"If you seek his monument, look around you."
Rest in peace Mr. Belle, and thank you!
Grand Central Terminal, the main building on Ellis Island and the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden — all among the greatest New York City landmarks — look better today than they have since their earliest years.
Many hands were responsible. John Belle was the common denominator.
Mr. Belle, the retired founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, an architectural and planning firm that has specialized in preservation, restoration and contextual design, died last week at 84.
With his death, the city has lost an architect who conveyed a genial joy in resuscitating the masterworks of his predecessors. That made him an appealingly modest figure in a room full of big architectural egos, since he was at his best when his own interventions were least obvious.
New York has also lost a link to the intellectual crucible of the 1960s, whenJane Jacobs and others demanded that architects stop obliterating the past and, instead, take time to understand the many ways in which people were well served by older buildings and neighborhoods.
“Preservation is one of the highest forms of good citizenship,” Mr. Belle said on his firm’s website. “As a witness to the aftermath of the urban renewal movement in New York, I was determined to find a different way.”
For her part, Ms. Jacobs held Beyer Blinder Belle in high regard.
“They were looking at the fabric of the community,” she said in an interviewin 1998. “That was very welcome and very exciting, that there were professionals who were, at last, doing that.” She added: “A community can’t just come by waving a wand. It has history. History was, to the modernists, an enemy. So this was a very radical realization. And an important one.”
John Belle was born on June 30, 1932, in Cardiff, Wales. His father, Arthur, was a clerk at a Lyons tea shop in Cardiff. His mother, Gladys, was a housewife. Mr. Belle received diplomas from the Portsmouth School of Architecture in England and the Architectural Association in London before moving to the United States in 1959.
Once in America, Mr. Belle worked for Josep Lluís Sert and Victor Gruen before starting his own firm in 1968 with Richard L. Blinder and John H. Beyer. Mr. Blinder died in 2006. Mr. Beyer is still active.
Mr. Belle’s early work included community planning projects in Manhattan. With the addition of James Marston Fitch to the practice in 1979, Beyer Blinder Belle began moving to the forefront of preservation-oriented architecture.
The firm attracted wide attention in 1990 with its renovation and restoration of the abandoned Ellis Island immigration station into the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. The vaulted ceiling in the former Registry Room, made of 28,258 Guastavino tiles, was cleaned until it looked — as Mr. Belle aptly put it — like mother-of-pearl. Where modern interventions were needed, they were made as inconspicuous and respectful as possible.
When the Haupt Conservatory at the botanical garden in the Bronx was restored in 1997, Herbert Muschamp, who was then the architecture critic at The New York Times, said it could “once again hold its sparkling glass head up high amid the great architectural symbols of New York.”
Though critics have faulted Beyer Blinder Belle’s conservatism, it is worth recalling that the firm was associated in 1998 with the daring architectSantiago Calatrava in what proved to be a losing bid to redesign the James A. Farley Building, also known as the General Post Office, as a Pennsylvania Station annex.
Penn Station was not where Mr. Belle was to win his greatest renown. That was at Grand Central.
You almost had to have been there in the 1970s and ’80s to believe how far the Beaux-Arts terminal had fallen into decrepitude, even after its status as a landmark was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1978. Travelers shared Grand Central with a large homeless population.
“The building was divided into turf claimed by different drug dealers,” Mr. Belle and Maxinne R. Leighton wrote in “Grand Central: Gateway to a Million Lives.” “Commuters were scared to take trains there at night. Parents warned their children not to use the dangerous bathrooms.”
In 1990, a design and engineering consortium led by Beyer Blinder Belle began work. Their strategic first strike was to demolish a billboard called the Kodak Colorama, which had blocked daylight into the main concourse for 40 years.
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“It was as if life were being breathed back into the building,” Mr. Belle and Ms. Leighton wrote. “Many commuters stopped in their tracks, speechless and amazed at the change that had so instantly brought back the majesty of the space.”
Their astonishment increased as the concourse ceiling was cleaned by workers on a scaffold that was rolled slowly through the room over a nine-month period. The mud brown sky turned a startling teal, with stars, constellations and zodiac signs popping out in gold-leaf contrast.
Besides restoring the past, Beyer Blinder Belle made fundamental changes, too, starting with the construction of an entirely new marble staircase to the east balcony. It echoed, but did not replicate, the ornate western staircase. Some preservationists hated the idea.
But the firm prevailed before city and state preservation agencies after it uncovered a plan by the original architects, Warren & Wetmore, that showed a staircase to the east balcony. That proved, Mr. Belle and Ms. Leighton wrote, that the idea “was not an ego-driven ploy to have our personal imprint on the building, but that in fact our goal was to complete the original design.”
Mr. Muschamp, the architecture critic, approved. “The new eastern staircase, which threatened to diminish the room’s amplitude, has the opposite effect of magnifying it,” he wrote in 1998, as the $425 million renovation neared completion. He continued, “Even more impressive is the uncovering of the ramps, located just behind the ticket windows, that lead down to the lower level and its fabled Oyster Bar.”
“Beyer Blinder Belle’s greatest accomplishment,” Mr. Muschamp said, “has been to reveal that Grand Central is above all a monument to movement.”
Mr. Belle’s first wife, Wendy Adams Belle, an artist and teacher, died in 1974. His second wife, Anne Belle, a documentary filmmaker, died in 2003. He died on Thursday in Remsenburg, N.Y., where he had a home. He also lived in Manhattan. The cause was Lewy body disease, said his son David Belle, who survives him, along with another son, Sebastian; three daughters, Amelia, Fenella and Antonia Chapman; and eight grandchildren.
Mr. Belle knew his work would never fully be done. “The act of restoring a building to its original state is only half the battle,” he and Ms. Leighton wrote. “The other half is to guard against its denigration throughout its future existence.”
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