reforming the LPC, pushing it to restore a balance between preservation and development and save Rizzoli Bookstore in the process. Otherwise, if we allow 31 W 57th Street and neighboring structures to fall, we permit New York’s gilded residents to wield their influence against the good of the many for the enrichment and status of the few and drive normal New Yorkers further from the city’s sacred spaces.
If you agree, please sign the petition to save 29, 31, and 33 W 57th Street and visit Rizzoli because, as of now, it’s last day of operation is April 11th. If Mayor de Blasio does not come to the rescue, this might be your last chance to experience New York’s vanishing book paradise.
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
-John Milton, Paradise Lost