Seeking a Second Chance at Landmark Status, Aluminum Siding and All

The home at 99 Ryerson Street in Brooklyn, where Walt Whitman lived. The Landmarks Preservation Commission said last year that the house “does not rise to the level of an individual landmark.” A coalition is asking the panel to reconsider.CreditElizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

Year after year for more than a decade now, Karen Karbiener has led summer-semester students from Columbia University along a side street in Brooklyn framed in the distance by the rusty-looking trestle of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. They hoped to cross the threshold in the middle of the block that Walt Whitman crossed when he lived there, which was when he published “Leaves of Grass.”

Usually, someone inside opened the door of the unprepossessing rowhouse and, after Ms. Karbiener explained their mission, let them in.

Something was different last year. They tried the half-dozen doorbells, but no one came to the door. From across the street, someone shouted: “She’s renovating.”

It was not clear who “she” was. But the students, and preservationists who heard about the situation later, were troubled. They worry about change, which was something Whitman paid close attention to as he made the rounds of what he grandly called “my city.” He wrote in the 1880s that “hardly anything remains” of the Brooklyn of the 1830s and 1840s, “except the lines of the old streets.” And that was in before bulldozers and wrecking balls made demolition work less complicated than it is now.

That was also before aluminum siding, which is one reason things became more complicated for those who favor landmark status for the house on Ryerson Street. Of the places where Whitman lived during his years in Brooklyn, it is the only one still standing.

But the Landmarks Preservation Commission said no last year after concluding, as a spokeswoman put it, that the house “does not rise to the level of an individual landmark.” But Whitman experts like Ms. Karbiener and preservationists are asking for reconsideration now that the chairwoman of the commission, Meenakshi Srinivasan, has left. She announced her resignation in April amid opposition to proposed changes at the commission that critics maintained would have diminished the defenses for preserving worthy structures. (At the time, a spokeswoman for the commission said Ms. Srinivasan’s departure was not related to the outcry over the proposed rule changes.)

Commission staff members concluded that the Ryerson Street house was unworthy — in other words, that it did not rate consideration by the commission itself.

This was where the aluminum siding came in. One reason the house did not qualify for landmark status, a spokeswoman said in an email, was that the house had been “re-sided, substantially altering its appearance.”

Greg Trupiano, the founder and artistic director of the Walt Whitman Project, a community arts organization, acknowledged that the siding was not the only difference between the way the house looks now and the way it looked when Whitman lived there. A third story was added, apparently in the 1890s. “What matters is what the house represents,” he said. “It’s the pinnacle of the American Renaissance of literature, a time that also saw the publication of so many great American works, including ‘Walden’ and Emily Dickinson writing poetry and ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and ‘Moby Dick.’”

By JAMES BARRON from NYT New York https://ift.tt/2Niylre