Village Preservation Releases First-Of-Its-Kind Report Analyzing NYC Landmark Designations 1965 to Present, Finds Dramatic Drop in Recent Years
This article is cross-posted from our colleagues at Village Preservation. You can find local media coverage of the report from amNY.
Study Finds Mayor Adams Much More Resistant to Designations than His Predecessors in Office; Fewer Landmarks Named Since Law Favored by Real Estate Industry Passed; Every Part of City Seeing Designations Drop Dramatically and Threatened Historic Buildings Ignored
Click the image to read the full report.
Village Preservation has released a first-of-its-kind study analyzing all 38,000 properties landmarked in New York City since the establishment of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. The scrupulous review of city data, Analyzing New York City Landmark Designations: A Review of Mayoral Influence and Policy, 1965 to the Present, found:
While landmark designations have waxed and waned over the nearly 60 years since NYC began the practice, under Mayor Adams they have been curtailed to a degree vastly exceeding any of his peers. Though Mayors Beame and Giuliani join Adams at the bottom of the list of Mayors to extend landmark designations, Adams far exceeds them, with two-thirds fewer designations than his predecessors, and three-quarters fewer buildings protected.
Since the passage of the controversial Intro. 775-A in 2016 at the behest of the real estate industry, limiting the time the Landmarks Preservation Commission can consider landmark status, the number and breadth of landmark designations have dropped dramatically, with landmark designations and the number of buildings protected down by about 60%, and the size of average historic district designations slashed by more than half. Preservationists and community groups that opposed the measure had predicted it having just such a chilling effect.
In spite of the promises of the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s “Equity Framework,” adopted in early 2021, to ensure a more diverse array of landmark designations, designations are down by 50% in the Outer Boroughs, 45% in Upper Manhattan, and by a stunning 85% in what the city calls the “Manhattan Core” (Manhattan below 110th Street on the West Side and below 96th Street on the East Side).
As the rate of landmark designations has dropped dramatically in recent years, the city has increasingly forgone consideration of imminently endangered historic sites, which have been lost or compromised as a result. Instead, for the small number of designations approved each year, the city has increasingly leaned upon sites that are already landmarked, or that due to other existing regulatory regimes are already wholly or in part insulated from the threat of loss.
The report comes on the eve of the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) in 2025, which is expected to spark retrospection and appraisal of the legacy of landmark designations in New York City. The LPC was established in part in response to the loss of great NYC landmarks such as Pennsylvania Station, and has helped prevent the loss of sites ranging from Grand Central Terminal to the African Burial Ground, Radio City Music Hall to the 19th-century Free Black community of Weeksville, Brooklyn. Neighborhoods that have been preserved as a result of landmark designation include Jackson Heights, Queens; Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; St. George, Staten Island; the Grand Concourse in the Bronx; and Sugar Hill, Manhattan.
Bar graph from the report showing landmark designation activity by mayor, beginning with Wagner and ending with Adams. The graph clearly shows that Adams's activity is significantly less than his predecessors.
“It’s critically important that we be able to take a 30,000-foot view of what’s happening with the process of protecting our history in New York City, even if what we find is deeply concerning,” said Andrew Berman, Executive Director of Village Preservation, which conducted the analysis. “The shockingly dramatic drop-off in activity to protect our city’s historic sites under Mayor Adams as well as since the passage of Intro. 775-A is extremely troubling, and points to a train that has gone off its tracks. The decrease in landmark designations over the last several years has been across the board, affecting every borough and neighborhood, in spite of the promise from the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s ‘Equity Framework’ to ensure overlooked areas, communities, and histories are given their due. The long list of buildings and neighborhoods that represent those overlooked and underrepresented histories that the Commission has recently ignored is cause for alarm, as is the growing practice of focusing on sites that face no immediate or foreseeable threat, while those that do are passed over. It’s clear that a combination of Mayoral directive and legislative handcuffing has resulted in a dramatically less comprehensive approach to preserving our city’s history, and one that too often is determined by avoiding opposition from powerful forces, especially real estate interests.”