The Historic Districts Council convened its 2026 annual conference around a question the preservation community has rarely placed at its center: whether the movement built to protect New York City’s buildings should also help protect the industries that once filled them. Titled “Making It in New York: The Preservation of Manufacturing,” the conference examined how landmark and historic-district advocacy intersects with a manufacturing sector the council described as squeezed between competing pressures on the city’s land.
According to the conference description circulated by the council, manufacturing has long been an integral part of New York City’s success, with businesses, makers, suppliers and others forming a network that supplies both the city and the world. The council pointed to the Garment District and the historic industries lining the New York waterfront as examples of places that, in its words, imbue neighborhoods with an irreplaceable character while also providing crucial jobs and goods.
But that legacy, the council said, now feels squeezed between a growing call for more housing, sharply increased real estate prices and the slow loss of industries to other places. The central question posed by the program was what role the preservation community should play in safeguarding both the historic places these industries inhabit and the industries themselves, a framing that pushes preservation beyond its traditional focus on architecture and toward the economic life of the buildings it seeks to save.
The conference, held Friday, April 10, 2026, from 1 to 6:30 p.m. at Baruch College, 151 East 25th Street, was organized into three panels. The first addressed practitioners and community, the second turned to developers and local development corporations, and the third asked an open-ended question about the future. The program structure traced a path from the people currently making goods in the city, through the developers and intermediary organizations that shape industrial land use, to the unresolved question of whether that activity can endure.
The conference was recommended by the Preservation Committee of the City Club of New York, which highlighted the program to its members in advance of the event. The Historic Districts Council, a citywide advocate for New York’s historic neighborhoods, hosts the annual conference as a forum on emerging questions in the field.
