An introduction

An audio version of this post can be found here.

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Hello, my name is Sam Hightower, and I am a blueprint wrangler, building detective, and the Director of the Office for Metropolitan History.

If you’re here, it’s probably because you’ve read the work of Christopher Gray, a columnist for the New York Times and other publications. If you’re unfamiliar, Christopher Gray wrote extensively on the architecture, history, and preservation policies of New York City. His award-winning columns, written from 1980 to 2014, form the most comprehensive look at New York City buildings yet published. This work would not have been possible without the diligent work of Suzanne Braley, the researcher for the “Streetscapes” column from 1989 to December 2012. I worked as a research assistant for the column for its last year and now run the research firm that Christopher founded to support his writing endeavors.

I spend most of my working hours trawling local archives in New York City for various historical documents, mostly architectural and structural drawings, and managing an ungodly number of spreadsheets with proprietary information about which documents are where. My friends and colleagues have compared my work to the adventures of Nicholas Cage in The National Treasure or Indiana Jones. I try to keep these comparisons in mind when dealing with the more grueling parts of the job, like sorting through multiple revisions in a set of drawings that has gotten mixed up at some point in the century since its creation.

Since I run a small business, I dedicate a certain amount of my day to maintaining the books, managing client communications, etc. I don’t imagine I will have much to say about that here. Still, I think it’s worth mentioning that without my client base, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to engage in any of the public-facing elements of my work, like recent public speaking engagements or maintaining the New Building database, a free tool hosted on the website with information about 20th-century Manhattan buildings.

My late boss and mentor Christopher Gray once wrote about the office’s business model:

I would rather eat worms than work in the non-profit sector or try to raise grant money. I like running a commercial research firm, and skimming resources off the top to do something useful, like the building permit database, or writing for The New York Times.

Christopher founded the Office for Metropolitan History in 1975, fresh out of Columbia University’s School of General Studies with a B.A. in Art History. As for myself, I did not study art history; I studied chemical engineering. Being an architectural historian with a chemical engineering degree has felt like a bit of a party trick at times, and I’ve struggled to explain why and how I ended up working at an architectural history research firm for the past ten years. If I were to try to draw a throughline between my interests over the course of my life, it would be a curiosity about the world around me and why it is the way it is. In college, I learned about this at the level of atoms and molecules. In my current position, I learned about the world around me on the scale of buildings and blocks.

I sometimes get the question: Well, did you look for chemical engineering jobs out of college? Yes! Part of the issue was falling in love with New York City. I don’t particularly want to live in Dallas working at an oil company. The job I remember being most interested in was becoming an investigator at the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, traveling around the country and doing some detective work on chemical accidents. I still read their reports and watch their (quite good!) Youtube videos. The travel aspect put me off from putting my all into an application there—again, if I already live in a city I’m in love with, a job that requires travel 30-40% of the time isn’t as attractive.

I actually got this job from a Craiglist post. Christopher was looking for a Columbia graduate, and I had four years of experience working at the circulation desk as a bibliographic assistant at Butler Library. I did not mention that my degree was in chemical engineering in my initial email to him. He paid me to do some test research for him, and I did well enough that he gave me a real New York Times column topic to research. Our work started via email at first, but then he invited me into the office to inventory some blueprints for a job he was working on on the commercial side. (It was a very gnarly building, but that is a topic for another post.) I did well enough that he hired me part-time, and I eventually took it on at a full-time level.

I remember times when Christopher worried about me running off, getting a well-paying chemical engineering job, and leaving the business behind me. You might know that the Columbia School of General Studies is for “non-conventional” students. You probably don’t know that Christopher ended up there after flunking out of engineering school. This became a bit of a running joke, and he generally asked me to double-check his numbers on the rare occasion that anything mathematically demanding came up at the office. Eventually, I convinced him that I was committed to working for the office, even though I had a random degree I had no particular interest in using professionally. He acquiesced, told me he thought I would be great at it, and told me that I was the business’s second most important asset, only to him.

In 2017, Christopher died suddenly due to complications related to pneumonia. At that point, he had handed the reins over to me for short periods while he was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, but there were a lot more questions I wanted to ask him. As you might expect with someone working with archives, he kept a relatively consistent record of his business dealings dating back to 1975. At this point, I feel like I’ve learned almost as much from the seven years of managing and reading the office’s record collections as I’ve learned from the three years I had with Christopher as my mentor in the flesh.

This brings us to now. I enjoy the commercial side of things. I provide a service my clients value, and the business transactions I undertake are win-win. I’ve also expanded the office’s e-commerce presence by digitizing some of its private historic photograph collections and making them available online for purchase as prints.

But I miss something about my research for the “Streetscapes” column. Also, in the ordinary course of business, I’m constantly coming across things that aren’t particularly relevant to my client but that are interesting enough to write to my friends and colleagues about. Sometimes, I don’t know if they’re suggesting that I start a blog, podcast, or newsletter because they think I have something interesting to offer or because they’re tired of getting a biweekly slew of text messages (e.g., “Hey, the old post office building near us is for sale, and I took a look at the 2014 deed for it, which is 98 pages! Did you know you can buy a building and still not hold the image rights to a mural inside it?”). My general rule of thumb now is that if I send over five consecutive messages about a building to someone, it goes on a list, and I should just try to write something about it.

Beyond my ramblings about various buildings, I’d like to spotlight various items in our office’s private collections (a teaser, there are thank you notes from both Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Nixon) and dive into the research behind some of the writing that Christopher did, not only for the Times, but in earlier columns for House and Garden and Avenue magazine.

Another quote from Christopher, just to preempt any queries about copyright:

I only once signed away the copyright from my work, in 1977, to a prominent preservation group - which then published my work without my byline. It's a fine point, but just something I won't do. I was ready to be fired from the Times on this principle, and almost was. But they caved.

I’m grateful to have worked for someone stubborn enough to maintain the copyright to his own work and prolific enough to stand his ground with the Times and win.

I also have some interests adjacent to but outside the scope of what Christopher researched and wrote. For example, our files on urban renewal, eminent domain, and the displacement of people associated with both are quite thin, but I’ve been reading about these areas and may dive into them a bit here. These topics have come up during research I had the privilege of doing for Landmark West’s San Juan Hill project on the neighborhood razed for Lincoln Center. It’s one thing to research an existing historic building, another to research a demolished building, and an even more obscure and difficult thing to research buildings whose addresses no longer exist. There is something to be said about the obfuscation of addresses and entire blocks and the obfuscation of people and neighborhoods, so keep an eye out for that as well.

Some housekeeping: I have turned on a paid tier for this Substack, which grants the additional perks of commenting on posts and submitting questions for future Q&A columns. These perks may change in the future. At this point, I’d like to keep the posting format somewhat loose. However, I suspect I will primarily be focusing on reviewing Christopher’s columns and diving into some of the research behind them—lines that didn’t make it to the final piece due to space and the like. My commitment to subscribers is posting biweekly, although I have an inkling it will be more frequent than that.

Thank you for being here, and I look forward to the journey!

Thank you to Dr. Jude Webre for his assistance with editing.