Margot Gayle, Urban Preservationist and Crusader With Style, Dies at 100-
Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.
The death was announced by her daughter Carol.
Ms. Gayle began her mission in the late 1950s, when a group of neighbors gathered in her Greenwich Village apartment to plot how to save the Victorian-Gothic curiosity that was the Jefferson Market Courthouse around the corner.
A half-century later, not only was the courthouse preserved (as a library), but so were scores of iron-framed buildings, Bishop's Crook lampposts, stately public clocks and many other wisps of a past that Ms. Gayle had deemed worth keeping.
"Why not let people in the future enjoy some of the things we thought were extremely fine?" she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998.
Ms. Gayle's crowning achievement was helping to win the establishment of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, encompassing 26 blocks in what was originally an industrial quarter known as Hell's Hundred Acres. The designation not only preserved important buildings and artifacts, it also saved SoHo from the kind of large-scale urban renewal that occurred north of Houston Street.
"It would be hard to find a district that was so single-mindedly engineered and promoted as that district was by Margot," Harmon H. Goldstone, a former chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in an interview with The Times in 1988.
The writer Brendan Gill said in a speech in 1997, "She badgered everyone in and out of government until it became a protected place."
Ms. Gayle combined the skills of an author (she wrote four books), Democratic Party activist, city bureaucrat, newspaper columnist and tour guide to forge such a distinctive public personality that Mayor Edward I. Koch called her the queen of New York.
She started organizations like the Victorian Society in America and Friends of Cast Iron Architecture. When she went to Albany to lobby for preservation concerns, she took Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to pose with flattered legislators.
People were charmed by her use of a magnet to offer proof positive that a building was, in fact, made of iron. And they could be equally charmed when, in a soft cadence, she sprinkled her conversation with old-fashioned expressions like "nifty," "gosh-darned" and "goodness knows." But the soft coating disguised a steely persistence.
"Heaven help the person she gets her teeth into," Gene A. Norman, another landmarks commission chairman, once said.
Margot McCoy was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 14, 1908. Her father was in the automobile business, and the family moved frequently. She attended a different school every year, including one in London.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, she went to Atlanta and got a job as a social worker, earned a master's degree in bacteriology from Emory University and married William T. Gayle, an accountant. During World War II, she did volunteer work publicizing civil defense efforts.
After moving to New York, she had a stint as a script writer for CBS Radio, became a freelance magazine writer and started a public relations business. She later held public relations jobs in city government and for 16 years wrote an architecture column for The Daily News.
In 1957, having joined the Samuel J. Tilden Club, a Democratic Party reform group, she ran unsuccessfully for the City Council under the slogan, "We need a woman in City Hall," campaigning with her two daughters in suffragist costumes.
That year, she began inviting friends to meet in her living room to discuss the stalled clocks on the four sides of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, at Avenue of the Americas and West 10th Street. A brick-and-stone edifice built in the 1870s, it had had been going unused by the city, and the hands of its clock had been stuck at 3:20 for two years.
The group's stated agenda was to fix the clock, but Ms. Gayle's real purpose was to save the building from the auction block. Since the clock needed the building for support, the building's preservation was presented as a necessary afterthought. Even Ms. Gayle's friends called the courthouse "that ugly old pile."
At Christmas 1959, her committee sent Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. a telegram saying they did not want "two front teeth" but rather a working clock. The mayor took the building off the auction block. Ms. Gayle enlisted more supporters, including the writers Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford and the poet E. E. Cummings, and by 1961, the group had raised enough money to restart and illuminate the clock. (They succeeded in having the courthouse reopened as a public library in 1967.)
Ms. Gayle soon became a strong voice in lobbying for a landmarks preservation law, which the city did enact in 1965, in response in part to the outcry over the destruction of Pennsylvania Station and Alan Burnham's seminal study of New York landmarks.
Ms. Gayle founded the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture in 1970, a propitious time for opponents of an expressway that would have sliced through SoHo along Broome Street. Her arguments about preserving cast-iron architecture helped kill the freeway plan in 1971.
Two years later, the center of what had become SoHo was named a historic district, preserving its low-rise character and bringing back features like cobblestone streets.
Ms. Gayle's marriage ended in divorce in 1957. In addition to her daughter Carol Gayle, of Lake Forest, Ill., survivors include another daughter, Gretchen Gayle Ellsworth, of Washington; six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Ms. Gayle went on to fight to preserve specific cast-iron buildings around the nation, as well as antique street clocks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She never shied from a cause. When SoHo's new residents wanted to plant street trees, she opposed them as historically inaccurate in a manufacturing district.
Ms. Gayle had not been entirely thrilled with SoHo's transformation into a chic shopping center but had conceded that it was probably necessary.
"That's the price of getting something saved," she once said. "There's got to be money in it for someone."
Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.
The death was announced by her daughter Carol.
Ms. Gayle began her mission in the late 1950s, when a group of neighbors gathered in her Greenwich Village apartment to plot how to save the Victorian-Gothic curiosity that was the Jefferson Market Courthouse around the corner.
A half-century later, not only was the courthouse preserved (as a library), but so were scores of iron-framed buildings, Bishop's Crook lampposts, stately public clocks and many other wisps of a past that Ms. Gayle had deemed worth keeping.
"Why not let people in the future enjoy some of the things we thought were extremely fine?" she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998.
Ms. Gayle's crowning achievement was helping to win the establishment of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, encompassing 26 blocks in what was originally an industrial quarter known as Hell's Hundred Acres. The designation not only preserved important buildings and artifacts, it also saved SoHo from the kind of large-scale urban renewal that occurred north of Houston Street.
"It would be hard to find a district that was so single-mindedly engineered and promoted as that district was by Margot," Harmon H. Goldstone, a former chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in an interview with The Times in 1988.
The writer Brendan Gill said in a speech in 1997, "She badgered everyone in and out of government until it became a protected place."
Ms. Gayle combined the skills of an author (she wrote four books), Democratic Party activist, city bureaucrat, newspaper columnist and tour guide to forge such a distinctive public personality that Mayor Edward I. Koch called her the queen of New York.
She started organizations like the Victorian Society in America and Friends of Cast Iron Architecture. When she went to Albany to lobby for preservation concerns, she took Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to pose with flattered legislators.
People were charmed by her use of a magnet to offer proof positive that a building was, in fact, made of iron. And they could be equally charmed when, in a soft cadence, she sprinkled her conversation with old-fashioned expressions like "nifty," "gosh-darned" and "goodness knows." But the soft coating disguised a steely persistence.
"Heaven help the person she gets her teeth into," Gene A. Norman, another landmarks commission chairman, once said.
Margot McCoy was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 14, 1908. Her father was in the automobile business, and the family moved frequently. She attended a different school every year, including one in London.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, she went to Atlanta and got a job as a social worker, earned a master's degree in bacteriology from Emory University and married William T. Gayle, an accountant. During World War II, she did volunteer work publicizing civil defense efforts.
After moving to New York, she had a stint as a script writer for CBS Radio, became a freelance magazine writer and started a public relations business. She later held public relations jobs in city government and for 16 years wrote an architecture column for The Daily News.
In 1957, having joined the Samuel J. Tilden Club, a Democratic Party reform group, she ran unsuccessfully for the City Council under the slogan, "We need a woman in City Hall," campaigning with her two daughters in suffragist costumes.
That year, she began inviting friends to meet in her living room to discuss the stalled clocks on the four sides of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, at Avenue of the Americas and West 10th Street. A brick-and-stone edifice built in the 1870s, it had had been going unused by the city, and the hands of its clock had been stuck at 3:20 for two years.
The group's stated agenda was to fix the clock, but Ms. Gayle's real purpose was to save the building from the auction block. Since the clock needed the building for support, the building's preservation was presented as a necessary afterthought. Even Ms. Gayle's friends called the courthouse "that ugly old pile."
At Christmas 1959, her committee sent Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. a telegram saying they did not want "two front teeth" but rather a working clock. The mayor took the building off the auction block. Ms. Gayle enlisted more supporters, including the writers Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford and the poet E. E. Cummings, and by 1961, the group had raised enough money to restart and illuminate the clock. (They succeeded in having the courthouse reopened as a public library in 1967.)
Ms. Gayle soon became a strong voice in lobbying for a landmarks preservation law, which the city did enact in 1965, in response in part to the outcry over the destruction of Pennsylvania Station and Alan Burnham's seminal study of New York landmarks.
Ms. Gayle founded the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture in 1970, a propitious time for opponents of an expressway that would have sliced through SoHo along Broome Street. Her arguments about preserving cast-iron architecture helped kill the freeway plan in 1971.
Two years later, the center of what had become SoHo was named a historic district, preserving its low-rise character and bringing back features like cobblestone streets.
Ms. Gayle's marriage ended in divorce in 1957. In addition to her daughter Carol Gayle, of Lake Forest, Ill., survivors include another daughter, Gretchen Gayle Ellsworth, of Washington; six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Ms. Gayle went on to fight to preserve specific cast-iron buildings around the nation, as well as antique street clocks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She never shied from a cause. When SoHo's new residents wanted to plant street trees, she opposed them as historically inaccurate in a manufacturing district.
Ms. Gayle had not been entirely thrilled with SoHo's transformation into a chic shopping center but had conceded that it was probably necessary.
"That's the price of getting something saved," she once said. "There's got to be money in it for someone."
Margot Gayle, Urban Preservationist and Crusader With Style, Dies at 100-
Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.
The death was announced by her daughter Carol.
Ms. Gayle began her mission in the late 1950s, when a group of neighbors gathered in her Greenwich Village apartment to plot how to save the Victorian-Gothic curiosity that was the Jefferson Market Courthouse around the corner.
A half-century later, not only was the courthouse preserved (as a library), but so were scores of iron-framed buildings, Bishop's Crook lampposts, stately public clocks and many other wisps of a past that Ms. Gayle had deemed worth keeping.
"Why not let people in the future enjoy some of the things we thought were extremely fine?" she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998.
Ms. Gayle's crowning achievement was helping to win the establishment of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, encompassing 26 blocks in what was originally an industrial quarter known as Hell's Hundred Acres. The designation not only preserved important buildings and artifacts, it also saved SoHo from the kind of large-scale urban renewal that occurred north of Houston Street.
"It would be hard to find a district that was so single-mindedly engineered and promoted as that district was by Margot," Harmon H. Goldstone, a former chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in an interview with The Times in 1988.
The writer Brendan Gill said in a speech in 1997, "She badgered everyone in and out of government until it became a protected place."
Ms. Gayle combined the skills of an author (she wrote four books), Democratic Party activist, city bureaucrat, newspaper columnist and tour guide to forge such a distinctive public personality that Mayor Edward I. Koch called her the queen of New York.
She started organizations like the Victorian Society in America and Friends of Cast Iron Architecture. When she went to Albany to lobby for preservation concerns, she took Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to pose with flattered legislators.
People were charmed by her use of a magnet to offer proof positive that a building was, in fact, made of iron. And they could be equally charmed when, in a soft cadence, she sprinkled her conversation with old-fashioned expressions like "nifty," "gosh-darned" and "goodness knows." But the soft coating disguised a steely persistence.
"Heaven help the person she gets her teeth into," Gene A. Norman, another landmarks commission chairman, once said.
Margot McCoy was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 14, 1908. Her father was in the automobile business, and the family moved frequently. She attended a different school every year, including one in London.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, she went to Atlanta and got a job as a social worker, earned a master's degree in bacteriology from Emory University and married William T. Gayle, an accountant. During World War II, she did volunteer work publicizing civil defense efforts.
After moving to New York, she had a stint as a script writer for CBS Radio, became a freelance magazine writer and started a public relations business. She later held public relations jobs in city government and for 16 years wrote an architecture column for The Daily News.
In 1957, having joined the Samuel J. Tilden Club, a Democratic Party reform group, she ran unsuccessfully for the City Council under the slogan, "We need a woman in City Hall," campaigning with her two daughters in suffragist costumes.
That year, she began inviting friends to meet in her living room to discuss the stalled clocks on the four sides of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, at Avenue of the Americas and West 10th Street. A brick-and-stone edifice built in the 1870s, it had had been going unused by the city, and the hands of its clock had been stuck at 3:20 for two years.
The group's stated agenda was to fix the clock, but Ms. Gayle's real purpose was to save the building from the auction block. Since the clock needed the building for support, the building's preservation was presented as a necessary afterthought. Even Ms. Gayle's friends called the courthouse "that ugly old pile."
At Christmas 1959, her committee sent Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. a telegram saying they did not want "two front teeth" but rather a working clock. The mayor took the building off the auction block. Ms. Gayle enlisted more supporters, including the writers Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford and the poet E. E. Cummings, and by 1961, the group had raised enough money to restart and illuminate the clock. (They succeeded in having the courthouse reopened as a public library in 1967.)
Ms. Gayle soon became a strong voice in lobbying for a landmarks preservation law, which the city did enact in 1965, in response in part to the outcry over the destruction of Pennsylvania Station and Alan Burnham's seminal study of New York landmarks.
Ms. Gayle founded the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture in 1970, a propitious time for opponents of an expressway that would have sliced through SoHo along Broome Street. Her arguments about preserving cast-iron architecture helped kill the freeway plan in 1971.
Two years later, the center of what had become SoHo was named a historic district, preserving its low-rise character and bringing back features like cobblestone streets.
Ms. Gayle's marriage ended in divorce in 1957. In addition to her daughter Carol Gayle, of Lake Forest, Ill., survivors include another daughter, Gretchen Gayle Ellsworth, of Washington; six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Ms. Gayle went on to fight to preserve specific cast-iron buildings around the nation, as well as antique street clocks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She never shied from a cause. When SoHo's new residents wanted to plant street trees, she opposed them as historically inaccurate in a manufacturing district.
Ms. Gayle had not been entirely thrilled with SoHo's transformation into a chic shopping center but had conceded that it was probably necessary.
"That's the price of getting something saved," she once said. "There's got to be money in it for someone."
Margot Gayle, who marshaled shrewdness, gentility and spunk to save the Victorian cast-iron buildings of New York — using a little magnet as a demonstration device — in a crusade that led to the preservation of historic SoHo, died Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.
The death was announced by her daughter Carol.
Ms. Gayle began her mission in the late 1950s, when a group of neighbors gathered in her Greenwich Village apartment to plot how to save the Victorian-Gothic curiosity that was the Jefferson Market Courthouse around the corner.
A half-century later, not only was the courthouse preserved (as a library), but so were scores of iron-framed buildings, Bishop's Crook lampposts, stately public clocks and many other wisps of a past that Ms. Gayle had deemed worth keeping.
"Why not let people in the future enjoy some of the things we thought were extremely fine?" she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998.
Ms. Gayle's crowning achievement was helping to win the establishment of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, encompassing 26 blocks in what was originally an industrial quarter known as Hell's Hundred Acres. The designation not only preserved important buildings and artifacts, it also saved SoHo from the kind of large-scale urban renewal that occurred north of Houston Street.
"It would be hard to find a district that was so single-mindedly engineered and promoted as that district was by Margot," Harmon H. Goldstone, a former chairman of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in an interview with The Times in 1988.
The writer Brendan Gill said in a speech in 1997, "She badgered everyone in and out of government until it became a protected place."
Ms. Gayle combined the skills of an author (she wrote four books), Democratic Party activist, city bureaucrat, newspaper columnist and tour guide to forge such a distinctive public personality that Mayor Edward I. Koch called her the queen of New York.
She started organizations like the Victorian Society in America and Friends of Cast Iron Architecture. When she went to Albany to lobby for preservation concerns, she took Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to pose with flattered legislators.
People were charmed by her use of a magnet to offer proof positive that a building was, in fact, made of iron. And they could be equally charmed when, in a soft cadence, she sprinkled her conversation with old-fashioned expressions like "nifty," "gosh-darned" and "goodness knows." But the soft coating disguised a steely persistence.
"Heaven help the person she gets her teeth into," Gene A. Norman, another landmarks commission chairman, once said.
Margot McCoy was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 14, 1908. Her father was in the automobile business, and the family moved frequently. She attended a different school every year, including one in London.
After graduating from the University of Michigan, she went to Atlanta and got a job as a social worker, earned a master's degree in bacteriology from Emory University and married William T. Gayle, an accountant. During World War II, she did volunteer work publicizing civil defense efforts.
After moving to New York, she had a stint as a script writer for CBS Radio, became a freelance magazine writer and started a public relations business. She later held public relations jobs in city government and for 16 years wrote an architecture column for The Daily News.
In 1957, having joined the Samuel J. Tilden Club, a Democratic Party reform group, she ran unsuccessfully for the City Council under the slogan, "We need a woman in City Hall," campaigning with her two daughters in suffragist costumes.
That year, she began inviting friends to meet in her living room to discuss the stalled clocks on the four sides of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, at Avenue of the Americas and West 10th Street. A brick-and-stone edifice built in the 1870s, it had had been going unused by the city, and the hands of its clock had been stuck at 3:20 for two years.
The group's stated agenda was to fix the clock, but Ms. Gayle's real purpose was to save the building from the auction block. Since the clock needed the building for support, the building's preservation was presented as a necessary afterthought. Even Ms. Gayle's friends called the courthouse "that ugly old pile."
At Christmas 1959, her committee sent Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. a telegram saying they did not want "two front teeth" but rather a working clock. The mayor took the building off the auction block. Ms. Gayle enlisted more supporters, including the writers Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford and the poet E. E. Cummings, and by 1961, the group had raised enough money to restart and illuminate the clock. (They succeeded in having the courthouse reopened as a public library in 1967.)
Ms. Gayle soon became a strong voice in lobbying for a landmarks preservation law, which the city did enact in 1965, in response in part to the outcry over the destruction of Pennsylvania Station and Alan Burnham's seminal study of New York landmarks.
Ms. Gayle founded the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture in 1970, a propitious time for opponents of an expressway that would have sliced through SoHo along Broome Street. Her arguments about preserving cast-iron architecture helped kill the freeway plan in 1971.
Two years later, the center of what had become SoHo was named a historic district, preserving its low-rise character and bringing back features like cobblestone streets.
Ms. Gayle's marriage ended in divorce in 1957. In addition to her daughter Carol Gayle, of Lake Forest, Ill., survivors include another daughter, Gretchen Gayle Ellsworth, of Washington; six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Ms. Gayle went on to fight to preserve specific cast-iron buildings around the nation, as well as antique street clocks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She never shied from a cause. When SoHo's new residents wanted to plant street trees, she opposed them as historically inaccurate in a manufacturing district.
Ms. Gayle had not been entirely thrilled with SoHo's transformation into a chic shopping center but had conceded that it was probably necessary.
"That's the price of getting something saved," she once said. "There's got to be money in it for someone."
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