Margot Gayle, Historic Preservationist, Dies at 100

"Ms. Gayle began her mission in the late 1950s, when a group of neighbors gathered in her Greenwich Village apartment to plot how to save the Victorian-Gothic curiosity that was the Jefferson Market Courthouse around the corner.

A half-century later, not only was the courthouse preserved (as a library), but so were scores of iron-framed buildings, Bishop's Crook lampposts, stately public clocks and many other wisps of a past that Ms. Gayle had deemed worth keeping.

"Why not let people in the future enjoy some of the things we thought were extremely fine?" she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1998."