BROOKLYN HEIGHTS AND THE LANDMARKS LAW: AN INTERVIEW WITH OTIS PEARSALL

This interview was conducted on July 19, 1994, in the offices of Mr. Otis Pearsall, by Anthony C. Wood, author of the "Pioneers of Preservation" series of interviews. Also present were Ronald Kopnicki, President of the Society for the Architecture of the City, and Christabel Gough.

MR. KOPNICKI

We are here to interview Mr. Pearsall, who is indeed one of the pioneers, instrumental in the creation of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, and a recent recipient of the "Landmarks Lion" award from the Historic Districts Council. And with that, Tony, take it away.

MR. WOOD

We have to begin with a heartfelt thank-you to you, Otis; because of all the people who played a role in this, I think you are the only one who's had a real, conscious sense of wanting to keep a record of what happened--I mean, you have such good records of what actually happened when and who was involved, it gives us the luxury of trying to get a little behind some of those facts and getting a sense of some of the "people-dynamics" and a little more of the political dynamics of that time.

Before you moved to Brooklyn Heights, that community had successfully fought Robert Moses on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Was that battle something that was fresh in people's minds at the time when you became active in the Heights­ which I think, if I'm right, was '57= 58-ish?

MR. PEARSALL

Nancy and I moved to Brooklyn Heights in the fall of '56, and it wasn't very long after that we started getting involved, one way or another--although actual focus on preservation I don't think began until a year or so later. But I think, to answer your question, that it was certainly fresh in the minds of some people.

You have to realize that at that juncture an event was occurring that probably hadn't occurred anywhere in a downtown, declining residential area before-that is, that a whole lot of young professionals had started moving into Brooklyn Heights. And that group, by and large, knew of the event that you speak of through hearsay. I, with Brooklyn roots, knew something more about it.

But there was another whole group in Brooklyn Heights--which of course is now entirely gone--of indigenous inhabitants, so to speak, who had lived through this. Roy Richardson was one, and there were a number of other old-timers still on the Board of the Brooklyn Heights Association, who had participated in one way or another in all of that. But it wasn't this young group of professionals who were now moving into the Heights, and who ultimately formed the life-blood of the preservation effort as it began to develop in '58, '59 and '60.

MR. WOOD

So there really wasn't any cross-pollination between those two fights.

MR. PEARSALL

Not really. The two fights, I think, really should be viewed as entirely separate.

MRS. GOUGH

At a later stage, perhaps, Mr. Bard's interest would be connected with that earlier struggle ...

MR. PEARSALL

Well, that's true; because Mrs. James, who was heir to the Underwood Typewriter money, and who had a marvelous house overlooking the river--reputedly designed by Richard Upjohn, although I think as a practical matter that may not even be true--she was sort of the grande dame of Brooklyn Heights, and had been for a long time. And before any organized efforts at preservation took place, she was fighting her own preservation battle, using her own connections and her own money.

She was a personal friend of Bob Moses, and shortly before the events that we're talking about this morning--say, it must have been around '54--Moses wanted to tear down the whole southwest corner of Brooklyn Heights, called Willowtown. Mrs. James effectively stopped that by inviting him to her apartment--they were friends--and had a group there; and talked to him very earnestly about how destructive to the Heights that would be, and succeeded in persuading him to give up that particular development plan that would have torn down all of Willowtown.[1]

MR. WOOD

Now is that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway fight, or is that yet still another Moses fight?

MR. PEARSALL

No, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was earlier. That was in the 40s, late '40s. I mean, I think the construction occurred in '50, '51, '52, somewhere in there. Then he had this idea of knocking down this Willowtown area. Later he did succeed in setting in motion a process that ultimately knocked down the whole Cadman Plaza area, although he was gone by the time it actually happened. But Mrs. James had a lot of connections, and she was the one contact with the Manhattan elite who were interested in such subjects. She was on the board for many years of the Municipal Art Society, and she may well have known Bard as a consequence of that Municipal Art Society activity. She was certainly the host of the event that he came over to participate in, and maybe they had known each other from earlier wars such as the BQE thing. But if there was any connection at all between the Heights and Bard prior to these events, it would have been through Mrs. James.

MR. WOOD

I'm getting a sense from what you're saying that she was probably also then a real powerhouse on the Municipal Art Society board.

MR. PEARSALL

She was. She was still on the board when I went on the Municipal Art Society board, which would have been in the late '60s. I remember she would always have a big black car, and a driver to take her home to Brooklyn Heights, and occasionally I bummed a ride with her. But she was a very interesting and energetic woman, who was tremendously keen on the Heights. And she invested personally; when a lot of houses along Columbia Heights were in jeopardy, she bought those houses just to preserve them, then ultimately sold them off when she found opportunities to put them in strong hands. And she did many things that I could go on about in terms of getting young people, as they began to arrive in Brooklyn Heights, interested in the Heights-interested in the Brooklyn Heights Casino--she took Nancy and me under her wing, along with other people, when we arrived on the Heights, and she had parties at her house at which she tried to have all these young people introduced to one another. I had known her because I had grown up in Brooklyn; I was a great friend of her two daughters. So she was very kind to us. I think that her enthusiasm for it communicated itself to Nancy and me and probably contributed, in some indirect fashion, to our willingness to put our shoulder to the wheel.

MR. WOOD

Taking us to the town meeting of April of 1959, and the larger meeting in May of 1960, what just fascinates me is--we're talking about the May, 1960 Brooklyn Heights Association Golden Jubilee annual meeting--you've got the head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation speaking; you've got a crowd of 700 people, all talking about historic preservation on the Heights; and this is now a full year or more before M.A.S., with the help of Felt, even suggests to the Mayor the notion of this committee.[2] So I mean clearly Brooklyn Heights' consciousness is way ahead of any other group or neighborhood in the city about historic preservation. I mean, that's what the facts plainly reveal. Am I right? You were way, way ahead.

MR. PEARSALL

True, absolutely true. We were absolutely the only ones who were beating this drum.

MR. WOOD

Were any of the other neighborhoods discussing things at all like this?

MR. PEARSALL

No, no, no. Greenwich Village-well, let's see. What was the nice old lady-the wonderful woman ...

MR. WOOD

Ruth Wittenberg?

MR. PEARSALL

Yeah, Ruth. Eventually our paths crossed, but it would be hard for me now to recall when that occurred. I'm sure it occurred at some point before the Landmarks Law was enacted. I remember going to her house; her husband was very interested in the subject, and I remember him delivering a little bit of a speech about how terrible it was to build these "filing boxes" for people. It was a concept that has remained in my mind ever since; and I would imagine that Greenwich Village began perking in, maybe, '63 or thereabouts.

MR. KOPNICKI

In a speech he made in 1978 to the Mechanics Institute, Harmon Goldstone expressed surprise that preservation had developed in a direction which really was favoring districts over individual landmarks in terms of proportion of designations. When you were starting things going in Brooklyn Heights, was that your vision of the future of preservation: being centered in districts? Do you think that some of the other districts that were designated, after the Heights sort of served as a pioneer in this way, have been up to the same standard? I mean, there was controversy at the time about Greenwich Village and its degree of aesthetic unity; it's referred to in the Platt and Goldstone interviews--some people thought at the time that the Village should not be one large district, but rather a group of smaller districts. When we first started getting interested in preservation, we were still encountering that view among people working officially in preservation for the City: that the Village really should have been smaller districts, and not just one; some parts were "more equal than others," in their view. How did you react to the developing emphasis on districts and the controversies about the degree of aesthetic unity that a district should possess in order to be worthy of designation?

MR. PEARSALL

Well, that's a multi-faceted question. First, I will say that it is my impression, I believe correctly, that what the Municipal Art Society was thinking in terms of in 1959 was individual landmarks. They had their Committee on Historic Architecture and produced these lists, starting maybe in '54, '55; that effort goes back into the early '50s, and I had one of the early copies. What the Municipal Art Society was focusing on was individual landmarks. They were not thinking of historic districts at all.

MR. WOOD

Mostly in Manhattan, too, right? Mostly in Manhattan, individual landmarks.

MR. PEARSALL

Oh yeah, yeah. Well--no, that's not fair. If you look at that original-a very large number of the buildings are not in Manhattan. They have a bunch of them in Brooklyn, but most of the ones from Brooklyn were in Brooklyn Heights. But there were others too. So they weren't looking just at Manhattan; that original list is more than just Manhattan. But that's what they were thinking of; they were not thinking of historic districts at all, until we came along.

Then there was an interesting kind of amalgam that occurred, because they had sort of the elitist connections, which we didn't have, but we had that kind of populist, grass-roots enthusiasm, which they saw that they could use. I mean, Platt and Goldstone had no political support of a grass-roots nature. They had contacts, but they didn't have any political support. So they saw that there was a "cross-ruffing" here that was potentially beneficial to everybody and slowly they began thinking about historic districts.

It was thought, I think, then, by me as well as others--that the Heights, and good parts of Greenwich Village would be the historic districts. I had no idea--and nobody did--there would be 50 or 60 historic districts. That was a completely foreign thought. Everybody would have blanched had they thought that it might develop to that extent, although in retrospect, given the fact that the city had no other means to preserve special districts, this clearly was the vehicle that had to be used, and I think has been very effectively used. But it wasn't in the contemplation at all of the people that I talked to back in those days. And I was aware that in Greenwich Village there were elitists who thought that the good blocks off Fifth Avenue were really what needed to be preserved; a lot of stuff didn't need to be preserved. It's amazing to me that as much got preserved as did, because exactly that kind of indifference--to some of the areas of Greenwich Village that actually contribute a great deal Ð was marked at that time.

MR. WOOD

I want to ask you a couple of questions about some preservation battles just to get a sense of weight, in terms of if they were just blips on the screen or impact. I know there was a flurry about the building in which Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" was published, when that was threatened and I guess ultimately lost. Was that a significant event at all in your memory?

MR. PEARSALL

Well, it was significant. Cadman Plaza was a pretty well crystallized, Title One defined project, in 1956. Although we fought Moses to the point where the project did not in fact go forward as it was originally planned, it remained a designated Title One project. And it had the support of people like John Cashmore, who was the long-term Borough President of Brooklyn, who saw Cadman Plaza as a personal monument. He's responsible for a lot of the terrible stuff that we see there: that horrible-well, I think it was a horrible-war memorial (we could have had a wonderful war memorial, but--); that war memorial. But, you know, the Supreme Court building; we had a wonderful Renaissance Revival Supreme Court building. Of course, it probably wouldn't have been suitable for current needs, but that monstrosity that's been built there is his doing. The closing of Fulton Street was his doing, and he wanted to see Fulton Street enlarged as it went down to the river, to become sort of a "Champs Elysees" of Brooklyn. He wanted to be able to look out his office and see this park and big wide street; and that was consistent with tearing down the eastern edge of Brooklyn Heights. So he was firmly supportive of the Title One designation, and so although there were many people, including myself, who greatly regretted the notion of leaving it behind, I made a judgment that we dare not risk this whole new idea and the possibility that we could actually get the preservation of Brooklyn Heights officially in place through a designation. I didn't want to risk that by dragging in the future of Cadman Plaza. And as I say, I've had regrets about that. If I had been tougher, maybe we could have pulled it off, and stopped it in its tracks, but that was the judgment that was made. And so the Heights Association, in its policy formulations, decided that they would go for the designation of Brooklyn Heights, either as a stand-alone district, or as a district within a larger system, with defined areas that excluded what's now the Cadman Plaza site.

Now there was Dan Knickerbocker; he was the head of the group, but I have no idea what--he left the Heights some years later, and I don't-he's probably dead now--but he and a band of very strenuous adherents tried to use the "Leaves of Grass." The building in which it was printed was there, it had a plaque on the wall, it was in the Cadman Plaza site, and while they wanted to preserve the building, what they really wanted to do was to save the Cadman Plaza development site from the wreckers' ball. That group had a name, and I've forgotten what that name was, and things were very tense for a while because I was fearful that they were going to undermine our efforts to preserve the rest of the Heights, and they felt that I was doing the wrong thing by not standing up for right and justice and saving Cadman Plaza. You know, I had great respect for their views, but we-just didn't want to take a chance, and so that's what happened.

MR. WOOD

In terms of opposition to the Brooklyn Heights District and its designation, there were the Watchtower interests. Were there other kind of organized opposition or was that really the only organized voice against your District?

MR. PEARSALL

I remember Norval White at the hearing saying that we were making a very big mistake not to include the eastern edge, which was the office building edge, facing Court Street: the block between Clinton and Court Street. And he was right. But we had excluded it because we didn't want all those big property owners coming in against us. But he was right. It would have been much better to have included it. But he was an advocate, not an opponent.

The only two formal opponents were the Watchtower Society and St. Francis College. The Watchtower people obviously saw what this was going to do to their efforts, and St. Francis had just bought a wonderful mansion, the Herman Behr mansion at the corner of Henry and Pierrepont Streets. They had monks back in those days, quite colorful folks in brown garb, who were living there. They were a little out of it; they didn't really know what was going on. Somebody told them that there was about to be this thing that was going to limit what they could do, and so they went down-they sent a lawyer down, or somebody, to oppose it. And that just came out of the blue. But we knew all kinds of people who were involved with them, so in no time we had a meeting with them, and explained, to them that this wasn't-you know, what this was, and how it was going to be good for them, not bad for them; and they withdrew their opposition, leaving only the Watchtower Society. This is now-you know, we've been talking about this for six years in Brooklyn Heights and we had systematically reached every quarter of the Heights. We had reached, through an early effort using John Codman, who was the father of the Beacon Hill Historic District-he came down. He was a realtor. He met-we had a big meeting of all of the Brooklyn Heights realtors, and explained to them how this was all going to work, and they all thought it was a terrific thing. It could sell houses for them, and so they thought this was great. So we bad absolutely no opposition from within the community; by that time everybody was just all revved up.

MR. WOOD

I was reviewing some of the documents that you've given me over the years, and....

[Mr. Wood and Mr. Pearsall have a pile of historic documents on the desk, and turn their attention to "Document 20, " the "Historic Zoning" proposal advanced 6y Arden Rathkopf which is reprinted in full on page 23 of this issue.]

MR. PEARSALL

That whole story is set out in my reminiscences, it takes place in the spring of '59, and I've got a fair amount of detail on that-a copy of the statute--you know, there are a lot of resonances of that original draft in the current Landmarks Law. I'm sure that there are threads that went all the way through. As far as I know, this is the first attempt to prepare a Landmarks Law for the city.

MR. WOOD

To clarify, this would be the document or the idea presented at those April and May hearings in 1959 that Arden Rathkopf presented--this draft zoning amendment for a citywide Landmarks Law. That is what document 20 is.

MR. WOOD

What firm was he with?

MR. PEARSALL

He had his own firm; it was Rathkopf and somebody. But he wrote the treatise; he was a wonderful guy, he had a great sense of humor, and of all the old codgers that were involved in the Brooklyn Heights Association at that time--and the Heights Association was very different then than it is today-the Board was a group of elderly men who did their best to maintain (and they did a damned good job of maintaining) the standards of Brooklyn Heights. But they weren't very flexible; let's put it that way. Arden was very flexible, and welcomed all of these ideas, and I'm sure that he and Shulman were the principal authors of this document number 20. He felt that the thing to do was have a citywide--essentially like we have now. That was what he wanted, and then you'd have individual districts designated under that. He thought we had a better chance of accomplishing it, rather than a special-interest provision for Brooklyn Heights. So this was prepared to take advantage of the fact that Felt was working on a substantial revision of the Zoning Resolution, and he was going around the boroughs holding hearings. He had a hearing in Brooklyn, he had a hearing in Manhattan, and this was presented on both occasions. Ted Reid was our guy, that is to say, the "Young Turks" guy, and he was a member of our CCIC group, and Arden carried the ball for the Heights Association. This is the document, and I think if you look at it you will be astounded. This is a very thin paper, but essentially it's all here; it's all here, and a lot of the same language is here. This is clearly the point of departure for what we now have as the Landmarks Law.

MR. WOOD

While we're on that subject for a minute: that was an effort to advance a city-wide zoning, the spring of '59, through the zoning reform process that was going on. Felt, I know, sent signals-I mean it was clear that that didn't seem to be moving forward with great alacrity, and you continued to then push kind of the single solution, the Brooklyn Heights solution, which I know you pushed for several years; and then, at a certain point--and one of my questions is, I know there was a radio show that Felt was on--I got a sense that it was clear the boom had descended and Brooklyn was kind of sat on, in a sense. I also remember, in one of the other interviews--I think it was either with Platt or Harmon Goldstone--that he made some reference to the, not the "Young Turks," but some phrase like that, in Brooklyn that had to be sat on.

MR. KOPNICKI

It might have been "lunatics."

MR. WOOD

That was a reference to the people in the Village. I don't think Brooklyn earned that. But it was kind of this notion that at some point they had sat on the Brooklyn effort to cool it down, to let the city-wide one move forward.

MR. PEARSALL

That's exactly what happened. It was after the Mayor's committee had been set up that basically Felt, while encouraging us, urged us to work with Platt; and that led to Harmon coming over, and we had a nice lunch at Darwin-at Mrs. James' apartment, following which--and we had the first pre-publication copy of the "Old Brooklyn Heights" book by Clay Lancaster, which I gave to Harmon-then we drove around the Heights afterwards. And he seemed very enthusiastic; but Platt was clearly the guy in charge, and so he set up a meeting with Platt, and that was the first of many meetings with Platt. The long and short of it was that Platt right from the very beginning, made it clear that he had no patience at all with our idea for a Brooklyn stand-alone. Yet we realized that if we got swept up into the city-wide vortex, where the Real Estate Board and its associated allies were very serious opponents, that we could be delayed for many years; and in fact that's exactly what happened.

In the spring of '62, in a last-ditch effort to give vitality to our stand-alone program, we went public with a full-blown Brooklyn Heights statute, a press release, all kinds of charts and schedules and maps that defined the styles, the dates, and all this; and we got a fair amount of publicity in the city-wide press. We sent copies of the book to a whole lot of different people. This is the book; I don't know whether you've seen the original edition of Old Brooklyn Heights, but it's a hard-bound book, and it was a very impressive vehicle. We sent it around to everybody we thought would be influential. But it was clear that there was not going to be any support for­ everybody who was interested in the subject in city government wanted to focus on the city-wide project and, as you point out, I made one last sally with Felt on that radio show. He was very encouraging; he said, gosh, you've got to be a historic district; but you've got to fold in your effort with Platt's group. And that was our last real effort to stand alone.

MR. KOPNICKI

What is your final evaluation of the role of Felt in the whole process? Because Platt and Goldstone both speak very highly of him. However, what always strikes me is the remark I believe Platt cites of Felt, about how "you're going to lose some buildings; you're going to lose them." And it's struck me that it's a bit like St. Augustine's prayer, "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet." In other words, Felt was willing to help with a certain amount of preservation but, nonetheless, some buildings would still have to be sacrificed. Do you think that it was necessary to compromise to that degree in order to accomplish anything?

MR. PEARSALL

I really don't know; I really don't know. I've been curious for a long time myself about what actually happened. We were essentially shut down, and what we did for the next two or three years was to hold meetings and have speakers and generate enthusiasm at the Brooklyn Heights grass-root level. But in the spring of '62, the Mayor changed his committee, made its report recommending a Landmarks Commission, and by December of '61-I may have the dates wrong--but then it was in the spring of '62 and there was a whole hoo-hah going on about Penn Station, and Platt was made the head of the Commission. There was a lot of overlap between the members of the original committee, but it was a different group and, to some extent, different people. Shortly after the appointment of that, one of my colleagues, Bill Fisher, who had been interested in this--who'd been one of our CCIC co-chairs, we'd made him a CCIC co-chair to try to embrace the Brooklyn Heights Association to the extent that we could, and see if we could pull together instead of in different directions--he was the head of the Housing committee of the Brooklyn Heights Association at that time. He was a good guy. He later became President of the Long Island Historical Society, and he was helpful in the whole process as we went forward. He had developed a relationship- through the Brooklyn Historical Society, then the Long Island Historical Society- with Hugh Carey, and Hugh Carey got him appointed to the Mayor's Commission. But Bill was not a "doer"; he really was perfectly content to kind of sit by and listen to people. He was not an activist, but he was the only eyes and ears that we really had into the Commission. He took very much of a back-seat role in all that, but we did learn some things. I did see, and was able to make some comments about, the Law

as it was being developed, and did have a chance to review an early draft. But they had a draft in essentially its final form by '63. The thing was done, and yet it was not presented to the City Council until winter, late winter I would think, of '64. 1 don't know, to answer your question, I don't know what the forces were that held up the Law for as long as possible. I've always attributed it to the real estate effort to defeat the thing one way or another, and I suspect that I probably had reason to believe that that was the case based on things that Bill Fisher was telling me were going on in the Commission. But I have no real information about exactly what was taking place, or why it took so long. It was two years, or at least a year and a half, after the Law was fully drafted, before it was presented to the City Council.

MR. WOOD

A quick question about Fisher: is he a different Fisher than the one who was with the MTA? A different Fisher than the family behind our current council member from Brooklyn Heights?

MR. PEARSALL

Oh yeah.

MR. WOOD

Totally different.

MR. PEARSALL

Yeah. Bill Fisher--nothing to do with any of them. Bill Fisher was a lawyer who, in this part of his career, was one of the chief lawyers for 20th-Century Fox, and had nothing to do with any of these other people.

MR. WOOD

The question I had was now, in the process when the law is actually being drafted, in the kind of fuzzy time period before it suddenly appears on the Mayor's desk, you said you'd had an ability to make some comments on it.

MR. PEARSALL

I made some comments, but I was not in the center of that effort.

MR. WOOD

You weren't in the loop?

MR. PEARSALL

I wasn't really in the loop. The meetings with Platt and Goldstone tailed off in '62. The effort to produce the statute was in the Commission. I mean, there were some things that we did; I remember Jim Vanderpool-I gathered a collection of all (I guess I didn't get them all, but I got 90 percent) of the preservation laws throughout the country, I gathered personally, put them in a book, and provided them to the Commission, so that they would know what was out there. And I made comments to Bill about what I thought needed to be focused on, and I did see an early draft ­that is to say, I saw a draft sometime in '63; I saw a draft and I commented on that, and eventually Seymour Boyers, who was the head of a City Council committee, and I suspect that Boyers, who was a lawyer and counsel to his committee, probably participated-I don't know whether Boyers is still alive or not--but he is the guy that introduced the bill and shepherded it through the City Council process. I do not know who the principal draftsmen were of the actual language. I did not draft it. My contributions were limited to: a), collecting all those statutes; b), making comments to Bill and then commenting on a draft.

MR. WOOD

That takes us to an interesting moment in time, though; that we've got a law that now finally has appeared on a Mayor's desk, and the City Council hearings on the law, and great speculation-­

MR. KOPNICKI

According to the Goldstone interview, he says "it got turned over to the Corporation counsel and Morris Handel took over, and Bernard Friedlander. . . "

MR. WOOD

Who's still around, Bernie Friedlander.

MR. KOPNICKI

". . . and several others." And then he mentions Lee Rankin, who was the Corporation counsel.

MR. PEARSALL

You know, the thing must have been--I remember generally who was on that Commission; there wasn't anybody on the Commission that would have done it. They didn't really have any staff. Jim Van Derpool was the staff, I think, and he was, of course, an eminent architectural historian but he certainly was not a draftsman. The thing has to have been drafted in the Corporation counsel's office.

MR. WOOD

Just to follow up on this Felt thing for another minute, because we come to this with Watergate mentalities, as opposed to the mentality of that time; but with him playing this key role, and kind of advising those trying to get the Landmarks Law passed; at the same time, his brother was a major player in the Penn Station thing.

MR. PEARSALL

I saw that in your questions, and I probably once knew that, but it is a new fact for me now. I've lost track of the fact that his brother was--of course, it was a real­ estate family, and I'm not surprised to hear that, and I must have known it at the time, but I certainly have lost track of it. There was never any indication, in my dealings with Felt, that he was other than completely sincere; but because of his -- ­this is just total speculation on my part--I mean, he was really plugged into the real estate group, the real estate families that really dominated the scene. And he probably knew that they were going to fight it tooth and nail and that this was going to be an anathema, and that it was going to take a lot of hard work. But, you know, I don't think the thing would ever have gotten across the goal line had it not been for Felt's support and efforts. He was the one person in city government that took what appeared to be a genuine interest. I mean, Wagner was the Mayor at the time, but although Wagner always said the right things, you never had any sense that he was actually concerned about this issue. Felt seemed to be the only one that was concerned about it, and I think he's the one that gets the credit for causing the city to listen. But I don't know why it took so long, and my guess is that it was probably just a political problem trying to get the thing accomplished in the teeth of very fierce opposition.

MR. WOOD

But Felt was positioned in such a way clearly-I just want to make sure I understand this--that he knew intimately what was going on in the real estate world as well as what was going on the civic world, so­

MR. PEARSALL

He's the only one, as far as I know, that had the whole picture.

MR. WOOD

Jumping back a bit to CICC, and its getting off the ground: would you say it's fair to characterize CICC as a reaction to Bob Moses?

MR. PEARSALL

It's an accurate, but only partially correct, statement. There were two things that got people going, that caused this young group to start meeting together in the undercroft of the Unitarian Church. One was the Moses plan for Cadman Plaza, which envisioned a destruction of the whole quarter and construction of efficiency apartments, small apartments, small, very expensive apartments. There weren't going to be family-sized apartments. And there was a whole group of these young people who saw as the principal issue, not so much the destruction, but the kind of apartment buildings and what the complex was going to be like. They wanted to have subsidized, middle-income, family-sized apartments because it was felt that such people would take an interest in whether there were trees on the street, whereas essentially high-income, small apartment uses would involve people that would not have an interest in the community. So there was one part of our contingent that saw that as the principal issue; there was another part that saw the destruction of the architecture as the principal issue, and then going along with that as the other primary source of inspiration, if you will, was the Watchtower Society. The Watchtower Society was busy tearing down houses. Just before I arrived, five houses on Willow Street, right near where I lived, were taken down by a private developer who put up an apartment house. Then right after that, in the winter of '57, the Watchtower acquired another group of houses, a whole block of houses, further north on Willow Street, and tore those down. It seemed as though a combination of private development taking advantage of the increased values in Brooklyn Heights as a consequence of its newfound popularity, on the one hand, and the Watchtower on the other hand, could be a very destructive force. So it was really, I guess, three things. There was a fear of private developers, absentee developers, who didn't have any stake in Brooklyn Heights, but would take advantage of increasing real estate values; there was the Watchtower Society, that was totally untamed and prepared to tear anything down that it felt it heeded in order to have its buildings; and there was Moses, who was prepared at that point to tear down the whole northwest corner of Brooklyn Heights.

MR. WOOD

Those are good motivating factors to get one going.

MR. KOPNICKI

What do you feel about how the Commission--say now looking back over all these years-how have they done regulating the Heights as a District, and in general?

MR. PEARSALL

I think by and large they've done an okay job. I have gotten pretty far away from that process and so I'm really not very expert any more. For a long time I was very much involved in the regulatory process because I would go to hearings and I would represent the Heights in the various application hearings of one kind or another. You know, there's designation, there's the regulation, but there's another piece of it, which is enforcement. And I think, on the third leg, throughout the City of course, I feel that enforcement has not been as effective as it should be. I can't cite you some examples right now, but over the years there have been plenty of examples in which it would have been nice for the Landmarks Commission to have been more rigorous in enforcing the Law. This has been a problem right from the very beginning. I had to fight tooth and nail to try to get any regulation or any enforcement of the Law at all in its early years. I prepared a desk book of the Landmarks Law. You know, it's a criminal statute, and I figured if I couldn't get the Landmarks Commission to enforce it, I would get the local precinct to enforce it. So I gave a copy of the Landmarks Law to the local captain and I indicated that, you know, the Brooklyn Heights Association was going to be calling the precinct to get some enforcement here.

MR. WOOD

I get a sense that that's an attitude that was at the top and-you know, a top-down attitude, from talking to Platt and Goldstone, that they were very worried about shaking the boat, or whatever.

MR. PEARSALL

This is exactly right. I mean, I have to say that Platt was worried, and so was Goldstone. And although nobody gives Beverly Moss Spatt much credit for anything, the truth of the matter is she brought a lot of courage to the Commission.

MRS. GOUGH

That's very interesting.

MR. WOOD

She certainly also brought its focus on neighborhoods again, I mean, for the first time in a broad sense.

MR. PEARSALL

She did.

MR WOOD

I get a sense--and you and I had the--I don't know if we could call it pleasure--but we were on the Historic Cities Committee, and you had that wonderful idea of trying to get the enforcement provision of the Law as something that a citizen-I can't remember the right legal term-but it was something to be initiated by a citizen.

MR. PEARSALL

It was a private right of action. Under the Landmarks Law, only the Commission can institute proceedings for injunctions and so on. But our idea was to allow any private citizen-we had some qualifications on it so it wasn't going to be a bunch of crazies; it would have to be some organization or something like us-

MR. WOOD

Organized crazies.

MR. PEARSALL

It would have to be organized crazies, but could bring injunctive actions if they had proper standing.

MR. WOOD

Because right now, we're all in the position, if you want to force something, you have to first try and do an Article 78 against the Commission. I mean, you really have to litigate the Commission for not enforcing the Law.

MR. KOPNICKI

There's just one sort of minor, and somewhat comic, factual question that I have. Is the Abe Stark who was Borough President of Brooklyn and was of help--is he the same Abe Stark whose name appeared in the late '40s on a sign in Ebbets Field saying "Hit Sign, Win Suit"?

MR. PEARSALL

Yup. Abe Stark-you say he was of help?

MR. KOPNICKI

Yeah. I think I read somewhere that he helped you in your-no? Not at all?

MR. PEARSALL

Abe Stark is the Borough President who wanted to rip the portico off the front of Borough Hall.

MR. KOPNICKI

Now I must try and track down where I read someone saying something nice about Abe Stark.

MR. PEARSALL

He wanted to rip--you know the Brooklyn Museum-well, you know the Supreme Court House-how they both lost their front steps? Well, Abe Stark's thought was that nobody used those steps, and they were in the way, and they were a maintenance problem, and they should be ripped off. And we had to battle him to get him to leave it alone. Fortunately now it's been wonderfully restored and looks just great, but if you'd left it up to Abe Stark, he would have torn the front steps off. I really don't remember-to be serious about it, I don't remember Abe Stark­

That's accurate [referring to a document which was produced]. He did save­ absolutely-you're absolutely right-he did save the day on the Limited Height District.

MRS. GOUGH

But he wasn't too keen on architecture, from what you were saying.

MR. WOOD

There may be totally other reasons why he did it.

MR. PEARSALL

He did it because he wanted to support the Brooklyn Heights Association. This was a political thing that he did, but he did stand in our corner, and we only just squeaked that Limited Height District thing through the Board of Estimate, 12 to 10, and it was because of Stark that we were able to get that done. So, to be fair, he does get the credit for that.

[1] Given the usual inflexibility of Robert Moses, we were puzzled by this account of the persuasiveness of Mrs. Darwin James. A possible key is found in The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro: Darwin James had been responsible for a turning point in Moses's rise to power. In 1914, reform Mayor John Purroy Mitchel appointed a new Civil Service Commission, intended to institute controls over patronage. One of the two new commissioners he named was "banker Darwin R James,. a natty one-time Princeton track captain and president of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities". On the strength of Moses's doctoral thesis, The Civil Service of Great Britain and his position at the Bureau of Municipal Research (a non-governmental institution bent on reform)-and with the support of the Mayor-Darwin James gave Moses his first job in government. He was to draft a detailed program to free the civil service from Tammany Hall through a system of examinations, job definitions, and regulated salaries. Although this first attempt at reform failed, it led to Governor Alfred E. Smith's appointing Moses as head of a special commission on government reorganization, launching his political career. Darwin James had also been among those who had supported Robert Moses as a reform candidate for Mayor in 1933-a move vetoed by Samuel Seabury. -The Editors.

[2] The Mayors Committee for the Preservation of Structures of Historic and Esthetic Importance, proposed by Harmon Goldstone, Geoffrey Platt and James Felt in May, 1961 (Village news, Vol. VI, No. 3, p. 12) and appointed in June of 1961.