How, exactly, did historic preservation--the attempt to preserve and protect historically significant buildings, landscapes, and other material artifacts--first take root in New York City? To most historians, New York is infertile soil for historic preservation. The headline of New York's urban biography is the hegemony of commerce and the real estate market. In keeping with this seemingly self-evident truth, such a keen observer as Kenneth Jackson has argued that "History is for losers"--historic preservation was a preoccupation of social factions that were losing out in the contest to control New York's future. Turning the old adage "History is written by the winners" on its head, the "History is for losers" notion stems from the idea that cultural hegemony was, in the early twentieth century, falling like sand through the fingers of older, established elite groups and being collected by new elite groups led by entrepreneurs without Old New York social ties. As the "winners" were busy writing the future of the city, the "losers" busied themselves by trifling in the past. Richard Hofstadter promoted this view of preservation in his 1955 Age of Reform, and serious historical works have followed his lead, marginalizing preservation as "a decidedly un-New York sort of enterprise".

The archives paint a different picture. The preservation field was created in the period surrounding the turn of the twentieth century by some of the winners--not the losers--and was built into a serious and fairly successful reform movement. By dramatically overstating the case that the economy determines everything of consequence in New York, historians mistakenly suggest that the city's culture and landscape resulted from a zero-sum game in which commerce and memory are in competition, the latter ever beholden to the former. The story of preservation's emergence reminds us that historical memory has long been cultivated (by preservationists among others) despite the power of the market to erase the past. The pace of market-fed destruction has never been fast enough to eclipse memory altogether, and the fusion of commerce and historical memory formed in this period has proven more lasting than competition between them.