The Briefing Room
General Category => Economy/Business => Topic started by: EasyAce on January 04, 2019, 08:58:18 pm
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Nancy Bass Wyden says historic designation would compromise her ownership rights and mean dealing with bureaucrats who "do not know how to run a bookstore."
By Jim Epstein & Nick Gillespie
http://reason.com/reasontv/2019/01/04/leave-the-strand-alone-iconic-booksto (http://reason.com/reasontv/2019/01/04/leave-the-strand-alone-iconic-booksto)
If New York City moves ahead with a proposal to landmark the home of the Strand Book Store (https://www.strandbooks.com/), it would be putting a "bureaucratic noose" around the business, says owner Nancy Bass Wyden. "The Strand survived through my dad and grandfather's very hard work," Wyden says, and now the city wants to "take a piece of it."
Opened by her grandfather, Benjamin Bass, in 1927, the Strand is New York City's last great bookstore—a four-story literary emporium crammed with 18 miles of merchandise stuffed into towering bookcases arranged along narrow passageways. It's the last survivor of the world-famous Booksellers Row (https://www.amazon.com/Book-Row-Anecdotal-Pictorial-Antiquarian/dp/0786713054/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1546602727&sr=8-1&keywords=Book+Row&tag=reasonmagazineA), a commercial district comprised of about 40 secondhand dealers along Fourth Avenue below Union Square.
On December 4, 2018, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on a proposal to designate the building that's home to the Strand as a historic site. If the structure is landmarked, Wyden would need to get permission from the city before renovating the interior or altering the facade.
"It would be very difficult to be commercially nimble if we're landmarked," Wyden tells Reason. "We'd have to get approvals through a whole committee and bureaucracy that do not know how to run a bookstore" . . .
. . . Why can 11 unelected individuals of the Landmarks Commission curtail Wyden's property rights? Signed into law in 1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Landmarks_Preservation_Commission), New York's Landmarks Act was challenged (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_Central_Transportation_Co._v._New_York_City) as unconstitutional 13 years later by the owner of Grand Central Terminal, which sued the city for preventing it from building a skyscraper on top of the train station.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/438/104.html) in a 6–3 decision, setting a precedent that in the dissenting opinion (https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/438/104.html) of Justice William Rehnquist undermined constitutional protections. As Rehnquist wrote, the city had "in a literal sense, 'taken' substantial property rights" from the company without offering just compensation, as required by the Fifth Amendment.
Since that ruling, the number of landmarked properties (https://www.nytimes.com/1978/07/02/archives/not-just-buildings-but-whole-districts.html) in New York has more than doubled to about 36,000 (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/lpc/about/about-lpc.page), encompassing more than a quarter (https://rebny.com/content/dam/rebny/Documents/PDF/News/Research/Policy%20Reports/Research_Analysis_of_Landmarked_Properties_in_Manhattan.pdf) of all the buildings in Manhattan . . .
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I spent many an hour (and dollar) in the Strand when I lived and worked around New York City. And I am with Ms. Wyden. New York Landmarks Commission, keep your filthy hands off what those who still go there don't need you to tell them is a landmark.---EA.