As any student of New York history can tell you, in the early 1960s the Pennsylvania Railroad Company committed one of the great architectural crimes of the century by demolishing Penn Station and replacing its Beaux-Arts grandeur with a warren of underground tunnels.
It is sometimes forgotten that, just over a decade later, the Penn Central Transportation Company tried to do the same with Grand Central Terminal, the equally impressive train station on the East Side of Manhattan. But this time a newly energized organization, the Municipal Art Society, and its executive director, Margot Wellington, were standing in the way.
In a multi-front war that included pop-up tours of the terminal and a lawsuit that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Mrs. Wellington and her allies managed not only to save Grand Central, but also to establish the foundation of landmark preservation in the law, and in the public eye.
Mrs. Wellington died on April 14 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 91. Her stepson, the architect James Sanders, confirmed the death.
Today, New Yorkers take for granted the wonderful old buildings and neighborhoods that give the city its character. Things looked very different in 1976, when Mrs. Wellington took over the Municipal Art Society.
In the depths of its 1970s financial crisis, New York was looking for anything to revive itself, and it often turned to the easy answer, replacing old buildings and neighborhoods with gleaming new towers.
Mrs. Wellington offered an alternate vision, rooted in her extensive travels in Europe. Yes, she admitted, the city and its buildings were looking a bit ragged. But instead of tearing things down, she said, the city should invest in them.
“It just is interesting how people’s perceptions change,” she said in a 2012 oral history for the Municipal Art Society. “You see a dirty old building and you want to tear it down, or you see a potential loft that you’d like to live in, and it’s the same building.”
Mrs. Wellington began her campaign in the mid-1970s by expanding the Municipal Art Society itself. To boost membership, she offered everyone who joined a poster of Saul Steinberg’s compressed cartoon of America as viewed from Manhattan. The promotion proved so popular that people across the country joined the group, just to get the poster.
She organized public lectures and tours of the city. She led the establishment of the Urban Center, a one-stop shop of sorts where like-minded groups, including the Architectural League of New York, could have their offices, alongside a bookstore focused on urban design. (The Urban Center closed in 2010.)
During her seven-year tenure, she led pioneering campaigns to form historic landmark districts, renovate blighted blocks and rescue threatened edifices like Radio City Music Hall.
“If you are running an advocacy organization, you’d better be taking chances, you’d better be filing major lawsuits, you’d better be showing the public that you mean business,” Laurie Beckelman, who served as her assistant and then deputy for four years, said in a phone interview. “You’ve got to take no prisoners, and Margo did not take prisoners.”
Saving Grand Central was her crowning achievement. She would be the first to say that it was a group effort, and that the eager involvement of the former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who called the organization one day to offer her services, made a huge difference.
Still, there was no question that Mrs. Wellington was the ringleader. She operated a storefront on Vanderbilt Avenue, adjacent to the terminal, where visitors could learn about its history, tour the building and sign petitions.
The locus of the fight was a lawsuit by Penn Central against the newly created Landmarks Preservation Commission, which had blocked the railroad’s plan to replace Grand Central’s aboveground structure with a 55-story tower.
At issue was the question of whether the government could restrict a property owner from making changes to a building in the interest of something as seemingly amorphous as the look and feel of a city.
Mrs. Wellington and her allies rallied the public in saying yes. When the case reached the Supreme Court, she even coordinated a special train trip to Washington, loaded with friendly politicians, architects and celebrities, to watch the arguments.
The decision, handed down on June 26, 1978, was 6-3 in favor of the commission.
“If it was a side-street building or not very important, you wouldn’t get a phone call from somebody like Jackie,” Mrs. Wellington said in the oral history. “We knew the significance was beyond the building.”
Margot Zausner was born on July 30, 1934, in Manhattan to Gertrude (Freeman) Zausner and Nathaniel Zausner, who worked for his family’s dairy business. (The Zausners are often credited with introducing crème fraîche to New York’s legions of home cooks.)
After Mr. Zausner contracted tuberculosis when Margot was a child, the family moved to the warmer climate of Los Angeles, where he worked in real estate.
Margot said her first experience with urbanism came in the 1950s, when she followed the news of efforts to repossess homes in the Chavez Ravine neighborhood, north of downtown Los Angeles, to make way for a new home for the Dodgers, who like her had also recently relocated from New York.
At the University of California, Los Angeles, she studied anthropology; at the time, she said, it was the best way to learn about urbanism. She graduated in 1955.
She married Fred Wellington, an animator, in 1955. His work took them to Europe and then to New York in 1965; they divorced in 1967. She was married to Albert Sanders from 1980 until his death in 2023.
Along with her stepson, Mrs. Wellington is survived by a son, John, from her first marriage; a stepdaughter, Avis Sanders; and three grandchildren.
Arriving in New York without a job in the 1960s, Mrs. Wellington cold-called Jane Jacobs, the author of one of her favorite books, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” She told Ms. Jacobs that she had used the book’s underlying ideas to make her way around Europe, and even to find the best restaurants, which were often in the dense neighborhoods Ms. Jacobs praised.
The conversation led to a job with an architect and then to a position as assistant director of the Downtown Brooklyn Development Association, a group that was trying to prevent businesses and residents from fleeing the borough’s blighted core.
There, she pioneered many of the tactics she would use at the Municipal Art Society. She organized tours, rallied new homeowners and sponsored community events, including the Atlantic Antic, a weekend festival that is still held today along Atlantic Avenue.
“Brooklyn was demoralized,” she said. “It was to try to get people to see that change was possible.”
Mrs. Wellington brought the same energy to the Municipal Art Society. To her, historic preservation, especially in the early, difficult days, was not just a fight over one building or another. It was a secular crusade.
“I used to say I used to feel like a Mother Superior, because just everybody is on a religious mission,” she said. “I’m not religious in any other way, but cities are really worth fighting for.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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