Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Jack Taylor, Scourge of the Wrecking Ball in Manhattan, Dies at 93

Jack Taylor guiding a tour of the Ladies’ Mile shopping district in 1987. He helped win landmark protection for the area two years later.Credit...Historic Districts Council

Jack Taylor, a volunteer landmarks preservationist, died on Feb. 8 in Manhattan after bequeathing to New Yorkers an enduring legacy that includes the historic Ladies’ Mile Shopping District and the storied Democratic Party headquarters known as Tammany Hall. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by a cousin, Taylor Wilcox.

In the early 1960s, many preservationists were galvanized by their failure to save Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station, a defeat that spawned a groundbreaking municipal law under which Grand Central Terminal was declared an official city landmark in 1967.

Mr. Taylor’s epiphany as a preservationist came in the early 1980s after he retired as a magazine editor. Luchow’s, the 19th-century German restaurant at 110 East 14th Street in his neighborhood — famous for its oompah bands and frequented in its prime by Diamond Jim Brady, Lillian Russell and Victor Herbert — was closing and was threatened with demolition.

“Was it an architectural landmark? Was it a cultural landmark? Just what was it?” he said in an interview in 2004 with the New York Preservation Archive Project. “It didn’t really matter to me then, because I didn’t know the ropes very much. But it just seemed to be something that the City of New York would be the worse without.”

Despite a campaign by the Union Square Historic District, Luchow’s was demolished in 1995 to accommodate a New York University dormitory. Mr. Taylor and the Dvorak American Heritage Association also lost a battle to preserve the house, at 327 East 17th Street, where Antonin Dvorak lived for three years and composed the “New World” Symphony. (It was replaced by a Beth Israel Medical Center Aids hospice.)

But as president of the Drive to Protect the Ladies’ Mile District, he helped win landmark protection in 1989 for a swath of historic late-19th and early 20th-century shops and department stores bordered roughly by 15th and 24th Streets and Broadway and Sixth Avenue. The area constituted what he called “a magnificent universe in miniature” that needed to be protected in its entirety.

Image
Mr. Taylor, left, at a demonstration in 1988 to preserve the Ladies’ Mile shopping district in Lower Manhattan. A historic district was approved in 1989.Credit...Steven Tucker

“To designate piecemeal would be a travesty, for the gaps and inconsequential structures are negligible,” he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.

Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, described Mr. Taylor as “an early champion of New York City’s commercial history.”

“New Yorkers’ lives are played out in public,” he said in an email, “and the shops we frequent, the places we eat and the halls where we congregate are just as much of our communal history as the apartments in which we live.”

Mr. Taylor and fellow preservationists also persuaded the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to create the East 17th Street/Irving Place Historic District in 1998 after lobbying for it for 14 years.

In 2013, after 29 years of lobbying, the commission also designated Tammany Hall a historic site. Inspired by the neo-Georgian architecture of Federal Hall downtown, the building, at 100 East 17th Street, was built in 1929, the heyday of the Democratic officeholders Alfred E. Smith, James J. Walker and Robert F. Wagner.

Mr. Taylor was born Jack Taylor Finkel on April 25, 1925, in Manhattan to Jack Manfred Finkel, an English-immigrant stockbroker, and Gladys (Thackston) Finkel, whom he described as a “world traveler” known as Gladys Taylor.

Mr. Taylor served in the Army Air Forces in occupied Germany after World War II, graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and attended Georgetown University before taking a job with The Washington Post. He was later an editor of Family Circle Magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Jack Taylor, 93, Amateur Who Fought for Landmarks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT