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In Preserving New York, Anthony C. Wood sets out to debunk the myth. A professor of historic preservation at Columbia University and chair of the New York Preservation Archive Project, Wood has authored an impressively researched account of the people, places, and events that led to the landmarks law. The loss of Penn Station was a "key chapter" in that evolution, Wood writes, "but for it to be seen as either the entire or primary story … is to rob New York City of the richer, more complex, and inspiring true story of how New Yorkers won the right to protect their landmarks."
That story, Wood contends, begins with several earlier battles to protect notable buildings—including the 1803 St. John's Chapel (demolished in 1918) and the 1812 City Hall (saved in the late 1930s). Beginning in 1939, a nascent preservation coalition successfully challenged city planner and master intimidator Robert Moses, whose proposals to construct a bridge (and later a tunnel) between Battery Park and Brooklyn would have destroyed much of the historic character of lower Manhattan. Of particular concern was Moses' plan to raze Castle Clinton, an 1811 fortification that later served as an immigrant processing facility. Led by George McAneny, who helped found the group that would become the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the coalition won support for saving Castle Clinton until the structure's 1950 transfer to the federal government and designation as a national monument. Efforts to inventory the city's historic buildings and recognize its neighborhoods continued in the postwar period, despite the loss of such significant buildings as the 1854 Brevoort Hotel in Greenwich Village, the Brokaw Mansions on the Upper East Side (1890-1911), the 41-story Singer Building (1908), and, of course, Penn Station, built in 1910.