SCAFFOLDING went up last week around the former American Folk Art Museum building on West 53rd Street. It was the first step in the Museum of Modern Art’s widely reviled plan to demolish that admired work of contemporary architecture, which MoMA purchased in 2011. Although most of the building will land in a Dumpster, the saga of dismemberment will be prolonged for the Folk Art Museum’s intimately monumental 82-foot-high facade. In response to protests, MoMA has said it would detach and preserve the facade’s 63 textured copper-bronze panels.

One might suppose that salvage is preferable to annihilation, but before we get too comfortable with such piecemeal preservation, it is worth noting that the panel-by-panel disassembly and storage of an architectural treasure’s metal facade has been tried before in New York City, with comically disastrous results.

Who around here remembers the Laing Stores? Very few, I’d wager, which is precisely why the sad and bizarre “preservation” of that historic landmark’s facade in the 1970s should serve as a cautionary tale.

Built in 1849, the Laing Stores comprised five stores in a row, designed to look like a single building, that wrapped around the northwest corner of Murray and Washington Streets in Lower Manhattan, near the bustling Washington Market. Sometimes called the Bogardus Building — after James Bogardus, the architectural innovator who designed them — the combined structure was adorned with starbursts, Medusa heads and half-round fluted Doric columns. But what made the building remarkable was its precociously modern construction: Its facade was a prefabricated curtain wall made of cast iron and glass, the forebear of the nonload-bearing curtain walls later used on modern skyscrapers.

After the city announced in the mid-1960s that a vast swath of Lower Manhattan, including the Bogardus Building, would be razed for a redevelopment project that would include the construction of the World Trade Center, the city Landmarks Preservation Commission worked up a plan to disassemble and store the building’s iron facade for future reconstitution. (Sound familiar? MoMA intends to transport the Folk Art Museum building’s facade panels to a storage facility; preservation proponents are discussing possible future homes.)

In February 1971, the 150-ton facade of the Bogardus Building was dismantled piece by iron piece “with the care and precision that would be given to handling a piece of jewelry,” according to the cast-iron architecture authority Margot Gayle and the historian Carol Gayle. The fragments of this colossal architectural jigsaw puzzle were then stored behind a padlocked barbed-wire fence in a lot on Reade Street, where they languished until June 25, 1974.

On that day, The Times reported, Beverly Moss Spatt, head of the landmarks commission, sprinted into the press room at City Hall “and shouted, ‘Someone has stolen one of my buildings.’ ” The brazen thieves, surprised in broad daylight by a contractor, had hopped into a truck and raced away. An investigation found that two-thirds of the landmark’s iron panels had been stolen and sold as scrap....Continue Reading

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