Neighbors crusade to stop construction on historic rowhouse

By Rachel Breitman

Alongside the colorful, modestly sized row houses on West 29th Street, number 339 sticks out like a sore thumb.
The building seems empty, cloaked in blue polyethylene mesh linings with scaffolding climbing two floors beyond the neighboring fourth-floor rooftops that line the quiet street. Construction appears to be at a standstill, even though a Sept. 13 stop-work-order—the third since April—was just lifted.

Despite appearances, the nearly silent building is awash in tension.

Inside the partially gutted interior, two rent-stabilized tenants remain, refusing to vacate their apartments even as a neighborhood crusade to preserve the 1847 structure threatens to slow the construction process further. Because the building, an alleged stop on the Underground Railroad, never received landmark status, the battle to halt construction of a two-story addition continues to hit dead-ends. Meanwhile, the remaining inhabitants worry about safety risks from the new construction.

Fern Luskin, an art and architecture historian at La Guardia Community College who lives down the block, has taken a personal stake in preserving the structure, digging through historical archives to ascertain the building’s history as the home of Quaker abolitionists James Sloan Gibbons and Abigail Hopper Gibbons. She has petitioned the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission, the Department of Buildings, the mayor, and her local assemblymember and state senator to stop the construction and restore the structure to its original appearance.

“It is my dream that it might become a museum, but I know that may not happen,” said Luskin. “At the very least, a building with so much history must be landmarked.”

Luskin said preserving the rooftop is especially important, since the Gibbons family used it to escape when their building was targeted by an angry mob during the 1863 Draft Riots.

But finding irrefutable proof of a building’s historical significance can be a stumbling block to awarding landmark status and halting imminent construction.

The Department of Housing Preservation and Development recently found that it was impossible to document Underground Railroad rumors surrounding Downtown Brooklyn’s Duffield Street Houses. The houses are currently slated to be demolished through eminent domain as part of a $9 billion Willoughby Square Park development plan.

Luskin, however, said she found valid documentation in letters from visiting abolitionists cited in the biography of Abigail Hopper Gibbons that describe the Chelsea rowhouse as a sanctuary for runaway slaves.

Despite this new evidence, preservation laws may fall short of shielding the structure.

If the building were previously landmarked, it could be potentially protected by both national preservation laws and the city’s landmark regulations, though neither is likely to have enough muscle to freeze the existing work permit.

Unless the building owner applies to add the site to the national historic registries, neither the Civil War Sites Study Act of 1990 (Public Law 101-628, 16 U.S.C. 1a-5 note; 104 Stat. 4495) nor the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-203) would be particularly useful to advocates.

“Federal historic preservation law is something that owners can opt into, or it has mandatory requirements for government-owned property, but for private property, it may have little effect,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

“What’s kind of amazing about this particular situation in Chelsea is that it appears that there are actually primary first-person accounts,” he added. “It’s just a shame that it didn’t come to light earlier.”

And since the permits for external renovations and the addition of a one-and-a-half-floor penthouse were issued in February and March 2007, it also may be too late for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to halt the construction.

“The landmarks law said that if there is an existing permit for demolition work or other significant alterations, that permit supersedes subsequent landmark designation,” said Elisabeth de Bourbon, the spokesperson for the commission. “If an owner has been given permission to tear down or change a building, there is nothing in the landmark law that gives us the ability to nullify it.”

However, if neighbors, the city and/or landmarks preservationists can give evidence for a building’s designation before work permits are submitted, the city can landmark the site over an owner’s protest. In certain circumstances, the city can also designate a building after work permits are issued: Though the work stipulated by those permits would be allowed to take place, future work would have to meet Landmarks Commission criteria.

Such was the case when a former school building at 605 E. Ninth St. was granted landmark status in September, despite a pre-existing permit for alterations of the building’s façade. The commission broke with precedent and issued landmark status after the building permit already existed.

Preservation activists at the East Village Community Coalition received a unanimous vote at a Sept. 15 City Council hearing to landmark the former P.S. 64, the day after the Department of Buildings had renewed a permit for further external renovations. While the building’s newfound status will not overturn existing permits, it will force any further work to receive the Landmark Preservation Commission’s approval.

That is unlikely to happen in the case of the West 29th Street building, since massive changes have already taken place there under existing work permits.

But Luskin perseveres.

Beyond the West 29th Street structure’s historical importance, she points to discrepancies in the architectural plans, suggesting that the height and history of the building were misrepresented by the architect.

The recent pause in construction has brought her a glimmer of hope, but little comfort for the remaining tenants.

Since construction began, first-floor resident Barbara Testi’s mailbox has been locked, the building’s outer buzzers removed, and access closed off to the basement or upper levels of the building. The building looked barely livable last week, with the outer brick shell all that remained of several floors.

And though Testi worries that there may be no heat this winter—after steam pipes in her apartment were shut off when they exploded over the summer—she and the other tenant have not yet hired a lawyer. She has called the first floor home since 1979, and her neighbor Vincent Morgan has resided there for more than 30 years, so both enjoy substantially below-market rent. Each refused to abandon the apartments after being offered smaller versions by the landlord.

Meanwhile, Testi supports a landmark designation, though she knows the possible work stoppages that may accompany it could cause the construction process to drag further.

“At least if it were landmarked, they would have to follow the law,” said Testi. “I am really concerned that the extra construction on the roof is going to destabilize the building.”

But the DOB found no such safety concerns when plans for a two-floor penthouse addition were approved in March, with amended plans approved in August.

Since April, the project has been halted on three occasions by stop-work orders, however.

According to the buildings department, the latest came on Sept. 13 following a site inspection in which the architects did not have the approved building plans on hand. The order was lifted on Oct. 5, when approved plans were found onsite by buildings inspectors.

The building’s architect, John Hulme, refused to comment on how plans have been updated.

Community Board 4’s Landmarks Taskforce has requested that the Department of Buildings re-audit the plans, evaluating whether the building’s additional stories would violate the city’s “sliver law,” which prohibits construction of high-rise buildings of more than 45 feet in certain zoning districts.

Luskin said that based on the scale of elevation, the total height of the building will be more than 63 feet, exceeding the legal limit of 60 feet for a structure of this type in an R8-B district, where this building is situated.

Meanwhile, the community board is also asking the Landmarks Commission to review the building’s historical significance.

“It’s definitely a warning to everybody,” said Ed Kirkland, the committee’s chair. “Never assume a building is landmarked, since by the time people apply, it can be too late.”

In July 1863, just after the Battle of Gettysburg, when the first-ever military draft was started in New York City and the Draft Riots began, Abby Hopper Gibbons and her oldest daughter, Sarah (Sally), were at Point Lookout, Md., in a dangerous zone, nursing wounded Union soldiers and helping escaped slaves to survive and avoid recapture. At home at 19 Lamartine Place (now 339 W. 29th St.) were Abby’s husband, James Sloan Gibbons, and their two younger daughters, Julia and Lucy. Here are a few glimpses of what happened to their home on July 14.
From a July 17 letter from Lucy to her Aunt Anna:

As for Bridget, the [Irish servant] girl, it was impossible to alarm her. Her sole consideration was getting through with the washing....
.... In fact, at about 5 o’clock,...I proposed taking a bath [after she and Julia had moved some clothing, personal papers, and portraits to their aunt and uncle’s home next door]. Fifteen minutes later, the mob appeared.
.... Our neighbors behaved nobly. Judge Robinson entered with the mob and saved what he could--a portrait of Willie [their brother, who had died in a freak accident while a student at Harvard, a few years earlier], a drawer full of letters,...Mr. Horn stood in the parlor and threatened the mob with a pistol. He drove off the women (!!!) who were trying to set fire to the house with torches, but was finally obliged to retreat through the back window. Mr. Grey rescued a sheet full of wet clothes which were being carried off; and his wife had them re-washed and ironed. A lilttle boy from somewhere, only about twelve years old, helped like a little soldier, bringing buckets of water to put out the fire.
.... Our butcher [probably an Irishman] went into the midst of the mob, and declared he would not have that house touched, for which he was badly beaten, but will recover.
Father was at the Fifth Avenue Hotel making a last appeal for military to protect the premises.
.... Mr. [Joseph] Choate...[accompanied us] over the roofs to the end of the block, (by this time the mob was violent) out of a house there [owned by a Jewish man], procured a carriage which waited in 8th Ave., put us all into it, and brought us [to his family’s home on W. 21st St.].

Excerpted from “The Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons as Told Chiefly Through Her Correspondence,” By Sarah Gibbons Emerson (1896)