WHAT DO YOU THINK OF when you think of a landmark? The word has become so institutionalized, especially in New York City, that it can conjure the thought of functionaries passing judgment on which buildings deserve protecting and which don’t; which ones can be torn down to make way for development and which ones need to be meticulously preserved exactly as they once were, imprinting on those places an enduring relevance that trumps the relentless march of “progress.” I think of these things when I think of landmarks, and I also think about my grandmother, a woman who lived her whole adult life half a block away from the house where she grew up on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. She could never remember the names of the streets, because for the better part of the last century they didn’t have signs, but she knew where everything was and could get you there with exacting precision. Walk past the corner store, then take a right, then you’re going to walk three blocks until you see the church on your left, then you’ll turn there, then keep going until the train tracks… To her, and to anyone receiving directions from her, these everyday sights were landmarks. These were the things that were important and needed to be remembered, and they needed to be remembered because they had a utility: They told you where you were going.
Time passes, the corner remains but maybe not the store. Or maybe, improbably, there it still is, thirty years later, as with the ice cream shop I grew up going to—on the other side of the park and across the railroad tracks from my grandmother’s house—which still sits as small as I remember on a corner, its yellow interior and white doors exactly as they were back then. Mostly though, these quotidian landmarks disappear. The city becomes something alien to its inhabitants; the tethers to the past, to where memories were formed, are severed; there is no way of getting them back. In New York, the point of landmarking, as in the official activity carried out by city commissioners, is to preserve those places that meant enough to enough people—or, maybe, to the right people. A scoop shop probably wouldn’t meet the threshold for preservation, but other seemingly not-special buildings might. If so, they’d be awarded an expository plaque, as is the case for the townhouse where singer and actress Ethel Waters once resided, just up the street from where I live now, on New York Avenue in Crown Heights.
The plaque on that building—190 New York Avenue—is a product of the Cultural Medallions Program, started in 1995 by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel during her tenure as chair of the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center (HLPC), the nonprofit she founded after chairing the Landmarks Preservation Foundation (LPF), the nonprofit started in 1980 to support the work of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), the city agency started in 1962 and later tasked with administering the Landmarks Law, the piece of legislation passed in 1965 with the intent of preserving historically and architecturally significant pieces of New York City’s built landscape. The law was perceived as a response to the widely abhorred demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s Beaux Arts Pennsylvania Station to make way for Madison Square Garden. Once the wrecking ball came down, the institutional bodies piled up.
Though it would be reductive to say that the Landmarks Law is inherently conservative, there is something of a conservative streak in its spirit, a wish to legitimize and perpetuate a version of the city that no longer exists—if it ever did.
Diamonstein-Spielvogel served under Mayor John V. Lindsay as commissioner of the LPC from 1972 to 1987, after a tenure as the city’s first-ever director of cultural affairs, also a Lindsay appointment. She moved on to chair the LPF and spearheaded, several years before the creation of the Cultural Medallions program, two other signage programs: the Historic District Maps and Marker Program, in 1988, and, the following year, the Historic District Name Signs Program. They’re the reason street signs in historic districts are brown and sometimes accompanied by a simple figure-ground diagram showing what, precisely, is historic, along with some text explaining the importance of the area. The template for this signage was designed by Massimo Vignelli, mastermind of the infamously perplexing 1972 subway map, and its adoption was prompted, in large part, by the fact that building owners kept committing preservation violations because they had no idea that their property was part of a historic district or was itself historic. The way out of this confusion devised by the LPC and its affiliated organizations was to create a compelling, if selective, narrative, bolstered by a chastened visual language, that the city could tell about itself to its visitors and inhabitants. Or, in the words of Diamonstein-Spielvogel, “outreach and education”—a kind of PR program for New York and its notable places.
TO BE CLEAR, the commissions founded in the wake of the Landmarks Law have done much to preserve the city’s architectural patrimony. Had it not been for its landmark status, established in 1994, the modern, soaring TWA terminal, perhaps the crowning achievement of Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen’s career, would likely have been demolished after its operations ceased in 2001. Grand Central Terminal was similarly spared. So was the Victorian Gothic building on the southwest corner of West Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue that now houses the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library. Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel, too. It’s difficult to imagine New York City as we know it without these structures, more difficult still to imagine their replacement with the sort of ticky-tacky developer-conceived boxes—or, worse, shiny and empty supertalls—going up today everywhere you look. Indeed, the real estate lobby was and continues to be the biggest opponent of the Landmarks Law. Though the law and its programs are not explicitly against development, nor do they effectively prevent it, they do significantly hamper the ability of owners, at least those of buildings of certain renown, to tear those buildings down and start from scratch.
In this way, the Landmarks Law is a protectionist program, and though it would be reductive to say that the legislation is inherently conservative, there is something of a conservative streak in its spirit, a wish to legitimize and perpetuate a version of the city that no longer exists—if it ever did. Over the years, the law itself has become part of that version of the city and an object of commemorations, the latest of which is a volume titled Beyond Architecture: The New New York. Edited by Diamonstein-Spielvogel, the book collects twelve essays, including an introductory one by Diamonstein-Spielvogel herself, reflecting upon the Landmarks Law, its attendant programs, and their effects on the city. Diamonstein-Spielvogel apologizes for the gender disparity evident in the contributor lineup—evidently, many of the women writers she approached to participate lacked the time to do so—and the table of contents does indeed read like a who’s who (male category) of the legacy media commentariat. Among others, Michael Kimmelman, A. O. Scott, and Justin Davidson ponder, respectively, the intangibility of heritage, the poetry of the city, and the future preservation of contemporary architecture. Not much holds the volume together, other than—you may have done the math—the fact that it marks the sixtieth anniversary of the passing of the Landmarks Law.
There is, as there should be, some room for criticism in its pages. Paul Goldberger injects the volume with a healthy dose of it. “It is not hard to think of New York in the twenty-first century not as a city that preserves its past but as a city that builds as eagerly, and sometimes as aggressively, as it has throughout its history,” he writes. And on the next page: “We are long past the time when New York City was the most important advocate for preservation in the United States.” Goldberger is up on the idea of preservation but down on the reality of its practice: He laments the fact that while the LPC can protect individual buildings, it has little power to stop new constructions from overshadowing existing landmarks, citing the eighty-five-story tower planned to replace the Grand Hyatt Hotel east of Grand Central, which will inevitably dwarf the terminal and the adjacent Chrysler and MetLife buildings, as a key example.
Goldberger’s essay appears early enough in the collection that its pessimism sets the tone, somewhat, for the rest of the volume. There is a nervous energy to many of the pieces, a feeling that the city is changing rapidly and almost nonsensically, but there’s not much willingness to ask why that might be or imagine that it could be otherwise. Davidson’s contribution flirts the hardest with a kind of irresoluteness, venturing that architects should, in the present, consider how their buildings might be used in the future. Vishaan Chakrabarti, in the essay that follows, makes the same contention from the point of view of an architect working today. Kimmelman argues for a more capacious definition of preservation—one that encompasses a building’s use, so that, to employ his example, a farmers’ market could be safeguarded through the years. The last two entries, by Lisa Switkin and Adam Gopnik, propose new rules for urban development: Switkin’s directives, if adopted, would likewise make it easier for outdoor sites, like public streets and parks, to be landmarked, while Gopnik’s are more idealistic, even fanciful, ideas for how to build in a dense city. Every contributor takes the existence of the Landmarks Law, as well as of the rampant development that often threatens its programs and protected sites, for granted. No one here is pushing for a new paradigm; instead, each is counseling an expanded, more powerful, and more encompassing version of what’s already on the books. The collection, then, ends up being an artifact more celebratory of the law itself, and the ideas behind it, than of the city the law claims to protect.
Indeed, it would take a lot of faith to believe that we all belong to the New York City that the HLPC, the LPF, and the LPC are currently trying to preserve. There are plenty of examples of this gap, between the city as reality and the city as illusion, in Andrew Dolkart’s essay, where he claims that the LPC “has not found it easy to assess cultural sites that are devoid of aesthetic interest,” failing to designate, for instance, humble beach bungalows in Queens, some of the best examples of that particular vernacular; the 1918 Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park; and the second-oldest church building in Staten Island, the Dutch Colonial–style New Dorp Moravian Church, built in 1756. Dolkart concludes that “preservationists still have a lot to do.” But what would happen if, say, the Brooklyn Army Terminal were landmarked? Would it be treated any differently than, say, many of the landmarked structures in my neighborhood of Crown Heights, itself a historic district? Here, the LPC has not failed to designate historically significant buildings. Rather, it “protected” them by bringing them into the speculative fold of the real estate market. A Seventh-Day Adventist school, one of the oldest buildings in the area and one of the few large Victorian-era complexes still standing in the city, was “saved” via a deal with a private developer that employed part of its grounds, long used by people in the neighborhood as a public green space, to put up luxury apartments. A two-bedroom apartment there rents for about $5,600 a month. A couple blocks over, a different school building has met a similar fate. The fact that both of these sites were landmarked, that the LPC approved the reuse projects, shows that the program is more concerned with preserving a particular image of the city than the possibility of life within it.
Kimmelman gets at this in the several paragraphs on the Stonewall Inn that open his essay; the gay institution’s landmark status meant that its “owners could no longer alter their brickwork or flower boxes without city permission,” but its use as a bar is not at all regulated by the LPC. For Kimmelman, Stonewall is an example of “what a wide swath of the general public assumes the law exists to preserve: valued and significant places and things that give the city and its neighborhood their character, distinction, vitality, social cohesion, and meaning.” In my experience, these places and things are, and will continue to be, far outside the reaches of the Landmarks Law. Their significance has far more to do with the slippery and mortal layer of the city than with its solid and demolishable one.
WHEN I LIVED IN KENSINGTON, before I moved to Crown Heights, I would, every day, walk by a cluster of white and blue votive candles, the tall cylindrical ones you can get at the bodega. The first few times I don’t think I noticed. But eventually the encounter became regular: I’d see the candles on my way back from the Church Avenue F/G, and they’d signal return. Lit at night—by whom? I wondered—they added a sacramental dimension to the last leg of my commute, marking a transition out of the harsh illumination of the subway; the din of the street; LED headlights; police cars; ambulances and ambulettes on the way to or from the assisted living facility one avenue over. During the day, while out with the dog, they seemed to me to stand for a kind of steadfastness, a belief in the permanence of memory, and the intention to light them anew.
My hunch that the candles were a memorial was confirmed by a second set of votives that popped up on a different corner closer to my apartment building. Propped up in front of these candles was a small photo of someone who appeared to be a teenager, smiling, his image captioned with a name and dates of birth and death. Quickly in my head I subtracted: twenty-one when he died. For a while, I held off Googling what had happened; it had felt wrong to inquire, akin to snooping. But after I walked by a group of people standing in silent vigil on the spot, I went home and typed the name into the search bar: “Brothers attacked by group in Brooklyn, 1 fatally stabbed”; “How the Killing of Tyler Kobe Nichols Turned a Family into Activists.”
There was a book, with photos and interviews by Spencer Ostrander and text by Paul Auster, and a foundation devoted to preventing street violence, established in honor of the murdered victim, who had been affectionately known as King Kobe. I didn’t know the family, but the physical manifestation of their love, their continued exercise of remembrance, had become a part of my life. It made me aware of the passing of time as the wax waned in the tall glass cylinders; aware of the weather as water pooled around the wicks; aware of the labor of remembrance as the candles were maintained in their neat arrangements and spent ones were replaced. It made me conscious of the fact that my life was happening here, too.
These ad hoc memorials take different shapes, all fairly recognizable: roadside altars of crosses drowned in fake flowers, bikes spray-painted white and chained to lampposts, a single picture in a frame affixed to a fence in front of a building, a ribbon tied in a bow around a tree. When David Lynch died in January people piled tuna cans, cigarette cartons, and doughnuts outside the director’s favorite diner, Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, California. Such shrines call out “someone lived here,” as in: Someone had dreams here; someone suffered here; someone loved and was loved here. Each represents a lost universe, a mess of severed connections, and the way loose ends tie themselves back up, or fail to, in the absence of a single crucial link.
They show up online, too, most often in the form of small collections of photographs of the deceased. These memorials tether the life being remembered not to a particular city block but to the whole world. I’ve seen more of these than ever—more than I could stomach at times, and more than I can now recall—over the last year and a half, as Israel unleashed US-made bombs on Palestine. The photos and videos were prompts to remember what it was that once made a place, that makes a place anytime there is one: the life of the people inside it. When landmarks, officially designated or not, are demolished or changed, they live on in the memory of those who lived around them, who either cared enough to remember or whose existence was so tightly wound around a place or a building that they couldn’t help but keep referring to it, even after it was long gone. Remember where the corner store used to be? my grandmother would ask in the middle of an anecdote she was telling, and technically I didn’t, but her recollection of it over time became my own, and the version of the city that once contained it became, to me, more tangible.
These places are, and will continue to be, far outside the reaches of the Landmarks Law. Their significance has far more to do with the slippery and mortal layer of the city than with its solid and demolishable one.
When buildings came down in Gaza, the world lost millennia of patrimony from one of the oldest continuously inhabited, and most densely populated, places on earth. Churches and monasteries from the fourth and fifth centuries, mosques from the 1300s, the remains of a Hellenistic city near Gaza—all gone or gravely damaged. The scale of the physical and environmental ruin is almost impossible to fathom; it is loss after loss. And yet these losses only become truly irretrievable when those who might have been able to remember, to keep something of that universe together, are entirely wiped out. Gazans returning, eating and sleeping and living amid the rubble, and Trump’s proposal to permanently relocate them, both stand as evidence for the same truth: that a place exists only as long, and exactly as long, as its people do.
I don’t know that the Landmarks Law and its programs, no matter how many buildings they protect and how well they display their history, could ever engender that sort of feeling of belonging. They’re too concerned with standards understood, even today, by a relatively small handful of individuals. Their power is dwarfed by forces much larger, specifically the real estate lobby, at whose mercy the vast majority of New Yorkers live every day. Belonging here, for this vast majority, is a devil’s bargain.
It’s worth asking on what side of that bargain the minds behind the Landmarks Law might fall. In 1984, the late American advertising executive Carl Spielvogel spearheaded a conference in Jerusalem titled “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies.” The event came on the heels of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which had resulted in almost twenty thousand Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian casualties. In the introduction to the conference, published later by Congress Monthly, Spielvogel said, “One must differentiate between making government policy and explaining it. I open with this point because I don’t want my friends and colleagues here in Israel to feel that a group of Americans have come here to tell the Government of Israel how to make policy.” The issue at hand was not Israel’s policies and their effects, but rather how to package them “in the most attractive way to the rest of the world.” How to make people believe a particular story about a place, a story that would take precedence over the reality of the lives of the people within it. Spielvogel continued: “The people of Israel have shown that they can plan and organize for their survival and prosperity better than anyone ever dreamed. And the world has learned a great deal from Israel. But now I would like to suggest that some of us feel a need to repay Israel for these lessons, with some skills in the marketing, advertising and communications areas in which we in the United States excel.” Or, as his widow might put it, “outreach and education.”