Colonel Gray and the World Monuments Fund.

It happened over a BLT at a 1970s diner on First Avenue and 53rd. The place still carries that faint hum of the city before cell phones—chrome, cracked leather seats, and the low murmur of people who look like they've been coming for decades.

Lisa Ackerman sat across from me, someone who has spent her life saving the world's beauty in brick and stone. She once led the World Monuments Fund and the Kress Foundation, and now advises at Woodlawn Cemetery. She speaks about preservation the way others talk about poetry—with affection, detail, and a sense of duty.

Between bites of my sandwich, Lisa told me about Colonel James A. Gray, the founder of the World Monuments Fund. She described him as a man who solved problems with quiet boldness—the kind who didn't just raise money but took action. In 1965, he founded what became WMF after pursuing ideas that seemed audacious at the time, like stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In 1968, he arranged to bring an Easter Island moai to New York's Seagram Building to remind the world what was at stake—heritage, memory, humanity itself.

Colonel James A. Gray

Listening to Lisa, I felt I was getting closer to Gray, as if his story had crossed the table with the ketchup and coffee refills. The way she spoke of him—decisive, selfless, a little audacious, larger than life—said as much about her as it did about him.

Lisa traced the arc from Colonel Gray's bold beginning to how the World Monuments Fund grew into a global network of preservation—from those early days at Lalibela to the transformative gift from Robert Wilson, who challenged WMF to raise money abroad as well as in the US, resulting in hundreds of projects across the globe. She spoke about Ethiopia and Easter Island, places where the work became real. The World Monuments Watch launched in 1995 with American Express as founding sponsor, broadening the movement and its public.

Under her stewardship decades later, those efforts found a new rhythm. Lisa served as Executive Vice President and then Interim CEO from 2018 to 2019, stewarding projects across dozens of countries and giving the Watch its clear, pragmatic voice. She helped shape the modern WMF—not only restoring what time had damaged, but ensuring that preservation itself became a living, evolving discipline.

We also talked about tomorrow's premiere of The Piccirilli Factor at the Calandra Institute, and about the Tiffany windows at Woodlawn. There's a certain symmetry there: marble and glass, both shaped by light, both testaments to collaboration and endurance.

Listening to Lisa connect these dots is like watching a map light up. The coffee went cold, the city roared on, and still the conversation lingered—one more reminder that the past survives not only in stone, but in those who know how to protect it.

And yes—the BLT was excellent.

Postscript: An hour after writing this, I walked to the corner store for a bottle of water and found myself face-to-face with a campaign for the 60th anniversary of the World Monuments Fund on a bus stop near my place in Brooklyn. There's something about this work—it finds you when you're paying attention. Or maybe it's always been there, waiting to be noticed, like the monuments themselves.