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David Garrard Lowe, a writer and architectural historian whose passion for historic preservation — and in particular for the Beaux-Arts mansions, museums and towers of the Gilded Age — helped stem the tide of urban renewal that was leveling large swaths of American cities in the decades after World War II, died on Sept. 21 in Manhattan. He was 91.
Terence Law, a close friend, confirmed the death, in a hospice.
As a child in Chicago, Mr. Lowe marveled at how architects like Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan had refashioned his city in the late 19th century, outfitting its homes, department stores and public buildings in neo-Classical and Baroque splendor, a resplendent mishmash of styles referred to as Beaux-Arts.
But by the 1960s, when he began writing about architecture, many of those buildings were falling victim to the wrecking ball, both in Chicago and in his adopted hometown, New York City.
Like many lovers of the Beaux-Arts era, he was shocked when, in the mid-1960s, developers tore down the original Pennsylvania Station, a sprawling transit hall inspired in part by the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, replaced by a claustrophobic warren of underground passageways below Madison Square Garden.
Everywhere he looked, architecture that spoke to the grandeur of urban life was coming down, replaced largely by anonymous modernist structures. He decided to act.
Mr. Lowe spent years traveling back to Chicago, where in various archives he found photos and other historical materials about the many Beaux-Arts buildings around that city that had since been destroyed.
The resulting book, “Lost Chicago,” published in 1975, was intended to be a minor publication, with a print run of just 1,000 copies. But a glowing review in The Chicago Tribune made sure it caught the eye of countless readers who were only then becoming conscious of their vanishing architectural heritage. It ended up selling close to 100,000 copies over multiple editions.
“‘Lost Chicago’ is for me the most moving and important American ghost story ever told,” the novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote to Mr. Lowe in 2004.
Like Mr. Lowe, many Chicagoans decided enough was enough. The urban preservation movement, once a niche concern, was just then reaching the mainstream. “Lost Chicago,” with its near-encyclopedic record of demolished buildings, became a foundational text.
“‘Lost Chicago’ inspired legions, generations of preservationists,” Ann Weaver, a preservationist in Chicago and a close friend, said in an interview.
Other books followed, including “Chicago Interiors” (1979),“Beaux-Arts New York” (1998), “Art Deco New York” (2004) and “Stanford White’s New York” (1992) — which was edited by his friend and fellow preservation activist Jacqueline Onassis.
Mr. Lowe quickly became a key fixture in the country’s architectural preservation movement, a proselytizer for beautiful buildings and a Cassandra warning about the price to be paid for destroying them.
He lectured widely, both around the country and in Europe, where postwar development likewise threatened the urban fabric. He founded the Beaux-Arts Alliance, a New York-based advocacy group, in 1995, and he remained its president until his death.
Mr. Lowe led protests against tear-downs, extensive renovations and the erasure of New York’s past. He wasn’t always successful, but his efforts did much to make city leaders, developers and the public aware of the cost of thoughtless progress.
“They were an incomparable heritage mindlessly squandered, pieces of gold minted by the fathers and thrown away by the sons,” was how he described the destroyed buildings in both cities in an interview with Chicago magazine in 2013. “I could not save them in their concrete form, but I was determined that somehow I would preserve their spirit.”
David Garrard Lowenstein was born on Jan. 9, 1933, in Baltimore. His mother, Grace (Garrard) Lowenstein, died when he was 6, after which he and his father, Mose, moved to Chicago, where Mr. Lowenstein had family.
His father was a well-known horse trainer — one of his horses came in second at the 1928 Kentucky Derby — who led a peripatetic life, mostly living in residential hotels. Unable to care for David, he sent him to a military school outside Lexington, Ky., where he spent most of his childhood.
He returned to Chicago during the summer. His busy father gave him free rein to wander the city, an experience that he later cited as the basis of his love for urban life.
He was a good enough student to win admission to Oberlin College, paid for by a wealthy aunt. He graduated in 1955 with an English degree, and a year later he received a master’s degree in literature from the University of Michigan.
It was around this time that he shortened his last name from Lowenstein to Lowe. He never explained why. His father was Jewish but his mother was not, and he had been raised Episcopalian.
Mr. Lowe moved to New York after college and, despite his affection for the Windy City, spent the rest of his life in the Big Apple. He began his career at American Heritage magazine, edited by the Civil War historian Bruce Catton. He was later a writer and editor at Look and McCall’s.
No immediate family members survive.
Mr. Lowe left the magazine world in the mid-1970s to commit himself fully to historic preservation. Not only did he continue to turn out books, lectures and essays; he also updated ”Lost Chicago” as, despite his efforts, developers and the city continued to tear down historic structures.
“I sometimes feel that my Chicago is like an immense picture puzzle,” he wrote in a revised and expanded edition published in 2010, “from which the pieces are removed one by one — the Chicago Stock Exchange, the Arts Club, the Northwestern Railway Station — until, at last, there will be nothing left of the city I knew.”
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