Results tagged “landmarkspreservationcommittee”

Yesterday the Landmarks Preservation Commission declared some new places worth saving. First up is the Prospect Heights Historic District, which includes 850 historic buildings, including single-family brownstones, commercial buildings and more dating back to the 1850s. Curbed reports that "There were also three individual landmarks designated: 94 Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan, Mount Olive Fire Baptized Holiness Church at 304 West 122nd Street in Harlem and the John Peirce Residence at 11 East 51st Street in Midtown." Meanwhile, the much talked about South Village Historic District is scheduled to be discussed at a later date. Related: Queens Crap looks at the city's university/college presidents that live in landmarked areas (the president of Brooklyn College resides in a 1918 neoclassical home in the Prospect Heights historic district).

The Landmarks Preservation Commission seems poised to green light the final hurdle in St. Vincent's Hospital's controversial plan to raze the landmark 1963 O'Toole building in Greenwich Village and replace it with a new hospital and residential towers on both sides of Seventh Avenue. The commission has already approved St. Vincent's designs for the hospital tower, and during a meeting yesterday, revised designs that shorten the tallest residential tower from 266 feet to 218 feet were deemed "fundamentally appropriate." The Rudin Organization plans to create some 375 residential units on and around the spot where the O'Toole building stands; the developer will pay St. Vincent's $310 million for the property, which the hospital will put toward the $830 million cost of a new medical tower. If the LPC approves the residential development next month, then it's the city Planning Commission and the City Council's turn. But die-hard opponents like Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation tell the Post, "It's a massive change that's being proposed and I think there are some fears and concerns about the scale of development and whether or not they match the character of Greenwich Village."

Right now is crunch time for the city's Landmark Preservation Committee with proposals of a dozen new districts potentially coming up for a vote by the end of the month. The Post talks to preservation experts who say that the recent building boom helped spur demand for landmarks. Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council, tells them, "Communities woke up to losing what they really valued and said we want to become a landmark." Included in the upcoming proposal include a stretch of an entire thirty-seven blocks along West End Avenue between 70th and 107th an area of Prospect Heights that includes 860 buildings, the largest potential preservation area in the last twenty years. But will all of this preservation turn the city into "a mausoleum?" One lawyer who has fought against landmark status before told the paper, "The more those things grow, the less dynamic of a city you have. You want to have a city where development is possible; otherwise you get stagnation."

The Landmarks Preservation Commission is once again considering a number of buildings and areas for potential landmarking or historic district designation, such as the Webster Hall, Fisk Terrace-Midwood Park in Broolyn, and One Chase Manhattan Plaza. You can see the list here - PDF.