Lenore Norman, a Quiet Force for Landmarks Preservation, Dies at 83

Neal Boenzi/The New York Times Lenore Norman, executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, with Gene A. Norman, the commission chairman, at a hearing in City Hall in 1984. They were not related.

If you love New York City's architectural heritage, you owe a debt of gratitude to Lenore Norman. Chances are, you didn't know that. She would have been pleased.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times Ms. Norman was credited with paving the way for the designation of the Woolworth Building as a landmark.

Ms. Norman died Dec. 21 at home on the Upper West Side. She was 83.

It was not her style to operate in the foreground. During her years as executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, from the mid-1970s to the early '80s, she was content to let the commissioners, developers, advocates and lobbyists occupy center stage. It was unusual to hear her say much at public hearings and rare to find her quoted in news articles.

Ms. Norman did her work behind the scenes, running the small agency and helping conduct the vital meetings that led up to the commis sion's designations and regulatory actions. If Dorothy Marie Miner, the agency's longtime counsel, was the “bad cop” in some applicants' eyes - that is, the unbending enforcer of landmarks law - then Ms. Norman played the “good cop,” ever sympathetic to applicants' concerns and usually persuasive that all would work out in the end.

“She had a nice sympathy for the human beings at the other end of government authority,” said Kent L. Barwick, who was the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1978 to 1983.

“By the time I got there, she was very much the stable, balanced center of things,” Mr. Barwick said. He inherited Ms. Norman as executive director from his predecessor, Beverly Moss Spatt, and passed her on to his successor, Gene A. Norman. (That's a telling measure in itself; the fact that Ms. Norman served as executive director fo r three chiefs of much different temperaments and backgrounds.)

Mr. Barwick credited Ms. Norman with helping pave the way for the designation in 1983 of the glistening, Gothic-style Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan - the “Cathedral of Commerce” - as an exterior and interior landmark. At the time, the tower still served as headquarters of the F. W. Woolworth Company, which had long opposed landmark status.

“Lenore met a number of times with the management of the Woolworth corporation to defuse their antagonism,” Mr. Barwick said. “Their antagonism was not easily defused.”

Ms. Norman herself spoke of the difficulties she and her colleagues faced in the commission's early years and how the impetus for a lot of designations came from cohesive old neighborhoods. In a 2008 oral history, conducted and transcribed by the New York Preserva tion Archive Project, she said:

Well, the commission was new; relatively new. The whole idea of preservation was not something that people really understood, and of course all of the larger institutions and buildings, for the most part, fought it. It was the communities, basically, where the grass roots sort of came through and really understood what this meant for their neighborhood, like Brooklyn Heights and Greenwich Village and that sort of thing.

None of this is to say that Ms. Norman was the preservationists' unquestioned friend. Her insistence on deliberative procedure sometimes infuriated advocates who believed New York's historical patrimony was crumbling under the bulldozers while the commission plodded and dithered.

“There was a solidity to her,” said Anthony C. Wood, a former staff member of the commission who went on to become an ardent, outspoken preservationist. “I like the phrase ‘unflappable,' because th ere were, over the years, a number of us who tried to flap her.”

Mr. Wood, the chairman and founder of the Preservation Archive Project, added: “She was a public servant in that unsexy, unthanked way. Somebody had to do it. And somebody had to do it by the rules.”

After leaving the landmarks agency, Ms. Norman served as director of intergovernmental affairs at the city's Department of Buildings. For the last 15 years or so, she had been co-chairwoman of the preservation committee of Community Board 7 on the Upper West Side. She stepped down about three months ago when her cancer made it impossible for her to continue working.

Scott M. Stringer, the borough president of Manhattan, declared Dec. 4 to be Lenore Norman Appreciation Day, although she was by then too ill to accept the proclamation from him in person. The document credited her work in developing the “first comprehensive survey to identify New York's most worthy structures and districts,” creating “a special district to preserve Broadway theaters,” and inaugurating programs “to salvage archeological artifacts unearthed in construction.”

The proclamation spoke of Ms. Norman's “grace,” which was a reflection of her dignified bearing. That is why her husband, Milton Norman, had always objected to the Woolworth executive who long ago said that the company had been persuaded to accept landmark designation “by three little women in tennis sneakers” - meaning Ms. Norman, Ms. Miner and Ms. Spatt.

“Lenore Norman would not go to a meeting in sneakers,” her husband said. “She wouldn't take out the garbage in tennis shoes.”