The dramatic story of how New Yorkers saved Grand Central Terminal and established the precedent for preserving urban landmarks.
No Ordinary Landmark tells the legal story of how Grand Central Terminal became a landmark. This is the fascinating, littleknown history of the railroad company that owned Grand Central, the architects and engineers who built it, the city that supported it, and the lawsuit that saved it. The cast of characters is immense: some familiar, like Mayor Robert Wagner and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and some now obscure, like Albert Bard, father of the New York Landmarks Law. Railroad moguls, real estate barons, politicians, arts experts, and above all lawyers and judges all played vital roles. It is a story of landmark law at a critical moment in its existence and what property owners ultimately do with their assets. Finally, this is the story of one of the greatest cities in the world, in microcosm.
Opened in 1913, Grand Central Terminal (GCT) became a costly luxury for the New York Central Railroad in the postwar years, as the rise of automobile culture and interstate highway systems led to a precipitous decline in railroad use. In the 1950s, proposals were put forward to replace GCT with more lucrative buildings, including the massive Pei Tower. This led Bard in 1954 to draft an act for New York State to recognize landmarks, the Historic Preservation Enabling Act. It was passed by the legislature and signed into law in 1956, though it was not used to create the New York City Landmarks Law until 1965—by which time Pennsylvania Station had been demolished to make way for the fourth, and current, iteration of Madison Square Garden. Immediately after the landmark designation for GCT became official in 1967, New York Central Railroad merged with Pennsylvania Railroad to form Penn Central, and the new company proposed to demolish GCT the way it had Pennsylvania Station. When New York refused to consider the plans, Penn Central sued the city, thus paving way for the legal battle that the Supreme Court finally decided in 1978.
Louis Hull Hoffer sheds new light on the suit between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the City of New York, showing how this iconic legal battle pit two core values of American jurisprudence against one another: the absolute right of property owners over their property and the public’s interest in shared urban spaces. While the tension between these values persists today, Penn Central v. New York City created a new legal framework for a generation of jurists, planners, preservationists, and legal scholars.