Christopher Gray to “Lollipop” Building: Drop Dead!

Christopher Gray, trying to create a stir, notes that some may soon consider Penn Station-killer Madison Square Garden an architectural landmark — a preposterous idea! — but that it wouldn’t be much different than the way people once perceived the idea of landmarking the “Lollipop” building in Columbus Circle, setting up a moral equivalency that’s hard to deny:

Are you exhausted by the drawn-out battle to preserve the architect Edward Durell Stone’s 1965 art museum at Columbus Circle? Well, if you couldn’t get your head around landmark protection for that Venetian-marble fantasy, you may gulp at the next threatened work of mid-20th-century architecture to be considered important.

. . .

. . . a decade or two ago, the idea of landmark designation for the Edward Durell Stone building would have been greeted by many with hoots Рand now it is a preservation cause c̩l̬bre in New York, with another round of lawsuits under way.

Diane Jackier, a spokeswoman for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said by e-mail that the commission has “not made any determination” about the Garden, a statement that may cause old-line preservationists to cringe. But the case for landmark designation is, on the face of it, rather strong: it is a unique building, designed by an important architect, with unusual engineering and a complex history.

Kate Wood, executive director of Landmark West!, said in an e-mail that the group has to mull the building’s significance but that “I’m all for a public hearing for Madison Square Garden.”

“It would tell us a lot about where we are in our ability to evaluate the architectural and historical significance of the recent past,” she said. “The Landmarks Preservation Commission needs to embrace, not shy away from, this kind of discussion.”

So Madison Square Garden — the very building responsible for landmarking laws after Penn Station was torn down — may actually be landmarked. The irony . . . so thick!