April 1, 2024

 

Hon. Sarah Carroll, 

Chair New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission 

No. 1 Center Street, 9th Floor 

New York, NY 10007

 

Dear Chair Carroll, 

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Thank you for your prompt response to my request that the Commission act swiftly to preserve the row of 19th-century townhouses on West 158th Street. Mine was yet another of several requests for their protection through designation. It would seem that my plea is to be among the last. 

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This is why your response is so disappointing. Condescendingly dismissive, worse still, it’s dishonest: professionally, intellectually, and morally. You repeat the same rationalization that you and your LPC staff have offered on multiple occasions over the past decade. It’s even expressed in precisely the same way. You still refuse to grant landmark status to what is, by all accounts but yours, a worthy cultural and architectural landmark. 

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For shame Chair Carroll! How sweetly you relate your insulting rebuke of our imperiled heritage. 

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Why does your indifference remain the plight of New Yorkers who don’t happen to be white? “Inclusion Initiative?” Where is the interest of the People of the City of New York to which your website so eloquently refers? Is the LPC really safeguarding “the buildings and places that represent New York City's cultural, social, economic, political, and architectural history”? Where are you doing this? 

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Not here. The modest sops of the new historic districts you note represent too little, realized far too late. Do you really mean that this is all that the death of George Floyd prompted? One might enumerate the legal mandate the New York City Charter requires of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, but this is something you know only too well. 

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I’m aware too that your active inaction, meant to expedite “The City of Yes!”, is an administrative order. It is a wrong-headed dictate, extending back at least as far back as “The Rich City.” 

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But do not think that your inaction, compelled or not, viewed through the lenses of history, will be absolved. You are responsible for perpetuating the institutional racism that continues to afflict our common home of New York City. It will not fail to be noted, how it came to be that the newest, most banal and bad buildings in a future Audubon Park, occupy sites where once stood houses of renown. Historians and devotees of fine old buildings to come, discovering the concerns raised by the neighborhood about lost heritage and gentrification, are sure to single you out, as the person charged with acting on behalf of the citizens of New York to preserve their heritage, for special condemnation. 

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These, they will surely feel, were some of the enclave’s most beautiful buildings. “How was it,” they will ask, “that on both 158th Street and on Riverside Drive, every single one of these most vulnerable buildings, the district’s oldest and most unusual, vanished?”

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This is the legacy you are guaranteeing for yourself, and more so for the citizens of New York City who entrusted you - and trusted you - to look after their heritage.

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From the close of the 19th century, the Edwardian row houses survived largely intact. Designed by a prolific local architect, John P. Leo, this row especially exhibits “special character” and “special historical or aesthetic interest or value…” Most assuredly, these houses “represent one or more periods or styles of architecture typical of one or more eras in the history of the city” and in a long-overlooked region.

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Washington Heights’ leading scholar and community booster, Reginald Pelham Bolton lived here. As area demographics evolved during the Civil Rights era, Black professionals determined not to abandon Upper Manhattan moved into these houses, adding an important chapter to the cultural history of New York City.

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Anyone even slightly familiar with the vagaries and inconsistencies of New York’s landmarks designation process recognizes your position as unsupportable. Pretending that nothing of significance existed here before the protected apartment buildings, or survives from any earlier time, is absurd. 

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To be fully representative of Audubon Park, once the homestead of the naturalist John James Audubon, it would seem imperative to preserve those extant original elements that show the neighborhood’s development. This is the context that the 1851 wood frame house at 857 Riverside Drive and this row on 158th Street from the 1880s and 1890s provide.

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By twice denying landmark designation to 857 Riverside, part of the Abolitionist colony created on the Audubon estate by Underground Railroad conductor Dennis Harris, you erase more than the history and evolution of Audubon Park. You also erase any physical memory of the social and racial history of the neighborhood, along with the contributions made here by people of color. On this Easter Monday, I can only wonder if you will deny it a third time?

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Divergent building types and contrasting architecture are hardly, as you imply, reason to exclude the row houses from the district. Indeed, these houses are exemplary of the changing tastes and the progression of circumstances that exist in most sections of the city. Greenwich Village is one of the City’s largest and most diverse historic areas, where connected districts comprehensively show that neighborhood’s fascinating suburban-to-urban transformation. Why is that allowed in the wealthy, White precincts of Greenwich Village and not in a less wealthy and less White “Uptown”?

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Identifying and designating a homogenous, cohesive historic district, though easily done, results in a highly artificial outcome.  As the luxury condo towers you are making way for arrive what you have done amounts to something abominable. All the power, prestige, and integrity of our Landmarks Preservation Commission will have been harnessed to socially engineer, to displace, and repopulate Lower Washington Heights and the environs of the entire Audubon Park area. This is no less harmful than ignoring until after it’s too late, other indisputable Black landmarks. Hotel Olga, Harlem Hospital, the Lenox Lounge, the Casino Renaissance and Theater, the Victoria Theater, the Audubon Ballroom and Theater where Malcolm X was slain and the Child’s Memorial Temple where his funeral was held, all might easily have been preserved. We only want what others have: to be seen and respected.  Much of what your agency still does is radical, egregious and discriminatory. 

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Our effort is, foremost, to obtain commemoration of, and protection for, our diverse and inclusive history. It’s what makes Audubon Park exceptional and significant. Without these houses, and those on Riverside Drive, the historic district designation offers only a partial record of our community’s splendid story.  

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Ours is sadly a time when government uses a chronic affordable housing crisis to justify scuttling zoning and landmark safeguards! With hope for little else, I call upon you one last time to honor your sworn oath to safeguard the buildings and places that represent New York City's cultural, social, economic, political, and architectural history.

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If you refuse to do the job which you have been entrusted to perform, this City and generations to come will at least document the irony of the administration of Eric Adams, New York’s second Black mayor selling Black history to the highest bidder with your connivance, and record the perversion of your inaction. 

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Sincerely, 

Michael Henry Adams