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.