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REMEMBERING RICHARD KAPLAN
Richard Kaplan, 1995
Richard D. Kaplan founded Heritage Trails in 1994 with the stated aim to “increase public awareness of Downtown New York and the history, architecture and attractions of Lower Manhattan,” and he actively led the project through its completion in 2000.
Kaplan was an architect and co-chair of The J.M. Kaplan Fund. Throughout his career, Kaplan was concerned with the problems facing the health and well-being of the urban environment, including zoning, housing, transportation, land conservation, and historic preservation. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard University Graduate School of Design. As an architect, Kaplan, with Jordan Gruzen and Mario Romanach, were principal designers of Kelly and Gruzen’s 1965 innovative housing project in Lower Manhattan, Chatham Towers. Kaplan also designed Crown Gardens, a housing complex completed in 1973 in Crown Heights for the Association for Middle Income Housing, and the 1971 The American Place Theatre in the J.P. Stevens Building at 1185 Sixth Avenue.
At the J.M.Kaplan Fund, Richard and his sister Joan Kaplan Davidson supported many transformative projects with early and important “seed money.” Particularly notable was the 1968-70 conversion of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the West Village into the Westbeth Artists Housing, with a design by Richard Meier, a classmate of Richard’s at the GSD. He also spearheaded the establishment of the Environmental Simulation Center at the New School for Social Research.
Richard Kaplan actively led the Heritage Trails New York project through its completion in 2000, whereupon HTNY was transferred to the Downtown Alliance. Richard also headed an outgrowth of HTNY, a non-profit called Heritage Trails World Wide, until 2006. Kaplan served on the boards of The Skyscraper Museum, the Forum for Urban Design, and the Regional Plan Association, and was the chairman of the Alliance for Downtown New York’s Committee on Tourism, Historic Preservation, Urban Design, and Parks.
Richard Kaplan received the City Club of New York’s Albert S. Bard Award for Merit in Civic Architecture and Design and the George S. Lewis Award from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Born in 1911, Richard D. Kaplan died peacefully at his winter home in Palm Beach on January 21, 2016, at the age of 82.
The following passages are excerpts collected from the interviews with people involved with Richard Kaplan on the Heritage Trails New York project.
NADINE PEYSER
Nadine Peyser worked closely with Richard Kaplan for five years, from June 1994 to 2000, as the Project Director of Heritage Trails New York. She recalled the driving force of Richard Kaplan’s interest in Downtown and his personal commitment to the project in an interview at The Skyscraper Museum in May 2017:
Richard was looking for a project in New York. He was starting to look around and decided that Downtown was what he wanted to focus on because it had this composite of the best architecture in the world. Downtown was going through a metamorphosis, or just about to. There was the question of – we have the most important real estate and financial center in the world, and we can’t let it disappear….
Everybody believed in it because they thought it was a great tool for getting people to be excited about Downtown again. It was a part of the larger ensemble of what they were doing. This was a device, right? And that is what we were ultimately selling. A cool, historical device, to get people downtown and walking. And to talk about the architecture and history.
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Richard was a futurist. He could understand the bricks and mortar of a building. He could understand technology. He was constantly interested in the mind, brain science, the world connecting that back into his life, and into climate. He was so far deep in with the Rocky Mountain Institute he understood looking at all aspects of the built environment.
I think that the investment that was being made down here and what was attractive about it was that you had all of these incredible collaborators, leading minds. You had a political will, you had a real estate will. You had all these, and I think it’s at heart because they couldn’t let Lower Manhattan “go down the tubes.
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I think Richard was very happy with the project. He loved his commitment to downtown. He really cared deeply about the Trails – about making it, contributing back to the city. He worked very hard on this: he came to the office every day. For a man like that – he didn’t have to – but he did. He was also very revered, and people Downtown loved him. He was effusive, as you know. He was able to bring everybody along: he was like a Pied Piper, in the best sense of the world. And you know, Carl [Weisbrod] and he got along great, and Bob Douglass, and Jennifer Raab. He wanted to do something and make a difference. I think he was really happy with the Trails. And it also gave him a raison d’être and something to focus on, and bring all of his communities together around him.
I think that for him, he looked at the Michael Kwartlers of the world and all of these people’s imaginations while they were putting this whole practical 3D work together, and he wanted to be part of that. So that’s why the idea of the buildings growing out of the map became very interesting to Richard, because the 2-dimensional was really kind of obsolete.
KEITH HELMETAG
Keith Helmetag was the principal graphic designer for HTNY, creating the “branding” of the logo, brochure, and site markers, etc.. After his work with Chermayeff & Geismar on HTNY, Helmetag established C & G Partnership. In an interview in their offices on April 27, 2017, he recalled Richard Kaplan’s foresight and his singular ability and capacity to both conceive and implement projects.
It was a cool project. There was a lot of shuttered space down(town) there, and [Richard] had the idea that it was gonna become more residential, which it became…
The thing that is so true is when you’re on the shores—when you’re at World Trade Tower or South Street Seaport, you get it, you get North-South. He was kind of a forefront of “why not walk it. Why don’t you bike it? It’s really not any distance.”
….
Richard was kind of like a cowboy in that regard because he was the entity. He was like the Pew Foundation: he would simply do it. Do it, fund it, rip on.
JAMES SANDERS
James Sanders, an architect, author, and filmmaker, worked on two projects for HTNY that also received support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund. “Town Square for the Global Village” was a redesign of Liberty (now Zuccotti) Park with large-scale electronic displays providing continuous streams of financial information from around the world that included a covered area for people to sit. The second project, TelTale, proposed to build a website and PDA application. The website would have featured information on Heritage Trails, and two other Sanders projects, Celluloid Skyline, which became a book of the same title, and the New York: A Documentary Film project. The passages below are excerpted from a transcript of an interview at The Skyscraper Museum on February 21, 2017.
To start, I connected with Richard Kaplan in ‘76 on a [housing] project called Crown Gardens, that Richard, it turns out, had designed. So we went to interview him at his old place on Lexington Avenue, and so that’s when I first met him, but then we re-connected in the 90s.
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So I guess he had conceptualized Heritage Trails, and so we in 95, and he had it pretty much in hand, I think I looked at the materials and talked about it generally, but as I said at the Board Meeting, this is not just factual information. I loved him, and I loved working with him, and it was a great experience in my life.
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He felt that there was five times more history in lower Manhattan. The interesting time in Boston was a 30-year period in the American story, whereas Lower Manhattan had had somewhat good early American and Revolutionary history, but then went on again and again and again to be the key place of the American story. And yet nobody knew it, or didn’t know it enough. So he felt that this was the way to recoup the history in a public history way and make it a kind of tourist attraction… The idea that people would come to Lower Manhattan.
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You know, so this was a kind of mission for him, and he was really into the idea, which fit into a larger area of kinds of problems that the Kaplan family was interested in. I should back up and say that I had had a long relationship with the Kaplan Fund…. I had a good track record and worked on 3 or 4 different projects through the parks councils, so I was well thought of as the kind of person that the Kaplan fund liked to do the kinds of things they loved to do, which were these sort of guerilla style operations. You know, they were famous for being risk-taking money: the whole idea of the Kaplan fund was that it was relevant. They put in the first $20,000 on a $150,000 project on the premise that they could leverage.
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[Richard] was the first person I ever heard, and he used the word in the year 96 or 97, he used the word “millennium.” I hadn’t thought about that word. He said, “well you know, the new millennium is coming up.” And I was like “Oh yeah, I guess so.” So that was probably the first time I ever heard it.
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Describing the project “Town Square for the Global Village,” a proposal for the re-design of the public space of Liberty Plaza on Broadway around the idea of an information kiosk with large screens that flashed financial information, an idea on which he worked closely with Richard Kaplan, Sanders recalled:
There were two major things that we did. One was the idea – and this is the version that Margot [Wellington] actually had a hand in this – that one of the problems of Lower Manhattan – it had been a historic problem –was that, unlike Midtown, which sort of showed off itself as ground level, because even though you couldn’t go necessarily into the buildings and offices around it, there were stores and restaurants and hotel lobbies, and museums and so forth, that it had a kind of a street level experience that gave you some good chunk of the energy and excitement of what was happening in the skyscraper office buildings above.
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So, we worked on it for a couple of years, but again we couldn’t figure out where to go with it and how to jump the barrier that we needed to do, and I think again, in retrospect, our timing was just a little too early. And we kind of moved on.
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Anyway, those were the projects, and Richard and I remained good friends. I would invite him to all the openings and projects that I did. We didn’t really work together much after, I guess 9/11 happened, and I can’t remember if we worked on it after that.
