[Dixielandjazz] New Yorkers Trying to Save Tin Pan Alley

[Dave Stoddard]

New Yorkers trying to save historic Tin Pan Alley
(from the Associated Press)
Saturday, November 8, 2008
NEW YORK - A group of New Yorkers is fighting to save Tin Pan Alley, the 
half-dozen row houses where iconic American songs were born.  The 
four-story, 19th-century buildings on Manhattan's West 28th Street were home 
to publishers of some of the catchiest American tunes and lyrics - from "God 
Bless America" and "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" to "Give My Regards to 
Broadway."  The music of Irving Berlin, Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, George M. 
Cohan and other greats was born on Tin Pan Alley.

The buildings were put up for sale earlier this fall for $44 million, with 
plans to replace them with a high-rise. The construction plan fell through 
amid the turmoil in the economy, but the possibility of losing the historic 
block hastened efforts to push for landmark status for Tin Pan Alley. "The 
fear of these buildings being sold for development crystallized their 
importance, and the need to preserve them," said Simeon Bankoff, executive 
director of the Historic Districts Council, a nonprofit preservation 
organization aiming to secure city landmark status for the buildings, which 
would protect them from being destroyed.

The Landmarks Commission is "researching the history of the buildings and 
reviewing whether they'd be eligible for landmark designation," said Lisi de 
Bourbon, a spokeswoman for New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission.  No 
date has been set for a decision, which she said depends on "a combination 
of historical, cultural and architectural significance."

The block is sacred to Tim Schreier, a great-great-grandson of Jerome H. 
Remick, whose music publishing company occupied one of the houses and 
employed a young sheet music peddler named George Gershwin.  "I'm not 
opposed to development in New York, but we have to balance development with 
history - and this is definitely American cultural history," said Schreier.

>From the late 1880s to the mid-1950s, the careers of songwriters who are 
still popular today were launched from the buildings at 45, 47, 49, 51, 53 
and 55 West 28th.  Nearby, high-rise condominiums have pushed out old 
brownstones. The four-story Tin Pan Alley buildings house street-level 
wholesale stores selling clothing, jewelry and fabrics; eight apartment 
units fill the upper floors.  It's a noisy neighborhood, with trucks beeping 
as they back up amid street hawkers selling bootleg movies and knockoff 
perfumes. A century ago, the windows of music companies broadcast a 
cacophony of competing piano sounds that earned the area the nickname Tin 
Pan Alley, to describe what one journalist said sounded like pounding on tin 
pans.

Leland Bobbe, a 59-year-old photographer, has been renting his apartment at 
Remick's old building since 1975. He says it's important to salvage the 
buildings in a neighborhood "that has lost its uniqueness. It's just another 
symbol of what New York was and what it will no longer be."