A Landmarks Chair Bows Out, After Preserving 1,437 Sites
Before the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission moved to a new office in April, the chair, Sarah Carroll, found herself going through old filing cabinets. In one was a report with a prediction by one of her predecessors, Beverly Moss Spatt: There were probably 35,000 buildings in New York City that could be designated as landmarks.
The city has exceeded Spatt's expectations from the 1970s: There are more than 38,000 landmarks, including 1,437 buildings and sites that have been designated since Carroll took over in 2018.
Now Carroll, 59, is retiring. She said she wanted to move to Maine, where she spent summers as a child and where her older daughter is going to college.
She has been unusual among the 12 chairs in the 60-year history of the commission. While her predecessors mostly had backgrounds as civic activists, architects or lawyers, she was the first with a master's degree in preservation. She was also the first who had been a staff member at the commission. She started as a public information associate in 1994 and rose through the ranks, spending nearly 10 years as the director of preservation and four as the executive director.
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