The city Landmark Commission outdid itself yesterday — voting to cast fall ing debris, forbidding scaffolding and scruffy vagrants in amber for residents of the Upper West Side to gaze upon into perpetuity.
Way to go, Landmark Commission.
The panel declared the dangerously decaying, 116-year-old West Park Presbyterian Church a city landmark.
Meaning there it will stand, in all its decrepit glory, until gravity pulls it down — which, given its present structural instability, might not be all that long.
It also means that there’s no way the $10 million needed for repairs can be raised by selling a small piece of the site to a developer, as the church’s pastor hoped.
And it means that congregants, who’ve been using another site, will now likely never have their church back.
But we wonder: Why didn’t the commission landmark the scaffolding, and the bums who sleep under it, too? After all, they’ve been there for years.
It all makes no sense whatsoever — except to the NIMBYist locals who manipulated the landmark law to defeat an investor who was going to pay for West Park’s rehabilitation.
The plan was for the developer to fix the building in exchange for the right to put up a condo tower on the site of a small chapel in the church, leaving 85 percent of it intact.
“I assume [the building] will be purchased by someone who will be able to use it,” said one of the NIMBYists.
For what?
A vagrant magnet?
The Rev. Robert Brashear, West Park’s pastor, was closer to the mark: The ruling “will not preserve our beloved church building,” he said. “Instead, it will hasten its demise.”
Now congregants, and the rest of the neighborhood, are stuck.
Call it “progress” — New York-style.