Landmarks and the City's Rulebook

Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group joined new towers to two designated buildings, the landmarked Steinway Hall on West 57th Street and the landmark Dime Savings Bank in Brooklyn, and this cluster explains the city rules that make a building a landmark and govern what may rise beside it. Two bodies of law are involved, preservation and zoning.

Preservation began with a loss. McKim, Mead and White’s Pennsylvania Station, finished in 1910 on two entire Midtown blocks, was slated for demolition in an announcement of July 25, 1961, and the New York Preservation Archive Project describes its destruction as the event popularly credited with starting the modern preservation movement in the city.¹ The law that followed was tested at Grand Central. When Marcel Breuer drew a tower to rise above the terminal in the 1970s, the owners challenged the landmarks law itself, and in June 1978 the United States Supreme Court upheld it, as Smithsonian Magazine recounts.²

Zoning is older. The 42 story Equitable Building, completed in 1915 at 538 feet, darkened roughly seven acres of the surrounding blocks with its shadow, and AIA New York’s centennial essay traces the 1916 Zoning Resolution to the alarm it caused, describing the new rules as limits on the use and shape of buildings.³

The entries cover both threads: New York landmarks law, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the demolition of Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal, the 1916 Zoning Resolution and the 1961 Zoning Resolution. A short entry on air rights points to the companion site that treats the transfer of floor area in depth.