Nathan Silver, who chronicled a vanished New York, dies at 89

Boston Globe

7 hours ago

'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.'
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He added, '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.'
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He found images in archives of 'first-rate architecture' that no longer existed, including a post office near City Hall; Madison Square Garden, at Madison Avenue and 26th Street; art collector Richard Canfield's gambling house, on 44th Street near Fifth Avenue; the 47-story Singer Tower, at Broadway and Liberty Street; the Produce Exchange, at Beaver Street and Bowling Green; and the Ziegfeld Theater, at 54th Street and Sixth Avenue.
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A haunting photo of the interior of Penn Station adorns the book's cover.
'The book was a cri de coeur about the losses the city was experiencing,' Anthony C. Wood, the founder of the nonprofit New York Preservation Archive Project, said in an interview. '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.'
The city passed the landmarks preservation law in 1965. But, Wood said, '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, wrote in an email that Silver's book 'added pressure on the relatively new Landmarks Commission to act.'
By the time the book was published, Silver had left for Britain to teach architecture at the University of Cambridge. He remained in Britain for the rest of his career.
'Lost New York,' which Silver said sold more than 100,000 copies, was a finalist for the National Book Award in history and biography in 1968. Silver was also a Guggenheim fellow in architecture, planning and design that year.
Silver expanded and updated his book in 2000 to include his pantheon of preservation villains: A.J. Greenough, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 'who wantonly engineered' Penn Station's destruction; Anthony A. Bliss, who took the Metropolitan Opera from 39th Street and Broadway to its new home at Lincoln Center in 1966, which 'ensured smithereens for the old building'; and Robert Moses, New York's midcentury planning czar, 'for his recurrent terminations of any place he autonomously decided upon.'
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In 2014, when Silver made a rare trip to New York City, David Dunlap of The New York Times wrote that Silver believed landmarks 'were vessels of human history,' adding, 'How a building was used, and by whom, were almost as important to him as what the structure looked like.'
Nathan Silver was born on March 11, 1936, in Manhattan and grew up in the borough's Inwood section and in the Bronx. His father, Isaac, taught mechanical drawing at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and was also an architect. His mother, Libby (Nachimowsky) Silver, taught Hebrew school when her three children were young, then became a public-school teacher.
Silver, a fan of opera and theater, originally wanted to be a set designer. But he could not find an academic program in that specialty, so he chose to study architecture -- first at the Cooper Union, where he earned a certificate in 1955, and then at Columbia University, graduating in 1958 with a bachelor's degree.
After traveling through Europe on a fellowship, he worked at the architecture firm Kramer & Kramer, where he helped design a new location for the Argosy Book Store in Manhattan in 1963. Janet Malcolm of The New Yorker 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.'
In 1961, he started teaching at Columbia, where he mounted the exhibition that would become 'Lost New York.' 'He was surprised by the number and quality of buildings that had been torn down and pretty much forgotten,' his brother said.
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He began lecturing at Cambridge in 1965 and earned a master's degree there a year later. He was a partner in a large architectural firm and also ran his own practice; headed the architecture department at the University of East London; edited the newsletter of the Westminster Society, a conservation advocacy group in London; and was the architecture critic of The New Statesman magazine.
He also wrote a book about the Pompidou Center in Paris, and another, about improvisation in architecture and other fields, with his fellow architect Charles Jencks. And he designed renovations to the Seven Stars, a 17th-century pub in London owned by his wife, Roxy Beaujolais.
In addition to his brother, she survives him, as do a daughter, Liberty Silver, and a son, Gabriel Silver, from his marriage to Helen McNeil-Ashton, which ended in divorce; and four grandchildren. His first marriage, to Caroline Green, also ended in divorce.
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