Join us for a special Preservation Book Club event as we welcome author Roberta Brandes Gratz to discuss her new book It’s a Helluva Town: Joan K. Davidson, the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and the Fight for a Better New York. Roberta will be joined in conversation by Anthony Wood and Amy Freitag.
Thank you to our sponsor: Peggy N. & Roger G. Gerry Charitable Trust
An award-winning journalist and urbanist, Roberta Brandes Gratz has been observing and writing about cities–how they grow, fall apart, and recover–for more than 40 years. Her books have explored such topics as the cultural resilience of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the influence of Jane Jacobs’s pioneering philosophies on the recovery of New York City since the 1970s, and other subjects related to urban revitalization. She served on the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission for seven years, on the NY Governor’s and Mayor’s Task Force on Planning Manhattan’s West Side Waterfront after the defeat of Westway and the Sustainability Advisory Board for NYC under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Gratz was a founder and leader of the award-winning restoration of the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, now the Eldridge Street Museum. She is a longtime Trustee of the Preservation League of NYS. In 2002, she collaborated with Jane Jacobs to establish the Center For the Living City.
Anthony C. Wood is a preservation activist, writer, teacher, historian, grants maker and philanthropic advisor. Since l993 Anthony C. Wood has been the Executive Director of the Ittleson Foundation. Prior to that he served as the Chief Program Officer at the J. M. Kaplan Fund. For over twenty years he was an adjunct professor in the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. He holds a Master of Urban Planning from the University of Illinois, is a graduate of Kenyon College, and was a Historic Deerfield Summer Fellow. For over thirty years, Mr. Wood has served on a variety of non-profit preservation boards from small local grassroots organizations to large national nonprofits. He has served as Chair of the Preservation League of New York State, is a former Board Member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is former Chair of Partners for Sacred Places, is Chairman Emeritus of the Historic Districts Council of New York City and is Chair Emeritus of the Drayton Hall Site Council, Charleston, S.C., and is the founder and Chair Emeritus of the New York Preservation Archive Project. He is the author of Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks (Routledge, 2008) and co-organizer of Preservation Vision (2009) and the Fitch Forum on Preservation Law (2011).
Amy Freitag is Executive Director of The J.M. Kaplan Fund and has led the Fund’s grantmaking since 2014. Her tenure has included three rounds of The J.M.K. Innovation Prize (which she conceived in 2014), grants in criminal justice reform, climate, democracy, and conservation of some of the world’s most important places including Civil Rights era sites in Alabama’s Blackbelt.
Previously, Amy served as the Executive Director of the New York Restoration Project (NYRP) where she led the private effort to plant one million new trees (MillionTreesNYC). Prior to her work at NYRP, Amy served as the U.S. Program Director for World Monuments Fund and as Deputy Commissioner for Capital Projects in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Amy served on the NYC Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, and currently sits on the boards of Philanthropy New York, the New York Preservation Archive Project, and the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation.
Amy hails from Akron, Ohio and now lives with her family in Montclair, New Jersey. She holds an A.B. from Smith College and master’s degrees in Landscape Architecture and Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.