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National Park Service Gets Land Near Grants Tomb PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Saturday, 14 August 2004
In 1910, to accommodate the crowds of visitors to Ulysses S. Grant's tomb in Manhattan, a classical pavilion was built across the street. Today only a few people wander over to the now-shabby pavilion, located on New York City land. For years the National Park Service, which oversees the General Grant National Memorial, has had its eye on the pavilion, hoping to renovate it as a much-needed visitors center.

On Monday, the Park Service got its wish when the city council transferred the city-owned parcel to the federal agency.

That's good news for the pavilion, which was deteriorating under city care. However, some preservationists object to the Park Service's plans to build an elevator beside the structure.

"It looks miserable: a big, hulking attachment glommed onto a Beaux Arts structure," says Michael Gotkin, a member of Landmark West, a nonprofit group dedicating to preserving New York's Upper West Side. "Aesthetically and historically they're really going to compromise this building."

"The transfer itself is a laudable step," says Frank Scaturro, president of the Grant Monument Association, which he founded 10 years ago as a student at Columbia University. "The frustrating thing in all this is that the park service hasn't been communicating with the general public."

Gotkin, who is on the board of advisors of the city's historic districts council, says, "The preservation community never saw these plans [for the pavilion]." He says he is considering filing a lawsuit to halt the renovation.

Scaturro has hired an architect to come up with an alternative plan to build the visitors center underground by expanding an existing tunnel between the pavilion and the tomb, completed in 1897.

In the 1990s, Grant's Tomb, covered with graffiti and frequented by homeless people and drug users, was a national disgrace. At Scaturro's urging, the Park Service restored the granite monument. Says Scaturro: "The site had higher visitation through World War One than the Statue of Liberty did."

http://www.nationaltrust.org/magazine/archives/arc_news/081104.htm
 
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