Notes From the Field

In this webinar, author LaTonya Yvette talks about her new book Stand in My Window: Meditations on Home and How We Make It. Buy the book here.

Through essays with stunning photography, the beloved multimedia storyteller and author of Woman of Color shares the powerful lessons she's learned about creating a home that honors the past and celebrates the future. “Home is a reflection of what we inherit.” Following LaTonya's presentation, she was joined in conversation by Katy Peace, the League's Director of Communications.

New York is filled with forsaken buildings, each ravaged by the exploits of modernization, each having fascinating histories. A Vanishing New York, published in 2022, explores over 40 of the most evocative abandoned sites in the Empire State and puts their individual stories in the larger context of New York’s historical legacy. Photographer and author John Lazzaro traveled the state over a three-year period, capturing what’s left of such places before they are swept away by time. Divided by region, these sites, ranging from the Catskills’ once-vibrant vacation destinations to Long Island’s melancholy psychiatric centers, reveal deeper social, cultural, and political changes that lead to their decay. These abandoned hospitals, schools, churches, railways, and estates offer us a view into a past rapidly dissolving before it disappears completely.

The League was thrilled to host Elizabeth and Ethan Finkelstein for a Preservation Book Club author talk in support of their new book Cheap Old Houses: An Unconventional Guide to Loving and Restoring a Forgotten Home. In this webinar, they discuss the process of putting the book together and the importance of everyday old home stewardship.

In this Preservation Book Club presentation, author Ariel Aberg-Riger discussed her brand new book America Redux: Visual Stories From Our Dynamic History. Ariel did a reading from the book and detailed the behind-the-scenes process of how a chapter was put together. Following her presentation, she was joined in conversation by Katy Peace, Director of Communications for the Preservation League of NYS.

…If what resonates with people is just the book recommendations, maybe there’s a better way to do that. So we’re going to spend the summer experimenting with a new format. Preservation Book Club, but make it Instagram.

In Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, author Alexandra Lange chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange's perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall's story of rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

In her book Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States, Dr. Whitney Martinko takes a look at how historic preservation played out following the Revolutionary War. She discusses the ways in which people debated whether and what to save of their built environment, and how preservation balanced (or tried to) the relationship between the public good and private profit.