Preservationist Joyce Matz Dies At 92

It was about a lifetime and a half ago and Joyce Matz, a formidable figure on the preservation scene in New York, showed up at the office of Our Town, a weekly on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The paper had a new editor, one Matz determined, needed an education about the city’s history, the importance of preserving it.

Over the course of an afternoon, Matz and the editor walked the neighborhood as she gave a graduate level course on the city.

Matz, who was such a figure that she once convinced the very private Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to participate in a press conference, died Monday at 92-years-old. She took with her more knowledge of New York than most people will ever accumulate.

“You need to know this about New York,” she said that day walking around that day. “You grow up surrounded by history. It’s easy to take it for granted.”

That, she said, is what happened to her. Until she read an article about how Venice was disappearing.

With her children and her husband - legendary New York PR figure Morty Matz - she headed to Italy where, as she put it, “I fell in love with buildings.”

Before long, Matz - who was born in Manhattan in 1925 and attended Fieldston and Mt. Holyoke - was back from Italy and getting involved in preservation fights, doing public relations for a variety of organizations.

She also spent time as the chair of the landmarks committee for Community Board 5.

Her first project that got attention was her successful 1978 fight to get landmark status for Town Hall - the auditorium on West 43rd Street.

What made it special, was that it wasn’t the architecture that got notice, it was the interior - the acoustics.

Matz says that she heard of plans to gut the building.

“I got frantic,” she would say later. “I began to research madly and discovered that the acoustics of Town Hall were the finest in the world. And I reached out to acousticians and I organized a little band of people and I went to work.”

That led to a successful fight to save Lever House on Park Avenue and a partial victory to preserve part of St. Bathrolomew’s Church, which was looking to demolish part of its property to build a 47-story office tower.

In both those cases she worked with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, even persuading the private former First Lady to speak with reporters and attend press conferences.

She recognized the value of having celebrities attached to causes. Besides Kennedy Onassis, she would do events with other quintessential New Yorkers such as Tony Randall and Woody Allen.

There are battles to save the City and Suburban Apartments, the Yorkville Clock, the Metropolitan Club.

Back on that day as she walked a reporter around the neighborhood, she had a developer on her mind whom she described in unkind terms.

That was Donald Trump, who was looking to build “Trump City” along Manhattan’s West Side.

Matz for a time was working for a coalition looking to scale back the project which, in part because of their efforts and in part because of Trump’s financial condition, it was.

In an interview with the New York Preservation Archive Project, she would talk about she was occasionally asked if she would ever work for Trump.

“You know I thought about that,” she said. “How much would Trump have to offer me for me to work with him a million? Two million? Five million? I’m lucky I don’t need the money. I don’t have a wife and children to support.

“That makes a big difference, you know. It changes your whole perspective on things, when you have a family to support and the money’s tight and you need to pay the mortgage. I don’t have that. It, it’s very easy for me to be honest. Very easy.”

Matz - who is survived by her ex-husband, her three children, and three grandchildren - had some very simple advice for living in New York.

“Always pay attention,” she said. “There is history and beauty in this city. Everywhere you look.”

Photo courtesy Morty Matz