"Houses of Worship Choosing to Avoid Landmark Status"

For more than 100 years the Bay Ridge United Methodist Church, with its serpentine stone and clock tower, lent a bucolic yet dignified air to the corner of Fourth and Ovington Avenues in Brooklyn.

Then, on Oct. 21, a bulldozer laid waste to the structure, known as the Green Church.
Daunted by the cost of repairing and maintaining the 1899 building, the congregation had sold it to a developer for $9.75 million. He plans to build a 70-unit apartment building, and the congregation will erect a smaller church on the site.

The destruction went forward even though preservationists and the area’s City Council representative had repeatedly implored the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to schedule a hearing on potential landmark status for the church, which was on the National and State Register of Historic Places.

Feelings on the issue ran so high that at a City Council hearing last year on the reappointment of Robert B. Tierney as chairman of the landmarks commission, the city councilman...publicly berated the agency for declining to act. “It was a part of our history in this community being torn away from us,” Mr. Gentile said in an interview. “The sad part is, it didn’t have to be.”
Read more about this at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/arts/design/01landmarks.html

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