Architecture Worth Saving in Onondaga County

The book includes descriptions of 64 buildings across 206 pages. They considered buildings for their "architectural merit, unisequences of style, representation of period and historical value," with a focus on commercial buildings in the downtown area, which were considered to be at the greatest risk for destruction. Architecture Worth Saving also offered suggestions on how to save the architecture, including ways to re-purpose old buildings.^[1] Buildings listed included:^[3]

A review published in New York History praised the book as a "worthy volume" that would hopefully be the first of several surveys creating "unique collections" of commentary and images on New York's historic architecture.^[2] Upon publication, an article in The New York Times wrote that after sending out information on the report to various officials and programs, "[t]he response in replies ha[d] far exceeded the council's expectations."^[1] Ada Louise Huxtable considered the work a "significant pilot report" and described it as a "remarkably competent survey of buildings of architectural value and historical importance." Huxtable also hoped that the book would be the first of a series of several such projects in other American cities.^[4]

A 1975 article in Pioneer America by Peirce F. Lewis argued that "the historic preservation movement in the United States has been, and continues to be, a thundering failure." He noted that the book had gone out of print, "perhaps because it has become obsolete— so many of the 'worth saving' buildings have been destroyed since the book was published, less than a dozen years ago."^[5] In a 1976 article Clifford E. Clark cited the book as one of the best studies of American domestic architecture.^[6]