Landmark Lecture: A History of Queens
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About the Event
The New York Landmarks Conservancy, in partnership with The General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen of the City of New York, cordially invites you to a Landmark Lecture
A History of Queens: Rural County, Urban Borough with Architect Laura Heim
In celebration of the late Jeffrey A. Kroessler’s book Rural County, Urban Borough: A History of Queens, his wife, architect Laura Heim, discusses the unique production process and engaging content of this first comprehensive history of the great borough of Queens. A former wetland, Queens today is a crowded cityscape of dense urban neighborhoods and suburban sprawl. Rural County, Urban Borough is a history of place, charting the rapid transformation of the Queens landscape, identifying what drove the borough’s development, from public infrastructure, architecture, and transportation to technological innovation and urban planning.
In this talk, Ms. Heim tells the story of Queens, “the world’s borough,” and describes its diversity and how it transformed, in less than one hundred years, from an agricultural hinterland to a vital urban corridor. She will reveal why Queens is integral to New York City and the wider world and show how, in its architecture and evolution, the whole arc of American urban history unfolds.
Jeffrey A. Kroessler (1952–2023) was a professor at the Lloyd Sealy Library of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. His many books include Sunnyside Gardens: Planning and Preservation in a Historic Garden Suburb, New York Year by Year: A Chronology of the Great Metropolis, and Historic Preservation in Queens.
Laura Heim, FAIA LEED AP, is an award-winning architect with a firm in historic Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. Her firm, Laura Heim Architect, has a particular expertise in historic preservation and adaptive reuse/renovation.
