Historians know that historic preservation didn’t begin with the demolition of New York’s Penn Station in 1963. Whitney Martinko teaches us that preservation didn’t begin at Mount Vernon either. Martinko pushes back decades before historians like Steven Conn, Patricia West, Jean B. Lee, William B. Rhoads, Michael Holleran, James M. Lindgren, Sarah L. Giffen, and Kevin D. Murphy, who all begin their stories in the 1850s or after. She divides her focus between the preservation of public structures owned by collective entities (town squares, government buildings, churches, cemeteries, the earthworks of pre-Columbian mound-building societies), commercial sites (taverns, hotels, restaurants, stores), and private homes, with an especially close reading of the preservation of Mount Vernon. Martinko uses a “synthetic material culture approach” (p. 6) on her voluminous and diverse sources: archival materials, news reports, court cases, fiction, and images that she reprints in a surprising and refreshing number in this age of publishing cutbacks.

Looking back on those indigenous earthworks, historic churches, private homes, and a tavern that unfortunately never served as William Penn’s residence, Martinko finds some of the same themes as scholars of the post-1850 period. She emphasizes two points.

One, historic preservation has often been used as a tool of real estate developers. The “politics of demolition” allowed capitalists to define a few buildings as worthy of saving and the rest, especially poor people’s homes, as targets for destruction and redevelopment. Martinko is excellent in detailing all the ruses and strategies that turned preservation into capitalist gain, like Stephen Gould’s attempts to rehabilitate his reputation by preserving the old synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island; Abel Bown’s woodcuts of architecture that had since been renovated or destroyed; and Stephen Van Rensselaer IV’s preservation and improvement of Rensselaerwyck in order to sell off pieces as suburban real estate. Actor Mark Ruffalo and writer/director Kenneth Lonergan should read Martinko’s chapter on the preservation of churches and reconsider their campaign to save one on the corner of 86th and Amsterdam in New York City, down the block from Barney Greengrass, the Sturgeon King.

The story about the not-Penn residence is especially amusing. In 1824, eighteen drunken gentlemen, among the cream of Philadelphia society, wandered into an Irish tavern under the misimpression that it was William Penn’s prior residence. Proprietor John Doyle took the opportunity to rebrand. Doyle immediately served up a meal—whether for free, at cost, or “at cost” is unclear—and acted the genial host. The gratified guests kept coming back, individually and for celebratory dinners, and began writing him up in the local papers. Eventually, Doyle got John Woodside to paint a new sign for the tavern with a portrait of William Penn. In this era, as rich and poor began to sort themselves into different churches, theaters, and shopping hours in the marketplace, John Doyle profited off a project of faux-historic preservation that brought wealthy and working men back together.

Two, the debates over historic preservation are really fights over capitalism and democracy, a process that Martinko sometimes calls “making a moral economy” (p. 4). Martinko’s sources crackle with the larger importance her subjects gave to this old house or that venerable hall. What should and should not be bought and sold? Who speaks for the common good? The preservation of Mount Vernon snares, inevitably, in the politics of slavery. Martinko points out that in Europe, aristocrats or the state took responsibility for preserving old places. In the United States, it happened through communal societies that were often linked to commercial interests, or sometimes directly by people hoping to turn a buck.

Martinko usually connects her subject deftly to the larger political economy, for example, by placing it in the context of Jacksonian Democracy and as a response to the intensifying boom-bust capitalist cycle. Sometimes she goes a little farther than necessary, for example, when she argues that “debates over historic architecture formed an integral part of debates over slavery and free labor in the late 1850s” (p. 211). Questions of slavery and freedom infected the era, and there’s no reason why Martinko should argue that historic preservation was more revealing or influential in its treatment of those controversies than other proxy debates.

Martinko is terrific on the motives and actions of the people who preserve. She has less to show us about how people engaged with places once they had been preserved. She knows that “the performance of consumption” (p. 85) was important to these places. She has some examples, mostly bad, like the “caravan of wild animals” (per the description of Jefferson’s granddaughter, p. 142) who walked right up to Monticello without invitation and expected admission, and the visitors who fought past the house slaves at Mount Vernon while John A. Washington Jr. died upstairs. (John brought it on himself—in the past he’d coordinated with steamboat captains to land at Mount Vernon so his slaves could sell refreshments to tourists.) More stories like this, about a wider variety of visitors and types of preserved buildings, would have supported Martinko’s claims about how historic preservation pushed certain ideas and practices, but they are hard to come by in the documentary record.

Despite all her cynicism about capitalist uses of preservation, Martinko’s book retains an appreciation, perhaps even an awe, for old places that still stand among us. They keep tearing them down—the 1910 Penn Station gone in 1963, and sixty years later, in 2023, the 1919 Pennsylvania Hotel across the street, the Model T Ford of the hotel industry, in its heyday, the biggest hotel in the world. Save it, say the preservationists, until you can make a bigger buck tearing it down. As Martinko writes in the final pages, “maybe it is time to try something new” (p. 215).