Servant of Beauty: A Conversation About Albert Bard
Anthony Wood and Peg Breen discuss Bard's four-decade battle with Robert Moses and his role in creating New York City's Landmarks Law, which protects 37,000 buildings.
Why we picked this
Robert Moses gets all the headlines, but Albert Bard spent forty years fighting him to a draw — and won. Every landmarked building in New York exists partly because of a civic lawyer almost nobody knows. This is his story.
Albert Bard (1866–1963) was a civic lawyer who spent four decades doing something everyone told him was impossible: limiting Robert Moses. Working largely without institutional support, Bard championed the legal right of cities to protect their own architectural heritage, engaging Moses in a prolonged battle that culminated — two years after Bard’s death — in New York City’s Landmarks Law of 1965. That legislation now protects more than 37,000 buildings across the city.
Anthony Wood, author of Servant of Beauty, brings Bard’s largely forgotten story to the General Society Library in a conversation with Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Together they trace Bard’s intellectual formation, his legal strategies, and the civic vision that made him such a persistent thorn in the side of the city’s most powerful builder. This is architectural history as political biography.
The story of how New York’s built environment got its legal protections is also a story about the long, unglamorous work of civic advocacy — and about what it takes to outlast the people who think cities should be remade for efficiency rather than beauty. Tickets $5–$15.