Decades of Curbed Archives are Gone

A significant portion of archived articles from Curbed, a publication that covered urban issues of national importance for decades before being folded into New York Magazine in 2020, have gone dark, reports Patrick Sisson in The Architect’s Newspaper.

The publication, known for its “[o]pinionated, passionate, thoughtful, thorough” coverage, began with a New York City-specific site and branched out into multiple other major U.S. cities. After its purchase by Vox Media in 2013 and its re-launch as part of New York Magazine in 2020, the other city sites were shut down, but the archives remained online. Now, they’ve been removed.

Vox says the change is due to a migration of the website, and that there are no plans for publicly maintaining the Curbed archive. “This latest change means that thousands of now-historic regional urbanism stories are not readable, linkable, and searchable. Like one of the many development dramas covered by the publication, pleas in support of historic preservation and the public good seem to have been ignored by corporate decisionmakers.”