
By Yvonne Vávra
Last week, a superhero descended upon City Hall, ready to unleash his powers to defend a building in distress. A 135-year-old structure, holding on for dear life amidst a battle about its existence: West-Park Presbyterian Church on the corner of West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. That hero? The Hulk. Mark Ruffalo, to be exact.
Ruffalo is one of many Upper West Siders fighting to save the church from demolition. The saga involves a building in a state of divine decay, a congregation down to its last twelve members who can’t afford to maintain or restore it, and an interested buyer who, alas, plans to replace the historic structure with luxury condos.
For most of the city’s existence, saving its legacy was never the priority. New York has a long history of not giving a pigeon’s butt about the past. Take the “Commissioners’ Plan of 1811,” which bulldozed this former island of hills to make way for the concrete jungle. The commissioners wiped out meadows, marshes, rocks, and streams, and overlaid the dead flat with a ruthless rectangular street grid. Or take Robert Moses, who forced his will on the city’s future at any cost, sacrificing entire communities — like the neighborhood of San Juan Hill, which stood in the way of his vision to build Lincoln Center.
A constant cycle of destruction and renewal defines the city’s architecture. In Adam Gopnik’s words: “There is always a new New York coming into being as the old one disappears.” Just ask the Singer Building. Completed in 1898, it was one of the first skyscrapers in Manhattan, and for one year, until 1909, it was the tallest in the world. It ultimately became the tallest ever destroyed by its owners when they sacrificed it for the future between 1967 and 1969. “The Singer fell victim to a malady called progress,” wrote the Daily News.
The list of remarkable New York buildings razed to make way for new ones is long, including the old Metropolitan Opera House and three Madison Square Gardens that lived before the current one. The demolition of the original Penn Station probably caused the most horror but it meeting the wrecking ball at least galvanized a national movement for historic preservation.
The Upper West Side, too, lost notable structures to historical indifference. Take the 75-room magnificent mansion of Charles M. Schwab, which looked like a French Chateau straight from the Loire, complete with a two-story chapel, a bowling alley, a gym, an indoor pool, and its own power plant. It filled even Andrew Carnegie with envy. “Have you seen that place of Charlie’s? It makes mine look like a shack,” he’s supposed to have said. Schwab’s mansion took up a whole block at Riverside between 73rd and 74th Streets all the way to West End Avenue. Harper’s Weekly wrote that it “may strike the average observer as a burdensome possession, oppressive to maintain, and likely to be embarrassing to heirs, but if Mr. Schwab can stand it, we can.”
Or not. The house was torn down in 1948 and shortly after replaced by a red-brick block, still bizarrely called Schwab House. Interestingly, in his last years, Schwab was anxious to sell the mansion, hoping the city would buy and use it as a mayoral residence. But Fiorello LaGuardia didn’t want to live in it. Too grandiose. “What, me in that?,” he supposedly said and later moved to Gracie Mansion, as Upper West Sider Stephanie Azzarone recounts in her book Heaven on the Hudson: Mansions, Monuments, and Marvels of Riverside Park.
Amidst all this tearing down and building back up, one emotion stands out as quintessentially New York: nostalgia. Pete Hamill captures it perfectly in his book Downtown: “The city is, in a strange way, the capital of nostalgia.” No wonder. What with this addiction to reinvent itself, someone has to keep an eye on the city’s soul. Walking past the familiar feels like being held by your surrounding. I was here. I am here. So it’s a special kind of pain when what had been there now is not. I’m still sad about the Duane Reade we lost at the corner of 75th and Columbus. A Duane Reade! What can I say, it held some good memories for me.
There’s no way around change. Not for cities, not for us. Every day, we face the struggle of merging the past with what’s next, constantly deciding what to hold on to and what to let go of. The balancing act lies in embracing the future while honoring what came before. Take a walk to Columbus Circle to see how beautiful that could look like: The Hearst Tower blends a landmark stone façade with a sleek tower of glass and steel, weaving together the old and the new into something cohesive and meaningful.
As the Rag once pointed out, the West-Park Presbyterian Church saga is a battle between head and heart. Is it too expensive to preserve? Too important to demolish? Whatever decisions were made behind those City Hall doors, this story challenges us to navigate the space between desires and realities. Right at the corner of 86th and Amsterdam, we’re forced to reconsider how we balance nostalgia with the need for change. The head and heart may never fully agree, but how we respond to this dilemma will define us as New Yorkers, far beyond 86th Street.
Yvonne Vávra is a freelance writer and longtime Upper West Sider.
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Nostalgia is fine, but like everything else NY’ers take it too far.
I truly love NYC and have had many wonderful experiences, work, meals, wonders and relationships here. My travel around the city is my dedicated hobby. Done it all! So, life is too short not to take is as far as possible. Yes, the city has changed tremendously and unfortunately my experiences cannot be replicated. Unfortunately, you cannot possibly understand what you haven’t experienced but call “taking it too far”
I suppose you could say the opposite too. “progress is fine but like everything else NY’ers take it too far”
You’re both right. Perhaps the most Zen way of seeing that dynamic is to understand that extremes are fine, but like everything else NY’ers take them too far.
I was pleased to see this reminder that the character of a neighborhood is important. But I was surprised to see no mention of Landmark West!, the primary preservation group for the UWS. LW is certainly concerned with preservation, but now we move beyond simple landmarking (no, it’s not simple, actually), and into the issues of environmental sustainability, affordability and community. To maintain a livable city, with fewer unneeded, banal luxury high-rises, we need to support groups like Landmark West. Check out the LW website and become a member.
Here’s the link 🙂 https://www.landmarkwest.org/membership/
As a resident of the modern day Schwab house, while the city definitely became a bit uglier with its replacement, now there are 600+ units where previously one rich guy and his family lived, a net increase of housing for ~2k people.
This city and country are becoming increasingly unaffordable and we need to be making these compromises faster in my opinion. Nostalgia is great but if it comes at the expense of young people starting families, then we have a problem.
Mark Ruffalo doesn’t feel the pain of housing so to him saving something pretty is worth it even if his decision lowers the housing stock (regardless of how luxury the proposed units are, it adds supply which reduces prices overall).
If the preponderance of new luxury buildings and towers going up in Manhattan are as you claim actually causing a reduction in housing prices, I’d sure like to see your evidence.
I don”t like him but how does saving this lower housing stock?
There’s a sizable plot of mostly empty land just east of Murray Street that cries out for development and could become home to much affordable housing. Why it sits unutilized year after year I can’t imagine. Nostalgia, I suppose!
Why don’t all these rich UWS people just pool their money and buy the church themselves?
Or Bloomberg!
Or the actual Mark Ruffalo who could put his money where his mouth is. That’s what I thought made him a hero but I guess NOT.
Nostalgia is a fantasy characterized by an unrealizable return to an imagined past that is colored with good feelings and favorable images that do not represent the reality that was, but a present that is wished for. In some sense, carried to an extreme, nostalgia is a form of neurosis that reflects unhappiness with the present and glorification of an imagined past. Dicken’s London is portrayed in nostalgic ways in movies, yet the reality of Dicken’s London was a stinking, dirty, unhealthy and in may ways, ugly and cruel place.
If you want to move beyond your facile, je jeune definition of nostalgia I suggest Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. It’s meaning may elude you but it is a far better definition of a profound state of mind.
Nostalgia is not fantasy if the experiences are true. Change can be good or not good depending on your point of view. If living on the UWS means restaurants, diners, jazz venues and happy hour, then you are out of luck!!!! But this was the UWS of the past. If you want to live here to raise a family instead on Long Island, then it will take $$$$ until the powers that be complete their erroneous and deceitful gentrification. Nostalgia is not the fantasy; unrealistic change is the fantasy.
I myself am all in favor of realistic nostalgia. It’s a little tricky in that it requires good memory.
A wonderful article and thought provoking. I recently attended a show at theWest-Park Presbyterian Church; we need performance spaces on the UWS and churches, especially defunct ones, need a purpose. Why not repurpose them & still keep some of the charm of mixed architecture, rather than turn into a super-modern city with only ultra-tall buildings?
What about the METRO? An eyesore for years in front of the Extell (?) building on 100th & Broadway, it may be turned into a non-profit cinema, which many of us would love.
I also attended a performance there for the first time recently. It is a really nice place. The pews are somehow harder than any I’ve ever sat on before but I’ll just bring my own cushion next time.
Thanks for a fine and pertinent story, Yvonne!
A small clarification: the Singer Building, in 1898 only ten floors tall and not much of a skyscraper, was COMPLETED in 1908 with the addition of the famous tower (“The Singer Tower”), bringing the height to a record 612.1 feet.
The options are not to tear it down or let it crumble. There is a buyer, a plan, and people who want to contribute to the building’s renovation. But the owner wants to hold out for the highest bidder, who will replace the church with luxury condos. Don’t we have enough tall glass buildings that look giant needles? The West-Park Presbyterian Church is a work or art. Maybe it’s time to rethink our definition of “progress”.
Whenever someone complains about ugly skyscrapers inevitably someone gets nostalgic for the Twin Towers that nobody liked. They were ugly. I miss them but they were ugly.
I don’t think that people pining for the Twin Towers are doing so for architectural design reasons. I think they’re probably doing so for other, more profound reasons.
A 1934 map of NYC shows movie theaters all along Broadway and elsewhere, nearly all of them now replaced with high rises, no doubt due to the addiction to TV and now Internet. Similarly, religious structures are targeted for redevelopment as attendance drops and funds dry up. Remaining walk-ups and those regulated are a thrill to see as bulwarks against aggressive developers erecting uglies.
It is interesting how people think that it is the most natural and normal thing in the world that they can tell real estate owners what they may and may not do with their real estate.
Ummm yeah well just because those with the most can usually do whatever they want doesn’t mean that whatever they want is always legal or ethical, and pointing this out to the real estate owners you’re referring to is perfectly natural even if they/you aren’t into it. Oh well!
It is a perfectly normal thing when real estate is in close proximity to others. That’s why you need building permits to construct additions and why we have local law 11. That’s why in the suburbs local ordinances often require homeowners to mow & maintain their lawns, and in some cases not paint their homes crazy colors. It’s why people aren’t allowed to keep pet tigers in their apartments or to sell alcohol from their front steps. Property ownership is rife with rules and restrictions. It’s an effort, albiet not perfect, to not let one owner’s rights impinge upon the rights and quality of life of neighbors.
And yet it’s the beauty and history of old buildings that makes neighborhoods desirable. Crumbling areas with good bones and grubby charm get “discovered” by gentrifiers. Eventually, property values start to climb and developers swoop in, ready to capitalize on the trendiness. Soho. Chelsea. Williamsburg. Bed-Stuy.
Landmark status preserves the charm and history that eventually makes a neighborhood desirable. Yes, it can backfire. But without it, a lot more of this city would look like Columbus Avenue in the 90s.
This same audacity crops up with regard to constructing nuclear power plants. The utter gall!
What’s wrong with pride and a sense of spiritual ownership of a city you love and live in?
It would be easier to accept progress in NYC if the replacements weren’t always so darned ugly.
I wish someone had turned that Schwab chateau into an art museum like the Frick, the Neue, the Jewish Museum, or Cooper Hewitt. (The multi-unit modern residential box could have replaced less distinctive structures somewhere else).
Yes, we need more creative, considerate builders. One of the towering buildings recently built on the UWS has turned my day into night by blocking the sun. The sad thing is that “all about the money”.
I’ll be blunt… preservationists have been opposing the demolition of affordable housing for decades while the City and the LPC have allowed buildings filled with affordable housing to be bulldozed for luxury condominiums. Destroying West Park won’t provide affordable housing units but will provide a nice windfall for the Presbytery and masses of profit for the market rate developer with whom they are working.
I’ve been working in the preservation area for well over 20:years with Landmark West! And I can tell you that preservation is about the importance of our shared cultural heritage that is present in our buildings, our parks and our neighborhoods. When it comes down to it, preservation is about people. West Park is an important part of our cultural heritage not just because of the exceptional building but also because of what went on at the building. The Presbytery has enjoyed the tax free status of the building for all these years and chose not to keep it up. While the Presbytery disagrees with me, I say that although the state of the church is not as dire as claimed, the current state of the church is, in large part, due to “not so benign neglect”. The LPC should have stepped a long time ago to protect the building but sadly it did not do so.
I find the suggestion that what is happening in the City today is all about affordable housing pernicious and cruel. We don’t have a housing problem we have an affordable housing problem. The COY that worked a whole sale destruction of our zoning laws at the behest of the Mayor’s blue ribbon committee of bankers, developers, billionaires and other members of the real estate elite makes affordability OPTIONAL! Yes that’s right OPTIONAL!
These decisions are not being made between the heart and the head they are being made on the basis of what developers and other members of the real estate elite want and the size of their war chest.
hey can i join this church and get a cut of the $$$$$$ they will be making for the big sellout?
You are essentially asking 12 people or at the most 12 families to bear the burden of mainating this building, which in my mind only casts an ominous shadow on the neighborhood.
To me, it would be great to have another performance space on the UWS, if it’s sustainable. But the church needs a tremendous amount of costly repairs and I don’t think there’s anything particularly remarkable about it’s architecture. Is it better than another luxury building? That depends on who you’re asking as everyone has a different opinion. It’s reasonable to want more tax payers living in the neighborhood and it’s also reasonable to want the neighborhood to draw tourists and residents to enjoy artistic performances. There isn’t one right answer in this scenario as no one is being evicted from their homes and we aren’t really losing a beautiful architectural treasure. However this plays out, the UWS will be just fine.
I think the Hearst building is a perfect example of why we need preservation. It’s a beautiful building and because they preserved it and built on top of it, it got more beautiful. The Schwab house and Penn Station are just a tragedy.
As a child from a small city, my introduction to NYC was from tv movies. My dream was to live in this vibrant, beautiful city. In my hometown, 6pm was the bewitching hour when everything was closed for the night.
At age 14, I came to NYC with a friend’s family. I remember crossing the George Washington bridge around midnight… AWESOME! But most awesome was the man lying on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant that was OPEN!!!! Oh my! Open at midnight?????? TRULY EMPRESSIVE!!!
At age 19, I came back to NYC as an officer in a committee at school. I spent a week, fully paid for, at the Americana Hotel, ate dinner at Mamma Leone’s, walked through Times Square and Central Park, etc.
After graduation, age 21, I moved to NYC. I still love living here but loved it more in the past.
Somehow my wonderful, vibrant UWS community has turned into that little town I left over 50 years ago.
The UWS aint what it was! Sadly!
(As an aside, Mark Ruffalo is a rabid antisemite, and it’s rich – pun intended – for him to involve himself when that decrepit building occupies useable space that could be repurposed to provide housing to underprivileged New Yorkers. The only constant in life is change, Mark – well, change, and also that you’ll continue to prove yourself to be an insufferable know-it-all with a hero complex, just because you play one in movies.)
Okay so like do you have any proof of that whatsoever? Or do you really just meant that he’s been vocally opposed to the genocide in Gaza? Because if so, despite what Israel would very much like the whole world to think, that is not the same as being antisemitic.
Why if I can afford to live on UWS, it is called privilege? Privilege is something unearned. I came to this country as a penniless immigrant, studied and worked 80 hours a week. Everything I have is earned. Call a spade a spade – poor New Yorkers are poor, not underprivileged. Some may be unlucky in life, but that is different from underprivileged.
Too bad LaGuardia didn’t want the Schwab Chateau. It would be a fitting domicile for the current Grifter Mayor.
Something with less acreage and more bars might be a better fit.
It is truly amazing that we all want to preserve old churches, old skyscrapers etc. etc. but no one wants to pay the cost of preserving a “fine old classic.” One of the writers nailed it. The church was built at the turn of the last century to hold, maybe, 1000 people who most likely went there every Sunday and had activities there the rest of the week. Their contributions paid the bill, plus of course their property tax exemption.
Now 12 people show up and probably risk having the roof collapse on them every time they sit in a pew. The same thing is happening all over the city.
A performance space would be great — but whose going to pay for it?
It seems we all want a beautiful, or at least old, city but don’t ask us to pay a dime to have it.
Well said. The UWS has changed a lot… As has the community living here! The old days with all the great places to live it up in after work .. Restaurants, jazz clubs, etc . Sad. But it ain’t gonna change back …
Mr. Ruffalo and his fellow wealthy crusaders can outright BUY the church instead of giving it a big fat check for …$1000 (one thousand dollars) and preserve it all he & his wealthy friends want. But he’d rather bask in the glory of being a crusader while the congregation’s right on their property are violated, year in and year out.
Nostalgia is part of what makes stories, too, and gives a perspective to things that would otherwise be taken for granted (or had been, till they were no more). Not necessarily something to avoid as it is to consider. Not all change is a choice, of course, but when there is a choice, we can wonder whether we are holding on to what should be held on to in physical form (for some things are decidedly worth saving from the wrecking ball), or can release into something new, as reminiscing carries its own sweetness. For example, we were very sad to have Central Park Cafe, a diner on 97th and Columbus, close in the early 2000s (it made way for Whole Foods and the Columbus Square complex). The building itself wasn’t anything to look at or save, but the cafe was a neighborhood hangout, a home away from home, with its ‘regulars’ and ‘their table’, its mediocre but predictable food, and Gus, the head waiter, who knew most customers by name and with whom many of us kept in touch with for years after he moved to work at another location. Do I miss the place? Yes, still. Nothing quite managed to replace it. Yet Gus’s customers still stop each other on the street to reminisce, and that, too, makes a kind of immortality.
and this area of the UWS from (Columbus Ave : 85h – 100th St.) has only one real coffee shop (Viand) since CPkCafe closed (which had once been Jazz place, Mikell’s). Further up you have to go to Broadway (City Diner 90th st.; Manhattan Diner 95th st.; Metro Diner; 100th St.; ). Columbus Square area has a few other try it if you like it specialty foods. Yes, things change, life goes on, we change,our tastes change, but what we are talking about is our “quality of life”. Only one movie theater from 72nd – 100th st, when there use to be 4. You have to go to the Lincoln Center area for more films (New Plaza, AMC, Bunin,) and most theater. It’s the cultural (and political) activity and diversity of people,housing opportunities and business as well as human services that make a community, a neighborhood, a city.
I hear you. I’m not qualifying specific change as good or bad (and I agree about some of the changes and dearth of things that used to be available as part of the neighborhood), but was referring mostly to the nostalgia bit. The fact that some change is okay, doesn’t make all change okay. So, I hear ya.
I do hear you, too. actually wasn’t disagreeing with you; just adding another perspective; we do have Effie’s and Mila Cafe (thanks to Mani Market family) in which to ‘hang out’
Beautifully put.
This column is a well written joke. But the joke is on us. The price of nostalgia is that our middle class is getting crushed under huge housing costs. Our electoral power is demolishing because families are fleeing to cheaper markets (red states). And to top it off, co-op and rent stabilized NIMBYs use it to preserve their privilege and high property values. None of this is funny. Preservation has become a perverse joke.
From 1836 though 1929 US economy went through well over a dozen recessions and several economic “panics” culminating in Great Depression of 1929. Not all wealthy were immune from such economic shocks, fortunes were lost and those once at top of social-economic ladder found themselves in reduced circumstances if not downright poverty.
As Gilded Age gave way to Progressive Era all sorts of things began to change. In USA like UK and other parts of Europe idea that one family should have homes/land were only a handful of persons lived which could otherwise home far more was taking shape.
Introduction and rising rates of income and other taxes were first salvos over the bow by governments. Then came waves of regulations, new laws (especially anti-trust and labor) and so on that curbed activities of robber barons such as Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan and rest. And so it goes….
Post WWI and certainly by WWII or bit after those old piles of masonry such as Charles M. Schwab House were becoming white elephants. Mr. Schwab himself was wiped out in Great Depression. Ended his days nearly penniless living in a small apartment on Park Avenue. https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2011/07/lost-1906-charles-m-schwab-mansion.html
Property taxes increased. As did cost of servants (if you could find them), fuel costs rose as well. Many of those old piles of brick consumed vast amounts of coal, Andrew Carnegie mansion burned 3k pounds of coal *per day*.
City’s building code of 1916 and successive changes that followed in many parts of Manhattan put an end to low rise buildings, at least along avenues and major cross streets.
Taking advantage of modern advances in technology such as elevators, fireproof construction and so on the modern high rise apartment was born. Downtown, Mid-town, UES, UWS… suddenly land beneath those old mansions or row houses was worth far more than comparatively small buildings thanks to unused air rights. Along Fifth, Park, Lexington, 8th (Central Park West), RSD, and rest those old mansions came down and were replaced by high rise apartment or office buildings.
Every other building wants to be a modern-day Metropolis. They all look basically alike And some luxury buildings look older than others But with the same idea. If you don’t know where you came from You don’t know where you’re going And this is true an architecture. We need contrast for personal development. Cutting everything down to make a cookie cutter standard is out doing ourselves. When the bottom line profit motive out shines our unique Architectural history that when money is the root to all evil.
Note not everyone can live in a luxury apartment in Manhattan. Not everyone can be a corporate Excutiive . But what we all have is something in common that money can’t buy. It is who and what we are, how we got their and that hands from the past that made it possible. In this respect, the profit motive and the money chase seem inferior to more lofty cultural goals and Architectural milestones.
The people on the UWS demand that my neighborhood with more limited transit options be upzoned and that I should have a harder time being able to afford a home since these developers all get abatements that I pay for while the UWS insists that there be a disproportionate amount of historic districts on the UWS. It is this limousine liberal approach that turns me off.