Nathan Silver, who chronicled a vanished New York, dies at 89
'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.'
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
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.'
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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.'
Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
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.
(
This article originally appeared in
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
When the Golden Gate Bridge turned 50, and a good city descended into chaos
It was a day for San Francisco to honor the Golden Gate Bridge. But by mid-morning on May 24, 1987, the gridlocked horde trying to celebrate its 50th anniversary got so desperate people were urinating off the side of the landmark. 'For a few, necessity overcame modesty, producing a rush to the railing and relief into the choppy waters below,' the Chronicle's Carl Nolte wrote the next day. That was just one indelible memory from the bridge's golden anniversary celebration, where bridge officials planned for 50,000 revelers and more than 800,000 showed up. Muni service was brought to a standstill. Hundreds of children were lost. And, most alarmingly in the moment, the bridge itself visibly flattened and warped under the weight of the masses. I called my mother, Jeanne Hartlaub, who attended the event, and she raged like it happened yesterday. 'What a freaking s—-show,' she said. 'We had no control over where we were going. I lifted my feet off the ground, and I was being carried by the crowd.' A recent search in the Chronicle archive revealed unpublished images — including one of a frustrated walker who hopped over the bridge railing to shimmy precariously sideways over the San Francisco Bay, plus time-lapse photos taken from high on the span that document the mounting chaos. I searched further in the archive to get the full story. Bridge organizers had reason to anticipate massive crowds would show up. More than 200,000 people arrived for the bridge's opening in 1937, when the Bay Area population was one third its 1987 size. A similar fiasco occurred in 1982 at the first 49ers Super Bowl victory parade, when City Hall planned for 25,000 fans, and half a million flooded Market Street. But when the Golden Gate Bridge Authority suggested closing the bridge for its 50th birthday, Marin County drivers were furious. A compromise was reached for the bridge walk to last just three hours and finish at 9:30 a.m., with a fireworks show later. Organizers said they expected just 50,000 attendees. They were off by a factor of more than 15. A growing crowd on the city side burst through the barricades at 5:45 a.m., and found another tidal wave of humanity coming from the opposite direction. 'For about 45 minutes it was fun,' the Chronicle reported. 'Then, at 6:10 a.m., a human wall from Marin hit a human wall from San Francisco and the Great Golden Gate Bridge Walk turned into the Great Golden Gate Gridlock.' Chronicle photos show a chaotic scene, including a baby in a stroller being passed above the throng like a crowd surfer at a punk rock show. In an era before texting and widespread cellular phone use, thousands were separated and lost. Walkers on the sidewalks shivered in 35-mile-per-hour winds, while those in the center shed clothes in the sweltering body heat. My mother's strongest memory was of a high school band from Pennsylvania who came to perform, but quickly pivoted to survival mode. 'Those kids in the band were fainting,' she said. 'They were passing them hand over hand over the crowd.' The Chronicle's Steve Rubenstein reported from a small 'lost and found' shack where Mayor Dianne Feinstein was helping children looking for their parents. 'I started out with four children,' bridge walker Sue Madrid said, as she approached the lost and found. 'Now I have one.' 'Officials lost count of the lost,' Rubenstein wrote. Miraculously, the Chronicle reported the next day that no one was seriously hurt or killed. The walk's organizers apologized and admitted the bridge should have been opened to pedestrians all day with a clearer flow of traffic. Days after the event, photos emerged showing the roadway flattened and slightly twisted under the mass of humanity, which led to some alarmist media reports. Engineers then and now insist there was no danger. ('There is no way to put enough people on that bridge to cause any structural failure,' bridge engineer Dan Mohn said at the time. 'You'd have to stick them three high and even that wouldn't do it.') But the day is still remembered by those who were on the shaking bridge as a near-catastrophe and a good time. While some were stuck at downtown BART stations — a frustrated crowd of 5,000 waited at the Embarcadero for buses that never arrived — there was a spirited we're-all-in-this-together mood at the bridge. Many brought bottles of champagne and shared with neighbors. 'I love this bridge,' Ollie Oliviera told the Chronicle, pulling out a bottle of cognac. 'It kept me sane in my younger years. I used to walk across the bridge to keep it together.' And my mother reports that my grandmother Louise Leal, a Mexican immigrant who loved San Francisco and walked the bridge on opening day in 1937, had the time of her life. My mother said she was also grateful … that she brought my grandmother's heart medication.
Boston Globe
21-06-2025
- Boston Globe
Nathan Silver, who chronicled a vanished New York, dies at 89
'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.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. ( This article originally appeared in
New York Times
21-06-2025
- New York Times
Nathan Silver, Who Chronicled a Vanished New York, Dies at 89
Nathan Silver, an architect whose elegiac 1967 book, 'Lost New York,' offered a history lesson about the many buildings that were demolished before the city passed a landmarks preservation law that might have offered protection from the wrecking ball, died on May 19 in London. He was 89. His brother, Robert, who is also an architect, said that he died in a hospital after a fall and subsequent surgery to repair a torn knee ligament. Mr. Silver's book — an outgrowth of an exhibition that he curated in 1964 while he was teaching at Columbia University's architecture school — was an indispensable photographic guide to what had vanished over many decades. It was published as the city's long-percolating preservation movement was working to prevent other worthy structures from being destroyed. '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.' 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.' 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; the 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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
