“Historic district regulations sometimes don’t make a lot of sense,” said the article in a Brownstone Brooklyn weekly, quoting a gadfly on a local Community Board.
The gadfly was me.
I was reminded of this recently when someone pointed out to me that, despite my recent nasty, vicious, and obsessive crusade against the NY Post’s prime purveyor of anti-Islamic hatred, Andrea Peyser, Peyser and I shared a common bond: our aggressive but Quixotic crusades against two of Brownstone Brooklyn’s sacred cows, bicyclists and landmarks’ preservation.
For instance, about the only difference between Peyser’s recent fatwa against cyclists and my own from 2006, is that mine’s funnier. Peyser is dead-on about the sanctimonious self-righteousness of cyclists and their obnoxious lobby, Transportation Alternatives. In fact, she’s inspired me to list a new outrage. Recently Williamsburg Bicycle Maven Baruch Herzfeld opined on Facebook that cyclists need not obey red lights, and should only be required to treat them as they do stops signs.
Query: has anyone in NYC ever seen a cyclist stop their bike at a stop sign?
At least until recently, Peyser and I also both shared a skepticism about the City’s Landmarks Law. In fact, before her recent change of position, Peyser was far more vehement than I. I feel the Landmarks Commission’s enforcement should be far more pragmatic, while Peyser seemed to have wanted to gut the law itself like a freshly caught bluefish.
But in Brownstone Brooklyn, our differences paled before the unyielding stridency of the local bluenoses.
For a short time before I quit the Board to avoid a ponderous public battle, when, as seemed inevitable, Marty Markowitz was surely going to can me, I was perhaps the leading gadfly in the landmarking ointment on Brooklyn’s Community Board Six, a notorious den of landmarking absolutists exceeded in their vehemence only by the old ladies and elderly gentlemen of the Cobble Hill Association.
Kane Street Synagogue thought the borders on the windows of the office and classroom building adjoining its sanctuary would look better in green. They did look better in green.
The Board said they had to be made black. I dissented.
A block of Canarsie-style double deckers incongruously stuck in the Cobble Hill Historic District wanted to continue its record of pink flaminingoed, early Louis Prima era bad taste.
The Board thought it had to be stopped, despite the fact that the block was already irredeemable. I dissented.
Then there was the 2004 case of Little Luna, documented in the New York Times and elsewhere. Someone had it in for the little antique store, which for about two decades, without a single complaint, had used an old fashioned metal security gate.
Though not old fashioned enough.
There are only two Landmarks inspectors in the entire City. They pretty much never act sua sponte, and instead respond only to complaints. This makes them a great means of settling scores.
Following the example of peasants in Communist era Poland, someone with an unrelated score to settle with Little Luna’s owner decided to denounce Luna to the apparatchiks, and the store was ticketed. The fine hurt, as did the inability of the property owner to legally rent an apartment in the building; then there was the $3000 it took to install new gates.
Strangely, the deli about two doors down with the same type of gate was left alone. No one had a grudge against the deli owner’s landlord (at least not anyone who knew about the gate‘s illegality). But once the pesky reporter from the Times called Landmarks and asked a few questions, he too was issued a ticket.
The story had legs. As the Daily News reported, Luna’s owner, Denise Taormina had come to the Community Board seeking a variance. It seemed to me that after 20 years of open and notorious existence in the face of the Cobble Hill Association’s vigilance, the gate had acquired the moral equivalent of an easement, and the community had forfeited its right to object to it. But while Taormina did find a few allies on the Board (myself among them) she found no relief from those good offices.
Among the Board Members who shed no tears for her plight was the deli’s landlord, Greg O’Connell, a local developer most noteworthy for wearing the wire that was used to strangle the career of former Councilman Angel Rodriguez and send him off to the hoosegow. O’Connell had a well-justified reputation as a straight talking guy which he took this occasion to squander.
Before he’d been issued a summons, O’Connell had voted to force Taormina to remove her gates. Shortly thereafter he’d been issued his own summons. O’Connell told the News that he had not voted on the Luna resolution, or even attended the meeting, and that his gates pre-existed the Landmarking Law and were therefore grandfathered in.
The News printed these assertions as facts, when, in fact, they were all false. A gadfly who’d attended the meeting dropped a dime. The Community Board was called by the News. . According to the Daily News, the Board’s District Manager, Craig Hammerman, to whose 2001 Council campaign O’Connell had contributed, stonewalled for a while, refusing to disclose how O’Connell voted, but eventually the truth came out.
Battles over landmarking in Brownstone Brooklyn are often portrayed as a war between ethnic Oldtimers and Yuppie Newcomers, but this is sometimes less than accurate. For instance, in the recent and well publicized skirmish over the windows of pop sensation Nora Jones, it was the Newcomer who wanted to do as she pleased, and the Oldtimers who wanted to wield the Procrustean mold.
And, despite my 21 years in Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens, I pretty much qualify as a Newcomer, and so does Peyser, a Cobble Hill resident.
In Cobble Hill, the Oldtimers are the genteel poor (at least in the context of Brownstone Brooklyn), Jews and WASPs, often retired from jobs which paid moderate salaries, who bought cheap and live inside magnificent chocolate-colored mountains of equity. The Newcomers are often power players with high salaries and jumbo mortgages, who, now that they own homes within walking distance of the Smith Street Restaurant District can no longer afford to eat there. The Oldtimers have wealth, but no income; the Newcomers have income but no wealth. The Oldtimers love the Landmarking Laws, which ensure both their gentility and their equity.
In Carroll Gardens, it is a different story. The Oldtimers are mostly working class Italians. They prize their equity, but not as much as they prize their freedom. They believe in the right to bear arms, shoot off fireworks, and install ugly metal awnings.
There is a lovely section of Carroll Gardens running from approximately 1st Place to 4th Place, which features large front yards, often with magnificent “Gardens” which give the area the name bestowed upon it by the remarkable Buddy Scotto.
I may sometimes be skeptical of the way the Landmarks Law is enforced, but the landmarking of this area is long overdue. However, as can be expected, it has spawned a battle.
There are two unexpected things about this battle.
The first is that Buddy Scotto is siding against the Oldtimers and with the Yuppies, in favor of .landmarking (perhaps not so surprising, if one factors in his financial interests).
The other unexpected thing is that Buddy is right.
Peyser had a different take, in an April 1st column, she sides with the Oldtimers, invoking the specter of “Big Brother.”
In the course of her article Peyser called the Landmarks Preservation Commission names like “bullies” and “government goons,” portraying their pitiful army of two inspectors as a veritable Gestapo on the run, trampling the rights of the poor peasantry.
Moving with her usual scrupulous disregard for the facts, Peyser tried to gin up fear by talking of a move to “expand the entire nabe into a historic district,” when far less than half of the neighborhood would actually be covered.
Peyser thought that Landmarking has gone too far, or as she put it, “In recent years, the city has grown drunk with power as it slaps ‘Landmarked‘ signs on buildings and neighborhoods, ensuring that homeowners can't change doors — or…a $2 light bulb — without drawing up plans and applying for permits that allow one to hire contractors charging three times the going rate.”
It should be noted that Peyser’s landmarked building is apparently engaged in an epic struggle with the Landmarks Commission over the right to change its light bulbs.
Go figure.
Peyser noted with extreme displeasure that "The city has landmarked 26,700 buildings since the mid-'60s, when Jackie Kennedy saved Grand Central Terminal. Some of it makes sense. But buildings where famous people once walked are now being protected, too. Last week, the city scooped up Midtown's Brill Building, where hit records were recorded decades ago. Addisleigh Park in Queens, where jazz greats once lived, is now a historic district — though its houses are not architecturally special.”
But what a difference a mere four months makes. On August 4, 2010, Peyser suddenly decided that “architectural significance” was not the point at all.
She was, in fact outraged. She called the decision by the Commission not to landmark an ugly but old commercial property of no architectural significance, a “fix.”
She compared the long and extensive hearing–a far better day in Court than what was given to Denise Taormina–the equivalent of the landmarking proponents having ball gags stuffed in their mouths. Her rationale for this was that, after the long hearing, the Landmarks Commission decided the position held by proponents of landmarking the building in question had no merit, based upon the landmarking criteria embodied in the applicable law. The was the very criteria Peyser felt the Commission had been abused and disregarded at Addisleigh Park and the Brill Building.
Now she was advocating such abuse and disregard herself.
In Peyser’s new world view “Neighbors have a right to know what the devil is moving in next door,” and the Landmarks law must be used as a hammer by the “bullies“ “government goons” and forces of “Big Brother” to implement that “right.”
Despite my desire to give this story an O. Henry Twist, it is probably no surprise that Peyser’s rapid and extreme mood swing, on landmarking (bordering almost upon dementia in its ferocity) is entirely related to the fact that the owners of the building in question wanted to build a mosque there. In stating her case for landmarking this building, she makes no landmarking related arguments whatsoever.
While Peyser states that she is merely calling for the Islamic Community Center proposed for the Holy Mother Coat Factory in Lower Manhattan to be moved elsewhere, one must doubt that this is really her position. As I’ve noted before, it appears that Peyser actually believes that anywhere in the Five Boroughs is too close (and, I suppose, should therefore be landmarked, just in case), for later on the same page, she hails the quashing of a proposal to build a Mosque on the Hallowed Ground of Staten Island as "a victory for the right to protest."
In Robert Bolt’s “A Man For All Seasons“ young Roper tell Sir Thomas Moore he’d tear down every law in England in pursuit of the devil and Moore responds "Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide…the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
In the lands in which most Muslims live, pursuit of the devil has left man’s laws flat (the lack of such trees perhaps accounting for the desert-like conditions), and the result has been world-wide tragedy. But even now, people like Peyser want to emulate Roper and turn our city into an Islamic Republic in order to pursue the “Devil” they call Islam.
Any day now, I expect a column from Peyser defending the right of cyclists to run over people wearing burkas.
I myself prefer to give the “Devil” the benefit of the law, and instead suggest to Peyser that she might just want to try moving the Young Men’s Islamic Association to 2nd Place to save the Oldtimers from the dreaded scourge of Landmarking.