Dear friend,

I have some wonderful news to share -- the Landmarks Preservation Commission has announced that they have dropped their plans to vote on the en masse de-calendaring of 94 individual sites and 2 historic districts which was scheduled for this Tuesday!

GVSHP and our fellow preservationists all adamantly opposed this plan, and made clear to the Commission that we believed this would be an enormous detriment to preservation in New York and a blow to governmental transparency and inclusion (read letters here and here). Thank you to everyone who joined the call and wrote to the Mayor and LPC Chair and urged them to drop this wrong-headed plan!

This does not necessarily mean this is the end of the story. While the plan has been withdrawn for next Tuesday, we do not know what the LPC plans to do from here about buildings and districts which were calendared years ago but about which they have taken no further action. We agree that sites and districts should not remain "calendared" (i.e. formally under consideration for landmark designation, with a 40 day delay period before demolition and alteration permits can be issued) for unending periods of time without a final decision about landmark status of the site.  But we believe that such decisions should be made individually and based upon the merits of the site in question, and we are willing to work with our fellow preservationists and the Commission to make that possible.

We will keep you posted as this continues to develop, but thank you again to all who wrote expressing their opposition to this plan, including Councilmember Rosie Mendez, State Senator Brad Hoylman, Manhattan Community Board 2, and the Preservation League of New York State.

Sincerely,

Andrew Berman
Executive Director

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