Public History Commons^™

Review: Saving Place: 50 Years Of New York City Landmarks, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

This piece is a review of "Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks" at the Museum of the City of New York from April 2015 to January 2016. It discusses the presentation of the history of preservation in New York City and how the landmarks law has been implemented and challenged over its first half century.

Article of record is at http://jsah.ucpress.edu/content/75/1/119.abstract

The City As Palimpsest, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

“Palimpsest preservation” suggest the necessity of keeping the successive layers of urban form alive rather than simply effacing and rebuilding, for that keeps a city’s history alive. No city without a tangible, tactile history, without the capacity for denizens and visitors to reach into the past while experiencing the present, can be truly vital. But this is a contested approach. George Orwell’s 1984 offers a warning in the guise of a party slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Preservationists may advocate on historical, architectural, or cultural grounds, but the final decision …