Kroessler described his relationship with history and preservation in his book New York Year By Year:
"I have been fascinated with New York for as long as I can remember. Though raised on Long Island, I was born in Brooklyn, and my parents always made me feel that, as Bobby Short sings, ‘New York is my personal property.’ But I also developed an early connection to the city’s history. Perhaps it was New York, Past and Present, the schoolbook a careless child left in the Barricini candy store in Flatbush, where my mother’s mother worked; I looked at every page of that book over and over and over again, marveling that places around me had an exciting past."[1]
Jeffrey Kroessler’s preservation work started prior to his doctorate research. While working at LaGuardia Community College, Kroessler became involved with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, where he learned about the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Works Building. Thus began Kroessler’s long involvement to protect the tiled building under Queensboro Bridge. In a 2012 interview with the Archive Project, Kroessler described how a team of preservationists at smoke-filled lobbying meetings finally convinced Queens Deputy Borough President Claire K. Shulman to landmark the waterfront Terra Cotta Works Building.
After this “first taste of preservation,” Kroessler decided to write an academic history of Queens as his doctoral dissertation topic.[2] During his dissertation research, Kroessler met Nina Rappaport and learned about the Sunnyside Foundation, a group dedicated to restoring the Sunnyside Gardens area “back to its historic self.”[3] Kroessler’s work with Sunnyside Foundation subsequently contributed to the creation of the Queensborough Preservation League in 1990. The League served as a union of the Sunnyside Foundation, the Greater Astoria Historical Society, and other Queens-based preservation groups.
Kroessler helped build and support a community of individuals dedicated to preservation in Queens. This community produced a book called Historic Preservation in Queens in 1989. In 2004, Kroessler moved to Sunnyside Gardens with his wife “just in time for the fight over whether it should be designated a historic district.”[4] There, Kroessler and his wife bought a house through connections to Sunnyside Foundation founder Dorothy Morehead. Morehead tracked houses in the neighborhood as they came up for sale and worked with a real estate agent to “manage the neighborhood.”[5]
Designating the neighborhood placed Kroessler in an intense battle with opponents of preservation, who vehemently argued that the designation would gentrify Sunnyside Gardens and go against the wishes of the immigrant communities in the neighborhood. Kroessler defended preservation against anti-immigrant charges on the Brian Lehrer radio show. Afterward, he contacted Robert Tierney, then Chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). Kroessler argued that, if Sunnyside Gardens could not become a landmark even when three quarters of the community supported designation, the 1965 Landmarks Law would have no future.[6] The LPC ultimately designated Sunnyside Gardens as a landmark in 2007, but Kroessler kept fighting for preservation of the garden suburb.[7] Kroessler continued to urge the LPC to preserve parts of the neighborhood.[8]
Kroessler’s preservation work was based in Queens, but his impact resonated throughout the City. He served on the boards of the Historic Districts Council and Preservation Committee of the Municipal Art Society, and as a trustee for the Elliot Willensky Fund.
As a historian, Jeffrey Kroessler researched local New York City history with an emphasis on Queens. Hofstra University’s Long Island Studies Institute featured his writing in three books published in 1988 and 1989. In 1996, Kroessler wrote Lighting the Way: A Centennial History of the Queens Borough Public Library for the hundredth anniversary of the Queens Public Library. Kroessler published his final book, Sunnyside Gardens, in 2021. This book served as both a history of the neighborhood which he called home and as a document of the preservation battle in which he was so personally involved. Kroessler was a historian deeply invested in preservation despite pressures from others who were indifferent to the preservation of historic structures or even outright hostile to preservation.
Kroessler did not shy away from stating his opinion on controversial matters. When racial violence sparked raucous debates about monuments to individuals considered problematic by contemporary standards, Kroessler defended keeping the statues as a reminder of the harsh history they represent. Kroessler said, in the context of debates over the Robert Taney monument in Baltimore that commemorated the controversial Chief Justice of the United States during the Dred Scott case, Kroessler stated, “By removing the statue we have eliminated the possibility of someone walking by and telling his companion, ‘Hey, you know who that is? Roger Taney. Do you know what that son of a did…Now Roger Taney doesn’t exist.’”[9] Kroessler waged a similar defense of the infamous Teddy Roosevelt memorial in front of the American Museum of Natural History Museum in an article for The New York Daily News, for which he wrote extensively.[10]
