A primer featuring some of the writer?s insightful columns about the city?s architectural history The passing earlier this week of Christopher Gray, architectural historian and writer of the New York Times?s Streetscapes column, robs the city, and world, of one of its foremost sages of the city street. His insightful and engaging Sunday column, which he wrote nearly 1,500 installments of between 1987 and 2014, dispensed architecture history with wit and style, a never-to-be-finished serial about the changing city as well as its many characters. As he once wrote: ?to riff on Mae West, 'Honey, architecture has nothing to do with it.'?
Unlike many architecture and real estate writers who spend most of their time examining important buildings during their pristine, stage-managed opening, or tragic demolition and destruction, Gray focused on the times in-between, when buildings become more than plans or symbols but living parts of the city, as well as odd, eccentric, and everyday structures with hidden stories. A column about his first apartment opens with a paragraph straight out of a novel: ?I was lucky in 1970, when I backed into my first apartment, a $45-a-month railroad flat built in 1887 at 1422 Third Avenue, south of 81st Street. It was with apartment 2C I learned how to circumvent the rent laws and that when it comes to housing in New York, even a friend will stab you in the back.?

Office of Metropolitan History
Christopher Gray

Gray also...