ABSTRACT
This chapter debunks two myths about the origins of historic preservation in New York City, and places preservationists' efforts to construct a usable past in the context of early twentieth-century urban modernization and reform. The first myth is that New York City preservation began in 1963, after the destruction of Pennsylvania Station. Contrary to this popular and heroic protest story, there was a thriving preservation field in New York City by the tum of the twentieth century. The creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965 was an important, but not the original, chapter in the preservation history ofNew York City. The second myth holds that preservation emerged in the nineteenth century as the marginal gesture of a dying elite, and has stayed that way.2 On the contrary, by the 1900s preservation was thoroughly embedded in broader economic, cultural, environmental, and other social processes driving urbanization. 3 Preservation was among the several types of social-environmental reform that took hold under the rubric of the Progressive movement around the tum of the twentieth century. These reform movements fundamentally changed the trajectory of the urban development, in the same remarkable historical and geographical moment when New York City was becoming truly modem and metropolitan following the 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs. Like the myriad other reform movements, focused on housing, transit, public health, sanitation, playgrounds, settlement houses, and more, historic preservation was part of the modernization ofNew York, not simply a reaction against it.
