NEW YORK, NY.- Beverly Moss Spatt, a fierce defender of New York City’s aesthetic and cultural heritage who battled real estate and political interests to protect distinguished buildings and historic districts as chair of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in the 1970s, died Friday in Brooklyn. She was 99.
Her son, David, on Monday confirmed her death, at New York University Langone Hospital-Brooklyn.
A Brooklyn judge’s daughter who grew up talking civics at the breakfast table, Spatt was on the City Planning Commission in the 1960s and became known as a shameless do-gooder. She got out and spoke to people in the neighborhoods, carried their fights to City Hall and developed a low tolerance for backroom deals. It was, she said, a good foundation for landmarks-preservation work.
More than a decade after wreckers demolished Pennsylvania Station and historical preservation had become a gospel of city planners, Spatt led the landmarks commission through years of controversy, from 1974-78 as chair, then as a member until 1982. Throughout, she stood up to powerful developers and their allies in her efforts to protect architectural treasures and significant neighborhoods by giving them landmark status.
In her years at the helm, more than 800 landmarks were so designated — mansions, Broadway theaters, apartment and commercial buildings, gems such as the New York County Courthouse in Foley Square, historic districts on the Upper East Side, scenic spaces in Central Park and Verdi Square in Manhattan, and even the magnificent interiors of City Hall and the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
The triumph of Spatt’s tenure was Grand Central Terminal, saved by the courts from a bankrupt Penn Central Company that had fought landmark status for years to erect a 55-story office tower over the station, at East 42nd Street and Park Avenue. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had played a highly visible role, but it was a coalition of city officials and civic activists in the Municipal Art Society that spearheaded the drive to save that classical Beaux-Arts terminal.
“It is the most important decision that the preservation movement has ever had,” Spatt said in 1977, when the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest, handed down the ruling. (The ruling was confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978.) It saved not only Grand Central, she noted, but also the landmark commission itself and the principle of landmark laws: to protect historic and cultural treasures even when it meant economic hardship for an owner.
“Especially when a city is in financial distress, it should not be forced to choose between witnessing the demolition of its glorious past and mortgaging its hopes for the future,” the court declared. “The landmark preservation provisions of the Administrative Code represent an effort to take a middle way.”
Spatt, who was 41 when she got into government, often presided over tumultuous public hearings, whipping off her reading glasses in confronting property owners or developers in debate. Writing streams of letters to newspapers, she carried on running battles with political opponents, seeing herself as neither liberal nor conservative but rather as a guardian of the commission’s prerogative to designate landmarks, which restricts demolition or alteration of buildings and limits development inconsistent with a neighborhood’s character.
In the 1970s, many developers regarded her as a meddling women’s liberationist — she had been a member of assorted women’s organizations — whose ideals had run amok, restricting their rights, robbing them of fair returns on investments, and imposing unreasonable business costs and conditions. Courts often agreed, and removed landmark status. The commission also reversed itself in hardship cases.
Widening the geography and concept of landmarks, the Spatt commission designated as such the cantilevered Queensboro Bridge and several Brooklyn sites, including Gage & Tollner’s seafood restaurant, Grand Army Plaza and tree-lined Ocean Parkway, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.
It also conferred landmark status on firehouses, police stations, skyscrapers, monuments and, in a nod to social significance, the First Houses on the Lower East Side, dedicated in 1935 as the nation’s first low-income public housing project.
“In this designation,” Spatt said, “we honor a great social experiment — the responsibility of society to provide for every human being decent housing with a high-quality humane environment.”
In 2015, when the Frick Collection on Fifth Avenue proposed a renovation that would have eliminated a garden for more interior space for its artwork, a long-retired Spatt joined a coalition of architects, designers and former landmarks commissioners to fight the plan, citing a 40-year-old Frick promise, made on Spatt’s watch, to create the garden as a “permanent” feature. Confronted with the evidence of a 1975 news release, the Frick backed off and said it would consider other options.
Beverly Moss was born in Brooklyn on May 26, 1924, one of three daughters of Maximilian and Grace (Leff) Moss. Her father was a Surrogate Court judge and former president of New York City’s Board of Education. She grew up in Brooklyn Heights and lived there at her death.
She graduated from James Madison High School in 1941 and from Brown University in 1945 before earning a master’s degree and a doctorate in urban planning at New York University.
In 1946, she married Dr. Samuel Spatt, an internist. They had three children, Robin, Jonathan and David. Samuel Spatt died in 2007. She is survived by her three children and three grandchildren.
Spatt joined the League of Women Voters, the Citizens Union and the Women’s City Club, and helped found the Brooklyn Democratic reform movement in the 1950s. In 1965, Mayor Robert Wagner appointed her to the City Planning Commission, the agency that approves zoning and land-use permits and sites for urban renewal and other major projects.
She mastered arcane zoning and planning concepts, talked to experts and ordinary citizens and in the neighborhoods became a visible face of distant government. In her five years on the commission, its two chief undertakings were the World Trade Center and a Master Plan for the city. She voted against both, calling the trade center too overwhelming for its site and the Master Plan a mix of “liberal generalities.”
She often dissented on zoning changes, usually on those that smacked of political deals, and opposed “incentive bonuses” for builders who promised “amenities” such as plazas in exchange for taller buildings and larger sites. She won a loyal following, rare for an obscure official in an agency that made few headlines but was vital to homeowners and the quality of life in the city.
Mayor John Lindsay, a frequent target of her criticism, did not reappoint Spatt in 1970. There was an uproar by union leaders, citizens groups and City Council members. The New York Times called her a “people’s advocate,” saying: “She has been available to the public, accustomed as it is to the bureaucratic runaround. In these days of deepening neighborhood trouble, people are convinced she cares.”
It did no good. But Spatt was not dismayed. “I realized they weren’t fighting for me, Beverly Spatt, but for a principle,” she said. “It transcends me. People are not supporting me; they’re supporting the right of the people to know.”
Spatt wrote “A Proposal to Change the Structure of City Planning: Case Study of New York City” (1971). Mayor Abraham Beame named her to lead the landmarks commission. She was not reappointed when Mayor Ed Koch took office in 1978, but she remained a commission member until 1982. For years, she taught planning, preservation, housing policy and community advocacy at Barnard College and was a special assistant to Bishop Joseph Sullivan of Brooklyn.
Spatt’s passion for landmarks was often personal. In 1974, she dashed into the press room at City Hall and shouted, “Someone has stolen one of my buildings!”
It was true, in a way. Cast-iron facade panels of an 1849 building designed by James Bogardus, dismantled and stored in lower Manhattan pending reconstruction, had vanished. They were eventually found in a Bronx junkyard. But they disappeared once more in 1977.
“My building has been stolen again,” she complained. “It’s a terrible loss.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
