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Got a question? Ask Knickerbocker

I read that an organization is trying to get "landmark status" for the meatpacking district. What's the actual significance of this? Will there be no more development in the area?
Simon Bowman, Queens

Knickerbocker never thought he would see the day when people were sentimental about a meatpacking district. But over the past three decades, old tenement houses have been designated landmarks, there are several parkways (Eastern Parkway, Ocean Parkway), there are even half a dozen lampposts in the Bronx that are official New York City landmarks. So why not an old smelly neighborhood where they hang pieces of dead cows?

For all this landmarking, we can blame some not very bright New Yorkers, who in 1963 took a look at the Pennsylvania Station, a building designed by Charles Follen McKim in 1910 with such brilliance and beauty it was often compared to the great cathedrals of Europe -- a stately monument modeled after the Roman baths of Caracalla and the basilica of Constantine -- and thought "Why not tear this down and build something that looks like a big bathroom?" And that is what they did. When New York woke up, Long Island commuters were walking through the ugly railroad station we know today.

The city that perpetually erases itself had gone too far. In 1965, the New York City Landmarks Commission was established to prevent such a travesty from happening again. Since then, the commission has declared an astonishing 22,000 of New York City's buildings as landmarks, and about 77 areas of the city as historical districts, the latest one something called Madison Square North, which should not be confused with Madison Square Garden, which is the toilet next to the bathroom that is Penn Station. Most of these districts are protected for their architectural or historical significance.

The Landmarks Commission is quick to point out that all this covers only about two percent of the city, so there is no danger that New York will become one big museum. As if that would be so terrible. If you ask Knickerbocker, if New York were a museum, it would be a lot easier to find a bathroom in it (a real bathroom, as opposed to a building that looks like one). But, of course, Simon, you didn't ask about public bathrooms. You asked about the meatpacking district.

If the meatpacking district gets designated a "historic district," it is not the end of the world, or even the end of the meatpacking district. You could, for example, still build a mega-mall. It would just have to look from the outside as if cows are being slaughtered inside.

To build in a historic district, or to redo the outside of a landmark, you need to apply to the New York City Landmarks Commission for a permit. For most landmarks, it is only the outside of your building that you have to worry about. If you live in Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, or any of the other historic districts, you don't need permission before buying that leather recliner you've been dreaming about, or even sticking up some stucco, as long as you put up curtains so we can't see it from the street.

It is only if you happen to own one of the 100 or so buildings whose interiors are preserved that change does not come easily. So it is with Rockefeller Center or Grand Central Terminal. There is even a tenement on the Lower East Side that has landmark status. But even preservationists have their limits; this tenement comes with a modern bathroom and air-conditioning.

The extra bureaucracy that comes with getting approval for "altering a landmarked district" (e.g. putting up a building) is a game that savvy developers love, according to Peter Salins, a prolific writer on New York City housing and development. All the red tape and maneuvering gives them a virtual monopoly on building in these areas, leaving their less-knowledgeable competitors, smaller developers or those from out of town, out of the money.

It is important to know that the laws do not dictate what buildings are used for. Today's laws would not require a meatpacking mega-mall, for example, to have slabs of beef hanging between the boutiques. In fact, some of the leaders to preserve the district's gritty quality are themselves owners of fancy restaurants more likely to have some organic sprouts on the menu than a nice sirloin.

Some preservationists surely do get carried away, such as when they called for 2 Columbus Circle to be designated a landmark to avoid its demolition. A press release called it, "the West Side's most unusual building." Yes, unusually ugly.

But maybe a century from now, if all this landmarking actually cultivates a sense of history and a sense of taste in the American public, there will be a petition at a National Landmarks Commission to preserve the one remaining industrial park in suburban New Jersey -- for its distinctive two-story box-style structures, its unique manicured lawns, its historically significant parking lots. Like the landmarked Lower East Side tenement now, it would be a shocking reminder that people once actually built places like that.


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