In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

34  “The Kind of Civilized Vision That New Yorkers Are Not Supposed to Have” How Historic Preservation Shaped Lower Manhattan’s Development The two megaprojects developing at opposite ends of Fulton Street, the only street in Lower Manhattan then running uninterrupted from river to river, dramatically reshaped Manhattan after 1966. The World Trade Center and South Street Seaport were the yin and yang of 1960s development. Conceived separately but adopted by the nation’s most powerful family, each complemented the other. Port Authority director Austin Tobin characterized the twin towers as a “vertical port,” while the Seaport depicted how the World Trade Center “will carry out the mission started at South Street.” Said Robert Fitch, there would have been “No South Street Seaport . No World Trade Center” without the Rockefellers.1 When built in 1811–12 to house merchants and countinghouses, Schermerhorn Row was “the first and largest of its kind” in New York. The Times later called it “the city’s original world trade center.” The twin towers, whose construction ran from 1966 to 1973, eclipsed any other skyscraper in the world. While the old Row was integrated into its neighborhood , the paired monoliths so overwhelmed theirs that they even had their own zip code. Bankrolled by the Port Authority, they were in 1974 “hurting for tenants,” while the Rockefellers’ proposed residential complex across West Street, called Battery Park City, was begging for funding. The Seaport’s fate was different as it had to answer these questions: What was its mission? Who would come to its aid? Why was it important for New York? All the while, the district became intertwined with the economic and cultural meaning of New York.2 More significant than the battle over Penn Station, whose sentence of execution was summarily announced and commenced, the three-year “The Kind of Civilized Vision That New Yorkers Are Not Supposed to Have” 35 battle for Schermerhorn Row set the context for much of Gotham’s attitudes about historic preservation. The debate was heightened as the city was socially, racially, and economically fracturing. And because Albany failed to fund the state museum, the Row’s fate was shaped by the highest bidder—the partnership of Sol Atlas and John McGrath. Ambitious and brash, Atlas had submitted in 1958 the high bid for Ellis Island, which had closed in 1954; he proposed demolishing the site and creating a resort, but the bid was rejected. Atlas-McGrath’s profit-driven speculation resembled that of Peter Schermerhorn 160 years earlier. Son of a Knickerbocker father and Huguenot mother, Schermerhorn was a merchant , chandler, and developer. He filled in a six-hundred-foot section of the river and, instead of letting the land settle after building a story, hurriedly finished the four-story Row to attract tenants. As a result, the leaning walls, out-of-plumb floors, and skewed lintels still reveal improperly settled fill. But renters were easy to find; within the next decade, the Brooklyn ferry landing, the Fulton Market, and the nation’s first packet lines for transatlantic and coastal shipping located nearby. It was the heart of the port.3 Lower Manhattan most dramatically changed when zoning revisions in 1961 set off a building boom. Except for a few landmarks, “the old building mortality rate,” Huxtable wrote in 1962, was “running dangerously close to 100 per cent.” By 1967, a dozen skyscrapers and superblocks were being built by Atlas-McGrath, Emery Roth, and Uris Brothers, the latter of which bulldozed “one of the city’s best preserved rows of early 19thcentury Greek Revival buildings” on South Street. Huxtable wondered if Uris had a conscience, and others if the LPC had a spine. Uris erected 55 Water Street, whose 3.2 million square feet made it the world’s largest commercial office building. Yet, like other binges, significant space remained vacant until the late 1970s. Frustrated by the unregulated growth, Huxtable wrote, “It isn’t just that New York has had no muscle; it has had no vision.” Thinking that the Seaport did, she encouraged Stanford “to use her name” and approach her editors. But Kortum feared he was “slow to grasp this cosmic strategy.”4 Reflecting a changing climate, John V. Lindsay, a Republican-Liberal, became mayor in 1966. He was “the darling of the Municipal Art Society,” said Barwick, and he later told LPC chairman Goldstone in 1968, “When in any doubt on landmarks, I say designate.” The LPC was slow to move [3.138.114.38...

Share