The end of Tin Pan Alley?

With its graffiti-covered storefronts, crumbling cornices and vendor-clogged sidewalks, the block of 28th Street between Avenue of the Americas and Broadway does not necessarily look like a place that would produce some of the catchiest melodies and most poetic lyrics of the last 120 years.

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."


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 [music publisher Jerome H 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."