Landmarks Omission
Historic preservation in the city's black neighborhoods is a struggle against snobbery – and local leaders bent on development.
Michael Henry Adams is an interloper among the gods and goddesses of New York City's landmarks world.
One of his favorite stories is about a tour he gave to Laurie Beckelman, the former head of the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission under Mayor David Dinkins. Beckelman had been publicly proclaiming the need to landmark more buildings in poor and minority neighborhoods, so then-Councilmember C. Virginia Fields decided to take her out on a scouting expedition in Harlem. Adams, uptown landmarks gadfly and author, was chosen as her local guide.
Adams gamely took Beckelman to a building he thought would be a sure contender: the 129th Street site that labor leader A. Philip Randolph created to be the center of the black union movement. Back in late 1920s, Randolph commissioned the state's first black licensed architect, Vertner Tandy, to design a headquarters for the new Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, comprised mostly of black railroad workers. Eventually, the Brotherhood would become the first black union allowed into the American Federation of Labor. Randolph would become vice president of the united AFL-CIO and a major figure in the black civil rights movement.
Although the building isn't a tower of architectural achievement, it is pleasant enough to look at. Decorative double concrete columns hold up urns on each side of the arched doorway, but it is essentially a hall built for a union with limited funds. And that is all Beckelman saw, Adams says, as she turned to a colleague to ask: "They want us to landmark that?"
"It was not the New York Public Library in terms of design," Adams admits. "But it's like comparing Shakespeare and Langston Hughes. The art of the one does not diminish the art of the other. If you are bothered just because Langston Hughes may use 'ain't,' then of course you will never see the accomplishment of what his work represents."
The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has always been a haven for the city's aristocracy, and its architectural honor roll has been a catalogue of what rich people have built or bought over four centuries.
But that's not all landmarking is supposed to do. City law directs the commission to landmark property on the basis of five categories: "cultural, social, economic, political and architectural."
Despite this mandate, the landmarks commission has chosen nearly all of the city's landmarks – 94 percent, according to a former commissioner – based on architectural value alone.
That means buildings like the ones Adams includes on his Harlem tours, buildings that reflect the history of non-white New York, are often denied the recognition they deserve. Of the almost 1,000 landmarked buildings in the city, about 100 are in communities of color. Only 16 earned their laurels based on their non-white historical or cultural value; the rest were landmarked because they had significance to white people who used to live there. And of the 750 blocks now protected by historic districts, only 135 are in black or Latino neighborhoods.
But snobbishness is not the only reason there are so few landmarks in minority neighborhoods. As the movement to landmark neighborhoods like Harlem has grown, so has unexpected opposition among community leaders.
