Bernard Marson, who as an architect and developer figured prominently within the transformation of a Decrease Manhattan industrial district into SoHo, an reasonably priced neighborhood for artists to work and reside earlier than it advanced into an enclave of stylish boutiques, movie star bars and overpriced flats, died on July 9 at his residence in Los Angeles. He was 91.
His loss of life was confirmed by his son, Alexander.
“Mr. Marson was accountable virtually single-handedly for the expansion of New York Metropolis’s SoHo into an artist neighborhood and historic district,” Raquel Ramati, who headed the City Design Group in Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration, mentioned in recommending him for a fellowship with the American Institute of Architects.
Mr. Marson was already a outstanding architect within the late Nineteen Seventies when he occurred upon the South Houston Industrial District, a 50-block space of five-and-six-story buildings, many with elegant Nineteenth-century forged iron facades. The district had simply been spared the wrecking ball when Robert Moses’s plans for a Decrease Manhattan Expressway had been revoked.
The neighborhood was in transition, ripe for the form of venture that Mr. Marson had undertaken with the Israeli architect Moshe Safdie in Jerusalem: renovating the plaza of the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter within the Outdated Metropolis from 1974 to 1976.
In Manhattan, many tenants between Houston and Canal Streets, principally small companies — twine and paper jobbers, rag converters, window shade and corrugated field producers, and garment sweatshops — had been shifting to locations with decrease taxes and labor prices, forsaking a dwindling industrial base that metropolis officers desperately sought to protect.
These companies had been being changed by a burgeoning artists’ colony within the space south of Houston Road, which had already been informally named SoHo. Artist had been changing high-ceilinged, undivided loft areas into studios and dwelling areas — a violation of metropolis laws in a neighborhood zoned for industrial use.
Within the late Nineteen Seventies, when the town was in an financial stoop, Mr. Marson was on the forefront of adapting a number of former manufacturing buildings to create a completely new neighborhood.
With different traders, he purchased the architect Ernest Flagg’s 12-story Little Singer Constructing in addition to 4 different buildings, together with a former glue manufacturing facility.
Among the house was already getting used illegally by artists, however Mr. Marson found a loophole in what most metropolis officers believed was an ironclad prohibition — an obscure zoning decision that allowed for “studios with accent dwelling” in manufacturing districts. To the officers’ dismay, the town’s Board of Requirements and Appeals ordered the Buildings Division to permit Mr. Marson to proceed.
What ensued was a protracted authorized and administrative battle. On one facet had been metropolis officers and a few landlords searching for to implement the zoning regulation to guard current tenants and forestall gentrification; on the opposite, with Mr. Marson on the forefront, had been builders and artists’ teams arguing for zoning variances to replicate the brand new realities of the actual property market.
“This principally legalized what was already taking place,” mentioned Peter Samton, an architect and former colleague of Mr. Marson’s. “The distinctive features of his contributions had been the melding of structure and improvement, which on the time, some 50 years in the past, had been so unusual.”
In 1982, state lawmakers handed laws that Carl Weisbrod, director of New York Metropolis’s Workplace of Loft Enforcement, mentioned would defend 90 p.c of loft tenants, together with these within the main loft neighborhoods like SoHo, Tribeca and NoHo in Decrease Manhattan.
Anthony Schirripa, who was president of the American Institute of Architects’ New York chapter in 2010, described Mr. Marson on the time as “a essential participant within the transformation of SoHo from its sweatshop previous to its jewel-like current.”
Latest recorded gross sales within the neighborhood have included a two-bedroom residence at 561 Broadway going for $4 million and a one-bedroom at 242 Lafayette Road for $2 million.
Bernard Aaron Marson was born on March 21, 1931, in Manhattan to Alexander Marson, an immigrant from Russia who turned a paint salesman, and Etta (Germaine) Marson, who labored in a retailer in Harlem. He was raised within the West Bronx.
After graduating from DeWitt Clinton Excessive Faculty within the Bronx, he earned a level in civil engineering from New York College’s Faculty of Engineering in 1951. He served as a nuclear weapons officer in the course of the Korean Conflict.
After receiving a level in structure from Cooper Union in 1961, he labored with Marcel Breuer as that architect’s web site consultant in the course of the building of the Whitney Museum of American Artwork on Manhattan’s Higher East Aspect, a Brutalist construction now quickly housing the Frick Assortment whereas the Frick museum close by is being renovated.
In his personal follow, Mr. Marson was notably commissioned to renovate the Twenties Montauk Manor, the Tudor Revival lodge on the East Finish of Lengthy Island designed by Schultz and Weaver and constructed by Carl G. Fisher, who developed Miami Seaside, when the lodge was transformed into condominiums within the Nineteen Seventies.
He married Ellen Sue Engelson in 1978. Along with their son, she survives him, together with their daughter, Eve; and two grandchildren. The couple moved to California in 2017.
