Page, Max

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PAGE, Max

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Yale University, B.A. (magna cum laude; history), 1988; attended Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1991; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. (history), 1995.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Art, University of Massachusetts, 151 Presidents Drive, Office 1, Amherst, MA 01003-9330. E-mail—mpage@art.umass.edu.

CAREER:

Educator and author. Georgia State University, assistant professor of history and director of Heritage Preservation program, 1996-99; Yale University, New Haven, CT, visiting professor of history, 1999-2001; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, associate professor of architecture and history, 2001—. Leverhulme Visiting Research Professor to University of Nottingham, 1998-99. Curator of museum exhibits; presenter at workshops and conferences; has appeared on radio and television programs. Atlanta Preservation Center, trustee, 1998-2000; Gotham Center, member of board of advisors, 2000—.

MEMBER:

Urban History Association (member of board, 2003—), Society of American City and Regional Planning Historians.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Furthermore/Kaplan Fund grants, 1998, 2002; Delmas fellow, New York Historical Society, 2001; Spiro Kostof Award, Society of Architectural Historians, 2001, for The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940; Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History fellowship, 2002; University of Massachusetts Healey faculty research award, 2002-03; Graham Foundation grant, 2002; Guggenheim fellow, 2003-04.

WRITINGS:

The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 ("Historical Studies of Urban America" series), University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1999.

(Editor with Steven Conn) Building the Nation: American Write about Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Landscape, 1789 to the Present, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2003.

(Editor with Randall Mason) Giving Preservation a History: Essays on the History of Historic Preservation in the United States, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Invisible America, Holt (New York, NY), 1995; Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture, 2000; Out of Ground Zero, Prestel (New York, NY), 2002; The Resilient City, Trauma, Recovery, Remembrance, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2003; and The Skyscraper Culturally Reconsidered: An Interdisciplinary Conversation, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including American Studies, Architecture Boston, Christian Science Monitor, Forward, Journal of Urban History, New York Journal of American History, New York Times, Politic, Preservation, Public Historian, Radical History Review, Reforum, and Wintertur Portfolio.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

The City's End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York Destruction, for Yale University Press, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

In The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 architectural historian and educator Max Page documents the "creative destruction"—to use a term first coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter—of New York City during the early twentieth century. Page draws on case studies of projects that include the development of Manhattan along Fifth Avenue, the clearing of the slums of the city's Lower East Side, historic preservation, and the planting and removal of trees. "Page's excellent research and his somewhat wry point of view come together nicely," wrote Danise Hoover in a review of the 1999 work for Booklist. While some supported demolition and rebuilding, others decried the loss of New York's architectural past, and Page explores the cultural backdrop of the decades of change that became a model for modern urbanization. "Page raises pivotal questions concerning the role of cities in shaping the framework of everyday life and the broader sweep of history and nationhood," explained a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

In the last two chapters of his book Page includes reproductions of art works which reflect his theme, among them "The Iconography of Manhattan Island," a set of illustrations by I. N. Phelps Stokes; Virginia Burton's "The Little House"; and a selection of photographs of the period under study. Library Journal reviewer Harry Frumerman called The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 "clearly written and well illustrated," while a Kirkus Reviews contributor maintained that readers "will find answers as part of the larger truth of how capitalism, culture, and art shape collective memory. For real or armchair New Yorkers, the whole package is a treat."