Or Lose It

Use it. Or lose it. That's the dilemma frustrating efforts to save Long Island landmarks.

In Garden City, efforts to save St. Paul's School, one the state's most endangered architectural gems, remain mired in village politics, as trustees consider competing visions for the school that is suffering from years of neglect.

One promising approach comes from the Committee to Save St. Paul's, a citizens group that has fought other plans to demolish much of the school. The committee recently offered its own plan to re-use the buildings for senior rental housing, and for a community center.

There's also encouraging news in East Hampton, where Supervisor William McGintee backs an ingenious plan to save a group of nine historic buildings, moving them from an estate where they were restored, and re-using them for town offices. The buildings were given to the town by Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil.

In Hampton Bays another preservation proposal is being weighed by the Town of Southampton. There, a developer recently offered plans to save the historic Canoe Place Inn, once a stagecoach stop, proposing to re-use it as a time-share complex.

And in Sag Harbor, architects have come up with an intriguing plan to save the landmark Bulova Watch Case Factory by restoring the historic structure, and using much of it to house 81 condominiums.

In all these cases, the key is to find a new use for historic buildings--a public use--to preserve these landmarks.

Use it or lose it: it's the iron rule of preservation. Maureen Traxler, Communications Director
Committee to Save St. Paul's
Garden City, NY

Bravo, Cablevision, on your editorial, "Use It or Lose It." The Committee to Save St. Paul's, a grassroots group of individual residents, families, business owners and civic leaders in Garden City, echoes your caution that if Long Islanders don't preserve their historic structures and landmark buildings for good uses--public uses--we are doomed to lose these "endangered architectural gems."

Ours might be called a David and Goliath story… average residents daring to propose a different approach to elected officials, real estate consultants and established developers. While ideas have come and gone, the Committee and its supporters have held fast to finding a compromise solution that restores St. Paul's School--a 125-year-old icon built in memory of Garden City's founder Alexander Stewart and which lay dormant for nearly 15 years--to its status as a focal point of our heritage and a place that can be used again by all the residents of the Village.

We look toward true historic preservation of its unique interior features and Victorian Gothic exterior architecture. We see the creation of senior rental housing combined with a senior and community center for residents from 6 to 60 and beyond… not just a prefab luxury condo arrangement behind a movie-set façade.

We must show our children that the lessons they learn about their communities are meaningful and that Long Islanders value important links to the past and the lessons they can teach us for the future. Rob Alvey
Garden City, NY

For more than 13 years, the Village Trustees of Garden City have kept the public out of the historic St. Paul's main building without even the courtesy of permitting a public referendum on whether to demolish, repair, or change NYS law to allow them to sell it to private owners so it can be gutted. Money to repair or demolish the building would have to be bonded, hence a possible vote to approve funds? Instead, they've continued to spread outlandish and unfounded fears of terrible costs and taxes. Meanwhile, the sports and recreation areas of the 40-plus acre site are used daily, and no one has complained about the continued investment of village money to restore, repair, and maintain the area. Surprisingly, the entire property was declared dedicated parkland as a means to preserve the area for public use. Now we hear trustees have been having their "volunteers" trying to identify an equivalent area of property within the village to transfer dedicated parkland designation to get out from under the restrictions. Of course, the village is supposed to have an Environmental Advisory Board too, but there's been no annual report for years and no meetings to the point where the board didn't even know which members had resigned.

Neglect is one issue, such as the old Brooklyn Waterworks building in Baldwin, but in Garden City it is purely politics and the power of money to keep some of the trustees in office. Most people don't even care. The village has 22,000 people, but last year's election--where you can only vote yes--gathered a whopping 60 votes for one of the candidates, who was re-elected. And one of the other winners got even less votes.

Use it or lose it? A very apt summary of the perpetual nightmare for residents of villages such as Garden City when the village "leaders" prefer to ignore the true benefits, values and opportunities of re-using unique and historical facilities within a community for the community. Instead, Garden City's trustees have locked the doors for over a decade and refuse to even allow the residents to vote on repairs to maintain the building, hoping that wind, rain, or fire will destroy it so they can say, "too bad."

They even had to hire public relations experts to figure out ways to confuse the public. I wonder if it's the same firm Bush relied on to convince everyone we needed to invade Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. If our President wanted to find the real weapons of mass destruction, all he had to do was look for the Village of Garden City's trustees.