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September 17, 2026

On 15 September 2026 the Landmarks Preservation Commission heard LPC-26-10317, a reauthorization of rooftop and rear yard additions at 73 Washington Place in the Greenwich Village Historic District, Manhattan. The work was first approved under Certificate of Appropriateness 17-7046, issued 24 September 2015, extended in 2021 and 2024, and expired in May 2026. SUK Design Studio Architecture presented. Community Board 2 recommended approval, the Victorian Society of New York filed written testimony, and nobody testified in the room. The motion carried ten to nothing. Two elements changed in nine years: the elevator bulkhead stands about a foot taller and the rear yard excavation is smaller.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission reauthorized rooftop and rear yard additions at 73 Washington Place on 15 September 2026, item six on the public hearing calendar, under docket LPC-26-10317.

The work was first approved under Certificate of Appropriateness 17-7046, issued 24 September 2015. That approval was extended in 2021 and again in 2024, and it expired in May 2026.

SUK Design Studio Architecture presented. Community Board 2 recommended approval. The Victorian Society of New York filed written testimony. Nobody testified in the room.

Commissioner Mark Ginsberg moved to approve, Vice Chair Angie Master seconded, and the motion carried ten to nothing. Chair Lisa Kersavage presided.

Two elements changed in the nine years between approvals. The elevator bulkhead now stands about a foot taller, having been scoped further back from the street. The rear yard excavation is smaller than the 2015 drawings showed.

The item took a few minutes. A reauthorization carrying a supportive community board recommendation, one piece of written testimony and an empty speakers list is the kind of application the Commission moves through, and this one moved through.

What is at 73 Washington Place is a boarded shell. The Greek Revival house went up in 1847 and it is now nine years into a permit cycle that has outlasted two extensions. The site sign carries the firm name only, SUK Design Studio Architecture, which I read off the sign and photographed. William Suk and John Gordon presented the application at the hearing.

Three doors east, 80 Washington Place is open to the public until 13 October as the Kips Bay Decorator Show House. The banner on its areaway fence lists twenty two designers, and Kips Bay puts tickets at fifty dollars and up. The two houses sit on the same block, inside the same historic district, eight years apart in construction date.

The plaque on 80 Washington Place carries the history of that house. It records that the house and the adjoining No. 78 were built as a pair in 1839 by the builder William W. Berwick, who lived at 78 and owned both until 1852, and it describes them as Greek Revival, though some accounts call 80 Georgian. It also records that the upper story and the elevator were added in 1919, when John Philip Sousa acquired the house.

That is the hinge. A century and seven years before the Commission reauthorized a rooftop addition and an elevator bulkhead at 73, the same two moves were made at 80. The 1919 work is now inside the boundary of what the district protects. The 2015 approval, reauthorized this month, will reach the same status by sitting still.

Both facades are covered. The Greenwich Village Historic District, LP-0489, reaches the street elevations of both houses, which is why the bulkhead height and the excavation depth were drawn, filed, calendared, heard in public, objected to in writing and voted on.

Neither interior is covered by anything. Administrative Code 25-302(m) defines an interior landmark as one "which is customarily open or accessible to the public, or to which the public is customarily invited". A private house interior does not meet that test, so it cannot be designated, so there is no interior landmark for the Commission to regulate. The limit sits in the definition rather than in any clause confining the Commission to the street.

The Court of Appeals read that accessibility test in 2019, in Save America's Clocks v City of New York, and held it a jurisdictional predicate for designation rather than a condition that has to continue afterwards. Accessibility is the gate. A private house never reaches it.

Interiors were not designatable at all until the Landmarks Law was amended in 1973, four years after the Greenwich Village Historic District was designated on 29 April 1969. The facades on this block have been covered for almost the whole life of the district. The rooms behind them were outside the statute for its first four years and outside the definition ever since.

So the rooms at 80 Washington Place are being fitted out at a level of specification that no public file will ever hold. The sponsor banner on the areaway fence names Kohler, Kravet, Casamance, Phillip Jeffries, Tai Ping, Artistic Tile, Made Goods, Marc Phillips, Benjamin Moore, The Shade Store, the New York Design Center. That is the trade at scale, on one house, for eleven weeks. None of it appears in the record of either house.

On 13 October the rooms come out. What was installed, by whom, in what material, to what detail, leaves with the installers.

Below the level of the designated facade, the durable unit-level description of a New York interior is the broker listing. It describes the renovation and credits nobody who made it. In rental buildings the equivalent is an operator's work-order log, which records what broke and what was replaced. The first is written to sell the apartment. The second is written to close a ticket.

The city has been describing the fronts of these two houses since the district was designated, and it has never described a room inside either. The 1919 elevator at 80 Washington Place is protected because it is visible from the pavement, and the same elevator's lobby is not, which is a distinction about sightlines rather than about craft.

What follows from that is a peculiar inversion. The most specified, most expensive, most skilled work in a house of this kind is the work that no public record retains, and it is retained instead by whoever is selling the result. A designation report will still describe the ironwork at 80 Washington Place in 2126. The names on that banner will not survive the week the show house closes.

The Kips Bay sponsor banner on the areaway fence at 80 Washington Place, and the plaque recording the 1839 pair and the 1919 addition.

How this was reported

I attended the hearing on 15 September 2026 and photographed the site sign at 73 Washington Place and the plaque and sponsor banner at 80 Washington Place. The transcript available for the 15 September session is partial. The segment between 1:34:46 and 1:38:44 is summarised rather than transcribed, and that segment carries the commissioner discussion of the 73 Washington Place item. Nothing here is quoted from that segment, and no account of what individual commissioners said about the application is given, because the material available does not carry one. The vote roll as captioned contains two names that are machine manglings of commissioner names, the same manglings that appeared in the Charles Street transcript. They are not reproduced. Every commissioner named above is named from the Commission's own published roster. The architects are named from two different places. The firm comes from the site sign at 73 Washington Place, which carries the firm name and nothing else. The individuals who presented come from the hearing. Both personal names are spelled from the firm's own published record rather than from the transcript, which mangles names. Administrative Code 25-302(m) was read at codelibrary.amlegal.com, the official compendium, current through Local Law 2026/147. The quotation is taken from there rather than from a mirror, because the freely indexed copies are a 2006 edition and predate later amendments.

Municipal record: LPC-26-10317

LPC docket LPC-26-10317, heard 15 September 2026: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/hearings/hearings.page Certificate of Appropriateness 17-7046, issued 24 September 2015, extended 2021 and 2024, expired May 2026: https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/applications/certificate-of-appropriateness.page Greenwich Village Historic District designation report, LP-0489: http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/0489.pdf Kips Bay Decorator Show House New York 2026, 80 Washington Place, 16 September to 13 October, tickets from fifty dollars: https://www.kipsbaydecoratorshowhouse.org Administrative Code 25-302, definitions, current through Local Law 2026/147: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-45840 Matter of Save America's Clocks, Inc. v City of New York, New York Court of Appeals, 2019: https://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2019/2019_02385.htm

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