For much of preservation’s initial history in the U.S., these ideals were not widely shared by the public. Early preservation efforts were scattershot, made possible by a motley crew of wealthy private individuals and groups. Some, such as the re-creation of Colonial Williamsburg, funded by members of the Rockefeller family, involved the extensive construction of new buildings made to look old. Even at the start of the postwar era, preservation still struck many as an eccentric, even reactionary hobby—a cause endorsed, in the words of the early New York preservationist Harmon Goldstone, only by “crackpots” and “ladies with floppy hats and tennis shoes.” By the middle of the 1960s, however, the tide was beginning to turn. In 1945, just two American cities could boast landmark-protection laws. Two decades later, by which point historic preservation claimed such high-profile supporters as Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson, the number had grown to 70.
In one sense, the cause of this shift was simple. As The New York Times observed in 1964, with each passing year the country was racked by “increasing public dismay over the vanishing of landmarks under the onslaughts of urban renewal and other construction.” Faced with highways, high-rises, and other pro-growth projects that marked the postwar decades, preservation activism offered Americans a way to fight back. The sudden popularity of historic preservation, however, had as much to do with financial sensibilities as aesthetic ones. Spurred by government-backed mortgages and a booming postwar economy, the proportion of Americans who owned their own home grew 42 percent from 1940 to 1960. The rise of a mass property-owning society invited new possibilities for how preservation might function as public policy. Conventional wisdom had long held that the best way to make money from owning real estate was to “improve” it—that is, to build something on the land. But preservationists argued that limits on even minor alterations to the appearance of buildings would, in fact, enable property owners to attract buyers who placed a premium on the existence of those same restrictions. In this way, landmarking would function as a signal to real-estate markets about the likelihood that a neighborhood would experience significant physical change, and, in turn, about its stability as a prospective investment. Wrote the editors of The Boston Globe in 1955, declaring their support for a Beacon Hill historic district, “This is designed not to burden property-holders, but quite the opposite—to protect them from acts of architectural mayhem which could wreck their real estate values and spoil their pleasure and comfort.” A Brooklyn Heights preservationist similarly recalled local real-estate brokers being told in the early ’60s that a historic district for their neighborhood “was going to turn a sleepy community into a hotbed of real estate activity, and they were all going to profit from it.” Even New York’s most ardent preservationists had once estimated that probably no more than a few hundred structures and two or three historic districts within the five boroughs deserved legal protection. By the end of the ’70s, more than three dozen historic districts had been created, and the number of protected lots in the city had surpassed 10,000.