In the spring of 1953 alarm swept Brooklyn Heights. The new Promenade, open to the public for a little over two years, was threatened with view-blocking new warehouses across Furman Street that would rise 20 feet higher than the Promenade’s 50-foot level. The Brooklyn Heights Association mobilized a letter-writing campaign. Curiously as it seems now, people were advised not to complain about the loss of the view but to stress such factors as noise and noxious fumes bouncing back from the proposed warehouses and affecting the health and well-being of Heights residents. But of course the view was what really mattered to most people.

In any event, the unusual uproar (nothing comparable had arisen a decade earlier over the threat of the BQE running through the heart of the Heights) led Borough President John Cashmore to call a “town meeting� at Borough Hall. Officials on the dais included representation from the New York Dock Company, then seen as the chief villain of the piece, but also two especially powerful individuals, the “master builder� Robert Moses and Austin J. Tobin, who, as executive director of the Port Authority, pulled as many strings as Moses. The words coming out of the mouths of the officials were not reassuring to the hearers packing the auditorium. Well aware of the feelings of his constituents, Cashmore granted their concern but seemed equivocal.

A man in the audience tried to get Cashmore to state a definitive position, and when Cashmore gave a noncommittal answer, he tried deferentially and laboriously to rephrase his question, with no better luck. I had gone to the meeting with my Finnish-descended but Brooklyn-born mother, known for her acerbic tongue. She stood up.

“What this gentleman wants to know, but he’s too polite to say so, Mr. Cashmore,� she declared, “is: are you for us or agin’ us?�

That brought down the house. Cashmore hastened to say that of course he was for us and would do what he could. Still, we left the meeting very dissatisfied about the prospects for saving the view. I was then in the Air Force, on a non-onerous temporary duty assignment in New York, and, since Moses was responsible for the Promenade’s existence, I wrote to him to express my chagrin that he had shown so little apparent interest in safeguarding his creation. Much to my surprise, I received a two-page typewritten reply, which began with “Dear Lieutenant� and went on to say: “Frankly, I don’t think you have sufficiently studied the problem of zoning on the Heights and the protection of the Esplanade enough to understand it completely, otherwise I do not see how you could possibly figure out that we would fail to do everything legitimate to protect what we have created.� The letter went into considerable detail about the area’s zoning history and technicalities I couldn’t really follow. But one sentence stood out: “The City cannot do a piece of spot zoning simply protecting this particular view.�

A gratifying, though temporary solution, was that the Board of Estimate (then the city’s most powerful body) shortly established Furman Street as an “S� zone, limiting construction to no higher than 50 feet. This would come under fire from real estate interests and later be rescinded. In the meantime most of the existing old 50-foot warehouses were torn down, and they had not been replaced by 1974 when the city finally adopted precisely the kind of “spot zoning� Moses had derided – by establishing a special “view plane� specifically to protect the view from the Promenade.

The campaign for the Promenade view is briefly alluded to by Anthony C. Wood in his new book, Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks, as one of the many strands that went into the almost century-long efforts that eventuated in the city’s 1965 Landmarks Law. A variety of campaigns, such as an early one to curb the proliferation of billboards, helped generate a consciousness that the city could be more beautiful than it was shaping up to be. Indeed, the notion of beauty – whether in the distinction of architecture or in the quality of certain views – plays a central role in Wood’s history. Among the book’s many heroic figures – with Brooklyn Heights represented by Gladys James, Otis and Nancy Pearsall, Clay Lancaster, Meredith Langstaff, William Fisher, Arden Rathkopf, Norval White, Elliot Willensky, Roy Richardson, and Heights Press editor Richard Margolis – no one is given more attention than Connecticut-born Albert C. Bard (1866-1963), a lawyer and civic leader whose belief that beauty was legitimately subject to the government’s police power ultimately found expression in New York State’s 1956 Bard Act, a piece of legislation that gave the crucial legal underpinning to the Landmarks Law that came nine years later. In 1978 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutionality in ruling for the preservation of Grand Central Terminal. Bard lived long enough to see the Landmarks Preservation Commission formed in 1962, when he was 95, but it would take three more years for it to gain power of enforcement under the Landmarks Law.

Wood is at pains to stress that the Landmarks Law did not simply grow out of reaction to the demolition of Pennsylvania Station, 1963-66, but that many efforts and studies – and many disappointments – preceded its passage and its final signing into law by the notoriously slow-to-act Mayor Robert Wagner. Many of the people who opposed Robert Moses – names like George McAneny and Robert Weinberg familiar from Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, as well as Harmon Goldstone, Geoffrey Platt, Margot Gayle, Jane Jacobs, James Felt and others – play important parts. Alan Burnham is credited with compiling an influential list of notable structures, published in 1963 as Landmarks of New York. The Municipal Art Society and several other organizations helped raise popular awareness. The impatient Brooklyn Heights contingent is described as pressing its special district cause so hard that it had to be restrained from jeopardizing the prospects for an overall law, but Otis Pearsall served the general cause well by collecting and analyzing potentially pertinent laws from many other cities. Wood shares the disappointment I recall feeling after the law took effect, that the Landmarks Commission was too intimidated by development pressures to designate major structures, like the 1908 Singer Building that was demolished in 1967. Preservation has remained an often elusive goal, foiled more recently by the defacing of landmarks such as the “lollipop building� at Columbus Circle and elimination of the Revere sugar refinery in Red Hook, both of which Wood mentions, and radically altering the Austin Nichols Warehouse in Williamsburg. Still, much continues to be protected under the Landmarks Law, including the Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill Historic Districts. And the heart of DUMBO looks to be added.

In closing I should mention the pleasant surprise of finding my writings cited in connection with the planning of the Brooklyn Heights section of the BQE and the development of the Promenade, and finding my name both in the index and the acknowledgments. Also thanks to Joni Whitehouse, who brought the book to my attention during a chance first meeting.

Anthony C. Wood, Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks, Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, New York (2008), 422 pages.

— Henrik Krogius,
Consulting Editor
Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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