Landmarks Has New Plan to Ease Backlog of Proposed Sites

We’ve noticed the Landmarks Preservation Commission has been moving quickly through the proposed landmarks it wants to designate, and is also now putting presentations with renderings and photographs of historic sites online for all to see, as it did with the proposal for the Brooklyn Heights Cinema Building, approved this week.

Things are changing under the LPC’s new chair, appointed under de Blasio, and lately the most visible changes seem to be for the better. Meenakshi Srinivasan is an architect, but not a preservationist, so local preservationists weren’t sure what to expect. Her first big move as chair — to dump a backlog of about 100 sites without individual public hearings — caused a great outcry, as we reported in a series of articles at the time, and the LPC backed off.

Now the department has come up with a new plan for that backlog of about 100 buildings, The Wall Street Journal reported. Individual public hearings will be held for each site this fall, and the LPC will make its final decision on each proposal by the end of 2016.

Only seven of the sites on the list are in Brooklyn, as we reported before. These include the extremely significant Green-Wood Cemetery, pictured above, the Père Lachaise of New York City, and New York’s most popular tourist attraction in the 19th century.

In some cases, what is holding up the proposal may be owners who oppose designation. This is the case with St. Barbara’s Roman Catholic Church in Bushwick, the Journal noted.

In addition to the list of seven, there are many more individual sites and historic districts in Brooklyn that have been proposed, including several historic districts in Bedford Stuyvesant, but that were not on the list of about 100. The LPC this month said it plans to vote on the proposed Bedford District within this fiscal year, as we were the first to report, but has not yet said anything about the others.

Here is the list of seven with the year they were “calendared,” or the LPC decided to consider them:

Lady Moody-Van Sicklen House. Photo by Kate Leonova for PropertyShark

Lady Moody-Van Sicklen House
27 Gravesend Neck Road
Calendared in 1966

Coney Island Pumping Station
2301-2327 Neptune Avenue
Calendared in 1980

Green-Wood Cemetery
5th Avenue and 25th Street
Calendared in 1981

St. Augustine’s R.C. Church and Rectory
116-130 6th Avenue
Calendared in 1966

Holy Trinity Cathedral/Ukranian Church in Exile
177-181 South 5th Street
Calendared in 1966

St. Barbara’s Roman Catholic Church
299-307 Central Avenue
Calendared in 1980

183-195 Broadway Building (aka Forman Building)
183-195 Broadway
Calendared in 1986

New York City Moves to Ease Landmark Backlog [WSJ]
Landmarks Will Not Dump Proposed Sites En Masse Tuesday After All [Brownstoner]
Breaking: Landmarks to “Decalendar” Hundreds of Proposed Historic Sites? [Brownstoner]
Brooklyn Sites the LPC Has Targeted to Dump [Brownstoner]

Map by LPC