Historic district pioneer Kornfeld is dead at 91

Robert Kornfeld, a successful playwright, photographer and journalist, who was responsible for creating the Riverdale Historic District, died while recovering from pneumonia at the Allen Pavilion in Inwood on Aug. 23. He was 91.

A board member at Riverdale Neighborhood House and the Riverdale Yacht Club, co-author of the book Landmarks of the Bronx and chairman of the Bronx Landmarks Task Force, Mr. Kornfeld was passionate about, and eager to give back to, the community he lived in for 56 years.

“He felt that Riverdale was so beautiful and that it shouldn’t be changed. It meant so much to him that he was an important part of Riverdale,” Celia Kornfeld, Mr. Kornfeld’s widow, said.

When he moved to Riverdale in 1954, it didn’t take Mr. Kornfeld long to fall in love with the river views, stately homes and lush gardens surrounding his residence on Sycamore Avenue. Watching apartment buildings overwhelm the Spuyten Duyvil ridge, institutions gobble up land by the riverside and home builders chip away at green space and open vistas, he conceived the idea of protecting a portion of Riverdale’s legacy.

In 1967, Mr. Kornfeld began a project that would take decades, doing research, and persuading surrounding property owners to join him in asking the city Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate their part of Riverdale as a historic district. Old real estate records were his main resource and, in a Press interview that took place after the battle was won, he recalled his naïveté when he first began to poke about in the county archives and the thrill of the hunt when he began to strike unexpectedly rich deposits of lore.

In 1990, the commission agreed enthusiastically with Mr. Kornfeld’s research. “The picturesque, physical interrelationship” among the site’s houses, outbuildings, walls and fences “is unique in New York City,” the commission said. “Riverdale is the earliest known railroad suburb within New York City and as such is a rare surviving suburban development.”

An area, bounded roughly by West 252nd and 254th streets and Palisade and Independence avenues, was safe from the bulldozers, high-rises and brightly colored storefronts that swallowed much of the Bronx.