Nathan Silver, an architect and author whose landmark book, Lost New York (1967), "offered a history lesson about the many buildings that were demolished before the city passed a landmarks preservation law that might have offered protection from the wrecking ball," died May 19, the New York Times reported. He was 89.
Evolving from an exhibition that he created in 1964 while teaching at Columbia University's architecture school, Silver's book was published as more and more people rallied to prevent other historic structures from being destroyed.
"By 1963, it seemed urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New York City," he wrote. "It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be razed, a final solution seemed likely for the 39th Street Metropolitan Opera [it was destroyed in 1967] and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were being pounded into landfill for a parking lot.... While cities must adapt if they are to remain responsive to the needs and wishes of their inhabitants, they need not change in a heedless and suicidal fashion."
Anthony C. Wood, founder of the nonprofit New York Preservation Archive Project, said, "The book was a cri de coeur about the losses the city was experiencing. It gave comfort to those trying to push back against that, and provided solace to people who cared about preservation and opened the eyes of a wider public." New York City passed the landmarks preservation law in 1965, but, Wood added, "Out of the gate, it was tentatively administered; it wasn't like once the law passed, preservation was unleashed."
Roberta Brandes Gratz, a journalist who was a member of the Landmarks Preservation Commission from 2003 to 2010, observed that Silver's book "added pressure on the relatively new Landmarks Commission to act."
Lost New York sold more than 100,000 copies and was a finalist for the 1968 National Book Award in history and biography. Silver expanded and updated the book in 2000 to include what the Times called a "pantheon of preservation villains" such as the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad responsible for Penn Station's destruction and Robert Moses, the urban planner. Silver also wrote a book about the Pompidou Center in Paris, and another work (with fellow architect Charles Jencks) about improvisation in architecture and other fields.
While working at the architecture firm Kramer & Kramer, Silver helped design a new location for the Argosy Book Store in Manhattan in 1963. In the New Yorker, Janet Malcolm wrote in 2014 that the store had been transformed "into a room of great charm, a vision of cultivation and gentility as filtered through a mid-20th-century aesthetic."