PHOTO: GVSHP

By Ron Brownlow

Andrew Berman doesn’t like director Julian Schnabel’s latest project.

So he organized a demonstration on a freezing January morning outside Schnabel’s home in the Far West Village to protest the artist’s plans to add a 110-foot addition to his three-story residence.

“As an artist, we hope he can appreciate the value of preserving this historic neighborhood,” Berman told the crowd of more than two-dozen demonstrators gathered outside 360 W. 11th St., shivering dogs in tow. “If not, we say shame on you.”

Berman knows the value of shame. As executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, it is often his last recourse when a Village resident such as Schnabel tries to cash in on the neighborhood’s charm by demolishing a historic building and constructing a posh new high rise in its place.

“There’s nothing wrong with fancy apartment buildings or fancy shops,” Berman says, “but there’s really no lack of that.”

“Why not keep the thing that’s special and unique and that would disappear if it was forced out of there,” he asks, “just for the sake of bringing in more of exactly the same of what you already have?”

Berman, who studied architecture and art history in college, joined the society in 2002 after working for eight-and-a-half years as an aide to former city councilmember and current State Senator Tom Duane. Berman started out as Duane’s Greenwich Village community liaison and later became Duane’s chief of staff.

Among his successes, Berman counts the creation in 2003 of the first new historic district in Greenwich Village since 1969, the Gansevoort Market Historic District, which preserved most of the Meat Packing District.

He also helped defeat a plan for a 500-foot-tall residential building proposed for 13th and Washington streets.

“We actually defeated it twice,” he says.

In the process, Berman’s group had a rule struck down that would have allowed, as of right, high-rise residential buildings in any light manufacturing district in any part of the city. “That’s the way that the developer of this 500-foot-tall residential building was trying to sneak it into the Meat Packing District,” Berman says. “We not only stopped this building, we saved similar things from happening in other parts of the neighborhood and in other neighborhoods in the city.”

The society could not save St. Ann's church and rectory, at 110 E. 12th St. in the East Village, from demolition.ttttttttPHOTOS: GVSHP

Defeating projects like these requires constant vigilance, as the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, which oversees 1,101 landmarks and more than 22,000 properties in 81 historic districts, lacks the staff and funding to keep an eye on all abuses, much less identify new areas for preservation.

That’s where Berman’s group comes in, keeping watch over a neighborhood with roughly 5,000 buildings and more than 100,000 residents.    

Berman welcomes the challenge. The activist is so passionate about his work, in fact, that he once jumped out of bed in the middle of the night to stop a developer from demolishing a building.

“My work here is a great marriage of my prior professional experience and some of my personal passions and interests,” Berman says. “I always say to people I feel really lucky to be able to do the work that I do, because it’s the kind of thing that I would want to do anyway, even if I wasn’t being paid.”