Gregory Jones, founder of SavetheHotel.org, outside the Hotel Pennsylvania on Friday. He and other members of the group handed out flyers to passers-by, beckoning them to join their bid to save the famous hotel from demolition by its owner, Vornado Realty Trust, which has plans to replace the building with a new 2 million-square-foot office tower.
Upstarts vie to landmark the Hotel Pennsylvania
By Chris Lombardi
The day after Thanksgiving, a handful of young men braved the canyon-wind of Friday’s merciless cold front to protest in front of the Hotel Pennsylvania on 401 Seventh Ave. They walked up and down the block, handing out flyers to passers-by and crying out: “Save the Hotel Pennsylvania!” One such protester, West 30th Street resident Gregory Jones, wore a sign with the same words as he blew on his hands to stay warm.
Taxi driver Gaspar Hippolyte smiled with approval, as he pulled up in front of the hotel. “I think they’re doing the right thing,” he said with a smile. “They can’t tear it down. It’s a landmark!”
Even when while growing up in Haiti, said Hippolyte, he had heard about the Pennsylvania Hotel: “It’s the largest hotel in the world!”
That was actually true in 1919, when the Pennsylvania Railroad completed its hotel to welcome those arriving at the newly erected Penn Station, and remained so right up till the 1950s, when big bands performed in its ballrooms and guests streamed into its 2,000 rooms. Despite its history, however, the building has never been designated a landmark; nowadays, its glory days long past, the hotel makes news only when its owner, Vornado Realty Trust, announces some new development in its plans to replace the building with a new 2 million-square-foot office tower.
But now a movement to declare the building an official landmark, energized by a grassroots committee of enthusiasts called Save the Hotel.org, has persuaded Community Board 5 to request that the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) designate the hotel. While LPC has so far been dismissive and the board itself split on the issue, advocates say they will continue to fight until Glenn Miller’s former concert hall is safe.
The ideals of the national railroad system
Big-band icon Miller, who performed often in the hotel ballroom in the 1930s, personified the hotel’s glory days, his song “Pennsylvania 6-5000” known even to many who’ve never seen it. Like the old Penn Station, the hotel was designed by architects McKim, Mead and White for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, which in 1919 declared the building “the embodiment of the ideals of the national railroad system.” Art historian Hilary Ballon, author of “New York’s Pennsylvania Stations,” writes that the hotel’s four towers, in the same Indiana limestone as that of the rail station, “provided the architectural harmony that [company vice president] Rea had long upheld” and that the hotel’s then-unprecedented direct subway tunnels were “groundbreaking.”
However, writes Ballon, somehow neither the station nor the hotel “energized an entire neighborhood.” Both the hotel and Pennsylvania Station fell into disrepair over the years, and in 1964 the station was demolished, in a long-lamented move that sparked the preservation movement. Meanwhile, the hotel’s fortunes waxed and waned under a succession of owners, including New York Times cartoonist Abe Hirschfield; the Hilton, Statler, Penta and Starwood hotel chains; Planet Hollywood Inc.; and its current owner, international real estate giant Vornado Realty Trust. Its million-gross square feet of space on 20 floors, including 300,000 square feet of commercial space and 70,000 square feet of banquet and ballroom space, have not always been easy to fill, and its three-story penthouse and 2.025 rooms were gradually reduced to 1,700 rooms and three floors of offices. In the past decade, while foreign travelers, entire airline crews and conventions like the Westminster Dog Show have long enjoyed the hotel’s ample space and pet-friendly policies, many complained that interior rooms were run down. (A 2005 lawsuit by some Swedish tourists, over bedbug infestation, was settled only this year.)
Members of SavetheHotel.org, the group protesting on Friday, told Chelsea Now that if the interior isn’t up to snuff, it is because Vornado, the sole owner in the past 10 years, is not in the hotel business and has never intended to turn the hotel into a showpiece. (At press time, calls by Chelsea Now to Vornado’s corporate offices had not been answered.)
Jones, the group’s founder, pointed out that Vornado has long been planning, as the Times noted in 1999, an “urban retail and entertainment locale similar to Times Square” for the Penn Station area. Jones added that earlier this year, Vornado chairman Steven Roth had told his shareholders that the hotel was “a placeholder, like a parking lot.”
The company’s recent moves, including a widely reported effort to lure Merrill Lynch to its tower, which would include 2,000 square feet of trading floors, came a year or so after Vornado, in partnership with the Related Companies, secured the development rights for Penn Station’s replacement, the new Moynihan Station. In its preliminary plans for the station, which envisions a “development sub-district extending as far east as Sixth Avenue,” the Empire State Development Corporation mentions the demolition and the new tower as context for the new project: “If approved, this development would be completed in 2013, and it would go forward whether or not the proposed actions for the Expanded Moynihan Project are approved.”
All along, there has been little resistance from the preservation community. “Preserving that hotel, which has become very seedy, is not anywhere near as important as reusing the Farley building and creating a new rail station,” Kent Barwick, of the Municipal Art Society, told the New York Observer this spring.
And Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, told Preservation Magazine in January, “It holds a lot of cultural resonance for the city…but the inside has been pretty much stripped.” No one spoke of making the hotel an official landmark.
“Landmarking is not just about architecture,” said Layla Law-Gisiko of the Historic Districts Council, who serves on CB 5’s Landmarks Committee. “Landmarking is also about history, and about engineering. And when I looked at the Hotel Pennsylvania, I realized, this is a very worthy building.” Still, she added, “The landmark process, it’s extremely political,” especially given the hotel’s location.
Law-Gisiko, who spoke to Chelsea Now on Tuesday, admitted that she had noy thought much about the Pennsylvania Hotel until Jones and his SavetheHotel.org—a passionate group of techno-geeks who knew nothing about the politics of landmarking—came along and made CB 5 pay attention.
A virtual campaign turns local
Few seem less likely candidates for the super-local politics of historic preservation than Jones and his gang, most of whom go by their online screen-names (Jones’ is “Pirho”) and all of whom became interested in the Hotel Pennylvania because it hosts the biennial Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference, held by the international “techno-libertarian” network known as “2600.” The bi-annual, international conference has been held at the Hotel Pennsylvania since 1994, focusing mainly on technology and civil liberties issues. But in January, when Jones posted, “HOTEL PENN THREATENED WITH DEMOLITION—HOPE CONFERENCES IN JEOPARDY” on the group’s Website www.2600.com, the hackers swerved into action as best they could.
Save the Hotel board member Jordan White made a video and brought it to similar conferences, while others established “Save the Hotel” sites on the Websites Second Life, MySpace and LiveJournal. As the months went by and their efforts failed to create much public outcry, Hacker Quarterly editor Emmanuel Goldstein theorized that perhaps New Yorkers were too busy or too apathetic. An email blast by Jones to his elected representatives appeared equally fruitless, he told Chelsea Now, until he finally heard from “some aide to a state senator.”
Colin Casey, aide to State Senator Thomas Duane, told Jones to get offline if he was serious. “I told him that if he wanted to landmark the hotel, he needed to get in touch with the community board before he did anything else,” Casey told Chelsea Now on Tuesday.
Their first stop was CB 5’s Landmarks Committee, chaired by Howard Mendes and including (among others) both Law-Gisiko and Joyce Matz, who has developed a longstanding reputation at CB 5 for opposing most applicants for variances on the first go-round (with the slogan “Say no, and you’ll get a better building”) as well as for supporting most landmarking proposals.
Jones, White and local writer Carter B. Horsley sat as the Landmarks Committee went over what they knew about the history of the building. Law-Gisiko reported that the interior was so degraded as to damage its landmark potential, and that most architectural historians considered the hotel, built after both McKim and Mead were dead, a “lesser building” not up to par with others built by the firm, such as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. But even Law-Gisiko was, she told Chelsea Now, won over by the additional history she learned that day.
Horsley told the committee that in addition to once being the largest in the world, the Pennsylvania was “a pioneer in other ways—it was the first to be built directly over train tracks,” and to have elevators straight to the top floor. And while much of the interior may have lost its luster, said Jones, “the ballrooms in the basement? They’re still there—locked. Old kitchens, with all their original details.”
In reply to the committee’s concerns about Moynihan Station, Jones asked: “It seems like everyone in this city is worried about keeping Vornado happy. Why?”
While the committee voted 8–1 in favor of recommending designation to the full board, the “no” vote was significant: It came from, of all people, Joyce Matz, who argued that the building’s architectural significance was too marginal to be taken seriously by the LPC. The following week, she repeated that same refrain at the CB 5 general meeting—which felt, at times, as if a board meeting had broken out in the middle of a political rally.
A ‘vote of conscience’
On Nov. 8, the room at FIT where the general board meeting was held was packed with close to 100 visitors. Save The Hotel enthusiasts were joined by numerous employees from the Hotel Pennsylvania, filling the seats and lining the perimeter of the room. All were in force at the public session: Hotel bellman John Hamilton cried out, “It’s time to tell people like Steven Roth that he can’t do whatever he wants,” while front-desk officer Sal Scotara added: “People ask me, ‘Is this where Glenn Miller used to play? Can you show me where the big bands used to play?’ And if you look at the hotel from the outside, you gotta ask yourself , How many buildings in Manhattan still look like that?”
As the board took up the discussion, Landmarks Committee members reprised their discussion of the prior week. David Golab, echoing Horsley, said that the building may not be architecturally significant, but “its historical significance is worth preserving.” And Matz spoke passionately, for 10 minutes, crying out: “They will never designate it! Of all the buildings we have recommended for designation, we have been turned down more often than not. If you want to save it, you have to mobilize the public and persuade the owner not to demolish it, but to reuse it and, thus, become a respected leader in the community.”
Many board members worried about their vote’s implications for the Moynihan Station rezoning. “I’m concerned that we’re pre-empting the process already in motion,” said board member Meile Rockefeller. “Shouldn’t we also be talking to Vornado, so they can have their say?” asked Dory Hack.
“With what we know about City Planning, their lack of attention to history — I don’t have to hear what this new Moynihan Station is going to be,” said board member Robyn Hatcher. “Whatever they build, I can guarantee it’s not going to be better.”
At the end, the full board voted 21–8 in favor of designation, in what Mendes called “a vote of conscience.” But last week, as their resultant letter sped toward the LPC, commission spokesman Lisi de Bourbon told Chelsea Now last week that it was “extremely unlikely” that the commission would bring the issue up for a vote.
An uphill battle
On Friday, as Save the Hotel’s board kept passing out flyers despite the cold, guests continued to check into the hotel’s glossy lobby, filling the air with the sound of their multiple languages. Most knew the hotel well, and none asked by Chelsea Now had heard that the venerable structure was in danger.
Farah Joyti, a flight attendant for Air India, first shrugged at the thought, as she and her entire flight crew were lined up for rooms. A resident of New Delhi, whose oldest buildings date back to the 12 th century, Joyti then sighed: “All this building, newer and newer,” she said. “Sometimes it’s good to also hang on to a little bit of your history.”
Jones of Save the Hotel told Chelsea Now that that the group will next reach out to more elected officials, such as Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. “But we really need to get this to Mayor Bloomberg,” he added. Meanwhile, no CB 5 members have publicly joined campaign to “mobilize the public,” as Matz had suggested.
Layla Law-Gisiko said that given the heavy-hitters operating in the area, she guesses that the group will have an uphill battle. “This building—it’s large but it’s not grandiose, and I think that will work against it,” she said. “But the decisions made on landmarking at that location—they will determine a lot about where New York City is in 2020 and 2030.”
