The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City (review)

It is a pleasure at last to review a book on American preservation history without having to praise it as a contribution to a neglected field. In the past ten years or so, historians have examined the early preservation movement in a number of cities and regions, written thematic and comparative studies, and even some biographies. Some of these accounts are collected in Randall Mason's earlier volume, Giving Preservation a History, edited with Max Page.¹ Much remains to be done, especially on the second half of the twentieth century, but we are off to a good start. So Mason's study of early preservation in New York City arrives in a field not yet crowded but at least inhabited.

What does he add? Quite a lot. First, for any urban phenomenon in America the story is not told until it is told in New York.² Preservation in New York did not begin with the demolition of Penn Station in 1963 and the subsequent passage of the city's landmarks ordinance. Mason shows that it was already a widespread, vital, and successful movement by the 1890s. The Once and Future New York is not the encyclopedic compendium that could and should one day be written. Better, it is a brief, readable synthesis with a point of view about where the field came from and what it does.

In Mason's telling, preservation was not a reaction against modernity but a product of it, and an essential part of modern city-building. Preservation created "memory infrastructure." Just as the modern metropolis was not manageable or livable without the new infrastructure of transportation, sanitation, water, and power—infrastructure that took elaborate physical form—it was also not manageable, comprehensible, or livable without memory infrastructure. This, too, took tangible form—preserved structures that became monuments, commemorative public art, plaques, public spaces that held civic meaning. In the increasingly dynamic, diverse, and sometimes chaotic city, this spatialized memory served to orient, to legitimize authority, and to inculcate a shared culture. Expression of this culture in the built environment was crucial because it was shared by all and reinforced by the tangibility and durability of real structures and places. Like the city's other infrastructure, memory infrastructure was deliberately constructed, not by a commission or authority with a staff of engineers but by a rising class of professionals and reformers with common expectations about civic culture and the built environment.

Mason quotes Kenneth Jackson as saying, "history is for losers"—one hopes in jest, but no matter, there are plenty who would say it with no hint of irony. Yet preservation in New York was a project of the leaders who built the modern city. Two of the central figures in the book are Andrew Haswell Green, "the father of Greater New York" (that is, the consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898), and George McAneny, whose many credits include guiding construction of the city's subway system and New York's adoption of the country's first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1916. A cast of other characters forms a who's-who of turn-of-the-century Progressive leadership. These men were the winners, and like winners through all time they wrote the history, including in the city's monuments. Like good Progressives, they did so comprehensively and methodically, with historical mosaics on the walls of modern subway stations and professionally restored landmarks above ground, illuminated with new electric lights.

The Once and Future New York is elegantly simple in the telling: three carefully chosen cases, weaving together discussions of an enormous body of preservation in New York City during this period. The first is the most recognizable as a conventional (if unsuccessful) preservation story: St. John's Chapel, on Varick Street downtown, built in 1807, closed in 1909, and demolished in 1918. The story echoes the controversy over the Old South Meetinghouse in Boston...