The Place Matters Toolkit is a guidebook to help you identify, promote, and protect places that you care about. We expect the Toolkit to evolve as we develop and post new material. Let us know if you have ideas for new topics, or if a topic covered here requires more explanation.

This Toolkit was made possible with support from the J.M. Kaplan Fund and the New York Community Trust.

Place Matters staff also are available to lead workshops and talks in community and classroom settings. Contact Molly Garfinkel at molly@citylore.

Introduction

If asked, each of us could probably point to public places in our city that connect us to the past, sustain thriving communities, contribute diversity and distinctiveness to our surroundings, and add to our well being.

But most of us are never asked.

To remedy this in New York City, two groups—City Lore and the Municipal Art Society—created the Place Matters project in 1998. Among other activities, Place Matters conducts the Census of Places that Matter, a ground-up inventory created through interviews, community forums, and via the mail and Internet. New Yorkers have nominated over 650 places to the Census, including the longest running Latin music store, a church built by Irish dock workers, and the city’s last surviving historic beer garden.

As the nominations mount, the Census is becoming a knowledge bank about the places New Yorkers care about. But it’s also revealing the vulnerability of many of these places to change and destruction—a vulnerability shared by similar places in cities across the country. While there are no sure ways to protect a place, Place Matters has created this Toolkit to help people nationwide to:

  • Identify the cultural and historical functions of places that matter;
  • Find ways to capture and use that information to protect them;
  • Share the strategies that people have often found effective in preserving places that matter.

When you preserve places that matter, you’re protecting our shared history, memories, traditions, and the continuing use of these places into the future.

Good luck!

The People’s Hall of Fame is an awards celebration and party established in 1993 that honors grassroots contributions to New York’s cultural life. Taking as its symbol a historic New York subway token, we present “tokens of our esteem” to individuals and organizations who are contributing creatively to the folk culture of New York City.

Halls of Fame are usually reserved for famous baseball players, rock stars and the like. So why create a Hall of Fame for “ordinary” people? The honorees highlighted here are exceptional because of the way they live their art and embody tradition within their own communities. Their character, presence and exceptional talent render the songs, dances, customs and stories that are part of everyday life extraordinary, vivid and real. The People’s Hall of Fame shines a spotlight on the contributions of ordinary people outside the glare of mass media, and honors local heroes who contribute to the culture of the city and its neighborhoods. Awards are selected by a committee of New York City-lovers working closely with City Lore’s Board of Directors.  See the right hand column to read about these stellar individuals.

Would you like to nominate a cultural hero from New York City to the People’s Hall of Fame? Please e-mail us a note (steve@citylo.staging.wpengine.com). Be sure to give us your reasons for the nomination.