Gene Norman helped landmark Broadway Theaters
Gene Norman, who as New York City’s unflappable official preservationist was instrumental in sparing Broadway theaters, St. Bartholomew’s Church and the Coney Island Cyclone from destruction or defacement by developers, died Aug. 30 at his home in the Bronx. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Christina Norman.
Serving under Mayor Edward Koch as the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission in the 1980s, he steered the panel to high-stakes decisions that to owners determined the value and future utility of their property and to conservators meant saving one more piece of the city’s precarious architectural past.
Few of those decisions mollified everyone. But most of the principals praised Norman’s equanimity, graciousness and acumen as an architect in navigating the labyrinthine landmarking bureaucracy.
Under Norman, the commission granted landmark designation to the Coty and Rizzoli buildings on Fifth Avenue; historic districts that encompass parts of the Upper West Side and of the late-19thcentury Ladies’ Mile shopping area, which encompasses some 440 buildings from roughly 15th Street to 24th Street and Park Avenue South to west of Avenue of the Americas; and the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island.
When he resigned at the end of 1988, after serving since 1983, Norman was widely praised, even by some of his occasional critics.
“It was amazing what he was able to accomplish,” Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said at the time.
Anthony M. Tung, a commission member who was not reappointed by the mayor and who opposed the administration’s support for a restaurant on the upper terrace of Bryant Park, said via email: “People’s opinions, in opposition or accord, must be met with civility if our democratic forums are to prosper. Gene’s habitual grace acted as an invitation for all who yearned to testify.”
While he was famously methodical, Norman personally hotfooted out to Woodside, Queens, in 1987 to successfully stop bulldozers that were about to demolish the New York and Queens County Railway terminal.
Two enduring issues he inherited as chairman were the fate of Broadway theaters and a proposal to build a skyscraper behind St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, on Park Avenue at 50th Street.
Norman also helped defeat state legislation that would have exempted religious institutions from landmarks designation.
“Gene joined other advocates including Jackie Onassis on a much-publicized train ride to Albany to meet firsthand with legislators,” Kent L. Barwick, his predecessor as commission chairman, said by email. “The proposed law died that day as legislators lined up to have their pictures taken with Jackie.”
Several architectural gems in the Theater District had already been demolished by the early 1980s, and owners and real estate developers coveted the right to raze even more to allow for much taller buildings than the low-rise playhouses.
Norman and the commission staff cobbled together compromises that would grant owners the flexibility to transfer their valuable air rights above the theaters to other sites in the district.
Owners were also able to alter the landmarked interiors of the theaters as long as the changes were cosmetic and temporary. As a result, after legal challenges were resolved, dozens of theaters were saved.
In 1984, the commission rejected plans by St. Bartholomew’s Church to raze its community house and replace it with a 59-story skyscraper. The church said that without income from the tower, it faced economic hardship. The commissioners concluded unanimously that the proposed tower would overwhelm the landmark.
“The kind of quality that I think needs to be alongside the superior quality of this Byzantine-inspired, beautifully organized, wonderfully ornamented church,” Norman said at the time, “is so severely lacking that it becomes a case of night and day.”
Alfred Warren Gene Norman was born on Feb. 14, 1935, in Charlotte Amalie, in the Virgin Islands, to Rufus Norman and Edith O’neal, a nurse’s aide. The family moved to New York when he was an infant.
After graduating from Morris High School in the Bronx, he attended Hunter College in New York and Pratt Institute School of Architecture in Brooklyn and served in the Marine Corps.
In 1959 he married Juanita Diaz, who survives, him along with their daughter; two sons, Gene A. Norman Jr. and Paul Norman; a sister, Patricia Kyle; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.