Simon Breines: An Oral History Interview
Simon Breines: An Oral History Interview
Conducted by Roger Lang
June 24, 2003
TAPE 1, SIDE 1
SB: People at the cinematic awards, who get up and say, "I want to thank my mother and father, and the teacher in my first grade [ ? ] --," having memorized all this, "who made me what I am," and so forth. Whereas, someone who gets up and says, "Really, I don't know what to say. I'm so glad to get this" -- something spontaneous -- so I thought I would carry on in that spirit. As I say, in an anecdotal way, try to recall as freshly as I can how we got started, and what were some of the circumstances and factors that were operating at that time. And, you know, looking back, I realize that I may be, of the original founding group -- I don't think anyone else is alive.
RL: I was going to speak to that. I should set the stage. This is Roger Lang, speaking with Simon Breines, founder of the Conservancy, and we've just been recalling Mr. Breines's acceptance of the Preservation leadership award at the recent Lucy G. Moses awards. We're sitting on his back porch in a beautiful jungle of pachysandra and rhododendron, and huge white oak trees, on a splendid summer day -- the first one we've had.
SB: Well, yesterday wasn't bad.
RL: Yesterday was pretty good. Pretty good, indeed.
Now, Sy, you just mentioned that all the founders are gone, and there was a list in this which I thought might be useful in that regard. Actually, I think a couple -- Of course, "Ken Barwick" is very much with us, and "Terry Benbo"; Dick Buford; Holly White has passed away; Michael "Gruen" is with us.
SB: Somewhere.
RL: Indeed. I speak with him often.
SB: Really?
RL: Yes.
SB: That's wonderful.
RL: Then a list of -- Jeffrey Platt --
SB: Brendan, Jeffrey, and Holly White -- I guess those are the people I think of as having departed this mortal coil. Well, let me begin this way. The Landmarks Conservancy was formed out of necessity. It had to happen. The events that led up to it occurred, I would say, in the early '60s -- 1960 -- when, to everybody's surprise (that is, everybody being the preservation fraternity, or community), Penn Station was put on the demolition block. We really didn't think such an event could happen.
For instance. Take my own case. Penn Station was my gateway to New York. As a kid, or growing up, as a young architect, if I went to Washington I went through Penn Station. If I went out West, I usually went through Penn Station -- on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Baltimore & Ohio, and coming in -- and, of course, as everybody agrees (this has nothing to do with style, architectural style, as such), just as a grand edifice, as a monument, really, a gateway, both in and out of the city, it was remarkable. The fact that it was suddenly in danger took everybody by surprise, but more surprising, still, was the fact that, despite our protests -- feeble as they were, with society notables like Brooke Astor or Jackie Onassis, literary figures and other cultural leaders, Brendan Gill and others, marching around in front of Penn Station -- the process of destruction just went right on, and this grand building was taken down. I remember Ada Huxtable wrote a few editorials in the Times about it, but we had no effective organization. That was really the watershed -- that event.
RL: And you're saying, by "no effective organization" -- you were, I think, a member of the Municipal Arts Society at the time, and the Municipal Arts Society organized the protest, did it not?
SB: That's it. Right. Yes, well, several of the protests -- the marches, and the posters, and the grand statements, brave statements to the press. In those days, incidentally, the TV wasn't a factor. I don't remember that being involved at all, effectively, anyway.
Despite all that, it became apparent that we had no way of stopping what seemed to be a burgeoning process, because New York was reaching maturity. Sites were getting scarcer, especially in the more desirable commercial and residential neighborhoods, and something had to be done. Now several of us who were on the board at the Municipal Arts Society at the time, people like Brendan Gill, Holly White, Jeffrey Platt, and a number of others -- You might, incidentally, Roger -- I think instead of my straining for names, when you edit this thing, you might insert other --
RL: Yes, and you'll have an opportunity to review that, as well. We can collaborate on that.
SB: That's great. That will put me at ease, because then I won't feel the obligation of trying to remember everybody, not leaving a sore or bruised egos.
RL: When you're speaking of the departed, the ego thing is far less important. You don't want to do them an injustice; but, then again, they're not going to complain, either.
SB: Well, they do. They do. They complain in the sense that they haunt your memory.
RL: All right. Fair enough. Well, we'll try to be as [ ? ] -- as possible.
SB: I think we have a certain moral obligation.
RL: We do.
SB: And I recognize very keenly that, though we're going to talk about individual -- it's always people, committees, and groups -- against whom, incidentally, you bounce your ideas, get your thoughts, and have your notions refined and modified. Because if you were all by yourself -- Well, that's the trouble with strong people, in dictatorships. They have no way of modifying their mistakes.
RL: Yes.
SB: Well, in any case, obviously all this was engendering a great deal of consternation and discussion in the preservation groups, such as the Fine Arts Federation, and those groups that were involved at the time in -- Well, at that time the New York City Arts Commission was an important factor because the city was actively building municipal structures, and they had to be approved by the Fine Arts Commission -- or the Arts Commission -- and the role of some of our groups, like the Fine Arts Federation and Municipal Arts, one of our main roles in those days was to get the right people on, to try to control what the city was doing, with reference to public architecture.
RL: Appointments.
SB: The concept in those days of historical districts had not yet taken root. That was really the trouble. We were noted for our municipal architecture. In the old days, the court houses, City Hall and stuff, and more recently the skyscrapers -- the symbol of American capitalism -- which were great when it was just the Woolworth building and a few other outstanding structures. But when they started to build next to each other (as we know, down in Wall Street), we got what we have now. We have overbuilt, over-dense areas.
But, leaving all that aside, the Municipal Arts Society, which, I would suppose, at the time was the most resourceful, resilient and muscular of the civic groups, spent a lot of time, particularly at board meetings, discussing this phenomenon -- what to do about it. It was at that time, also -- Well, the Penn Station destruction took place early in the 1960s. As a result of that, the Preservation Commission -- isn't that what it's called?
RL: Yes. The Landmarks Preservation Commission.
SB: The Landmarks Preservation Commission was formed, I think, in 1965.
RL: That's correct, '65.
SB: But shortly thereafter, several years after, we were faced with a possible demolition or destruction which, in its way, was even more pervasive and more disturbing than Penn Station, and that was the loss of the block on Park Avenue between 67th and 68th Street, an entire block of the original townhouses, which had developed from the early days, from well before the Civil War, just after Henry James had written some of his novels. Here was a block of splendid houses, many of them not only good pieces of architecture but also historically important, and it was under the demolition hammer. In fact, I believe that a developer had acquired that whole block and was beginning, or threatening, or announcing its imminent destruction. We realized that the Preservation Commission and the Art Commission were powerless to do anything about it; that is, the developer was within his rights to do what he had to do for his own reasons, mostly economic.
Fortunately -- fortunately -- an individual, a very affluent individual, a Marquesa "Niqueva," stepped in and bought that whole block, and gave it, as we know now, for various uses -- Spanish -- there are some consulates in there -- Anyway, they saved the buildings, but it became apparent that this process was like a tidal wave, which we were unable to stop. It was just at that time that it happened that I, now living -- having been born in Brooklyn, living in Manhattan for a few years after getting married, so I could walk to my office in the Grand Central district -- that I had moved, with my family, up here. It happened I was a very enthusiastic bird watcher, and I became very active in the local Scarsdale Audubon Society here. The reason I mention that is that as I became president of the Scarsdale Society, as such I became involved, as an official of the local group, in the attempt to preserve "Myanis Gorge."
Now at that time the Nature Conservancy did not yet exist fully. It came, also out of necessity, to save that particular piece of open land, and it called upon all the neighboring county organizations, including the Scarsdale Audubon Society, for help. So we had an ad hoc committee for "Myanis Gorge," which met not only for strategic reasons, but became an instrument for raising funds, to step in and do some of the immediate things like buying up pieces of property; putting deposits down on others; getting local legislators to appropriate -- because involved was a one-mile stretch on both sides of the "Myanis" River, which started up in Connecticut and drained into Long Island Sound.
Now I've taken the trouble to go through all that because it made me aware of an instrumentality, of a method, for tackling this problem, through the open-space experience, as it might apply to the architectural landmark problem. With some of the experience that the Nature Conservancy was happening under my very eyes, and with my own personal participation as part of the county-wide effort here to save that piece of open property, open land, we needed to have an organization that was patterned somewhat along the lines of the Nature Conservancy, and that was possibly the key to what needed to be done in New York City, to attempt to prevent the loss of a Penn Station or some important residential district, a whole district. And, what was obviously going to be the pattern of the future, i.e., the steady acquisition of important structures or sites for the expansion of the city.
I wrote a memo along those lines to the board of the Municipal Arts Society. I looked for it in my own files here (which are chaotic), but I know that in either my file at the Landmarks, or somewhere in there, there are copies of that memorandum. It was intended as a catalyst for discussion of the problem in the Municipal Arts Society. Basically, at that time, I saw the MAS as the instrumentality to do it. In talking to my fellow board members, some of them, like Brendan, Holly White and others, they were all very sympathetic and eager, somehow, to grapple with this problem. On the other hand, we had a large board and there were a lot of skeptics, people who opposed the thing.
Incidentally, I might digress for just a moment. At the Lucy awards, the Lucy Moses awards, I bet two of my predecessors -- Otis Pearsall -- I reminded him that his name was, for me, very important, because one of my earliest musical enthusiasms was the music of "Percil," who obviously must have come from the same historic English roots, only the spelling was different, and the pronunciation. I knew some "Percils" here, and Purcells --
RL: -- but not Pearsalls?
SB: -- and Pearsalls. Of course, Otis had his own version. I don't know his family history. But the reason I mention that (and I'm just tickled at the associations, both with Otis and with my early interest in music), Otis was a member of the MAS board at the time, and told me at the Lucy awards that he remembers very keenly some of the discussions, which I'll just touch on, but which I suggest, if you have the time, you check with him. He started to recall some of the actual debates that we had at MAS. Mind you, at that time I was hoping that the MAS would agree either to have a kind of branch of itself devoted to preservation, or help set up a new instrumentality which, like the Nature Conservancy, could do the things which were needed. And the things that were needed that couldn't be done with the current instrumentality we had in the preservation field was we couldn't buy buildings; we couldn't sell them; we couldn't manage them; we couldn't trade them; and we couldn't own them. What we needed was a charter to do the things which developers could do, but which no public agency could do, and which we saw, in the case of the Marquesa "Niqueva" project, the Preservation Commission could not do.
Now for possibly six months we had a furious debate in the Municipal Arts Society, and Otis will be, I feel, the best source of the atmosphere of that debate, because he was able to watch it a little more objectively. His interpretation of it, vaguely, wasn't -- He says I came in, meeting after meeting, with these memoranda and my arguments, only to be browbeaten and ridiculed by a great many of the old-time members of the Municipal Arts Society, who felt that our role should be educational; that we not only shouldn't involve ourselves in real estate, in handling these properties, physically, but that -- Well, to put it in the terms of one of the arguments against me at the time, was by this fellow, Ben "Sonnenborn." I guess he was a big-shot on Madison Avenue, and he had, himself, a very fine townhouse on -- I often went there -- on University Place and 11th Street. It was on the corner, a very nice, four-story building, very profitable. You know, you had the feeling that that was one of the things that William James and the people of his era knew intimately; it was that time. He said the whole notion I was putting forward was quixotic; because, he said, through his own building there, on 11th Street, that millions of dollars were involved in just one little building, and where were we going to ones like that? That the whole notion was absurd. And I would argue, rather feebly, that, "Look, I'm working with an organization, the Nature Conservancy, which also doesn't have any funds, but has discovered ways to do this." For instance, when they discover a problem, it's earmarked, and the Nature Conservancy would go about looking for people who might want to help, specifically, there; or, people in public life, like governors or officials, who were sympathetic but who couldn't move quickly, where the Nature Conservancy could get a 100-day (what is the term?) -- make a deposit on something, or get help in acquiring it, with the assurance, let's say, that the State of Connecticut, or the county, would, at its next session, pass a budget item, and so forth.
In other words, to operate in the field, according to the necessities of the time, and which would not involve, necessarily, huge amounts of money in each case. For instance, in the case of "Myanis" Gorge (which, as we know, turned out successfully after a long fight), a stretch of well over a mile of this very fine example of the original open space topography of lower Connecticut -- What happened there was, individual parcels were here and there bought as they came along, through donors who were rustled up for the occasion. In other places, where sympathetic owners would say, "Look, we'd love to have this preserved but we can't afford it," or "We need the money," or whatever, but who were willing to hold it on the assumption that some permanent solution would be found for buying it -- Little by little the Nature Conservancy accumulated reserve funds and, in addition, because it had a charter which allowed it to own, to lease -- It didn't, for instance, just have to hold onto property. It frequently allowed some development, for ten, twelve, fifteen years -- commercial stuff; so-called tax-payer stuff; devices which the private sector took advantage of, and which a semi-public group like the Conservancy was also able to utilize for the same purpose.
But the thing is, little by little the Nature Conservancy, as we know, over the years has become a powerful instrument for preserving landmark open spaces -- not only locally, as we did in Connecticut, but through the whole country, and now, around the whole world. It is no accident that in those early discussions, and in my early memorandum on the subject, I said that not only did I think the example of the Nature Conservancy was important, but that I thought we ought to borrow the name, too. The reason we became the Landmarks Conservancy was because of our relationship to the Nature Conservancy at that time.
Well, it became apparent that the Municipal Arts Society was not going to do this thing; that is, the majority of the board had the comfortable feeling that, despite the dangers, the MAS should remain an educational organization (which it still is, today). Those few of us -- the so-called founding group -- decided then that we had to start a completely new organization, which we called the Landmarks Conservancy. We used to meet once or twice a week, curiously, in Mrs. Roosevelt's house on 65th Street, which you may have read about recently -- the one that her mother-in-law, the two houses with the connection between.
RL: Connecting doors.
SB: The elder Mrs. Roosevelt would supervise her son's family, or over-supervise it.
Well, in any case, we used to meet there. We had no staff, and we recognized that if we were going to continue in the direction we chose -- that is, to break off from MAS and devise an instrumentality that could do the things that had to be done, or we felt had to be done -- we needed a charter to enable us to do that. We needed, therefore, an attorney (that's where Mike "Ruen" came on board). Because Brendan was an active editor at The New Yorker, Holly White was doing -- he had just written Organization Man, or whatever it was -- and was an active sociologist. I was up to my ears in architectural work. I was really in mid-career, and it was most important that I attend to my own -- In fact, curiously, I was spending so much time with our committee (as were the others, of course) -- we not only met, but were having lunch almost on a daily basis, discussing the various things -- but one day, to both my amusement and consternation, I came in and found a plaque on my office door which said, "Landmarks Conservancy." I got the hint.
RL: Was it Ralph who did that?
SB: I guess so. He never admitted it.
RL: The "Ralph" would be Ralph Pomerantz, Sy's long-time architectural partner.
SB: I was obviously heavily involved, as we all were. Because this was an imminent danger, and we didn't yet have the proper solution for it. We realized that the important thing was that somebody had to be able to take full time and devote himself, number one, to getting a charter. Which meant that we had to work with he, or somebody had to work with an attorney. We had to first draw up our principles; to get an attorney to write the charter; to pursue the charter process in Albany; and to get it approved. In discussing that with various people, including "Kent Barwick," who at that time was the executive director of the Municipal Arts Society (and very poorly paid and barely able to make a living out of his work. It really was a pretty sad thing. He really had a hard time. He had a young family) -- At that time Joan Davidson was very active, the heiress to a fortune. What was it? Welch Grape Juice? I think that's what --
RL: I'm not sure.
SB: It was something like that. It was either grape juice, or Ex-Lax, or some important --
RL: -- commodity.
SB: -- commodity. She became highly enthused about this effort, and I remember a luncheon I had with her and her lawyer, Ray "Rabinow." Did you know him?
RL: No.
SB: Well, he was the family lawyer and advisor or counselor to the Kaplan Fund. Her father was Jack Kaplan, and she was then married to someone named Davidson. I never knew him. In any case, she agreed -- because we had discussed this with Kent -- to put up $5,000 (which in those days was a considerable sum), and that Kent would devote six months of his time -- He would resign, temporarily, from the Municipal Arts Society, and his main job was to get the charter Believe it or not, that's what happened. We, of course, discussed it. Now we were meeting separately from MAS. In fact, I know in my case I resigned from the board --
RL: [Inaudible]
SB: -- disappointment, but because I wanted to devote myself to this thing. Then a number of other people, very important people to the Conservancy, came on. Dick Buford and Whitney Seymour -- Now Whitney Seymour was very important for us because of the "Simpson-Thatcher" Commission. It hasn't often been said publicly -- I don't think, really, the Conservancy would have survived those early years, certainly not as well and as resiliently as we did, if it hadn't been for [Interruption] --
RL: Well, Whitney North Seymour, in the Simpson-Thatcher connection, is the current topic. Do you know how he came to join the board? Who was the connection to Whitney?
SB: Well, I know that some of his partners were interested. Cyrus Vance was interested. "Orsman," Don "Orsman" was a young partner at the time. He was interested. But Clarence came on the board at the time when we had already made a few advances. As I said, I wasn't going to go into the details of some of our projects (like the Fraunces Tavern) that came on very early, but I'll get to that. I think you'll have to ask Jack "Kerr," or one of the younger partners, how that happened.
RL: Okay.
SB: I know I touched on it at the Lucy awards remarks -- you remember?
RL: Yes.
SB: Because I think it has to be said that the Simpson-Thatcher connection was one of the glories, really, of the early days. Not only did they give us the meeting spaces -- and the lunches -- but the moral support, and the legal backup. Clarence --
RL: That's a name I'm not familiar with.
SB: Whitney North Seymour was very generous in offering the services of many of his partners at strategic points. For instance, in the early days our projects had to do with the general services -- federal. That was through the Moynihan connection. The federal government was, then, anxious to divest itself of several unnecessary projects, like the custom house, which was no longer used for that purpose; the appraiser's building; and because Wall Street -- I won't go into that, because that's well-known because of the 9/11 experience and all the competition for Ground Zero -- but Wall Street was going through a very rapid series of changes. For instance, originally Simpson-Thatcher, when we first got to know it, had moved into the Chase building, downtown, and had quite a few floors there including that famous corner office of the Whitneys, which later became the office for Cyrus Vance when he resigned from the Nixon administration. So those were very heady and hectic days.
But we used to meet there, and very soon it became apparent (and the history of the Simpson-Thatcher firm bears it out) that Wall Street had gone very quickly into a tailspin, and Simpson-Thatcher moved up to Grand Central, after only, I think, fifteen or twenty years downtown -- which, in real estate terms, is a very short span.
RL: I'll check the date. I think it was in 1986, but I'm not 100% sure.
SB: Yes, probably around that time.
RL: I know Jack Kerr was --
SB: I can't answer your question as to just how Whitney became a member, but I know a number of very distinguished people became members of our board once we had the experience (successful, I might say) of the Fraunces Tavern and the Archives building. We acquired Brooke Astor, Jackie Onassis was on the board and came to a few meetings, interestingly enough. She never said a word (which was characteristic of her, incidentally). Moynihan attended some early meetings, but then always sent representatives, with the result that -- and I think we missed a number of opportunities while he was senator, of making some real progress along the lines of the Archives building. That's the thing I'd like to end up my discussion with.
Once we got our charter -- and Kent "Barwick" went back to his regular job as director of the Municipal Arts Society -- we were faced with the problem of -- well, we're in a boat now, how does this thing work and where do we go? We found we couldn't any longer, with a larger board, meet in Mrs. Roosevelt's house. We needed an office of our own, and we settled on what Susan Jones used to call our "closet," at 11 Wall Street. Have you ever been back there?
RL: I have not. I know 11 Wall.
SB: It's down just north of the Custom House, there on the west side of Broadway. We had a little office which was really no more than a closet, about the size of this space here. There was a large storage closet where we had a few files, which were beginning to bulge. It was at that time, with just the resources -- I think at one point Susan was our only employee. No, Tony --
RL: Terry "Benbo." Or, Tony Newman. Tony Newman.
SB: Tony Newman was footloose at the time. You might turn that off for just a moment.
RL: Sure. [Interruption] So Tony, in effect, succeeded Kent "Barwick," and --
SB: Well, Kent "Barwick" -- it was acknowledged that it was a temporary phenomenon.
RL: And Tony was probably the first employee of the Conservancy.
SB: He was the first employee. Well, I think Susan came on at the same time. But Tony, for various reasons -- For one thing, I imagine, in terms of prestige and compensation, was seeking a more established job. I believe he got a very nice berth with the Audubon Society. He became their national director or something like that, and soon left us. So Susan at one point began to hire a few people, young women mostly -- I've forgotten the names. One of them later took Susan's job. What was her name?
RL: Beckleman. Laurie Beckleman.
SB: Laurie Beckleman. Yes. She came on early, as a kind of almost semi-volunteer, with a number of other people. I'm trying to struggle for the names. A number of other people. In any case (all these recollections crowd in on me), we started with very modest physical circumstances, a modest staff. In the early days, for instance, Jeffrey Platt and I were the chief architectural consultants to the Conservancy, and we spent a lot of time not only looking at buildings but -- like in Fraunces Tavern, during the year of construction, I attended all the job meetings.
Aside from all those things which could be discussed with a lot of pleasure, and if we had all the time -- the point I was really eager to get to in these reminiscences was that the Conservancy, as I said, was launched out of a need, and that need was to be able to own and handle -- to buy, to sell, to do all the things with real estate that the private sector could do, so we could more flexibly act in a preservation mode. Indeed, we sought as our mission -- it was the main, new thing in the charter we acquired, and our early adventures were always along that line -- Well, for instance, it's amply described in the historical records of the Conservancy -- but we suddenly found that these five buildings, half of a block, at "Coenties Slip," downtown, were on the demolition block, again; that ownership had reverted to a bank (I've forgotten the name of the bank). They were very sympathetic to our cause, but they had acquired these old buildings, and the duty and obligation of a bank was to get as much return for their shareholders as they could. They had made mortgage loans on these properties, and they had now gotten a piece of property that, in those days, was almost worthless.
I'm very keenly aware of what was happening down in the "Coenties Slip" area. One of my treasured commissions, architecturally, in those days -- this would be thirty years ago or so -- was the new plant and headquarters for the Savrin Coffee Company. Savrin Coffee was owned by Schöenbrun family, a Dutch family originally based in Amsterdam. They were prominent in the coffee trade, because Holland had Java as a colony. In fact, in early American slang, Java was often the name for a cup of coffee. The Savrin Coffee Company had a building, a roasting plant, on Water Street, a block or so away from "Coenties Slip, and they were condemned at that time, by the city, because there were complaints about the odors, and the "particulates" from the roasting process. It happened that Schöenbrun lived in Scarsdale, and his son was a classmate of mine at the local school. So I got to know him, and I got the job to do the new plant, in New Jersey.
So I was aware of what was happening downtown, and it was a neighborhood on the brink of disaster. The banks didn't know what to do with these five buildings, half of a block. Fortunately, Mrs. Astor, on our board, came forward with a quarter of a million dollars. The rest we got -- how I don't know. You'll have to find out from Susan Jones on this. I think Susan was instrumental, and I wouldn't be surprised if Whitney Seymour -- why do I call him Clarence?
RL: I don't know. Did he have a nickname?
SB: Could very well be.
RL: He seems like such an august figure to me, that he would not have a nickname.
SB: You know, there's an interesting thing about Whitney Seymour. Did you know his son, Mike Seymour?
RL: I know of him.
SB: Well, Whitney North Seymour, Jr. liked to call himself Mike, because he couldn't tolerate all those family names -- Whitney and North. In fact, in an effort to --
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SB: Mike Seymour stood for office as a state senator, or assemblyman, and was elected, from Manhattan somewhere, as a Republican. And he told me that when he was introduced at his first session, in Albany, the tradition was that the new members waited in an ante-room, and the clerk of the assembly or the senate would announce them one by one, as they came in and took their seats. You would step in, according to [ ? ] -- and the clerk would say, "Who are you?" You would give your name, he would announce it in "stentorian" terms, and this was your introduction to the first session.
So he came in, and he told the clerk that his name was Whitney North Seymour, Jr., and the clerk said, "Step forward, Mr. Junior." So he realized that he had, really, to try to cultivate the more familiar name of "Mike," and he was known amongst his friends and colleagues as Mike Seymour.
Well, in any case, Whitney -- I've lost my thread.
RL: Well, I was just -- He's such an august figure to me, but Sarah "Tomberlain" Lee told a story about him. She said that when he came to board meetings at Simpson Thacher he would always sit next to her, so he could fall asleep and put his head on her shoulder.
SB: Well, she's quite correct about his falling asleep. I never saw the shoulder thing. But Sarah, herself, was quite an imposing character, you know. They looked as though they were very important. They looked the part -- unlike myself, who always looked like Mr. Junior.
In any case -- You know, it's curious about Sarah Lee. Later on, when she wasn't too well, and Whitney was getting along, too, he fell asleep almost regularly. He took to sitting next to me, but he never put his head on my shoulder. You know, we had the good fortune in the Conservancy of a number of people who were what they are because of their common sense and their character, but were steady, unflappable, strong personalities -- people like Whitney; people like Sarah Lee; Ada Huxtable, who tended to be, for my taste, a little on the conservative side (well, Dick Buford was a perfect example), but they always had such common sense, basic understanding and basic sympathy, that they kept the conservancy on the right course. I think we were very lucky in our board, and we were very lucky in our staff -- Susan, Laurie for a while, and, of course, when you and Peg Breen and our current staff came on, that simply solidified a pretty powerful firm structure, to begin with. I think the health of an organization, whether it's in the public realm, such as we are, or in the private, is management. And if you're lucky to have good management, you'll survive the changes of time.
Well, in any case, my feeling is that, for one thing or another, because we got into all these, not extraneous but new fields that had to be pursued, but which I think took us, to a degree, from my point of view, off our main purpose, like, you know, the technical aspects; the publishing aspects; the educational things; the endangered species -- Not endangered [species] -- what do we call it?
RL: Endangered buildings. Well, it is endangered species, in a way.
SB: That's right. And, incidentally, the reason we had the funds to do these wonderful things with the endangered buildings was that, to a degree, one of our original efforts paid off. For instance -- I'm repeating myself, and I can only, in order -- stay within the restraints of feasible time. We don't have all day or all week.
I had from time to time, in the thirty years that I was a member of the board, written memos in an effort to get ourselves back on the nature conservancy track, trying to interest chairmen, other board members and presidents in that aspect of our work, or our potential work. So there are records, and I won't try to repeat all that. For example, I remember writing a memorandum to Garfunkel -- what was his first name?
RL: Norton. Norton Garfunkel.
SB: Norton. Now I remember. Norton Garfunkel. I wrote him a memo. He was very sympathetic. I thought it was too bad -- he left for personal reasons, rather abruptly, at the time. Siegel -- Steve, is it?
RL: Stuart.
SB: Stuart Siegel. I wrote him a memo (they're in there, somewhere), and detailed some of my thinking. I won't try to repeat that. But to try to consolidate what I'm getting at -- I have a feeling that we missed two opportunities, not only to develop skill and experience in the field of acquisition -- that is, the potential of our charter -- but also we missed opportunities, in at least two cases, for benefiting from our effort in the projects. For example, to put it simply, in the case of the Fraunces Tavern block, through the agency of Mrs. Astor and the Warner picture company, at the time, I think saved -- that may very well be. I think Don "Orsman" had a connection with them, and it may have been through that, in those early days, that we got the connection with Simpson Thacher. Because until that time I don't recall -- See, Whitney came on in the second wave.
Well, in any case, that's something you might look into. But the Warner picture company put up the rest of the money, and I think $500,000 enabled us to acquire, in a sense, ownership of the five blocks from the bank. I forget which bank it was. Anecdotally (this isn't very well known, even to our board), for a period of time Brendan and I were the owners of Fraunces Tavern -- nominally; that is, there had to be several individuals. I remember, finally, only recently -- about five or ten years ago -- Jack Kerr came to my office with the papers that I signed, divesting my nominal ownership, so that the people who developed the Fraunces Tavern -- They had to refinance it, and they had to be clear of encumbering obligations, such as the Landmarks Conservancy. By all the rules of the game, the real estate game, we, having owned the property, could have made an arrangement with a developer whereby he would be what they call the general partner, and we would be the limited partner. In other words, he would undertake to finance, to build, to be responsible for, financially, all the requirements of this development project. We would be the limited partner, with an equity share. Instead of which, we were so eager, so inexperienced, so naive, really, that we gave him complete ownership -- that is, I cited, for a while we retained this ownership through Brendan and myself, until the developer -- I've forgotten his name. I think one of the partners was a fellow named Livingstone. Do you remember him?
RL: Barnett Lieberman.
SB: Barnett Lieberman --
RL: I think the entity is called Orb Management. Winthrop Chamberlain.
SB: Winthrop Chamberlain. Those were the two partners, I recall. They, in effect, were handed a piece of property to develop. We had a few requirements, such as they had to agree to develop the sidewalks on the block, and the lighting -- things like that -- after which we would give them complete ownership. But there was no reason why we shouldn't have had a 50% or 25% equity position in that, with income, even to this day, from that property, which is highly successful. I attribute it to inexperience. I also feel that we should have taken more seriously, the experience to heart -- we should have paid attention to the experience that the Nature Conservancy had, where they actively, and unashamedly, without any hesitancy, bought and owned property, against the criticism that that subjected us to all sorts of uncertainties, financial and otherwise. The limited partner is free of that. All the obligations in the project, financial and otherwise -- in terms of insurance, carrying out all the legislative and municipal requirements to operate businesses and buildings -- were the undertaking of the general partner. I say this confidently and boldly, because in my own experience as an architect, I was fortunate, on a number of occasions, to be a limited partner in some very successful real estate ventures. There's very little money to be earned in architecture, and there certainly wasn't, in the kind of architecture -- I was not a superstar like "Gary," or Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. I was a journeyman architect. We did a lot of buildings, and I was happy in my career, but the returns were disproportionate as compared with the returns of attorneys, surgeons, and, certainly, real estate people.
The thing is, I had the experience on a number of projects where a general partner would do a building and give some favored limited partners (usually people with whom he worked professionally; that is, the architect, the plumbing contractor, the electrical contractor) -- we had to act as professionals, and our fees were subject to taxes in the normal way. But they were nominal and modest. What happened was that we were permitted, through this relationship with the general partner, to become equity owners -- limited partners -- who then, if the project were successful, would participate in the returns. If the project was unsuccessful, there was a modest loss, but the main burden of that would be borne by the general partner. I always felt that, had we been more sophisticated, we could have remained as limited partners in Fraunces Tavern. Certainly, we realized that when the Archives building came along, and we made fairly good financial arrangements, which helped found the Endangered Buildings Fund, and gave us a return of several million dollars, but, in relative terms, really, very modest compensation for what, in effect, was the giving of the property to the developer. It's water over the dam now, but I think we could very well have retained an equity interest in the Archives building, which would have given the Conservancy, the Landmarks Conservancy, the kind of annual income that is enjoyed by the Nature Conservancy, from its various ventures and properties, and which would have enabled us to not only expand our activities, but not to have -- and I say this with due respect to all the wonderful people who were involved in carrying these things out, and to the heavy efforts that the Conservancy makes these days to raise money, through the various galas and other things, which are marvels of their kind and, I'm sure, are the envy of many other organizations, but which is not what our charter is about. I mean, we have to do it to survive, but, to use the naval or boat analogy, a boat is meant to navigate, to travel somewhere on the water, not to bail out -- not to be obliged to be making repairs to it all the time, and just keeping it afloat.
So that, in this opportunity to review the early days of the Conservancy, I thought I would try to recall, for whomever reads these recollections, the possibility, the potentiality, that we have in our charter, and, by example, the work of the Nature Conservancy -- and, our own brief experience in the several projects like the Fraunces Tavern and the Archives building, to seek out similar opportunities in the future.
Now we had the good fortune, through Moynihan and his connection with the federal government and the General Services Administration, which owned federal property, which managed federal property, to get involved in these few projects. We almost got involved in a famous and similar experience with the Custom House. For a while it looked -- and I remember Moynihan telling us (and he was very confident at the time) that the Conservancy would take over the Custom House the way we did the Archives building. I remember in those early days -- and it shows the resiliency of operation that is possible. For instance, we were given temporary jurisdictional control of this vast edifice, the Custom House -- one of our more prominent municipal landmarks. Moynihan, in effect, said, "The government doesn't need it, and we would like to save it as a historical building. But if we can't find a useful re-use of this structure, they may put it on the auction block." So, for a while, we had possession of the Archives building. I think it was Mrs. Astor but it may have been someone else, who provided us with $25,000, with which we hired I.M. Pei to do a feasibility study.
RL: We still have the model.
SB: It shows how tentative and uncertain was the future of downtown Wall Street, and the whole of Lower Manhattan that we couldn't find a satisfactory re-use. Pei obviously didn't make much money out of that $25,000 and the model. Pei investigated department stores, hotel possibilities, residential suites, various other things, and nothing came of it. In the meantime, because of our uncertainty, all sorts of other political interests entered -- the American Indians and so forth. And, you know, it's funny -- for a year or two, when we were very actively involved with Pei, studying it, Jeffrey Platt and I had keys to the Custom House. I'm sad to say this -- The Custom House was vacant. The only occupant was the police precinct, in the basement, on the lower level, below the main level, which the steps led to. So in the basement of the Custom House, in part of the building, was the local police precinct. They had the run of the building, and they stole everything out of the building. They stole all the hardware; they stole all the lighting fixtures; they stole every bit of bronze plaque. I think, at the end, there may have been, here and there, some pieces from -- who were the architects, again? Carrera & Hastings?
RL: Yes.
SB: In those days, you know --
RL: No. Excuse me. Cass Gilbert.
SB: Cass Gilbert.
RL: In those days the architect would design even the hardware, the plumbing fixtures, the electric fixtures. Everything. All that was gone, was lost to the police department.
RL: Was the bankruptcy court in there as well, during that interval? I know all the customs facilities moved out, but --
SB: No, the only occupant, when we had it, was the police department.
RL: So it was otherwise completely vacant.
SB: Oh, absolutely. Of course, a lot of sentiment was spilled about the murals, because they were at one time better known than the Custom House. In fact, it amused us -- Even the Times had it wrong, and would call it the "Customs House," but it was the Custom House.
Well, in any case, because of our, you might say, inexperience, and ineptitude -- I mean, you couldn't fault us for hiring Pei, who was at that time perhaps the leading architect in the city if not the country. He was Zeckendorff's architect --
RL: That was a bold move, wasn't it?
SB: You couldn't want anything better than that.
You know, it's an amusing thing about Zeckendorff. In one of my commercial ventures, where my partner and I became limited partners in a real estate venture, Zeckendorff was involved in that, too. He owned the property that our partnership acquired, and Zeckendorff, who at one time was the biggest developer in the country, real-estate wise, was having a hard time of it. He was always strapped for funds. And somebody -- it might have been Brendan Gill, it sounds very much like him -- said, when someone said, "Oh, Bill Zeckendorff is in trouble," Brendan said, "Yes. I hear he's down to his last city." But we lost the opportunity to be junior Zeckendorffs at the Custom House.
Now I think, myself -- and I propose -- I have more detail, so I won't try to cover all that in these remarks -- but I have a feeling that, in the future, if the board agrees, a committee ought to be set up of the board and the staff -- hopefully, say, someone at your level would be responsible for it -- to have some brainstorming with real estate people and all, based on our actual experience, to see whether we can make a renewed effort to activate that aspect of our charter, along the lines I indicate, where our financial responsibility would be minimum, and where we would have the opportunity to become a factor in preservation, somewhat comparable to the Nature Conservancy in land preservation. I mean, the Nature Conservancy isn't the only one. There are several large, trust-fund -- public trust fund, isn't it?
RL: Yes. Trust for Public Lands.
SB: Trust for Public Land. There are several, smaller organizations similar to the Conservancy, but the Conservancy has become, I think, the leading agency, by a long shot. We ought to learn from that, and our charter makes it possible to do that. The Conservancy has a record, because of its operation and its careful avoidance of risk, financial risk, of having had almost parallel -- I think they're only a few years older than the Landmarks Conservancy, because in my early days, and in my early experience with both Conservancies, they're more or less contemporaneous. I have the feeling that out of such a committee's work -- an appraisal, again, of what we might do with our charter possibility -- that we might, then, do some things to make it possible to get control of important properties, both from a preservation point of view (that being the primary thing) and from an income point of view. I have the feeling that -- Of course, we might someday have a relationship with Hillary Clinton such as we had with Moynihan. That could possibly be developed, if she could be interested in that. It might very well be that opportunities such as came to us thirty years ago will again appear, if the economy -- as is possible -- remains depressed, and if the federal government, particularly with the administration we have now, is eager to divest itself of federal properties; of federal obligations, if they know about us being available, and experienced and able to do it, have the opportunities that we had in a few cases in our early history -- which I hope we can take advantage of. But judging from my own experience and the Conservancy's experience, going back to our early founding days, you can't expect to have things put into your lap. You've got to do what -- I just mentioned this briefly. I think I mentioned that I had this in my memorandum to Stuart Siegel. I recall once that James Baldwin, the writer, was interviewed on TV. I happened to hear him. The interviewer said, "Mr. Baldwin, you've had a number of successful novels and books. How does a writer go about getting an idea for a book." And he said, "Well, there's no magic formula. It's really like being hit by lightning. But when I need an idea for a book, I go out in a storm." I think we have to go out in the storm. By that I mean if a review committee agrees with my estimate of what we might be able to do in the future, they would then, I think, have to see to it that, through our board and through our staff, we let it be known, in government circles and even in the private sphere, that we are ready and able to do this job. This presumes (and I'm sure it exists, because this has been the experience with the Nature Conservancy) that there are people who own buildings, both private and public, who would like to preserve them, under certain circumstances, providing there is a feasible method for doing it. For instance, there are many families who own large, public lands, open lands. A good example was the Harriman family, in New York, which gave us the Interstate Park, the Harriman Interstate Park. There are many examples of paper companies that own forests, that would like to see them preserved, and have made favorable arrangements with the Nature Conservancy saying, "Look. We'll give you a year's time to raise the necessary funds, and this is the price we'll put on it. Get New York or the New England states to appropriate this money, and we can preserve these forests."
Well, the same with buildings. There are people who would give us properties if they knew we were in existence, and ready and able to do this. This is a minor point, but I recall that at one of our board meetings a few years ago, when I made a similar pitch, briefly, on some other subject, at the board, along these lines I'm discussing with you -- In fact, it was at the time when the Lucy Moses awards were set up, and Mrs. Moses gave the Conservancy $100,000 to start these awards in her name. When I made my remarks, along the lines I've just covered, Mrs. Loeb said, "God. If Lucy had known we were interested, she would have left us her house." Now it happens that Mrs. Moses -- It wasn't a house. She owned a very large apartment, one of those twenty-room apartments -- a whole floor in some building on Fifth Avenue. But if she had left that, she could very well, according to Mrs. Loeb, her dear friend, she could very well have left that to the Conservancy, if it had been in her mind that we were interested in that kind of thing. We could have owned an apartment and sold it for a few million dollars. That's merely a small but typical example of what I mean by letting it be known that we are both able and willing to do this kind of thing. I believe investigation could show that, and I'm so confident -- We have a number of real estate people on our board -- Doug "Durst," Jack Kerr, and "Forel," very sound minds. I've had talks along these lines with them, and when I have their attention they are most sympathetic and say, "You know, maybe you have something there," but they get involved in their own interests and their own problems.
I think we have to do what we did when founding the Conservancy, and how do we do that? We finally got somebody like Kent "Barwick," who was committed for six months to do nothing but think about this. I think we have to have that kind of equivalent, again, for this aspect of our charter.
So, I don't wear a wristwatch, but I'm very much aware that time is passing.
RL: We're doing fine. It's 12:20, it's probably time to take a break, maybe have a bite of lunch.
SB: Well, I figured that around noon time we would stop. Have you [Interruption] --
RL: I did promise Tony Wood that I would ask you if you had any recollections of Albert Bard.
SB: Oh, yes.
RL: Do you?
SB: Bard was a very good friend of mine for many years, because we were both board members of the Citizens Union. That, I think for a while, was Albert's main interest. So yes, I did know Albert Bard.
RL: Did he talk with you at all about the Bard Act, or about the need for a landmarks law?
SB: Oh, yes, yes. He was quite vociferous in those days. You see, when I knew him, and when he was a member of the board of the Citizens Union, we used to meet in (I wonder if it's still there) the Lawyer's building.
RL: You mean the Bar Association building? On 44th?
SB: No, no. The one downtown, on Broadway. What is it called? It's on the west side of Broadway. In fact, there's a subway station in the basement of it. The Lawyer's building? It's a fake gothic --
RL: Right. It's still there.
SB: It's still there. Well, we used to meet in -- there was a luncheon club up there, where we used to meet. In those days -- the reason I mention it -- Albert was retired, and he had pretty much lost his hearing. He became something of a nuisance on many of the committees he worked on, because he had a very primitive hearing device, which was only a step above the old --
RL: -- horn?
SB: What did they call those things? A megaphone. You'd sometimes use it this way, but you also used it -- Well, he had a thing which he would very ostentatiously -- because he was probably told not to hide it, because he was not to be ashamed of the fact that he had this disability -- so he would put this thing down, and it would ring like my telephone, at various times during the board [meeting]. People would get upset, and after a while complain privately -- never to Albert.
Albert was the most eloquent speaker I've known, he and Richard Childs. Did you ever hear of him?
RL: No.
SB: He was also a member of the -- Well, the short answer is, I knew Albert Bard.
RL: No, that's very helpful. Obviously, it's a strong interest of Tony's, and he's working on a collection --
SB: Albert Bard was famous for all sorts of eccentric exploits. For instance, one of his pet peeves was the taxi-drivers who would block the pedestrian cross-walks. He had spent a lot of time getting the pedestrian cross-walk idea established, because before that, New York was famous for jaywalking. That's how we became jaywalkers; in order to get anywhere, you had to go out and brave the traffic. Here, after getting the cross-walks, and getting the stripes put in, the taxi-drivers -- He was written up in the New Yorker and in the Times and other places. If a taxi-driver did that when he was trying to cross, the light was red, and there was the taxi-driver, blocking passage, he would get in the cab -- he would open the door, get in the cab, and leave the door open; go through the cab; open the other door; leave that open, cross on, and leave the cab driver there with two open doors. He did that a number of times, he said to make his point. But that's the kind of man Albert Bard was. He also had one famous (this is so delicious) --
At one time the Citizens Union was embarked on a deep story for the re-organization of the Board of Education. The problem we have today is a perennial problem, and forty and fifty years ago, in the time I'm talking about, it was an awful problem. It wasn't a problem in the Tammany Hall days because the Irish simply ran the school system. The Irish came here (and in Boston, too), and they could speak English. Unlike the Hungarians, and the Germans, and the French, and the Italians, and the Jews, they were ready and available for all the civil -- they became the firemen, and the policemen, and the politicians. We had this committee on the Citizens Union. I remember this fellow -- what was his name? -- he was the attorney for the New York Life Insurance Company. Anyway, he was their lawyer, their housing expert, a very prominent committee. He was on the committee, and several of the people prominent in educational affairs. They were set up as a committee of the Citizens Union to draft a proposal for the reorganization of the Board of Education -- no small job -- and they finally came up with this forty- or fifty-page report for the complete reorganization, for getting rid of the superintendents, making principals responsible -- all this kind of thing, you know. We had a whole session, a couple of hours at a board meeting, where they explained the thing, and it was then open to comment. Albert Bard took the floor, and he said, well, he appreciated the work that went into this committee, and the chairmen, and all that stuff, but he felt that the report didn't take into account the reality of New York, not only of the political, but of the fact that there were people here -- parents and others, local politicians, local interests -- who weren't a part of this study. He said it reminded him of an apocryphal situation where several tailors (this is the anti-Semitic streak of Albert Bard), several tailors were gathered in a basement in London, and they were sitting around with a document they had composed for the reformation of the British Empire. One of them undertook to read the document, and it began, as he said, with these three tailors, sitting cross-legged around this table, in this tailor shop, and the document read, "We, the people of England -- " and he sat down. And, you know, this proposal, which had taken a year to do, died at that moment.
RL: Wow.
SB: That was the end of it. That was so powerful, was Albert Bard as a force, and so pungent was this example. And, as I said, Albert himself would, of course, hasten to deny any hard feelings, except, in his mind, three impoverished Jewish tailors represented the hopelessness and the romantic innocence of this committee, that was going to reform England, making the analogy with the Board of Education. But he was a real municipal force, and he had the eloquence, which we don't have today. You know, I cringe when I listen to -- of course, our president -- but our mayor, the speaker -- Sheldon Silver, or Bruno, the Republican, or Pataki. There are a few (though I don't agree with them). Gingrich had a flair for it, but, fortunately, he's hung out to dry -- I hope. But in Albert Bard's day, our English tradition -- Shakespeare, the great poets, the big statements -- were highly relished. And, you know, Brendan Gill had it. The Irish had a flair for eloquence, and Tammany Hall carried it. Al Smith. I remember, as a kid, Al Smith was a big political figure. And, of course, Roosevelt, within his restricted tradition of the American country gentleman. Well, he was American nobility. But they were confident, they had the gift of gab.
RL: And Bard had it.
SB: Bard had it, oh, yes. Do you know, he was a delight to listen to, on almost any subject. I remember one of my most exciting projects as a young architect was the Civic Center plan. I don't know if you were aware of that. It's written up in that book I wrote, called The Pedestrian Revolution.
RL: Yes. Yes.
SB: There I persuaded Robert Wagner, who was then the governor, through a series of articles and through a series of statements I'd made at public meetings, that we ought to have a grand civic center downtown, in the neighborhood of City Hall, which was worthy of a city like New York, instead of what was then the Brooklyn Bridge spilling into nowhere, with all that traffic concentration -- a rabbit warren of municipal and federal buildings, scattered. At that time I was very much involved in "pedestrianism," and my proposal was that we create a big civic center around City Hall; that we demolish a number of unnecessary buildings, opening it up, include Foley Square and some new, proposed federal buildings, into an organized, pedestrian region -- which, of course, as you know from my own statements in other connections like this, downtown, could be serviced, and would have access to vehicles, as needed, to maintain the thing; but which, during normal hours, would be pedestrian, and which would then have --
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