Newsday (Suffolk Edition) du lieu suivant : Melville, New York • 11

in 1025 Debts Deluged Murder Suspect Westfield, N.J. (AP)- List wanted to keep up with the Joneses. But a beat-up Chevy in the driveway and cracks in the plaster of a Victorian mansion are not enough in Westfield. Out here, one must have money. In his book, "The Status Seekers," author Vance Packard described Westfield as "a wealthy bedroom town favored by Wall Street commuters and other nearby executives." Parkard also said the town is populated by "economic titans who have homes staffed by servants." It was not that way for John List.

List's mother, his wife and their children were murdered last month in the 18-room mansion they had occupied for five years. Authorities say List, 46, is the prime suspect in the case, and a worldwide search for him is under way. List, a veteran of World War II and Korea who was awarded a Bronze Star, was financially solvent when he moved his family from Rochester, N.Y., to New Jersey in 1965 and put down $10,000 on the Westfield mansion. He was a vice president of First National Bank of New Jersey. His mortgage was $40,000, but First Fed- eral Savings Loan Association of Westfield believed he could handle it.

A short time later, List took a posttion with American Photographic Corp. of New York City. He was paid $23,500 a year. But a short time later, the economy nose-dived. List's wife suffered a nervous breakdown and underwent expensive treatment at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, New York City.

List at this point tried to contend with his economic difficulties. In September, 1968, he borrowed $4,000 from a bank, securing it with a loan on the mansion. He paid up four months later, but had to take a $7,000 second mortgage. Later, he took out a third mortgage of $1,800. The house and the bill to heat it cost about $750 a month.

When J.S.A. Wittke, a wealthy New York stationer, had the house built in 1885, it was one of the finest in town. Mrs. John Wittke, the wife of Wittke's grandson who now lives in the gardener's quarters behind the mansion, lent List pictures of the interior of the house so that he could restore it. But the restoration plans failed and the pictures were not returned.

List changed jobs. He went to work for State Mutual Life Assurance Co. of -Continued on Page 14 UPI Telephoto There were three children in the John List family. Young friends carried their coffins at services Saturday in Westfield, N.J. The (High) Rise and Fall of 5th Avenue -Continued from Page 9 Madison Avenue and later refined by the Pentagon.

There were, that is, certain "soft sites," which were "ripe for assembly and redevelopment." Land was simply being "underused" by "low yield" retail establishments where there was "the more profitable alternative of office use." Four- and five-story buildings were "not taking advantage of their full earning potential." First the debasement of language, then the assault: everyone saw it coming. To head it off, the lions of the Fifth Avenue Association last year sat down with the lambs of the City Planning Commission. Together they devised a new zoning scheme whose commendable aim is not only to retain the retail character of the street but to promote the inclusion of residential units in any new construction there. In elaboration, however, the defenders more or less continue the euphemistic stratagems of the marauders. Fifth Avenue from 38th Street to 58th Street is now a "special planning district," according to the Planning Commission.

(It is both a "preservation district" and an "incentive district," adds one staff member, plunging into the spirit of the thing.) A survey, the commission's report continues, "suggests that Fifth Avenue is not only Midtown's most elegant street but is also one of its most stable. However, a look at the zoning map shows that most of the avenue is not developed to its full zoning potential. In fact, approximately two-thirds of the sites within the Special District have been identified as potential building sites (In addition) all Fifth Avenue department stores and large specialty stores are built well below their zoning potential and are therefore susceptible to redevelopment." Accordingly, the commission provides an "Elective Lot Improvment under which the developer can increase the overall mass of his building in return for various "bonusable amenities," as the commission felicitously calls them. In plainer language, the plan mandates a minimum of two floors of retail space beginning from the sidewalk level, in any new building. Should the builder agree to provide such "amenities" as additional retail floors, an interior shopping arcade, or residential units on the upper floors, he can increase the "bulk" of his building by upwards of 40 per cent.

In essense, the Elective Lot Improvement Bonus is an extension of the incentive zoning plan that the city first instituted in 1961 and that stimulated the great real estate gold rush of the 60s. The principalities," Monday, December-13, 1971 vebawg? amenity sought by that plan was the plaza, a bit of elbow room in front of a building, perhaps graced with a fountain or two, in return for extra bulk. You can still get arguments over how good a bargain it was for the city. Builders provided plazas, each according to his own whim, avarice or conscience, and aded every inch of rentable bonus space the ordinance would permit. The results are there for anyone to examine: they constitute much of the present working environment of Manhattan.

Virtually every Midtown commercial artery except Fifth is afflicted with corporate elephantiasis. Glass and aluminum-sheathed 50-story monuments to the spiritual leadership of Equitable Life, Sperry Rand, Standard Oil, et al, stand cornice to cornice from Third Avenue to Broadway, and the city is soon to give us the first east-west "spine" of similar high-rise office construction along 48th Street to the shores of the Hudson. (When the wind blows through Manhattan these days you can almost hear the glass shivering.) Sixth Avenue, in particular--the Avenue of the Americas--was supposed to emerge from the wreckers' rubble as a shining testament to the efficacy of the new zoning. Until the mid-'60s, it was a raunchy promenade of beaneries, back-issue magazine shops and pre-porno novelty shops, its one virtue being that it had a varied and bustling street life for most of the day and evening. All that raunch and ruckus have vanished now along with most of the retail shops and eating places.

Nearly as far as the eye can see northward from the '40s, there are nothing but towering corporate headquarters buildings casting long shadows across the pinched and eclectic little plazas on the street below. Incentive zoning rehabilitated the street the way a lobotomy rehabilitates a manic depressive. The Planning Commission's planners acknowledge the Avenue of the Americas to be a monumental failure. They cite it now as an object lesson in planning gone wrong. On Fifth Avenue, the newer, wiser zoning prohibits plazas.

Instead, the scheme requires a continuous line of retail shops at street level, uninterrupted by office entrances, which must be situated on sidestreets only. No ground-floor banks or tourist offices are to be allowed, and the planners envisage shopping arcades that will link up with one another to form a continuous interior mall on the east side of the street. But still, there is the constant nearby reminder of how builers are apt to exploit their "bonusable amenand the, threat of all that bulk, eventually looming over the avenue. The commission quite cheerfully expects that as many as 25 skyscrapers might go up. Michael Grosso, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Association, seems confident that most of this will happen below 43rd Street.

Besides, he says, "not all of them have to be 50 stories he admits, on the other hand, that there is nothing to prevent them from being 75 stories tall. Plans for a 50-story office-and-residential tower, with four or five floors of retail shops, already have been drawn up for the Best's site, which stands not below 43rd but between 51st and 52nd. ('The building will rise directly alongside St. Patrick's Cathedral, thus providing a clear test of strength between God and Mammon.) Across the street, a 35-story structure will go up on the DePinna's site, and the developer of that building has already purchased the Georg Jensen site at 53rd. It seems inevitable that most of the remaining small building owners eventually will succumb to "the more profitable alternative" offered by the developers.

"Bulk," says Grosso, "is the only device we have to keep retailers on the street. If the retail image of Fifth Avenue disappears, New York and the country will never have is to say nothing of the aesthetic image. By the mid-'70s, Fifth Avenue may still be a thriving street, but it is apt to be quite a different one. Surprisingly few New Yorkers seem to know or care about the reasons for all the chaos of the demolition and construction around them every day. Streets, buildings and shops crumble, gaping holes appear, whole new blocks arise, the environment grows more faceless and inhuman by the day, and barely a voice is raised to ask what is happening.

It is as if the landlord were to march into one's apartment, knock down walls, replace the furniture with inflatable plastics, change the color scheme, and then stand back to say, "There, that's better." The tenant shifts to his new plastic chair, brushes the plaster off his inflatable coffee table and goes on reading his morning paper. It is possible, at overwrought moments, to feel that during all the years of anti-war protest when we were out marching on Washington and levitating the Pentagon, we should have been here at home stoning the windows of the city planners and real estate speculators. The enemy was cutting us up in our own streets. With the advent of the "electric lot improvement bonus," in any case, the planner's equivalent of the Pentagon's "protective reaction strike" has come to New York. Somewhat like that celebrated and unfortunate hamlet in Vietnam, Fifth Avenue is to be destroyed in ordes to be saved.

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