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Margot Gayle Fund for Preservation of Victorian Heritage

Applications for the 2011 Margot Gayle Fund grants are due February 14, 2011.

Establishment of the Margot Gayle Fund was announced by the Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America at its annual meeting on May 29, 2003.

Created to commemorate Margot Gayle's 95th birthday on May 14, 2003, the fund honors the eminent preservationist around whose table the Victorian Society in America was founded in 1966. She is also the founder of the Friends of Cast Iron Architecture and is credited with raising public awareness nationwide of the significance of iron-fronted buildings of the Victorian era. Her preservation efforts extend from the 1960s when she successfully campaigned to save the Jefferson Market Courthouse in Greenwich Village to a drive in the 1990s to restore the Yorkville sidewalk clock on Third Avenue near 85th Street.

Overview of former Sparrow Shoe Factory Warehouse, 195 Broadway, Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, 1882, one of the city's cast-iron buildings that has not been officially designated a landmark

The fund enables the Metropolitan Chapter to make monetary grants for projects for preservation or conservation of Victorian material culture in the New York Metropolitan area. At present, the fund has raised over $15,000 in contributions.

The first project underwritten by the fund was a study of cast-iron-fronted buildings in New York City that have not been officially designated as landmarks. Commissioned by the Chapter in 2004 and completed by architectural historian Andrew S. Dolkart in 2006, the survey documents 56 undesignated cast-iron-fronted buildings in Manhattan, distributed geographically from Downtown to West 125th Street in Harlem, as well as 11 buildings in northern Brooklyn, between Downtown and Williamsburg. The examples cover 50 years, spanning nearly the entire history of the use of cast iron as a building material.

The next project of the Margot Gayle Fund was the publishing of the report in the form of an online database. Visit www.castironnyc.org to .

Please see below for ways you can donate and help make this project become a reality.

Detail of former Sparrow Shoe Factory Warehouse.

Margot Gayle continued to advocate the designation of such buildings, particularly those on the margins of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, up until her passing at age 100 in 2008. Her most recent book, Cast-Iron Architecture in America: The Significance of James Bogardus, written with her daughter Carol Gayle, was issued by W.W. Norton on her 90th birthday. For many years she wrote the popular column "Changing Scene" in the New York Daily News that presented then-and-now documentation of city building sites. She also served on the founding board of Friends of Terra Cotta.

Tax-deductible contributions to the fund, payable to Metropolitan Chapter VSA, may be sent to:

Margot Gayle Fund for Preservation of Victorian Heritage
VSA Metropolitan Chapter
232 East 11th Street
New York, NY 10003

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