In this lecture Joshua will introduce Gayle (1908-2008) a key figure who helped to mobilise the landmark preservation movement in the USA. A social activist in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1930s, Gayle joined the League of Women Voters and the anti-poll tax league. Having moved to New York in 1957, she ran as a reform Democrat for the (all-male) New York City Council on the ballot ‘We need a woman in City Hall’.
Failing to be elected, she turned her rhetorical skills to architecture, soon becoming the first female member on the historic buildings committee of the Municipal Art Society in 1956. She chiefly championed 19th-century cast iron architecture, however, and is perhaps best remembered for handing out bright yellow pocket-magnets to other devotees, with the words “I’m a Friend of Cast-Iron Architecture” on them. Her obituary in the New York Times noted her ‘cast-iron will — cloaked in Victorian gentility’.
Joshua will assess Gayle’s own magnetism, in contrast to her subsequent estrangement, considering how her advocacy manifested itself through journalism, 19th-century iron foundry catalogue facsimiles, photography, strollology and materials science.
Joshua Mardell is an architectural historian with broad specialisms, mostly in British architectural history of the 19th and 20th centuries, conservation, and the historiography of British architectural history. He is a member of the Victorian Society Publications Committee
Attendees can either watch the talk online, at £6 a ticket, or a small number of people can attend the talk which is £12 a ticket.
Venue: The Victorian Society, 1 Priory Gardens, London, W4 1TT
Image: Gayle with a poster of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, Greenwich Village.
All attendees will be sent a recording of the talk.