Co-Sponsored by the Merchant’s House Museum

Join us for a presentation by Anthony Wood on his new book, Servant of Beauty: Landmarks, Secret Love, and the Unimagined Life of an Unsung New York Hero.

This is the true story of the interplay between the two all-consuming passions of this unheralded civic champion: his love of beauty in the public realm that would forever change New York City, and his love for a younger man that would forever change Bard. Albert Sprague Bard (1866-1963) fought for cities to have the right to protect their beauty, propelling him into a David versus Goliath combat with Robert Moses and paving the way, after four decades of advocacy, for New York City’s Landmarks Law (1965).

Today the law protects over 37,000 buildings, mostly in historic neighborhoods, and it has inspired cities across the nation. Bard was delighted and disappointed by his two enduring loves: one for a troubled younger man, the other for the beauty of New York City. Persevering against the odds, resilient in the face of disappointment, and a man who became embroiled in a spy scandal at the same time as he served as a stand-in father to three, Bard is an uncelebrated renaissance man and civic hero whose story will inspire and inform generations of citizens who continue his battle to preserve the beauty of the places they love.

Anthony C. Wood is a nationally recognized preservationist who started as a preservation advocate in New York City and has gone on to work for, found, serve on the board of, and chair preservation organizations including Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, the Preservation League of New York State, and Partners for Sacred Places, winning awards such as the 2020 New York Landmarks Conservancy Lucy G. Moses Award for Preservation Leadership. He has served on the adjunct faculty at Columbia University and he founded the non-profit New York Preservation Archive Project, whose mission is to document, preserve, and celebrate the history of preservation in New York. Wood is also the award-winning author of Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmark (Routledge, 2008), and has been featured in several documentaries.