June 26, 1978 is indeed a landmark date in the history of preservation. On this day the United States Supreme Court upheld New York City’s landmarks law in the case of Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City. The long held fear that New York City’s Landmarks Law would face a legal challenge that would ultimately bring the question of its constitutionality to the Supreme Course had been faced and the law had survived!
Since the earliest days of the law, when the Commission’s Executive Secretary Frank Gilbert kept a sign on his desk that read: ”This Law Raises Grave Constitutional Questions (see Baccash p. 9), the primary preservation objective of the Landmarks Preservation Commission was preserving the landmarks law itself. Only when Grand Central Terminal itself was threatened did the Landmarks Preservation Commission face a situation where they were willing to bet the farm.
As Harmon Goldstone recounted to me in an interview in 1987, “But when it came to Grand Central, I said, we may well be torpedoed, but let’s go down with all the flags flying…And the Commission was marvelous: I had really a hundred per cent backing. And, you see, the fact that they’d independently come to this view was awfully important. No arm-twisting or anything: they all agreed, independently.” [The entire interview was published in Village Views, Vol. IV, Number 3—Summer, 1987.]
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Henry Geldzahler, with Nancy Menapace, front left, daughter of Municipal Art Society President Ralph Menapace and right, Ariel Hyatt, daughter of Gordon Hyatt on the April 1978 "Landmarks Express" train to Washington, D.C. focusing national media attention on the Penn Central case and the effort to save Grand Central.
Some of the back story of the law suit and the advocacy efforts on behalf of Grand Central Terminal is available in Gregory Gilmartin’s Shaping the City: New York and the Municipal Art Society. The battle over saving Grand Central Terminal became a national story and truly propelled preservation to a new level of public awareness.
Did this Supreme Court victory empower New York’s preservation community? Did it unshackle the Landmarks Preservation Commission from the chain of cautiousness that had seemingly, and perhaps wisely, held it at bay during its early years? Clearly preservation reached new heights in the 1980s. Did this legal decision unchain the Commission? Was there a new sense of empowerment or were the peaks attained after the decision just aberrant behavior for a still otherwise conservative institution? What role did the Supreme Court victory play in shaping the Commission’s agenda and behavior in the years that ensued?
These are good questions for future historians to explore and even better questions for those who lived these events to answer.
Do you have stories to share about the effort to save Grand Central? Were you on the “Landmarks Express” to Washington? Were you at the Supreme Court hearing? Based on your preservation involvement in the years after the court decision, do you feel it freed the Commission? Did the victory help shape the agenda for preservation in the 1980s and 1990s? Or, do you feel the landmarks law has been administered as though its constitutionality had never been affirmed?
There can be no question that on this day thirty-two years ago, the cause of preservation won a decisive victory. The question of the impact of this victory on preservation is one you’re invited to answer.
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