A Law and the Face of the City

On May 19th, it will be 35 years since Grace Gold, a Barnard College freshman, was struck and killed by a falling piece of masonry at 115th Street and Broadway. Her death sparked in 1980 what was then called Local Law 10, requiring facade inspections. Preservationists warned that wholesale stripping of architectural ornament would result. A survey of Upper West Side buildings in 1993 and today indicates otherwise.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there are many reports of injuries and deaths caused by objects falling from buildings. Most accidents occurred during construction when stones fell out of slings or hammers slipped out of hands.

Builders were required to erect sidewalk sheds around buildings under construction, and in 1897 what The Real Estate Record and Guide called “a bill to petticoat buildings” was introduced in the City Council, requiring buildings under construction over 85 feet high to be enclosed by a metal or wooden barrier to keep the streets safe. The law was not enacted.

But there aren’t many instances involving random pieces of dislodged masonry. The most spectacular was probably on St. Patrick’s Day 1918, when a piece of stone fell from the north tower of St. Patrick’s with enough force to go through the roof. No one was injured.

In 1927 a one-foot square of granite fell from 346 Broadway, and in 1935 a 25-pound piece of stone fell from the aptly named Rockfall apartments, at 111th and Broadway. But no one was killed in these and half a dozen other incidents.

Among the buildings of that period that later lost most of its exterior décor was the Dacornel (now named the Deerfield) apartments at Riverside Drive and 145th Street, built in 1910 and designed by George and Edward Blum. On this building the brothers’ trademark tapestry brick was more subdued than usual, and they added a large projecting copper cornice. They had used cornices on other projects, but were among the few architects in New York who were partial to leaving them off, sometimes giving their buildings a naked look up top. The Dacornel/Deerfield, which held onto its cornice and balconies until around 2006, definitely looks that way now.

Initial occupancy was, like most new buildings, all white, but in 1945 The Afro-American reported that a dentist, Charles Ford, had purchased the apartment house “to get the best living quarters for colored people.”

Gaetano Ajello was more conventional than the Blums, favoring a cool, classical style, and in 1911 he designed a pair of buildings on the west side of Broadway from 115th to 116th Street for the developer Joseph Paterno. At first the plan was to make them 16 stories high, the tallest apartment houses in the city.

But Mr. Paterno later reduced them to the usual 12-story height. Before he did so, he told The New York Times that he had received 40 requests for upper-floor apartments, proving that there was an appetite for living on high floors, which had not existed at the beginning of the apartment movement. One of these buildings, 601 West 115th Street, had the terra-cotta fragment that fell and killed Miss Gold in 1979; all trim was subsequently removed.

After World War II landlords in nonprime areas — like the Upper West Side — often skimped on maintenance. A 1993 Streetscapes column surveyed tall apartment houses from Broadway to Riverside Drive, from 70th to 110th Streets, and found that, of 46 structures that had been stripped, as many as half had been de-ornamented before 1980. The practice had begun long before the new law.

To develop a control group for comparison, apartment houses along Riverside Drive and Broadway, from 135th and 165th, were examined early this year. In that area, there are 105 apartment houses of six stories and lower, and 26 that are seven stories and higher; only the taller group is subject to the facade inspection law.

Of the 105 six-story buildings, 39 had been cleared of ornament — a rate of 37 percent. Of the 26 taller apartment houses, the number was 9, a rate of 34 percent.

There is thus no greater frequency of facade alteration when a building is subject to the law.

That is not what the preservationists predicted at the time the law was adopted. In 1982, New York Magazine quoted Philip K. Howard, who was active in landmarks preservation and civic affairs, as saying that, “If any city in Europe had a law like Local Law 10, there would be nothing left.” He added that “a terrible wave of destruction has been set in motion by this apparently innocuous law.”

His reaction was understandable. The Department of Buildings was perceived as friendly to real estate interests, and as not interested in landmark preservation. Few would have chosen D.O.B. to supervise something as delicate as restoring a cornice or a terra-cotta balcony. Indeed the whole restoration industry was in its youth. But now, as Peg Breen, the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, says, “There has been a revolution in the industry,” both in contractors’ knowledge and owners’ attitudes.

Mr. Howard hasn’t changed his mind. “Local law 10 worked to make facades stable,” he said last week in an email, “but also resulted in the decapitation of countless Beaux-Arts buildings.  Easier to remove cornices and pediments than shore them up. That was a flaw in the law.”

Last year, Grace Gold’s sister, Lori, successfully campaigned to have Broadway from 115th to 116th Street renamed Grace Gold Way to perpetuate her memory.

And thousands of buildings, landmarks and otherwise, are benefiting from the requirement for facade inspections — and undoubtedly people are, too.