In April 1969, two months before police officers raided a gay bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the Village a historic district thanks to its rowhouses and spaghetti entanglement of streets, the serendipity of Colonial-era cattle paths and property lines colliding with the city grid.
Stonewall occupied a pair of former horse stables. During the 1930s, the site was a dive bar and restaurant called Bonnie’s Stonewall Inn, which shuttered in 1954. Three years later, the Genovese crime family reopened the bar, retaining the Stonewall sign and name. Gay bars were mostly mob-run back then because of laws against homosexual behavior in public. Police raids were typically settled with mob payoffs. They rarely turned violent.
But in the summer of 1969, patrons fought back.
The Stonewall uprising helped galvanize the gay rights movement. The bar itself shuttered shortly afterward. The Genoveses sold the property, which for a time morphed into a bagel shop. No one was talking about landmarking Stonewall then, but the city’s designation of the Village helped forestall various proposals to raze the building. Then in 2000 Stonewall was named a National Historic Landmark, and in 2015, designated a New York City Landmark. By that point, gay marriage had become the law of the land and a new bar using the Stonewall name, now spruced up for tourists, had taken over the space, with a museum next door.
What exactly is preserved by the landmark designations?
The city designations mean that Stonewall’s current owners can’t alter the building’s brickwork or flower boxes or signage without permission from the Landmarks commissioners. The designation says nothing about the building’s actual use. Nothing about Stonewall’s landmark status prevents the building from reverting to a bagel shop or morphing into a dentist’s office or a nail salon.
So what do we mean when we designate something a landmark? It’s a trickier question than you might think.
Landmark laws across the country have come into existence to preserve things we deem culturally significant. But they don’t always protect what we actually want to save. When government officials, historians and preservationists talk about landmarks, they typically mean sites of architectural or historical distinction or places like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.
But when most people talk about things that define communities and neighborhoods, which they fear losing and hope to sustain, they’re thinking not only of Grand Central Terminal or the Golden Gate Bridge but a beloved bodega or corner bookstore, a farmers’ market or local high school, or even a tradition, like stickball or the Thanksgiving Day Parade or the tango.
I began with Stonewall because it is definitely not Grand Central, the Golden Gate or Hoover Dam. The disconnect between what many people wish to preserve and what official agencies legislate is not limited to New York City’s landmark provisions, which have formed the basis for similar laws across the country. Americans have enacted these laws to save buildings and sites of historic, environmental and artistic significance.
But how do we treat less obvious or tangible things and values like the physical fabric of a community or a sense of place?
I’m not suggesting America invent new kinds of red tape. At a time when the country urgently needs to build millions of affordable homes and new infrastructure, landmark laws are too often weaponized by NIMBYs, derailing progress. In the name of fighting change and gentrification, they can harm the very places, businesses and activities that communities most hope to safeguard. Expanding the regulatory tool kit for obstruction is the last thing we need to do.
What I’m imagining is simply a rebooted and more ecumenical conversation about the meaning of preservation.
There’s a loosely defined term of art for things that are prized and embedded in a culture but not necessarily architectural landmarks: intangible heritage. Japan for generations has placed institutions like its great Ningyo Johruri Bunraku puppet theater on its national list of Intangible Cultural Property. The Ise Shrine is on the list, too. Dating back more than 2,000 years, the shrine is ritually dismantled and rebuilt, in keeping with Shinto beliefs and practices. So the actual shrine isn’t ever older than 20 years. The intangible heritage is the construction process itself. “Miyadaiku” — carpenters and artisans trained in the ancient traditions required to rebuild the shrine — are its custodians.
UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, more than two decades ago established global lists of intangible cultural heritage, which the organization broadly defines, in its usual bureaucratese, as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills — as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith — that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals, recognize as part of their cultural heritage.”
Translation: Intangible heritage need not be a building or place. It can include the French gastronomic meal, Moldovan blouse embroidery and traditional ensembles of xylophone players distinct to southern Mozambique, among myriad manifestations of arts and crafts that nations have nominated for inclusion on UNESCO’s lists. It’s a topic of increasing interest and lively debate, especially among younger preservationists and urbanists.
Intangible heritage is the next frontier for preservation in America.
A farmers’ market? A flower district?
Like pornography, intangible heritage may be hard to pin down or define legally but, depending on your neighborhood or community, you probably have a pretty good sense of what it means.
It’s a fair guess, for instance, that Upper West Siders in Manhattan would consider a legacy business like Barney Greengrass, the famous old smoked fish restaurant, a cultural landmark of the district. Many residents might say it is more important to preserve the restaurant, which the city’s landmark laws do nothing to protect, than to designate as a landmark, say, yet another classic apartment tower by the early 20th-century Hungarian American architect Emery Roth, who designed the San Remo and Belleclaire, both of which are architecturally great buildings.
I’m picking sites in New York, but feel free to insert examples in your own cities and towns. I’m also liberally stretching the term intangible heritage, which is already squishy. Determining what is intangible heritage requires addressing issues generally outside the purview of existing landmarks laws, issues that raise huge ancillary questions about what makes a healthy neighborhood and about the free market.
Should New York City preserve, say, its shrinking flower district? What would that mean, practically speaking? Would it mean specialized tax breaks and subsidies? The flower district is but one of dozens and dozens of business clusters that once defined the commercial geography and cultural identity of the city. There used to be a philately district, a millinery district, a fur district. The Twin Towers in the 1970s replaced an electronics district where New Yorkers went to buy new parts for old radios. For years, before the towers were mourned and the current World Trade Center rose, New Yorkers complained about new development erasing a human-scaled, working-class neighborhood.
But of course this is where progress and preservation run headlong into each other. Looking back, what would it have meant for New York to have embalmed a district devoted to record players, Princess telephones and rabbit-eared, cathode-ray television sets? It is one thing to save an old building, after all, another to privilege the outmoded industries the buildings served in the name of preservation, which then runs up against competing economic interests.
Since the 1960s, New York has sought a partial solution by declaring “special purpose” districts, dozens of them. In 1977, a district was assigned to preserve and strengthen the character of Little Italy. Another was created to sustain 125th Street in Harlem as an arts and business hub with its mix of commercial buildings like the Apollo Theater and historic rowhouses. You probably have never heard of these special purpose designations because the legislation carries little, if any, enforcement power. Today most of the neighborhood that comprised Little Italy is a ghost of itself; stretches of 125th Street have become unrecognizable.
San Francisco has tried a different approach, employing financial carrots and sticks. Certain districts in that city have rules by which businesses that are chains and franchises must first receive permission before they can move into the neighborhood. The idea is to advantage homegrown companies. Blue Bottle Coffee opened its first brick-and-mortar site in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, where chains like Peet’s and Starbucks were not permitted to open stores. That gave Blue Bottle a leg up in its early days, and the coffee business has now become a point of pride for the neighborhood.
San Franciscans also approved a ballot initiative establishing the Legacy Business fund, as part of a program adopted in two dozen other American cities. In effect, it allows endangered local businesses and storefront nonprofits, which have been around for decades, to apply to the city for time-limited grants to help pay the rent if they’ve started falling behind. The grants are not so large or long-term that they keep afloat a doomed and destitute enterprise, because that would use public money to tip the scales of government in favor of one private business over another.
New York State has tentatively followed San Francisco’s lead, creating its own Historic Business Preservation Registry, which has so far tried to safeguard cherished city landmarks like Sahadi’s, the Middle Eastern grocer in Brooklyn. The businesses receive a medal, but not yet a grant, so it’s not clear what that will ever add up to.
Preserving the smell of salt air
The idea of saving an important neighborhood business raises all sorts of red flags. Would a family-run restaurant like Barney Greengrass be eligible for such special treatment if, say, it were sold to Long John Silver’s? Does it matter if the owners change, or if the character of the place changes but its function doesn’t? Would it be right to insist the mob still ran Stonewall?
“We are expecting too much of the existing landmarks law now,” is how Erica Avrami sees the challenges. She is a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University, whose latest book, “Second-Order Preservation,” will be published in December.
By second-order preservation, Avrami means thinking that goes beyond whether a site is architecturally significant and toward thinking more broadly about collective priorities — about who benefits from preservation and about whether there are built-in biases in how landmark status is determined. Studies show that historic districts tend to skew toward wealthier, whiter populations, for example.
Certain energy codes also exempt buildings in historic districts, which means owners of these buildings avoid costs that burden competing landlords. That may be necessary. Is it just? A weekly farmer’s market, as Avrami points out, may be a neighborhood staple that a community wishes to preserve, but it comes and goes. The space it occupies is a void. What the community wants to safeguard is not the void. It is the market, which changes over time.
In the end, these sorts of thorny questions around intangible heritage, or whatever we choose to call it, come down to how we wish to define and enshrine our neighborhoods, our culture and ourselves. There aren’t clear or easy answers. The discussion itself is a crucial part of the preservation process.
Avrami left me with the example of the Valentino Pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn, facing the Statue of Liberty. In the 19th century it was a bustling cog in New York’s shipping industry. But by the 1980s, the industry had moved elsewhere and the Army Corps of Engineers was set to tear the pier down. It was a wreck and there was nothing architecturally distinguished about the pier.
But it was a neighborhood staple, a link to its past, and residents lobbied the city to preserve at least a version of it. A new pier was built.
“Did it have the original pilings and decking? Of course not,” Avrami points out. The original materials were not what community members wanted to save. They wanted to save something less tangible but more meaningful, she said. “They wanted to save a place where they could walk out over the water, see the Statue of Liberty, and smell the fish and salt air.”
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