As a dedicated historic preservationist, the only thing that makes me sadder than losing an important landmark is to read or see media pieces describing the loss, and/or similar losses, as inevitable, no big deal, or just another step on the inevitable march of human progress. If it surprises you that this perspective is still prevalent, even after we've lost so many important structures and places in the early part of this century, you probably don't read publications like the New York Post. For the most part, that's no great loss; it's a paper that has lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several decades promoting, often in libelous ways, various right-wing causes and perspectives. Even so, it's s source of information about New York, a city whose people--and landmarks--are deeply important to me.
Which is why it hurts to read this piece by Steve Cuozzo. Not just because it catalogues a number of recent losses among Big Apple landmarks. Not even because it pretends to exhibit a studied level of indifference to these losses, under a you-can't-fight-the-future mantra. But, because in doing so, it is fundamentally dishonest about why this is happening in the first place.
Cuozzo's main purpose in this piece seems to be to dispel the idea that money is the motivation for destroying New York's physical history in favor of faceless, can't-tell-one-from-the-other super-skyscrapers. It's not about sheer greed, according to him; it's just humble real-estate investors living to serve the needs of the flood of young people coming into the city, who, if anything, prefer the glass behemoths of, say, the Hudson Yards, to low-rise townhouses and shops of yesteryear.
That might be plausible, if the young people could afford to live and work in those buildings. But they can't--many of them, in fact, can't even afford a mortgage on a house, which is why so many of them are still living with their parents. In fact, most of the high-rise residential structures built in midtown Manhattan are little more than investment properties owned by wealthy individuals from abroad, who view New York real estate simply as a safe place in which to park their money. In fact, many of these supposedly "luxe" buildings are unoccupied. There's no one in them to enjoy whatever luxury they provide. Nor are any of these non-tenants present to contribute to the economic life of the city in other ways: shopping, sightseeing, and so forth.
The truth is, and has been for years, is that young people have come to New York in droves even during its leanest periods (as I did, in the 70's) because of its unique role as the center of American culture--and not just to consume it, but to, in the words of Kander and Ebb, "be a part of it." And, when I use the word "culture" in this context, I'm not just talking about the arts and other media, but its physical landmarks, buildings and other public places that have played (and often continue to play) a major role in American life.
In fact, Cuozzo's article alludes to an example of how this process in continuing.
He mentions the shuttering of Lord & Taylor's Fifth Avenue store as an example of the acceleration of landmark departures. However, what he doesn't mention is the fact that, although the store itself has disappeared, the building itself is protected by landmark designation from the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission. Nor does he mention that the new occupant of the building is going to be WeWork, a company that provides flexible, short-term office space to young companies who find using such space to be more affordable, and otherwise more practical, than leasing real estate under more traditional terms.
So, if Cuozzo's thesis is true--if young people are hungry only for what's new and shiny--then what is a company like WeWork setting up shop in an old, nineteenth-century carriage-trade department store?
I'm not going to pretend that I've talked to the WeWork folks about why they did this. And I suspect that the Fifth Avenue location played a factor in its decision to take the space. But they clearly weren't deterred by the age or design of the building. And I have to believe that the building's status as a visual icon, a powerful symbol of commerce in the city, didn't hurt in the decision-making process.
But I also have to believe that the key consideration for WeWork was simply this: what type of space would young people want to work in? And I have to believe that they believed that they would rather be in a historic building like Lord & Taylor's old flagship than in whatever glass behemoth might be just around the corner.
And I would be the least surprised person to discover that, in fact, that was true.
After all, whenever young people have come in significant numbers to New York in the past half-century or so, they have always gravitated to historic neighborhoods and buildings. In the process, they've taken structures that the marketplace had effectively declared worthless, and turned them into financial magnets for real estate investors.
Think Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Or Soho and Tribeca in the 1970s. Or the Upper West Side in the 1980s and 1990s. Or Brooklyn--Brooklyn!--in the 21st century. When I lived in New York in the early 1980s, and with the notable exception of Park Slope, you couldn't get the city's real estate industry to touch Brooklyn with a ninety-foot pole. Today, Brooklyn, its historic brownstones and other structures, are the hottest part of the city's real estate market. Even long-lost historic theaters, such as the Kings and the Paramount, have come back.
Young people don't move out of America's faceless suburban tracts simply to move into faceless skyscrapers. They can't afford to. And they're not interested in any case. They want to be connected to something bigger than the next five minutes, contrary to what some media "experts" argue in self-serving efforts to pigeonhole them. The truth is that, by choosing landmarks over supposedly "luxe" buildings, they are actually making conservative choices in doing so. They are voting to connect themselves to America's past, and using it to build a future for themselves. They are also putting meat on the bones of their environmental rhetoric; as is commonly said in the preservation community, the greenest building in the world is the one that's already built.
And the truth is that even Cuozzo recognizes this. Here, in a later piece, he laments what he sees as the "fact" that New York will never produce another Andy Warhol, in part because he came of age in a New York where, thanks to the city's mid-20th-century economic decline and the "preservation by neglect" that the decline effectively encouraged, a lot of amazing and historically important real estate could be acquired and repurposed to continue writing new chapters in the city's and the nation's history.
The truth is that all five boroughs of New York City are rapidly running out of space that young people just starting out in life can afford to live in, work in, or use in any way for their purposes. And that's also the case in other cities throughout the country. The urban renewal of our past that was launched in the late 20th century may become a victim of its own success. And, as a consequence, the continued existence of existing landmarks may be threatened by pressures from investors and builders whose pocketbooks depend on the perpetuation of the new and shiny.
Affordability. Conservation of history. Economic growth. These are all elements of a successful city. We are rapidly reaching the point at which it seems impossible to have all of them in our major metropolises. In the case of New York, we may very well have reached that point. Perhaps the message from Cuozzo's conflicting pieces is that we are, definitely, already there.
Are there any answers? At this point, I can only say that I hope so. Somehow, we have to figure out how to continue moving toward the future without sacrificing what we can gain from the past. I don't think there are any easy answers. I'm not even positive that their are answers with which all of us can live. But I think that we have to try to find such answers, if we can. As young people have recognized, and continue to do so, the past is an important part of who we are. It's
important--in fact, I would say it's essential--not to try moving forward without it.
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