 We are very excited to have such a great response to our 50th anniversary keynote lecture for Greater Portland Landmarks. Now, as you know, Greater Portland Landmarks' mission is to preserve and revitalize the architectural fabric, history and character of Greater Portland, renewing our neighborhoods, spurring economic development, and keeping Portland one of the most livable cities in America. Thank you for joining us today. As you know, Landmarks got its start back in the 1960s, and the sort of critical moment was the demolition of Union Station in 1961. And for those of you who can see the panel on the front of the podium, there's that classic view of the tower being knocked over of Union Station. That really got the citizens of Portland motivated to form an organization that would protect and preserve our architectural heritage. So our years of research, education, preservation services, and activism can be seen in the authentic historic fabric of this city. But there is still a great deal to be done. We need to broaden protection of more historic areas in our cities, such as the India Street neighborhood. We need to save endangered properties throughout our region. And we need to build awareness of the wonderful historic architecture and the architectural heritage of Greater Portland. Now before we start today, I'd like to first of all thank all of you for caring and for your support for preservation, and the personality and the sense of place that we have in the Greater Portland area. I'd also like to thank our sponsors. The Dead River Company is our lead 50th anniversary sponsor this year. And our other 50th anniversary sponsors are the JB Brown Company and the Danforth Group of Wells Fargo Advisors. And Jack Zinn is here tonight from Wells Fargo. I don't know if he can wave his hand, but he is here with us tonight. And I'd also like to thank an anonymous donor who made this possible. And that is really true to have someone to say, I don't want you to worry about that event. I'll make sure it happens. So thank you very much for your generosity. And I'd also want to mention for those of you who are wanting to see this lecture again, or if you have friends who can't make it tonight, this is being filmed for Community TV. That is on Channel 5 on Time Warner. So if you have friends who missed it or if you'd like to see it again, it will be filmed and shown on Community TV. We have a very special guest with us in addition to our keynote speaker. And that is Earl Shuddleworth, who is the director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and State Historian. And Earl was one of the founding members of Greater Portland Landmarks. He was still in school and was attending those very early meetings. And his name is like the John Hancock on the articles of incorporation. So I'd like to introduce Earl Shuddleworth, who will introduce our speaker. We meet tonight in the First Parish Church, the oldest religious building on the Portland Peninsula. Gathered in 1674, the First Parish built a framed meeting house on this site in 1740, which withstood the British bombardment of the town in 1775. Fifty years later, the old Jerusalem meeting house, as it was affectionately known, was replaced by this handsome granite federal-style church, which was designed by parishioner John Muzzy, a local businessman. This beautiful structure narrowly escaped destruction in the great fire of 1866 and is now a local landmark as well as the setting for an active, unitarian, universalist congregation. In 1906, the First Parish established an endowment fund for the maintenance of this church. Recently, the congregation was faced with a $225,000 project to restore the belfry and spire. $60,000 was raised from the parish, 90,000 secured through a bank loan, and the balance came from that 1906 endowment. It's always good to have an endowment. The church is now appealing to members of the greater Portland community who have an interest in the preservation of the city's historic buildings to help raise the funds to pay the loan and replenish the endowment. Please consider supporting this worthy project and worthy building. Also in the area of public announcements, please voice your support for the retention of the American and New England studies program at the University of Southern Maine, an asset of great intellectual, cultural, and economic value to our city and state. It is now my pleasure to introduce Morrison H. Heckscher, the Lawrence A. Fleischman chairman of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Morrie grew up in Philadelphia and was first drawn to American decorative arts by a high school shop project to replicate an early 19th century tripod table. While most of us were making lamps and tie racks of questionable merit, Morrie was creating an object of lasting value, a precursor for what lie ahead. As an undergraduate, Morrie attended Wesleyan University, learning about American art and architecture from Professor Samuel Green, an inspiring teacher who actually had pioneered the formation of the Colby College Art Department in the 1940s. And I know that there are several Sam Green students here in the audience, including Paul Stevens and Tom Ellerman. After earning his master's degree from the University of Delaware in the Winter Tour program, Morrie received his PhD in art history at Columbia University. Morrie Heckscher began his career at the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in 1969 and became its chair in 2001. For 45 years he has played a major role in interpreting American culture through a series of distinguished exhibitions, catalogs, lectures, and publications, which reflect his passion for architecture and furniture. For a decade he worked with architect Kevin Roche and museum colleagues to redesign the galleries that now comprise the modern American Wing. I have it on good authority that Morrie shares dual citizenship between New York City and the state of Maine. His love affair with our state began as a counselor at Camp Kiev in Damerscota. On an outing to Louds Island, he and his campers sought refuge from the rain in an abandoned house. In time Morrie returned to Louds Island to buy that house for his vacation home, a much beloved property which has been restored over many summers with the help of visiting friends. So be sure to pack your work clothes if Morrie invites you to his coastal retreat. Tonight Morrie Heckscher will present Greater Portland Landmark's 50th anniversary keynote address. The preservation movement in New York City parallels with Portland, Maine. He will compare the plans of the two cities including their wonderful Olmsted parks and focus on the beginnings of historic preservation in the transformative decade of the 1960s. Morrie. Thank you Earl and thank you Hilary and may I say what a pleasure it is to be here today to participate in your 50th anniversary. Also to be able to speak in a building of such architectural quality and beauty. I didn't know this was going to be taped because I proposed tonight to take a sentimental journey and to view Portland and architectural preservation and New York City and my life in a very personal way. So I hope that the tape is destroyed shortly after this evening is over. If we could, we may want to dim the lights and we'll see if I can run a PowerPoint. This goes back to 1950 more or less when I was about 10 years old and growing up outside Philadelphia with the benefit of a wonderful grandfather who was an amateur painter, an amateur cabinet maker, someone who could teach me the names of the stars, identify them, and who taught me to identify trees and woods. And most important for tonight, he took me one day when he was meant to be working on an architectural tour of Philadelphia before urban renewal. It was a 19th century English city, it might as well have been. All the old buildings were in place, many of the streets were cobblestone, and the building that opened my eyes to architecture was, well, there were a row of them, but on the left of the screen, the Provident Life and Trust Building by Frank Furness, the great Unitarian architect of Philadelphia, 1876. Ugly, powerful, brooding, dirty, coal encrusted at the time, and I looked at it, my jaw dropped, and what is that? And then on the right, one of his other, from the 80s, he'd mellowed a little bit, the National Bank. But it was the power of urban architecture in Philadelphia. That first opened my eyes to America's architectural history, to the importance of architecture, the visual power of it, and of course these were among the very first buildings destroyed in the post-war effort to, quote, bring American cities into a modern world and to rejuvenate after the war. But that was really where it began. That was the early 1950s. The next year, 1951, as Earl mentioned, I was sent off to summer camp. I didn't really want to go, but was sent off to summer camp in Maine, and on the way, well, we went to the old railroad station in Philadelphia and 40 little kids, bags of popcorn, hundreds of comic books, had our own car to go from Philadelphia, to stopping in Boston, stopping in New York maybe, but ending up, I think, in Nobleboro, where the car disgorged its contents. And we went obliviously through Pennsylvania Station in New York, and we went again obliviously past Union Station here in Portland, Maine. And I did that two years running. I then didn't want to be with all these kids in camp. I wanted to go to Vermont, where my heart really was, and work on a farm that belonged to this same grandfather. But come 1958, my father said, time that you get out of the house. You're not going to work in construction. You go and be a camp counselor at Camp Keeave, Nobleboro, Maine. And so I was put back on the train, this time on my own. And I remember changing trains in Pennsylvania Station. I remember, I do not remember, sadly, Union Station. It was still there, but I don't have to be honest, I don't recall it. But I do remember the train stopping in Bath. And the conductor said, oh, get off if you'd like, stretch your legs. It was a nice June day. And a photographer got on and took pictures of the empty interiors of the cars as part of the presentation to the Commerce Department, whatever, to say that, you know, passenger service to Maine no longer makes sense. So I was there for the end of it. I was thrilled to hear today that Amtrak is alive and actually well, and people are using it again. But what a loss those two buildings are. So there's a connection here. I then went to Wesleyan and Sam Green, again, mentioned by Earl, the superb teacher of architectural history. And I began to learn a little bit something about these buildings that had meant something to me subliminally. And then the year I moved to New York City to graduate school there, the thought of leaving Maine in the summers and all to go to New York City was so, so horrifying that I ended up buying a house on Louds Island in Maine. And there it is. Earl stole my thunder entirely. Talking about, I can name each of those miscreants there on the screen. This house, well, the barn, that is a photograph taken a couple of years before we bought the house. And the barn was on its way down and was gone by the time I got there. But that is the house that Andrew Wyeth would have loved it. And we still do today. And for that reason, I'm a frequent visitor up and down the coast to go to Wonderful Miscongress Bay. One of our two of my neighbors on the island are here this evening. And in those days, this is what you saw on Route 1. And in 1966, the year after I bought the house, the Walker Art Gallery at Bowdoin did an exhibition of photographs of nature and of man in nature on Route 1. One of Marvin Sadek's great exhibitions in the mid-1960s. And two years later, or three years later, I had a fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum, loved it. And then Phil Beam, professor of art at Bowdoin, called me up and invited me up and said, How would you like to be the director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art? And you can take the summers off and play golf. And it was the hardest thing imaginable for me to do to give up the opportunity. But the time didn't seem ripe. Maybe there will be time sometime. But I needed a place to stay, coming in to and from. And my brother, meanwhile, who had studied architecture at Penn with one Paul Stevens of Portland, Maine, had moved to Maine. And here is where I used to stay in the late 60s and 70s. This is Pleasant Street, the Howe family houses. The one on the left belonged to Paul and Dotto Stevens, who are here tonight. That's his Volkswagen. The one on the right belonged to my brother. And his ancient Volvo is peaking outside the window there. So all of this is totally irrelevant except that this is a sentimental journey. And I wanted to have a chance to say it in Maine. So let's now, I'll talk about that in a minute. Let me set the scene for what was going on in the world of architecture in the early 1960s, the years that you've learned about my misspent youth. And let me just read a quick chronology. June 1961, Mayor Wagner creates the Committee for Preservation of Structures in New York City. April 1962, he appoints commissioners. August 1962, Agbeny is founded. The action group for better architecture in New York. And they're famous because in August of 1962, the great architect Phillip Johnson and Eileen Saranen were leading a pickets in front of Penn Station in an effort to save it. The next month in September of 62, Con Edison, the New York utility, proposed building a huge pump storage facility on the most historic and beautiful part of the Hudson River at Storm King. In January of 63, the City Planning Commission held hearings. And in 1963, the first book on preservation in New York landmarks by Alan Burnham was published by Wesleyan University Press. Now, August of 63, the demolition of Penn Station began. November of 63, Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference was established by a great historian of the Hudson Valley, Carl Carmer. And the following year, Greater Portland Landmarks was established. That same year, Columbia University began its preservation, historic preservation program. In April of 65, the Landmarks Commission, Preservation Commission was finally established in New York only after the loss of the greatest public building in New York. In 66, Henry Hope Reed was made the first curator of Central Park. In 66, for the first time, the National Historic Preservation Act provided money from the federal government. From 66 to 96, they actually, government funds were provided for preservation. In 67, Grand Central Station was designated. And in 68, the Penn Central Railroad's proposal to build above Grand Central was denied. An incredibly active, busy time. I think the two sides were, had never been more dramatically opposed as then. I've talked about myself, I've talked about the preservation movement's activities. Let me talk for just a second about Portland and New York as comparables, if you will. Two great port cities, neither the capital of its state. But with very similar parallels in being the leading economic mercantile centers of their states. And with rather similar planning developments in them. Let me start and focus particularly on New York City, which is the city I know something about. I do not want to talk about Portland in detail in front of Earl Shuttleworth. But let's start, I have to be very quick. 1811, the commissioner's plan for a rationalized organization of the very long, narrow island of Manhattan. Twelve wide avenues north-south, 155 narrower streets east-west, starting at House and Street and running north. A way to rationalize and make functioning what everybody knew by 1811 was going to be the leading mercantile center of New York. Everything about it was indicative of the growth the city would have. The fact that by 1825 the Erie Canal would connect the seaport of New York with the hinterland. So there is the plan. And on this plan it represents a very pragmatic approach to urban design. There were nine public parks. You can see them in green, including the center square one, the old parade ground, about 230 acres. The total public space was about 500 acres in 1811, which seemed terribly inadequate to us. At the time it was highly controversial. It was considered far in excess of what was needed. And it wasn't until the 1830s, well by the 1830s, 1840s, the amount of public space in New York had been reduced to about 200 acres because people didn't think open space and parks were important. That changed with two incredible visionaries in New York City. The man on the left, William Cullen Bryant, who was the famous romantic poet, but also the editor of the New York Evening Post. And in 1844 he came out with a great broadside in his newspaper saying, before it's too late we must open up, we must preserve and acquire for public space a big enough part to be worthy of New York City. On the right, the other major voice at the time, Andrew Jackson Downing, the father of the romantic, the natural landscape in America, the editor of the horticulturalist, a highly influential horticultural magazine, and a charismatic figure. And he did a series of editorial statements as well. So by 1850 there was actually a ground swell of interest in acquiring sufficient public space in the rapidly developing space of Manhattan. Here is a view of 1854. And I don't have a pointer, but you can see in the center there are two little rectangles. That is the Croton Reservoir, the receiving reservoir completed in 1844. And the space around it was relatively speaking still available for acquisition. It wasn't heavily developed. But this is the setting that New York was faced with in the 1840s. And by 1851 there was an effort to, or the first proposal was to take about 200 acres on the East River. And you can see it in the map on your left, the green area toward the lower right. That was known as Jones Wood, Jones's Wood. And it was surrounded by farmland owned by the Beekman family. And it was proposed that that would be a public park. But Downing came out and said 150 acres, you know, absolutely inadequate. And the stars were in alignment. And so by 1853 you have an 800 acre section centered on the reservoir that was chosen for Central Park. And then the question was who was going to design that park. And a very second rate design had been proposed. And then the man on the left of these two, an English architect named Calvert Vaux, who had come in 1851 to New York to work for and with Downing. Downing died in 1852 tragically in a collision of a fire of a paddle wheeler on the Hudson River. But Vaux wanted to honor his memory and the importance of good romantic English garden design. And so he arranged that there be a competition, a public competition for the design of Central Park. And he enlisted Frederick Law Olmsted, a young writer, an editor, an abolitionist, a passionate man to go in and design Central Park with him. And this is the famous Greensward Plan of 1858, which the two of them put together and which won the competition. And it made a long, narrow, incredibly unsympathetic space site into one of the world's greatest parks. It took the most difficult project and made something out of it. And it did so by creating a series of semi-submerged cross streets, which many of you I know must know, that still work linking the east and west sides of Manhattan. And then by treating the landscape as a series of pictures. So it is actually a series of paintings, if you will, in nature. The proposal was brilliantly produced with a series of illustrated boards. And I show you just two that include the plan at the top and then photographs of the existing view, chosen view by Matthew Brady. And then painted suggestions of what the views would look like in the finished project. And this is an aerial view of 1864 showing the design that was approved and that then Olmsted brilliantly achieved, had most of it built before the end of the 1860s and during the Civil War. So Olmsted, and this is the kind of work that he did, the cross, the transverse road, you see a photograph, the lower left. I walk through one of those when I'm not in the park. They're still exactly the same today, 100 and some years later. And then look at the top. That is a view through a cross section of one of the bridges over the transverse. And you'll see a roadway for carriages, a walkway for people, a bridal path for horses. So all of the different transportation modes segregated in a way that was revolutionary. And then to tie this into Portland a little bit, you'll see that in addition to Central Park, he did Riverside Park at the top of the upper slide. And he did Morningside Park, a little lower down. And details and photographs of Morningside Park are shown at the bottom. This by 1868. So Olmsted was doing a series of perimeter parks as well as a Central Park. Now Olmsted lived until 1903. Olmsted and his son and the partnership were brought into, well, they worked for so many American cities. But in the late 1890s, they first came to Portland and met with James P. Baxter and were engaged with the issue of how to do similar work in Portland. So there is Olmsted as an old man in the photo on the top left. Olmsted as an old man painted by John Singer Sergeant and the portrait that hangs at Biltmore today next to Richard Morris Hunt, his colleague in that. And then on the right is your great leading citizen of Portland, James Baxter. And then here are a couple of plans of Portland. The one on the upper right, 1832, which I believe is the year that Portland was incorporated. And then at the bottom, 1850 or 52. And you'll see that on the extremities right and left, your eastern and western proms are already in place. And I was amazed to read in that wonderful book that Portland Landmarks has published about the parks of Portland. That those were first laid out in the mid-1830s or were chosen as things that needed to be preserved. Then the image on the left is of Dearing's Oaks, which was completed in the 1870s. And this follows really very closely upon what Olmsted and his firm was doing in New York and very much an American story. This is the master plan done after Olmsted's death but by his son, 1905, which incorporates both Dearing's Oaks, the eastern west prom and Baxter Boulevard. And it's a different shape but the philosophy is the same as New York City. And there at the top you'll see the same treatment of walkways, bicycle paths in this case, automobiles in the 1920s. Very suggestive of the parks in New York. Now, let's switch gears again. A capsule history of New York City architecturally. I divided into really three great eras. John Jacob Astor, the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers as families and individual real estate people who transformed the visual and physical shape of New York. And this is the north side of Washington Square, a row of terrace houses built in the 1820s in a photograph of the 1920s. But this is the city that Astor was so involved with. The floor plan, the footprint was the 1811 map and then all of these row houses, usually 25 foot fronts. Some of these are a little bigger but was the footprint and he kept buying and selling and so did everybody else. And every year in the 20s and 30s, one or 2,000 of these houses were built. And that was the face of New York really until after the Civil War when the great new fortunes began to introduce a different type of architecture. So here we have, on the left, we've got the Vanderbilts twins, if you will. This is 50th to 51st Street, 51st to 2nd, William Henry Vanderbilts houses. And I compare them to the, what is it, is that the spring houses here in Portland, you know, a pair of, what are they, competitive brothers probably. Uncle and nephew. All right, there we are. Sounds just like the Vanderbilts. But the scale a little different but otherwise the idea very much the same. Do these survive? Well, you're one up on New York because all the great Vanderbilts houses in New York on 5th Avenue were destroyed and it's tragic. But those were by herder brothers with extraordinary interiors. And then the next block, which you could see just at the right of that slide. The Great House by Richard Morris Hunt for William Kissam Vanderbilt, 1879. The Loire Valley in Manhattan. And I'm just back from Biltmore. So if you like this kind, you can still see it in Asheville. It's superb. But what do we have here in Portland? Well, we have Victoria Mansion and the greatest Italian villa perhaps in America. In the process of a wonderful restoration, Arlene. So once again, you're one up on us. You've kept your major building. What replaced those Vanderbilt houses? Well, Rockefeller Center. So Vanderbilt to Rockefeller. At least in this case, the greatest of its period is replaced by the greatest of the next period. And it remains one of the great, I think, successes in urban commercial real estate and design. And this brings me to the odd role that museums play in historic preservation. Because art museums tend to collect things that are collectible and put them together in galleries and all. But how do you preserve architecture? And this is part of the location of the Vanderbilt. Well, this is a brownstone West 54th Street. That was lived in by the elder, the senior John D. Rockefeller in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. St. Thomas's Church is visible in the background in this photograph. And there is the sculpture garden at MoMA today from this site. And that's another view of the house back in its heyday on the right. And on the left is the extraordinary 1881 dressing room from that house, which was created in 1881 to three by a firm called George Shasty, who is almost unknown today but is coming back. This is a house that was torn down in the 1930s for MoMA by the Rockefellers. But they realized the interiors were important and offered rooms like this to the Met, to Brooklyn, to the Museum of the City of New York. Well, Brooklyn took the Moorish smoking room. The Museum of the City of New York took this dressing room in the adjacent bedroom. And the Met was so involved with the colonial revival that it didn't do anything. And yet we have just finished installing that room in the American wing next to a wonderful interior of the same date by McKimmedon White because the Museum of the City of New York, which had put the rooms in the attic, has rearranged its priorities. So I'm pleased to say that we are custodians of a very great, very rare survival of the aesthetic period, which will open up next year in the American wing. And on the subject of the Met with preservation, we were able, long before my time, to preserve the wonderful white marble, ionic-columbed facade of the Branch Bank of the United States from the north side of Wall Street, 1824, upper-right image. You see it as installed as the facade of the Met's American wing a hundred years later in 1924. And then the lower left you see it in 1980 when we first opened our courtyard. And then on the lower right you see it when the First Lady cut the ribbon on the 1909 reopening of the American wing. So the American wing art museums, we have a peripheral role in preservation when things cannot be preserved in C2. Now, we've talked about city planning, we've talked about great buildings, all of these things. Let's say a word or two about what really matters, which is individuals and people. So key to this preservation movement, which is not run by the federal government, but it's all about people. Let me start oddly enough perhaps with Robert Moses. You all know him from Robert Kara's 1974 biography of the Power Broker, a reviled man who brought in superhighways and tore down neighborhoods in New York, Long Island. He started out in the mid-thirties Governor Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, upper left, made him in charge of the parks. And for 40 years he, with an iron hand, ruled, but he was responsible for many great things. And the lower left you see one of Jones's Beach out on Long Island. Great, great public works, a huge series of great public swimming pools, all the parkways to and from New York and Long Island. But power did get a little to his head probably. And you see fortunately one of his last efforts that didn't succeed the cross Manhattan arterial, the lower Manhattan expressway, which would have done so much to destroy the cast iron district. But part of the effort to rebuild American cities without too much sensitivity toward historic buildings. Now, New York City landmarks preservation, it's really all about two buildings, two iconic public buildings, private public buildings, privately owned buildings for public use. This is 1904, the first publication of the model by the Pennsylvania Railroad for its great New York station. These are the views. How many in this room remember ever being in it? Well, okay. It was at its, looking at its worst and couldn't have been more ground at the time. This is what, this, when I moved to New York City to go to graduate school in the fall of 1964, they were just beginning to tear out the steps as you see in the photograph on the right. And I watched from the Amtrak trains as they dumped the stones into the, into the meadowlands, which you see on the left, year after year. This was, as I said in the chronology, this was a great tragedy that caused the public to rise up. Penn, Pennsylvania Station, was torn down two years after Union Station here. But it served in a way of the same sacrificial purpose to energize an effort to keep it from happening again. The other iconic public building is Grand Central. Penn Station was 1914 by McKinney and White. Grand Central was Senior Moment, 1903 to 1913 by Warren and Wetmore. In many ways, an equally grand, maybe not quite as grand, but incredibly important, wonderful public building. And it was at risk at the same time. This is what got built in 1963 by the developer Emory Roth, by the modern architect Pietro Baluski. And the effort was to build, the plan was to build another monumental tower directly on top of the surviving station. And that effort was thwarted by a Supreme Court decision. And then I mentioned Scenic Hudson. I mentioned Con Edison and their proposal of 1963 for a pumped storage. Here it is. The preservation group Scenic Hudson was established the following year. 17 years later, 1981, the landmark Scenic Hudson ruling, which the court said that for a public purpose like this, you could prevent this kind of development. Now, those are the two key buildings. Now, how about a few of the key players? Some of whom I had the pleasure of knowing. The first one was Margot Gale, born in 1908 and died in 2008. A stalwart to the end. She began in the 50s. Her first effort was to have the clock in the tower of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, which was Frederick Withers from the 1870s, reactivated. And that was the foot in the door to have the building saved. She persuaded Mayor Wagner not to tear it down. And it got preserved. It's now an anchor of the West Village. And here, for her 100th birthday, a series of, I could tell you about all these people, but she was a force, and she's with Philip Johnson in the bottom right there. He's got the round glasses. And here, my claim to fame, 1974, she inscribed a copy of her book on cast iron architecture. For me, a treasured proof that I was around. So Margot Gale, she really was Ms. Cast Iron. She gave out magnets to people so they could test if their buildings were made of stone or of iron. Then there was a couple in Brooklyn named Evelyn and... Oh, God. I have to look up. My memory is just going... Everett. Evelyn and Everett Ortner. In 1963, they bought a row house in Park Slope. Not one of the ones you see here. But there were miles of these brownstone houses in New York. And they, in 1968, formed the Brownstone Revival Committee, a private sort of grassroots group to start acquiring and promote the creation of historic neighborhoods. And so they focused on the brownstone, Margot on the cast iron. And then James Marston Fitch, who was a professor at Columbia, and established and was the long-time head of the first American historic preservation study in this country. He had his students disassemble one of the earliest cast iron buildings, the Bogartis-designed Lang Stores of 1849, and mark all the elements, which were then put in a vacant lot. And then thieves came along and stole them all. But nevertheless, Jim Fitch is the one who really taught the first generation of American preservationists. Then, perhaps the best-known name of all, Ada Louise Huxtable, who started out as a curator of design at MoMA. And then she was hired as the first critic, architectural critic in any American newspaper for the New York Times in the, I think it was 1963. In 1970, she received a Pulitzer Prize, and there she is in the lower left with Punch Sulzberger, the then publisher of the Times. She lived until just a couple of years ago, into her 90th years, a lovely lady with an incredibly sharp, perceptive pen. Lots been done. There are lots of challenges. Here's one of the great public institutions in New York, the Carrera and Hastings New York Public Library. The last piece of writing that Ada Louise Huxtable published was a tirade against Sir Norman Foster's, or is it Lord Norman Foster's, the English Architect's proposal to basically gut much of the interior of that, to take the stacks out and put in a, well, a reading room or perhaps a Starbucks in that building. But so in New York City, the interior of one of our landmark buildings is at risk. Here's something more positive. This is Betsy Barlow Rogers, who single-handedly established the Central Park Conservancy in 1980 and raised hundreds of millions of dollars so that that park that we saw something about its history earlier is now in better condition and has never looked so beautiful. Here she is, 2013, with Jay Lorenzo on the left, the Secretary General of the UN, Secretary Ban and Ann Van Ingen of the New York Conservancy at an award ceremony. So lots going on with Central Park and preserving there, but we have a huge issue right on the palisades right now when a Korean electronics firm is proposing an eight-story office building that will totally interrupt the preserved view of from the cloisters and from Manhattan across the palisades. And that is a battle that is underway as we speak. I think the thing that New York lacks and I'm here tonight to work on is getting someone who we can bring in to take care of it all. Thank you. What's his name? Thank you very much.