Saving a Station

Grand Central wins in court

Amid the boxy steel-and-glass skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan stands a colonnaded French palace of classical elegance. Adorned by Jules Coutan's sculpture Transportation, assorted stone flourishes and a neo-Renaissance portico, the 65-year-old Grand Central Terminal remains one of the nation's finest Beaux-Arts showpieces, a source of inspiration for students of architecture, and a place of sentiment for many of the 500,000 people who pass through it daily. For more than a decade, preservationists have fought to keep the terminal, and last week they won in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The battle to save Grand Central began when New York City named the terminal a landmark in 1967. This meant that its owner, the nearly bankrupt Penn Central Transportation Co., could not make any changes on the building's exterior without permission from the city's landmarks-preservation commission. Five months later Penn Central leased the airspace above the terminal to a British corporation that wanted to erect an office building on the site. Penn Central submitted to the landmarks commission two plans by Marcel Breuer. One envisioned a 55-story concrete skyscraper floating incongruously above the terminal's mansard roof. The other called for tearing down the facade of the old building and partly encasing the terminal in a 53-story glass-and-steel box. When the city rejected both designs, Penn Central went to court, claiming that its property rights had been violated. Although the trial court ruled in the railroad's favor, the appeals court reversed the decision in 1975 and the case ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Last week the court rejected Penn Central's argument that New York City's landmark designation amounted to a "public taking" of private property without compensation--a violation of the Fifth and 14th amendments. If the city wanted to preserve Grand Central, the railroad reasoned, it should pay for it.

"Agreement with this argument," wrote Associate Justice William Brennan in the majority opinion, "would invalidate not just New York's laws, but all comparable legislation elsewhere in the nation. We find no merit in it."

Across the country, preservationists were jubilant over the decision. All 50 states and more than 500 municipalities already have preservation laws, but many of them have hesitated to designate commercial properties as landmarks for fear of legal challenges. Now, said Randall Scott, research director of Washington's Environmental Law Institute, "the court has reassured many communities that they can move rapidly on these cases."

Preservationists already are making plans to use the Grand Central ruling in their fight to save other landmarks: for example, the 1898 Bayard-Condict Building, the only building designed by Architect Louis Sullivan ever constructed in New York City.

In other cases, the ruling will have a less immediate effect. In Chicago, for instance, a developer wants to build a high-rise apartment house over a wing of the Bateman School, a historic Astor Street mansion that was designed by Stanford White near the turn of the century. If the project is not turned down by Chicago's planning commission on grounds that it would lead to overcrowding in the elegant neighborhood, preservationists will probably go to court with a case based on last week's decision.

Thus, as New York City Mayor Edward Koch puts it, the Supreme Court's ruling on Grand Central is indeed "a landmark decision," a victory of aesthetics over relentless progress.

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