The LPC: As arbitrary and capricious as they wanna be

Hey Crapunzel,

You have probably heard that the Pepsi Cola sign in LIC has achieved Landmark status, but consider this from The NY Times story:

"The Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation reconstructed the sign in 1993, after heavy damage was inflicted by a winter storm."

I am certainly not an expert on NYC Landmarks but this appears to be a contradiction of a previous decision by the landmarks commission concerning Old St. James Church of Elmhurst.

If the Pepsi sign was totally reconstructed and granted Landmark status why hasn't St. James, whose appearance has hardly been altered since the 18th century, been treated in the same manner?

I guess the Manhattanites have decided that an ancient Elmhurst church isn't as cool as a 20th century LIC commercial sign. Go figure.

Adios,

philipe the confused

Yes, Philipe, I think you have nailed it.

About the landmark backlog

Sorry to be late with this. The LPC decided to designate 3 of the 8 items on the backlog list for Queens:

Bowne Street Community Church
Lydia Ann Bell and William Ahles House
Pepsi Cola Sign

However, the following were removed from their calendar:

Old Calvary Cemetery Gatehouse - Van Bramer
First Reformed Church and Sunday School of College Point - Vallone
Proposed Douglaston Historic District Extension - Vallone
Spanish Towers - Dromm
Fairway Apartments - Dromm

Included are the names of the council members who did not support the designations of the dropped items.

Queens properties to get LPC hearing

From the Times Ledger:

Preservationists were outraged in December when the Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City and seven other historic sites across the borough were put in jeopardy after the chairwoman of the Landmarks Preservation Committee proposed to remove them from consideration for protection. The blowback was so fierce that Chairwoman Meenakshi Srinivasan reversed course less than a week later and decided not to “de-calendar” them and to consider a new plan to deal with a backlog of nearly a hundred buildings and sites citywide.

The LPC announced last week that its Backlog Initiative would begin addressing the properties with a public comment period and then a special hearing on the 95 properties that were placed on the commission’s calendar decades ago.

Each property, including the Douglaston Historic District, the Old Calvary Gatehouse in Sunnyside, the Bowne Street Community Church in Flushing, the Spanish Towers and the Fairway Apartments in Jackson Heights, the First Reformed Church and Sunday School of College Point and the Ahles House in Bayside will each get a months-long process of public review and hearings.

Throughout the period the public is welcome to submit written statements to backlog95@lpc.nyc.gov. Those statements will be entered into the record and be distributed to the LPC commissioners.

All Queens properties will be addressed at a public hearing on Oct. 8. Speakers will be allowed to testify for three minutes and can register by e-mail at backlog95@lpc.nyc.gov.

The LPC will vote for or against designation of each property in 2016. The commission can also choose to issue a “no-action letter” for some items, which would remove them from consideration but would not disqualify them from landmark designation in the future.

Amazing aerial footage of NYC

First featured by WPIX:

They’re awe-inspiring sights of New York City that rival any video game or Hollywood blockbuster out there, and they were captured by Bronx photographer and drone enthusiast Victor Chu.

From over the iconic Brooklyn Bridge to the famed Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City with of course, a pit stop at Yankees Stadium.

The sights in Chu’s “Ultimate Aerial Video of NYC! (Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island) – DJI Phantom 2” on YouTube, will give any New Yorker goose bumps.

The extreme project took several months of shooting and editing this past summer with what Chu says were plenty of close calls.

In what’s considered the most incredible shot, Chu flew his drone through the Unisphere at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, all while complying with drone rules and regulations issued in the City of New York.

Happy Friday!

Dromm, Van Bramer, Vallone and Koo stay silent as LPC moves to decalendar properties

From DNA Info:

The Landmarks Preservation Commission plans to remove almost 100 sites and two historic districts from consideration for landmark status without formal public input, despite most being on the agenda for decades, officials say.

It's a move preservationists fear clears the path for the possible destruction of dozens of architecturally, culturally and historically significant buildings in neighborhoods across the five boroughs because it removes the preliminary protection that they were afforded while under consideration.

Being on the LPC's calendar provides the building with a modicum of protection because the Department of Buildings notifies the commission if building or demolition permits for a site with such a designation are requested. The commission then has 40 days to make a decision on a site's landmark status.

Landmarks Preservation Commission to Remove Almost 100 Sites From Consideration

But often, due to political pressure, the buildings remain in limbo on the calendar with the commission never voting, sometimes for decades.

LPC spokeswoman Damaris Olivo said the removal of the sites and historic districts is an attempt to "streamline" the much criticized process.

So let's run down the list of Queens sites that are on the chopping block:

Location: The Ahles House
Neighborhood: Bayside
Council Member: Vallone

The skinny: Tony Avella advocated for this site to be designated as far back as 2002. It was calendared in 2009, but was not designated due to threats by Dan Halloran to veto it at the Council. Paul Vallone has let it languish and as his campaign was heavily funded by REBNY, he's likely to keep his mouth shut and shrug his shoulders when it gets decalendared.

Location: Douglaston Historic District Extension
Neighborhood: Douglaston
Council Member: Vallone

The Douglaston Historic District Extension was also heavily advocated by Tony Avella and calendared in 2008, but Dan Halloran once again gave the nabe the middle finger. And I'll just ditto mark the Paul Vallone stuff from above... """""""

Location: First Reformed Church of College Point
Neighborhood: College Point
Council Member: Vallone

I couldn't find much about this nominee, but I think it's been on the list for quite a while with no action taken by LPC. There really is no reason why it sat on the docket without a decision.

Location: Calvary Cemetery gate
Neighborhood: Blissville
Council Member: Van Bramer

Location: Pepsi Sign
Neighborhood: Hunters Point
Council Member: Van Bramer

The fact that the above two potential landmarks are on the list really makes you scratch your head. Neither stands in the way of development, and the Pepsi Sign in particular is actually used as a marketing tool by developers and real estate people, so you'd think they'd want it landmarked. I guess these 2 aren't in Sunnyside Gardens, so they're just not a big deal to dear old Jimmy. Luckily, neither appears to be going anywhere.

Location: Bowne Street Community Church
Neighborhood: Flushing
Council Member: Koo

Why this isn't designated is interesting, since plans to do so stretch way back to 2003 when then-Council Member John Liu was allegedly pushing for it to prevent its demolition.

Location: Spanish Towers
Neighborhood: Jackson Heights
Council Member: Dromm

Location: Fairway Apartments
Neighborhood: Jackson Heights
Council Member: Dromm

And these apartment buildings are not under threat of demolition, so their non-designation is also weird, but I guess Danny Dromm has more important things to wring his hands about, like horse carriages and Asians protesting homeless shelters.

Perhaps if Dromm, van Bramer, Koo and Vallone voiced their support for landmarking at this hearing, these properties would be designated instead of removed from the list of potential designees. But don't hold your breath, folks. Here's the only letter I have gotten thus far from any elected officials about this:

Well, at least it has the Pepsi sign...

From the Wall Street Journal:

F. Scott Fitzgerald was looking toward Manhattan when he wrote, in "The Great Gatsby," that "the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world."

He certainly wasn't looking from the bridge toward Queens. In the 1920s, the view would have been a landscape of factories and warehouses.

Today, amid a development boom in Long Island City, the view is different but no more pleasing. The waterfront towers that have sprouted seem to have taken their aesthetic cues from Newport, N.J., rather than from that other borough across the East River.

Further inland, there's been a flurry of new residential projects by developers eager to cash in on New York's healthy market for both rental apartments and condominiums. Since 2008, at least a dozen new residential buildings with about 5,000 units have been completed or are under way in the 37 blocks in central Long Island City that the city up-zoned in 2001.

Land rushes like this in many other New York neighborhoods have been enough to create a sense of place. But in Long Island City, that's proving trickier to pull off. The area boasts some architectural diamonds-in-the-rough, but they're far more isolated than those found in neighborhoods such as Dumbo, which retained a historic character despite plenty of infill watering.

Rather, the area consists mostly of nondescript, low-slung buildings and enough parking lots to house seemingly the whole of the New York yellow cab fleet. It's a promised land for developers; but the area needs quality as well as quantity of both residential and commercial development to become a real neighborhood.

In the end, the aesthetic hope for Long Island City is perhaps best seen in the best-known symbol of the area: Artkraft Strauss's Pepsi-Cola sign, which once topped a bottling plant along the waterfront and now sits in Gantry Plaza park. The Strauss firm designed some of New York's most interesting signage from the 1930s to 1950s; let's hope that a sign from 1937 won't remain the most innovative thing about the neighborhood.

No one ever said building a neighborhood mainly from scratch was easy, and some welcome and discerning decisions have clearly been made in charting its development. The fine balance that remains to be achieved is to create a coherent neighborhood whose greatest asset is something more than the five-minute ride to Manhattan.