Court Won't Save
Hartford's Gallery

By Henry J. Stern
February 25, 2005

The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the decision by the Landmarks Preservation Commission not to hold a public hearing on the proposed landmarking of the late Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art, a nine-story building southeast of Columbus Circle, designed by Edward Durrell Stone and opened in 1964.  Hartford's museum folded, and the building came into the hands of Gulf & Western, a conglomerate, in 1976.
 
Conglomerates are not in great public favor today.  They are large corporations composed of many substantial companies, often in fields unrelated to each other.  The idea was that the business skills of the owners could be applied in many fields, and increase operating profits in all of them.  It turned out that people who knew a lot about one area usually did not know that much about others, and conglomerates often declined in value as a result of unsatisfactory earnings. Many were broken up in spin-offs.  There is much to be learned from the discipline of the market.
 
Gulf & Western began as an auto parts company.  At one point it acquired Paramount Pictures, the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company and the Consolidated Cigar Corporation.  The company was headed by Charles G. Bluhdorn, who was regarded at the time as a business genius. Bluhdorn donated the old Hartford Gallery to the City of New York, which used it as headquarters for the Department of Cultural Affairs. He died in 1983 aboard an airplane while being flown to the United States for medical treatment, the same fate that had befallen Howard Hughes in 1976.  Gulf & Western, the company was merged into Sumner Redstone's Viacom in 1994.  That is why Viacom owns Paramount. Sic transit gloria mundi.
 
The Hartford building, on a small and unusually shaped plot, was not ideally suited for either a museum or office space, and Cultural Affairs moved in 1998 to the old McGraw Hill Building, a blue/green glass tower at 330 West 42nd Street which is a designated city landmark.  The building, known as 2 Columbus Circle, has been largely empty since.
 
Although the structure overlooks Central Park, it has virtually no windows, except at the top floor.  When it was opened, it was ridiculed as a sign of Huntington Hartford's eccentricity. His art collection was also derided as being too naturalistic.  Hartford, an A&P heir, was an oft-married playboy.  He, in conjunction with Robert Moses, had proposed a restaurant in Central Park overlooking the Pond on Central Park South near Fifth Avenue.  The plan was rejected amidst horror by park people.
 
Hartford spent a great deal of money on women, both while and after he was with them.  He eventually ran out of real money and closed the museum.  It was long regarded by the architectural cognoscenti as a quirk.  At one point, Donald Trump wanted to buy it so he could tear it down and build a hotel on the site.  He had already acquired the Gulf & Western skyscraper on the north side of Columbus Circle and converted it to the Trump International Hotel and Tower, not to be confused with the Trump World Tower on First Avenue and 47th Street.  The city decided not to sell the building to Trump, and found a museum, which was called the American Craft Museum, but which had changed its name to the Museum of Arts and Design, in its quest for upward social and artistic mobility.
 
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) planned to replace the marble facade with terra cotta and glass, although the building would still be largely opaque as far as its park frontage was concerned.
 
West Side residents and distinguished architects protested, having become enamored of the structure they thought was ridiculous in 1964.  The Landmarks Preservation Commission refused to hold a public hearing on designating the building a landmark because they did not believe it was one.  The objectors sued, lost in the Supreme Court in a decision by the highly-regarded Judge Walter Tolub, who has not hesitated to rebuke the city in other cases before him.  As is their right, they took the case up to the Appellate Division, where they just lost.  They can ask for leave to appeal to the Court of Appeals, but when a decision is made by a lower court and unanimously affirmed, prospects for reversal are not bright unless the most important principles are involved.  When you rightly ask, "important to whom?" the answer is: to the judges, not to the plaintiffs.  But you never know what a court will do, and it may be a few months before the matter is finally settled.
 
Without going into the architectural merits of the case, an issue on which we are not professionals or  experts, several questions arise from the viewpoint of process:

1) Is a building a landmark because a lot of rich, famous or educated people say so?  Or because honorable poor people who like the building say so?

2) What is the point of having a Landmarks Commission if they are not allowed to decide whether a building is a landmark or not?

3) Isn't the remedy in this case, if one is needed, political rather than judicial?

4) What if a building is in vogue now, but will be scorned as tacky in ten years?  If landmarking is permanent, are we going to be stuck with the architectural fashions of yesteryear?

5) If the protestors love it so much, why don't they buy it, or at least propose an alternate use for the property that would be self-supporting.

6) Why do local elected officials sign on to a cause if they find twenty people supporting it, and there is no intervening issue of political correctness?

7) When did this building, which had been laughed at, become a treasure?

a) When Edward Durrell Stone died, in 1978.

b) When people learned, after five years boarded up and vacant, that another museum wanted to open there and invite visitors.

c) When the Bloomberg administration, in cooperation with a museum, tried to bring life and activity to a blighted, abandoned block. 

Probably no single event triggered the discovery of this treasure whose life was to begin at forty.  It is just that New York is a great city which lives in conflict, and nothing is ever done without both sides being heard.  In a way, it is embarrassing that we cannot live without judges telling us how to conduct our affairs.  In another way, that shows we are a city of laws, or whatever the judges say to be laws.
 
I suggest that, before the museum is demolished or refaced or whatever, the most glorious virtual photographs should be taken and prominently displayed, so that all those who fell in love with the oddity can, with the smallest stretch of the imagination, believe that it is still there.  Those who live in the hearts of those they left behind shall never die.  George Huntington Hartford, think of Ozymandias.

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