Submitted by BarbaraJames_75 t3_zubv42 in nyc
The NYT article: On Gay Street, Another Piece of NYC’s History Is Coming Down - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
From the article:
One Monday in late November, preservationists, politicians, neighbors and looky-loos gathered at dusk on Manhattan’s tiny Gay Street, a slim crescent in the heart of Greenwich Village, to protest the demolition of a nearly 200-year-old house there. The place in question, 14 Gay Street, is one of a clutch of six winsome but precarious early 19th-century buildings on Gay and Christopher Streets that were owned for decades by Celeste Martin, a singular character devoted to her properties and to the often eccentric cast of tenants she nurtured.
Ms. Martin died in late 2018, at 94, with no will and no close relatives, so the city took over her holdings, selling 14 Gay Street and its siblings for about $9 million to a buyer who flipped them last April to Lionel Nazarian, a 37-year-old developer, for about $12 million. Since then, Mr. Nazarian has done foundation work that has destabilized 14 Gay Street and imperiled its neighbors, so the city has ordered its demolition, a slow, laborious process that began just before Thanksgiving.
Chillingly, this scenario is one that is playing out all over the city, said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation and the organizer of the November protest: As developers have been buying up vulnerable landmark properties, they are either allowing them to deteriorate or doing work that compromises public safety. In the last year, he said, more than a dozen such buildings have come down.
[deleted] t1_j1id87o wrote
This is so sad, I've long studied New York City urbanism and there is already so much of NYC's history that has been erased...
It's also striking that the exact same M.O. is followed by developers in Beirut for landmarked buildings. They cannot take them down so they fragilize them or leave them to rot. Or sometimes they send teams at night to destroy them quickly.
I understand that such tactics work in Beirut; the Lebanese state is weak and corrupt, and it's only in the past decade that preservationists have become mainstream. But how can this shit fly in NYC?