Revitalizing the Post-Covid City: What We Can Learn from the Past

Reader note: The following article is adapted from Lizabeth Cohen's Keynote Address "Revitalizing the Post-Covid City: What We Can Learn from the Past," presented at Preserving the Recent Past 4, on March 20, 2025, in Boston.

Good morning. We are gathered here over the next two days to discuss strategies for preserving and conserving modern architecture and design in the United States, specifically the built environment that has emerged since the Second World War. Although this era may barely seem like history in an American city as old as Boston, where we now sit, we are in fact talking about the architectural production of eight decades.

Not surprisingly, much of our discussion at this conference will focus on particular buildings and sites and the architects who designed them, as we share approaches to saving representative fragments of the fast-disappearing modernist legacy of the postwar U.S.

But one building’s preservation is not so easily isolated. No building stands alone in space or even in time. Inevitably, it is part of multiple contexts that we need to be mindful of and seek to remember as well. I am an historian by discipline, not an architect, architectural historian, or preservationist. My focus has been on the history of the United States in the 20th century, with particular attention to cities in the postwar era. And as an historian, I see my job as putting people, places, and events in context to better interpret their meaning and significance.

Therefore, I will set out today to move us beyond the singular architectural specimen to illuminate several contexts that I think are crucial to consider – and memorialize – in preserving postwar modern architecture and landscapes. And I hope that we can carry awareness of the importance of these contexts into the panel discussions that will follow at the conference. I am pleased to see that quite a number of sessions will, in fact, explore these issues. My contexts for today include that of history, of surroundings, and of use; in other words, contexts of time, of space, and of utility. Let’s begin with History.

The Context of Time

Historic preservation has had many successes since its embedding in the legal code in the mid-1960s, but it still struggles with the societal tension between protecting the material achievements of the past and welcoming new creations in the present and future that convey continued economic and cultural vitality.

The post-WWII historic preservation movement, in fact, was born out of this tension. After the war ended, American cities were stagnant. During the previous decade and a half of the Great Depression followed by austerity on the homefront, most cities saw the erection of very few new buildings. Residential projects, as well as business investments downtown, were put on hold. Consequently, as the postwar era dawned, a huge housing crisis unfolded, as soldiers returned from war and long-delayed marriages and births put even more pressure on an inadequate and deteriorating housing stock.

Moreover, as Black Southerners moved north with the Second Great Migration in search of good industrial jobs and other opportunities, housing became even tighter – and more racially segregated.

Although there were a number of possible solutions, the one that the nation embraced was to grow the suburbs by cutting highways through what had been farms and forests to improve access to urban hinterlands.

And to incentivize the construction of new housing there, the government underwrote mortgages through the FHA and the Veterans Administration. As a result, cities lost population, investors, and tax dollars, while their larger metropolitan areas boomed. And alongside mushrooming suburban housing developments rose suburban industrial and office parks and retail shopping centers that challenged the primacy and viability of urban downtowns. What was to be done? [1]

Although the federal government’s incentives to postwar suburbanization have grabbed most of the attention, Washington also undertook a parallel effort to revitalize cities, what is generally referred to as “urban renewal.” Its implementation through the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 represented a hope that cities could be renewed by removing the “blight” of decades of deterioration and disinvestment and building anew, ideally in architectural styles that demonstrated a forward-looking embrace of the future as the U.S. aspired to a golden age of postwar prosperity. It had a head start, after all, as the major industrialized nation whose manufacturing capacities and infrastructure survived the war most intact.

I don’t need to review with this audience the many problems with urban renewal, particularly in its earliest phase in the 1950s, where cities from San Francisco to Boston experienced misguided demolitions of whole neighborhoods, often lived in by immigrant and minority residents, and their replacement with solutions that were expected to make cities more viable for the future as they faced mass suburbanization. These solutions included superblocks; curtain-wall office buildings; public, middle-class, and luxury housing built as towers-in-the-park; new highways and parking to bring, and keep, suburbanites downtown; the replacement of longstanding commercial cores with suburban-style malls; and so much more. One can find evidence of these efforts in almost every city, whether the West End of Boston, the Oak Street neighborhood in New Haven, the Lower Hill in Pittsburgh, the Fillmore District in San Francisco, or Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in Detroit.

I rehearse this history because it is important to remember that many of the buildings we are trying to save today were in fact the replacements  intended to mark a revived commitment to the city, whether new offices, housing, schools, city halls, and more. By way of example, at our doorstep here today is Boston’s Government Center.

Its centerpiece is the Brutalist-style Boston City Hall, which very recently the Boston Landmarks Commission recommended, and city officials approved, for landmark designation – to the cheers of some and the loathing of others.[2] Moreover, it was the loss of so many historic structures with urban renewal that spurred the passage of landmark legislation, creating entities like the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965 and the Boston Landmarks Commission a decade later, as well as the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, with its National Register of Historic Places.

Therefore, as we work to save buildings like Boston City Hall for their architectural significance, we should appreciate this origins story and not forget that these structures are part of a longer urban narrative of booms and busts, trials and errors, and good buildings that arose out of bad decisions. As Lewis Mumford is often quoted as saying, “In a city, time becomes visible.”[3] Preserving that historical trajectory should be a goal.

I should also note here something that is often overlooked. Although the urban renewers were responsible for much destruction of the historic fabric of American cities, sometimes they were the ones who came to recognize the importance of preserving vestiges of the past. In Boston, for example, urban redeveloper Ed Logue (who is the protagonist of my recent book Saving America’s Cities) became convinced that historic buildings surrounding the new Government Center he was constructing should be saved, such as the Sears Block and Sears Crescent, Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, the Old State House, Dock Square, the Custom House, and the Blackstone Block. As he told an American Society of Planning Officials meeting in Boston in 1964, after “a wrestling match” over “what buildings we were going to save…wherever possible we decided to try to keep them and work our new plans around them.”[4]

And soon thereafter prominent architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable praised Boston for having “the only major urban renewal agency with an official architectural historian on its staff” and for embracing “preservation and rehabilitation…well aware of the sensitive problems of combining the old city with essential new construction.”[5] From begrudgingly accommodating the champions of historic Boston like Walter Muir Whitehill, Logue himself in time urged greater “sensitivity to the relationship between the new and the old…that is all-important in maintaining the fabric of the city.”[6] By the 1980s, he in fact expressed fear that the decade-long economic boom was bringing too many massive “glass boxes” [that is Logue’s language] and undermining the visually exciting, delicate balance between the historic and the modern.[7]

But even as Logue saved these 18th and 19th century Boston buildings, he tore down the long-established honky-tonk red-light district of Scollay Square to construct Government Center, and his approach to preservation removed the historic structures he saved from their contexts, museum-izing them you might say. The buildings survived, but they were ripped from their historic surroundings and selected with a rather narrow definition of what mattered historically – Faneuil Hall was historic, Scollay Square with its nightclubs, burlesque theaters, pawnshops, tattoo parlors, and amusement arcades was not. We are fortunate that over time, appreciation has grown for greater variety in our definition of what is historic, with more attention to vernacular buildings and cultural landscapes. So too has our recognition that a city should aim for a more seamless collage of old and new architectural styles in balancing preserving with constructing. Nonetheless the tension between keeping the old and building anew persists today, as does the challenge of not icon-izing one historic building apart from its larger historical setting.

The Context of Space

The second context I want to draw your attention to follows directly from the mistakes of these early historic preservation efforts: that is, that surroundings matter. A building is part of a gestalt – of a block, a neighborhood, a district – and one building alone cannot capture the significance of setting. It is also worth remembering that most architects whose buildings we hope to preserve designed them with an eye to more than the one plot of land on which their building would stand. They inevitably looked around at the future building’s neighbors. Of course, it is often not possible to do more than save one building deemed to be of value, whether defined as architectural, cultural, or historical. But we should make every effort to document, and if possible preserve, the historical setting in which a structure first emerged. Minimally we can strive to communicate that larger setting to enrich the significance of what has been preserved, whether a former industrial area, a theater district, or an immigrant neighborhood. Historic districts, of course, do capture this larger context of surroundings; preserving a significant slice of a whole community like a Chinatown speaks volumes about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. But even if it is not possible to save more than a single building, the built environment that once surrounded it can still be documented and conveyed through photographs, exhibitions, oral histories, or other means. To do any less is to repeat the error of the early urban renewers who too often made the physical remains of historic Boston into quaint relics within the modernizing city.

There are many examples one could point to, however, where the larger setting surrounding an historic structure has sufficiently remained to help tell a bigger story than any one building can. Here, for instance, is the warehouse arts district of New Orleans where hotels, restaurants, residences, and art and history museums now thrive, but the original industrial character of the neighborhood has not been lost.

How much richer is the significance of a preserved building – whether a hotel or art center – when it is embedded in the city’s economic history as the district where in the 19th century goods were stored as they passed through New Orleans’ bustling port. In the early 20th century, moveover, many of the warehouses were converted to manufacturing. As that economy in turn faded, and the area was faced with demolition, it was miraculously saved and revitalized after New Orleans hosted the 1984 World’s Fair and made use of buildings in what was then known as the “Old Warehouse District.” This new appreciation significantly broadened the concept of historic preservation in New Orleans beyond the French Quarter and the Garden District.[8]

Another case where the preservation of full surroundings makes saving any one building more compelling is the residential area of Wooster Square in New Haven, Connecticut.

Here, an Italian working-class community was actually preserved by urban renewers once the Federal Housing Act of 1954 allowed for rehabilitation, and not just demolition, of structures and neighborhoods deemed to be “blighted.” That crucial change in the law made it possible, in the words of Ed Logue (who led this effort before moving on to Boston) to “rebuild a neighborhood with a scalpel not a bulldozer.” For example, grants funded with federal dollars became available to local homeowners to undertake much needed improvements to their property, though those renovations often pushed rents higher for those Wooster Square residents who rented and didn’t own. And although the New Haven Urban Redevelopment Agency was pleased to be working closely with community members, many of them parishioners in the local Italian Catholic Church under the leadership of their parish priest, there emerged a racial dimension that greatly disturbed Logue. The neighborhood homeowners hoped that urban renewal would not only preserve their buildings, but would also limit the growing number of African American residents who had increasingly been drawn to the neighborhood by its low rents.[9] Hence, the preservation of the Wooster Square area as a whole reveals not only a neighborhood that survived intact architecturally, but also allows for analysis of the complex racial story often entangled in urban renewal.

So while the context of history locates a building on the vertical register of chronological time, the context of surroundings locates that same building spatially, putting it in a horizontal frame of reference. 

The Context of Use

The third context that matters emerges out of recognizing a building’s former surroundings, but it focuses specifically on the use to which the structure was originally put. Whereas a few buildings warrant preservation with as little changed as possible, the survival of most will require adaptive reuse. But that does not have to mean burying the history of how it functioned at opening and how it evolved as time passed. For example, a 19th century mill building that is now upscale apartments works well for its new purpose because of the requirements of its original use, such as the need for big windows to bring in light for workers to toil.

Or the Ferry Building in San Francisco lends itself so effectively today to being a site of small, locally owned shops and restaurants and a farmer’s market in what is now called The Marketplace, because of its long, narrow structure, which was originally designed for train and then ferry transit.

Understanding a building’s past use can also contribute to inventing new uses that creatively adapt structural characteristics to contemporary purposes. Survival may indeed depend on just that flexibility.

Consider how much attention there has been post-Covid to how to revitalize our increasingly abandoned urban cores. Moody’s, for example, recently documented an historically high 20 percent vacancy in downtown office space nationally; a Conference Board survey arrived at an even worse estimate, claiming that occupancy rates post-pandemic have settled around 50 percent, leaving one office cubicle empty for each one filled. Boston calculated its office vacancy rate at a record-breaking high of 23.2 percent at the end of 2024. In other measures, 20,000 fewer people work in downtown Boston than they did five years ago, leading to about half as many work trips to the downtown core.[10] These declines in work traffic, moreover, have dangerous spill-over effects for retail and other commercial activity, public transit usage, and tax revenues. Faced with this crisis, the solution many cities are seeking is the renovation of office buildings into residences, thereby solving another common crisis – a massive shortage of housing, particularly that which is affordable.

What we are learning, however, is that many glass and metal office towers of recent vintage do not lend themselves well to this transformation, given their large floor plates, open-plan layouts, inoperable windows, and ill-suited mechanical, electrical, ventilation, and plumbing systems. Building codes and zoning laws can also be challenging to meet. Rather, it is the office buildings of an earlier era – often smaller in footprint, with windows that open to let in fresh air and natural light – that transition better.

Ironically, a city like Youngtown, Ohio, which has kept its downtown buildings intact out of a paucity of new economic investment since its steel-based economy collapsed in the late 1970s and 1980s is better positioned to offer its substantial senior population pedestrian-friendly and convenient downtown living than nearby Pittsburgh, which when its steel industry similarly tanked had the will and the capital to construct new high rise office towers in its center.[11]

Pittsburgh, like so many American cities today, is viewing a growth in residential as the solution to its decline of 26 percent in daily downtown activity, prompting the city to collaborate with the State of Pennsylvania in a much-publicized Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, Pennsylvania’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program, and the Pittsburgh Downtown Conversion Program.[12]

As the city’s mayor Ed Gainey has put it, “Downtown is the heart and soul of the entire region, and these conversion projects are a critical piece of making sure that Downtown remains that way for generations to come. Everyone who works Downtown, should have an opportunity to live Downtown, and as we move to transform historic office space into housing, we must have affordability in mind in order to build a Downtown for all.”[13]

Yet the more prosperous postindustrial city of Pittsburgh – with its office towers – faces greater challenges than deindustrialized Youngstown in bringing residential life to downtown. Despite its advantage, however, Youngstown will still have a hard road ahead, with ongoing declines in public subsidies, which are usually crucial to making the numbers work for developing affordable housing. Instead, Youngtown’s leaders will have to depend on the more limited tools of property tax abatements and inclusionary requirements that cities can wield on their own.

The lesson I draw here is that to maximize the lifespan of a building, architects when designing should keep in mind potential future uses. It also suggests that as we preserve existing buildings, we need to be as flexible as possible in turning them to new purposes. That may require greater openness to changes in interiors and even exteriors than preservationists often favor and preservation laws sometimes allow.

Architectural critic Justin Davidson, in an essay titled “The Long View: Building for Rebuilding,” argues that “today’s architects should at least try to seduce the preservationists of, say 2100, into according their work due respect. . . .Wise people plan for the aging of their bodies. A wise society should plan for the aging of its physical plant, too.” He points, by way of example, to the fact that we are able today to reuse 19th and early 20th century structures because, “by today’s standards, they were extravagantly built. . . . Industrial-age builders kitted out their world with faith in the long term, and later generations kept fixing up the holdovers, wearing them down, and fixing them up again.”[14] With that ideal of an architecture conducive to longevity and constant reinvention, architect Vishaan Chakrabarti – himself no stranger to the capitalist dynamics of real estate – regrets that despite the discovery of how difficult it is to convert vacant office buildings to residential, “little is discussed about how our building stock became so inflexible in the first place, how it devolved owing to the specialist demands of corporate finance and cookie-cutter real estate.”[15]

A relevant case to study in considering adaptive reuse is Paul Rudolph’s Government Service Center in Boston, which in the urban renewal era was a major component of the Government Center complex aimed at rejuvenating downtown.

For many years since its opening in 1971, it has been disparaged by public officials who have tried to tear it down for occupying valuable downtown real estate with what they judged to be too limited a return. Short of demolition, some gubernatorial administrations have tried – unsuccessfully – to put it to new uses, such as a mix of offices, commerce, and life science laboratories. Today, Governor Maura Healey’s administration has a new plan, to convert it to affordable housing, which Boston seriously lacks. So this latest reincarnation of the Rudolph building will try to use it to meet today’s need to revitalize downtown through making it more residential.

This is ironic, as a half-century ago Rudolph’s project was constructed on the ruins of Boston’s West End immigrant residential neighborhood to help populate the downtown area with more workers and clients of Massachusetts State social services. I hope that preservationists will support this new use, which will surely require tremendous change in the building’s interior and exterior. Adapting it in this way will keep within the fabric of downtown Boston a building remarkable for its exterior texture of corrugated or corduroy concrete, its monumental scale and siting, its unique sequencing of interior space, and its reminder of the effort in the 1960s to use the power of the public purse and the physical presence of government to turn around a city that was in dire economic straits. Returning the West End to residential use today, as it had once been before, is part of a cycle of urban visioning and revisioning that should be integrated into the important story that this building can – and should – tell.[16]

Conclusion

Putting a building in its multiple contexts – in its place in history, in its original setting as well as how those surroundings have changed over time, and in how its uses have evolved – should thus be inseparably linked to preserving it as an architectural structure. To landmark a building or site should be taken literally to mean marking that land in time, in space, and in utility. Contexualizing a building in this way should thereby make it even easier to argue for its survival into the future, as it demonstrates persistence and flexibility along multiple continuums. If residential transformations stall and fail to bring new life to downtowns as urban planners have hoped, cities might then try adapting existing structures to other uses, such as recreation, entertainment, the arts, and “third places” like libraries, even if their adaptive reuse will require major reengineering.[17] There could be no better way to insure against the pitfall of making “quaint relics” out of postwar architecture, or losing them altogether to the bulldozer.

Embracing the importance of context and appreciating how sites emerged out of a particular moment in history, have related to their surroundings, and have used space should also have a bearing on how we design new buildings in 2025 to provide future generations with insight into our built environment today. The Trump administration’s recent Executive Order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” calling for federal public buildings to “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to . . . ennoble the United States,” is a not-very-subtle rejection of modern design.

Resurrecting solutions from the past and imposing them onto the present violates all that I have been arguing for today.[18] Only if architecture truly reflects options authentic to its own time – in style, materials, values, spatial configurations, environmental approaches, setting, financial advantages and constraints, and more – will it be worthy of preservation in the future. Only by serving as a genuine window into an era, not imitating the past, can architecture and landscapes prove fully deserving of being granted a new lease on life.

Thank you.

[1] For more on postwar suburbanization, see my two books A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003) and Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019), the latter also for extensive discussion of postwar urban renewal.

[2] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Boston Landmarks Commission Accepts Boston City Hall Landmark Designation, A Major Step Toward Its Preservation,” The Architect's Newspaper, December 11, 2024; Murray Whyte, “My Love/Hate Feelings for Boston’s City Hall,” The Boston Globe, January 31, 2025.

For more on the Boston City Hall and Government Center, see Lizabeth Cohen, “Building Government Center: The Boston Redevelopment Authority, 1960-1967,” 48-61, and Mark Pasnik, “Boston City Hall, Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles, 1962-69,” 94-105, in Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, and Chris Grimley, Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2015).

[3] Architectural Critic Paul Goldberger often makes use of this quotation. See a recent example: Paul Goldberger, “The State of Play: Landmarks at Sixty,” in Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, ed., Beyond Architecture: The New New York (New York: New York Review of Books, 2024), 62.

[4] Edward J. Logue, “The Boston Story,” Planning 1964: Selected Papers from the APSO National Planning Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, April 5-9, 1964 (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1964), 5, 7.

[5] Ada Louise Huxtable, “Renewal in Boston: Good and Bad,” The New York Times, April 19, 1964.

[6] Logue, “The Future of Boston, Its Architecture and Architects,” in Boston Society of Architects: The First Hundred Years, 1867-1967, ed. Marvin E. Goody and Robert P. Walsh (Boston: Boston Society of Architects, 1967), 101.

[7] Logue, “Could Growth Kill Boston’s Boom? Boston College Citizen Seminars, State Street Bank, May 19, 1987.

[8] See website Warehouse/Arts District History | New Orleans

[9] Logue quoted in Allan R. Talbot, The Mayor’s Game: Richard Lee of New Haven and the Politics of Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 137. New Haven was the first city to make use of the new provision in the Housing Act of 1954 for rehabilitation of existing structures; Fred Powledge, Model City: A Test of American Liberalism: One Town’s Efforts to Rebuild Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 39.

On  Wooster Square urban renewal in general, see New Haven Redevelopment Agency, Redevelopment and Renewal Plan for the Wooster Square Project Area (New Haven, CT: 1958, amended 1965); Mary Hommann, Wooster Square Design: A report on the Background, Experience, and Design Procedures in Redevelopment and Rehabilitation in an Urban Renewal District (New Haven, CT: New Haven Redevelopment Agency, 1965).

[10] Moody’s, “Q3 2024 Preliminary Trend Announcement: Multifamily Performance Steadied, Office Stress Continued to Manifest, Retail Vacancy Declined, And Industrial Cooled Down,” October 1, 2024; Conference Board statistic cited in Christopher Hawthorne, “Architects are Coaxing Downtowns Back to Life,” The New York Times, September 6, 2024; Collier’s market report cited in Michael Jonas, “Boston Office Tower Going on the Auction Block,” Commonwealth Beacon, February 21, 2025; Janelle Nanos, “Downtown Boston Is Trying To Find Its Post-Pandemic Identity. It’s Fighting An Uphill Battle,” The Boston Globe, March 19, 2025;  Jon Chesto, “Wu Expands Office-to-Residetial Conversion Program to Build Dorms. Here's How It Would Work,” The Boston Globe, March 27, 2025.

Also see Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, “The Future of Downtown Boston & Commercial Real Estate: Post-Covid Changes in Work-Life Patterns,” February 2025 by EBP for the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

[11]  More photographs of downtown Youngtown by Noritaka Minami will appear in the Harvard Design Magazine Issue 53, co-edited by Jeanne Gang and Lizabeth Cohen, which focuses on the theme of reuse and repair and will be released in early fall 2025.

[12]  Aakanksha Agarwal, “Six Key Data Points to Watch As Downtown Pittsburgh Transforms,” Public Source,  January 21, 2025. Also see Tim Schooley, “Woda Cooper Plans Affordable Housing Conversion of 100 Ross Street,” Pittsburgh Business Times, March 5, 2025; Tim Schooley and Jake Dabkowski, “About That $600M Revitalization: 5 Months In, Here’s the Status of Each of the Downtown Projects,” Pittsburgh Business Times, March 27, 2025.

[13] Quote from Mayor Grainey on Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh website.

[14] Justin Davidson, “The Long View: Building for Rebuilding,” in Diamonstein-Spielvogel, ed., Beyond Architecture, 87-89.

[15] Vishaan Chakrabarti, “Preserving the Future: Architecture as Archaeology,” in Diamonstein-Spielvogel, ed., Beyond Architecture, 92.

[16] Timothy M. Rohan, “The Dream Behind Boston’s Forbidding Government Service Center,” The Boston Globe, September 7, 2014; Boston Preservation Alliance, “Government Services Center,” c. 2022; Mass.gov Press Release, “Healey-Driscoll Administration Announces New Redevelopment Vision for Hurley, Lindemann Buildings; State Will Seek Private Developer to Build Housing and Drive Economic Development in Downtown Boston,” July 24, 2024; Maria-Cristina Florian, “Proposed for Mixed-Use Housing Transformation,” ArchDaily, July 30, 2024.

For more on the design of the Government Service Center, see Mark Pasnik, “Government Service Center, Paul Rudolph, 1962-71,” in Pasnik, Kubo and Grimley, Heroic, 118-27.

[17] There is a substantial literature about “third places,” including libraries. See, for a recent example, Alan Ehrenhalt, “Are Libraries the New ‘Third Places’ We Are Looking For?” Governing, February 18, 2025. Also see Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2024) and Nanos, “Downtown Boston Is Trying To Find Its Post-Pandemic Identity,” The Boston Globe, for more ideas of “third places,” and warning that it is important to keep these places public, not privatize them.

[18] The White House, “Promoting Beautiful Civic Architecture,” Executive Order, January 20, 2025. The Trump administration’s threat to slash the jobs of those preserving public artwork owned by the U.S. Government, along with its stated intention – temporarily paused – to sell off a large percentage of federal buildings, many of them historic, pose very serious challenges to the preservation of the nation’s artistic heritage, including those produced in the post-World War II period. Kriston Capps, “Trump Administration Slashes Division in Charge of 26,000 U.S. Artworks,” The Washington Post, March 11, 2025.

About the Author

Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Research Professor and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the History department of Harvard University. From 2011–2018 she was the Dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, which won the 2020 Bancroft Prize in American History. Among her other publications are A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America and Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, which won the 1990 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer.

Her writing has appeared in many edited volumes, academic journals, and popular venues, including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and American Prospect. Among many honors, Cohen has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute. She is an elected member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. She was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University during 2007–2008 and is a former president of the Urban History Association, which has just created an annual award in her honor, “The Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Cities and Political Power.” Cohen received her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley and her A.B. from Princeton University.