Places connect us to the past, host community and cultural traditions, and keep local environments distinctive. City Lore and the Municipal Art Society founded the Place Matters project in 1998 to identify, promote, and protect such places in New York City.

Place of the Week

A unique planned community on the East River, Roosevelt Island incorporated elements from its long history into a cutting-edge late 1960s urban design.

Today it combines a mix of market and affordable housing, historic landmark buildings, parkland, and incomparable views of the East River and the rest of the city in a small 147-acre package. The Island’s name dates only to 1973, when it was renamed in its transformation into a residential community. It was Minnahanonck to native New Yorkers, Hogs Island in Dutch New Amsterdam, and Blackwell’s Island for more than two centuries.

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Roosevelt Island

News

Nueva York (1613-1945) opens September 17, 2010

The exhibition is presented by the New-York Historical Society in collaboration with and on view at El Museo del Barrio through January 9, 2011. Nueva York (1613 – 1945), guest curated by City Lore's Marci Reaven, is the first exhibition to explore how New York's long and deep involvement with Spain and Latin America has affected virtually every aspect of the city's development, from commerce, manufacturing and transportation to communications, entertainment and the arts.

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News & Events

Cultural Initiatives

Introducing the PLACE MATTERS TOOLKIT

The Place Matters Toolkit is a guidebook to help you identify, promote, and protect places that you care about.  Place Matters has created this Toolkit to help people nationwide to identify the cultural and historical functions of places that matter, find ways to capture and use that information to protect them, and share the strategies that people have often found effective in preserving places that matter. This Toolkit also features stories of people who fought long struggles to save places of historical and cultural significance.
 

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Toolkit