Where is the “Preserve” in Historic Preservation Nowadays?

An epic rant about something I feel strongly about. My holiday posts and good cheer will return, I promise!

(Troy’s Fire Alarm, Telegraph and Police Signaling Building, Photo: Wikipedia)

Historic Preservation as a profession and as an advocacy is relatively new in this country. Europeans have been preserving their historic structures much longer than we have. Of course, they are much older than the US, and frankly, they care more about their architectural legacy than we do. England, for example, passed the Ancient Monuments and Preservation Act in 1882. In the UK, it’s a criminal offence to carry out certain actions on listed buildings, including demolition, without necessary permission. They take preservation seriously enough that people have gone to jail or have been heavily fined for ignoring their laws.

I learned to love and appreciate older buildings by growing up in one. I explored every inch of my home and grew up believing that old had a rare elegance and sensibility that was beautiful. Going to Yale was spectacular for a budding architecture geek. The campus is an architectural delight. I moved to NYC after college, first to the Bronx, in an Art-Deco apartment building, and then to Central Brooklyn, where I fell in love with brownstones and late 19th century Brooklyn architecture. It was there, living in Bedford Stuyvesant and later Crown Heights North, that I became a preservationist, fascinated with the lifestyles, the history and the various forms of architecture that make up New York City. Writing about it became a career. Thirty-some years later, I moved to Troy, a city I loved on first sight because of its architectural heritage.

Living in NYC was a course in preservation. I learned that masterpieces like Grand Central Station wouldn’t be here today if preservationists hadn’t lobbied and protested to save it. Had it not been for high profile advocates like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, it still might have been torn down. Many important NYC buildings had already been lost, most significantly the original Penn Station, a masterpiece by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. Today’s Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, some of the most unloved and reviled pieces of NYC architecture ever, stand on its underpinnings.

(Pennsylvania Station, NYC., the most important building lost in NYC. Photo: Wikipedia

Because of this loss, and the loss of other important buildings throughout the city, the City of NY finally passed the Landmarks Law in 1965, creating the Landmarks Preservation Commission, a city agency charged with designating  and protecting the architectural heritage of the five boroughs. With similar advocacy across the nation, a year later, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, which created the National Register of Historic Places. The responsibility for preservation was assigned to the National Parks Service, which oversees the individual state offices. Here in NY State, the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) is headquartered just across the river from Troy on Peeples Island, a small island on the Hudson River.

NYC’s Landmark Law and the National Historic Preservation Act have been in effect for almost sixty years. They have both designated and offered official protection and rules throughout the city and state, and because of them, significant architecture and spaces have been saved from doing what NYC and other places seem to do best – tear down buildings. But they’ve been slipping, as of late, as has preservation across the nation. Buildings that should have been protected, buildings with clear historic provenance and importance have been bulldozed. Many of these buildings were championed by preservationists, neighbors, local politicians and the press, yet those cries have been ignored and the consequences for those who tear them down have been practically nil.

What is going on here?

Many people think that historic preservation is a club for blue-haired patrician white ladies and gentlemen who only want to save the mansions of the rich. Some preservation efforts across the country may have started that way, and thanks to those blue-hairs, a lot of important homes and other buildings WERE saved, some of them decades before the National Register or local preservation laws. But modern historic preservation is so much more.

For some reason, we here in America do not consider our architectural heritage to be more important than our urge to build anew, replacing anything old with something new, over and over. Some of that is the necessity for growth and the need for housing and other built structures, but let’s face it, some of it is just power and greed, pure and simple.

Neighborhoods that once housed working class, poor people, and minorities of all kinds have always been targets for those who put building new ahead of people, with little or no concern about what they are tearing down or how it affected lives. Just look at the South End neighborhood of  Albany torn down for the Empire State Plaza. 9,000 people, mostly working class Italian Americans, were displaced and removed, an entire neighborhood completely obliterated because the governor wanted a monument to himself.

Look at the neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook in Brooklyn, and much of the central Bronx ripped out for highways meant to make it easier for cars and trucks to escape the city for the suburbs of Long Island and Westchester. Did anyone care that neighborhoods like Red Hook were cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by a wide trench with a busy highway? Was Nelson Rockefeller upset about bulldozing people’s lives and businesses? Nope.

(3rd St, downtown, 1950s. Aside from the large Frear Building in the background, everything on the right side was replaced by the Atrium Mall.)

Then there is Troy, where the heart of a once-successful downtown was partially destroyed to “modernize” the city  in an attempt to bring shoppers back downtown to an ill-conceived mall. Look at Troy and neighboring Watervliet, with neighborhoods divided or destroyed for highways, including one that (thankfully) was never built. All so that cars could more easily commute from Albany to the suburbs. Did anyone think of the people being displaced, the buildings that were torn down, the fabric of cities bypassed or how that impacted the built environment and the quality of life of those left in their wake? Of course not.

I was a part of the preservation efforts of the Crown Heights North Association, which spearheaded the efforts to get our Crown Heights North, Brooklyn neighborhood landmarked by the LPC, the NYC Landmarks Commission. Landmarking would protect the majority of our neighborhood’s streetscapes, a remarkably intact late 19th century neighborhood built for the upper-middle classes and the rich, a neighborhood with some of Brooklyn’s finest residential, sacred and civic architecture on its streets.

We were most certainly not a group of blue-hairs. Crown Heights North and neighboring Bedford Stuyvesant were redlined and written off in the late 1930s. This vast neighborhood, larger than some cities, had been populated primarily by African Americans, Caribbean immigrants and Spanish-speaking people, mostly from Puerto Rico, since the 1950s. By the late 1960s, Central Brooklyn was labeled by the press as “the largest ghetto in America.” For most people in the city, these neighborhoods were unwanted, ignored by city services and left to residents and owners to fend for themselves.

While some parts of Bed Stuy and Crown Heights suffered greatly during those years, other parts, especially in Crown Heights were held intact by owner-occupants, mostly Caribbean American, who saw owning property as the culmination of the American Dream, and wealth creators for family, now and down the line. Most of Crown Heights North remained as those who fled to the suburbs in the 1950s and 60s left it, intact blocks of fine architecture. We had great pride in our neighborhood and didn’t want it destroyed by developers only interested in profit. Developers were already buying land, tearing down perfectly good buildings and putting up ugly replacements, usually condo-boxes. Or they were adding ill-conceived new stories on top of historic rowhouses.

Our organization was headed and populated primarily by black women. It still is. Through our efforts, and over the course of more than ten years, we were able to get most of Crown Heights North landmarked as a city historic district and placed on the National Register. In the process we became the poster child for modern landmarking – black homeowners embracing the tenants of historic preservation to protect our built environment. Our diverse board showed that the blue-hairs were not the only ones interested in historic preservation. Landmarking benefits those who are not white, not rich, and not in “good” neighborhoods. We all have much to preserve, no matter where we are.

Which brings me to today.

Brooklyn and Troy are now hot. Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights North are two of Brooklyn’s most rapidly gentrifying and popular neighborhoods for young renters and families. Here in Troy, where rentals predominate, new market-rate housing is leased out in no time. The pandemic helped this entire region grow, as many found that they could work remotely, and that Troy was welcoming to a demographic that prizes a walkable downtown, lots of cafes, restaurants and bars and small shops. Troy has or is close to a great deal of art and culture, and one can be in a real city, but find the country only minutes away by car. And Troy has great architecture.

While both Troy and NYC claim to prize their architectural heritage and both have laws and commissions who monitor and regulate what is done with that historic fabric, why are important buildings still being lost? Who is watching the store? How important is historic preservation to us?

(Jacob Dangler mansion, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Destroyed in 2022.)

This past year in New York City, in Brooklyn specifically, several important buildings met bulldozers. In Bedford Stuyvesant, neighbors and preservation advocates were working to have the Jacob Dangler mansion landmarked. It was built in 1902 for a wealthy meatpacker at a time when that part of Bed Stuy was home to many successful German American entrepreneurs. The mansion stood proudly on its streetcorner, the design of one of Brooklyn’s most prolific and important German American architects.

After Bedford Stuyvesant became an African American neighborhood, the large house was the headquarters of a women’s Masonic group and was well-known as an event space for meetings of various organizations, for the block association, Scout troops, they hosted wedding and baby showers and more. But the Masonic lodge had severe financial problems and sold the house to a developer who planned to tear it down for a lot-sized condo building. The neighbors rallied to save the building.

This past April, the community succeeded in having the LPC conduct a hearing to determine the building’s eligibility for landmarking. It was a very positive meeting, with a great many people from all walks and interests advocating for it to be made an individual landmark. The house had all the requirements – the provenance, the important architect, the style of the building, the importance of Jacob Dangler, and its subsequent history as an important social center for the community. I was one of the many people who testified. The Commission seemed amenable and we really thought we had won this one. It was a great feeling after some other losses.

LPC had a month to designate. But inexplicably they let the clock run out. Due to a supposed “clerical error” they weren’t informed that the developer had gotten a demolition permit, and the day after the deadline to designate was up, the bulldozers rolled in and tore the mansion down in record time. By the time the City Councilman and the community were able to get a stop work order, the building was rubble. The developer was in such a hurry to tear it down, he didn’t follow safety and asbestos protocols, and is in trouble for that. On top of that, he didn’t have immediate plans to build anyway, so the lot will sit empty for years. He just wanted the house gone so it couldn’t be landmarked. Any fines he will have to pay will cost him less than if he had to work with Landmarks to repurpose or redesign the building and grounds.

Troy is not immune to this either. The Fire Alarm, Telegraph and Police Signaling Building, aka the Signaling Building was built in 1920 to condense the city’s system of emergency responders’ alarms. Troy had several huge city-decimating fires in its history, so miles of signal wiring led to this building, giving the city a central location for notification and dispatch. The building and system were ahead of their time, a rare precursor of the 911 protocols. Because any city worth its salt wants its civic buildings to be representative of city pride, this building was designed in an impressive Jacobean style. It was in use until 1968 and was then purchased by Rensselaer County which used it as only as storage.

The building was placed on the National Register in 2003. I’m sure with that designation and the tax credits associated with it, people expected the building to someday be renovated and repurposed, especially as Troy got back on its financial feet, but after a brief period of being used by RPI’s preservation students, it was abandoned and stood deteriorating for years. It had small trees growing on the roof in the photo.

Last week, with no notice to the city’s preservation community or anyone else, the county claimed the building was too far gone and had to be torn down. They got an emergency demo permit and before anyone could even take photographs, the building was torn down. Rumor has it that the county will use the site for a parking lot.

The Signal Building was just outside of the downtown historic district, so no bells went off that the building was in danger or slated for immediate demolition. Had the preservation community been aware, efforts to save it would most definitely been instituted. RPI has been an important ally in preserving the city’s historic fabric, and no doubt would have been involved, as would those in SHPO. As a listed building on the National Register, it was supposed to have some protection. It had next to none.

After urban renewal projects and new highways destroyed parts of the city, people began to realize that the destruction of Troy’s architectural legacy was not a good move. The new buildings often did not mesh with the old, and in the case of Troy’s City Hall and the Uncle Sam parking lot, didn’t last more than 40 or 50 years, not long in a city with some of its oldest building stock dating back to the late 18th century. The efforts of TAP, RPI and concerned citizens saved the Rice Building, the Ilium Building and the entire stretch of River Street between them. All were slated for demo in a second phase of a plan to replace downtown with modern structures. Can you imagine our city without them?

Even though the city was going through some very rough times, and many people were calling Troy the “Troylet,” film scouts were bringing the city to the attention of some of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers and companies. They were thrilled with our historic downtown and residential neighborhoods. Our historic buildings, our fine architecture has worth, our streets are our fortune, they are some of the city’s strongest attributes. Why are we tearing unique buildings like the Signal building down? It was one of a kind. The county has some explaining to do.

Buffalo recently lost a very historic and important grain storage warehouse because its worth was not recognized by the powers that be. We’ve lost buildings in New York City, even landmarked and “protected” ones. Here in Troy, we must be more vigilant. Preservationists and neighbors need to get out in front of the developers and designate and preserve important structures and neighborhoods BEFORE the backhoes start to roll up the street. We have to hold our preservation watchdog agencies accountable. We need to lobby for funding to preserve our architectural heritage before it is so far gone that renovation is too costly and demo is necessary.

We have to do better, or more will be lost, and all that will be left are photographs and regrets. I have hundreds of old photographs and postcards on my computer that I use in my research and writing work. Most of the buildings in those photographs are gone. Now I’ll have to add the pictures I took of the Signal Building a few years ago to that file. Many people think that preservation is just keeping our municipalities encased in amber, never allowing change. That’s not the case.

Not everything can be kept, not every old building is a hill to die on. We do need growth, and there are, of course, legitimate reasons to build anew and equally legitimate reasons to demolish at times. But some structures are really worth the effort. The Dangler Mansion, the Signal Building and many, many more could have been saved, renovated, repurposed and put into their best 21st century use. Not just because they were old, or perhaps beautiful, but because they matter. Historic preservation has positive benefits for everyone.

It’s time to respect our history and heritage. If people can still live, work and worship in European buildings that date to the 14th century, surely we can find ways and reasons to hold on to more of our 18th, 19th and 20th century structures. They tell the story of our villages, towns and cities. They showcase the talents of thousands of anonymous craftspeople, and the lives and businesses of those who came before. Let’s act before we lose more.