June 20, 2025

The Board of Directors 

The Archive Project is thrilled to announce its 2025 slate of officers. Lisa Ackerman and Elizabeth Jeffe are continuing their respective roles as Chair and Vice Chair. Adrian Untermyer has also stepped into the role of Vice Chair, Christopher Jeannopoulos is now Treasurer, and Matt Dellinger is the new Secretary. Will Cook is serving as Legal Counsel. 

We also thank Michele Bogart for her commitment to the New York Preservation Archive Project during her term on the Board. Her contributions to the organization’s work, especially pertaining to reviewing applicants for the Shelby White & Leon Levy Archival Assistance Initiative Grant, will be missed.

The Archive Project’s board members are active across our region and have shared the following updates:

• Archive Project Vice Chair Elizabeth Jeffe joined the board of the Sylvester Manor, a former provisioning plantation, Enlightenment-era farm, and pioneering food industrialist’s summer estate located on Shelter Island, NY.

• NJ TRANSIT Rail Operations appointed the Archive Project’s Vice Chair, Adrian Untermyer, as its Chief of Staff. He previously helped coordinate the railroad’s relationships with Amtrak, PATH, Metro-North, and other freight and passenger railroads and transit agencies.

• Daniel Allen is currently in construction for a large restoration of the Works Progress Administration-era Bronx County Courthouse at 851 Grand Courthouse and the exterior restoration of the Hunterfly Road houses at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn.

 

Team Updates 

Matt Goff has been hired as the 2025 Jeffe Fellow. He recently completed his first year in the Master’s program in Historic Preservation at Columbia University and brings experience in archival research, collections management, writing, and interpretation to this role. His work at the Archive Project centers around processing collections donated through the organization’s Saving Papers initiative. The Jeffe Fellowship is made possible by the generosity of the Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Foundation.

 

Oral Historian

Sarah Dziedzic has departed the Archive Project as the Oral History Program Manager after accepting a full-time position at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Under her tenure, Sarah conducted over 30 oral histories and led the Roots of LGBTQ Preservation series and Gerry Charitable Trust Oral History Intensive. The Archive Project thanks Sarah for her diligent work for the organization since 2019 and wishes her continued success in her new role. Archivist and oral historian Brandon Perdomo, a graduate of Columbia University’s Oral History Program, has begun consulting on the Archive Project’s oral history work.

 

Grants 

Leon Levy Foundation

We are thrilled to announce that we received $155,000 in additional funding from the Leon Levy Foundation to continue the Shelby White & Leon Levy Archival Assistance Initiative through 2027, support the organization’s Saving Papers work, and expand the Archive Project’s digital archiving work. We will begin accepting applications for the 2025 Shelby White & Leon Levy Archival Assistance Initiative Grant in June 2025. Please check our website and social media for additional information.

Termination of National Endowment for the Humanities Grant

In January 2025, the Archive Project announced that it would be receiving a Public Impact Projects at Smaller Organizations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities—the first major federal grant awarded to the organization in its over 25 year history. This grant would have supported the launch of a thematic podcast series, featuring voices from New York City’s historic preservation movement, as well as conducting new interviews with neglected voices in preservation. On April 29, 2025, the Archive Project learned that this grant was terminated due to the Trump Administration’s cutbacks on government spending.

While the Board and staff are devastated by the loss of the NEH grant, the organization is honored to have been selected for such a competitive program. Please consider donating to the Archive Project’s Oral History program to ensure that the organization can continue to highlight diverse voices in preservation during this unprecedented time.

 

Outreach 

New York State Historic Preservation Organizations Speak Out Against the Rewriting of Our History

In February 2025, the Archive Project joined over 40 New York-based preservation groups in signing the Preservation League of New York State’s letter speaking out against the rewriting of history after the National Park Service removed all instances of the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Monument’s website. The letter reads, “As a preservation movement, we say in no uncertain terms that LGBTQ+ history is our history, and it needs to be amplified and celebrated. We choose not to remain silent while attempts are made to deny the existence of Trans people, both past and present. Revising the historical record for political purposes is dangerous and unacceptable.”

 

New York Statewide Preservation Conference 

Executive Director Emily Kahn led a collaborative workshop titled “Preserving Your Community’s Preservation History” at the New York Statewide Preservation Conference held in Poughkeepsie in May 2025. She encouraged attendees to apply the Archive Project’s methodologies for documenting preservation history to their own communities and helped them gain skills for advocating for the preservation movement on a local and statewide level.

 

Special Projects 

Saving Papers 

Thanks to a donation from Laura Heim on behalf of her late husband Jeffrey Kroessler, the Archive Project acquired 11 boxes of papers related to the Citizens Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation, formerly held in the office of Whitney North Seymour at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Following processing, the Archive Project will donate these papers to a permanent repository.

 

Following Albert Sprague Bard 

In April 2025 to celebrate the forthcoming publication of Servant of Beauty: Landmarks, Secret Love, and the Unimagined Life of an Unsung New York Hero, author and Archive Project founder Anthony C. Wood, Vice Chair Adrian Untermyer, John Oddy, and Liz McEnaney took a day-trip to Norwich, Connecticut, the birthplace and home town of Albert Sprague Bard. They visited Bard’s childhood home and the Slater Museum, where Bard attended school under the auspices of the Norwich Free Academy, among other places.