Peter M. Wolf

Peter M. Wolf is an American author, land planning and urban policy authority, investment manager, and philanthropist. He lives in New York City.

Early biography
Peter Michael Wolf, a fifth-generation member of the Godchaux-Weis-Wolf family, was born in New Orleans. He is the author of several books, including the biography The Sugar King: Leon Godchaux, A New Orleans Legend, His Creole Slave, and His Jewish Roots and his memoir, My New Orleans, Gone Away – A Memoir of Loss and Renewal. Wolf attended Metairie Park Country Day School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yale University (BA), Tulane University (MA), and New York University Institute of Fine Arts (PhD). At Yale, he was elected to the Manuscript Society and the Elizabethan Club, and served as a board member and the publicity manager of the Yale Daily News. During his graduate studies, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Paris. His doctoral dissertation was published internationally in 1968, Eugène Hénard and the Beginning of Urbanism in Paris 1900–1914. In 1969, it became the basis for a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Wolf has been awarded grants for his writing and scholarship by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the National Research and Education Trust Fund. He has twice been a visiting artist/scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

Wolf's career in urbanism began at Wilbur Smith Associates, where he engaged in land planning focused on transportation. He began teaching urbanism as an adjunct professor at the School of Architecture at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1971, and continued in that role through 1987. Wolf also began working for the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1971, participating in a number of research initiatives, including: "The Street as a Component of the Urban Environment" (co-director with architect Peter Eisenman, 1971–1973); "Low-Rise High-Density Prototype" (co-director with professor Kenneth Frampton, 1971–1973); and Union Square Redevelopment Program (director, 1972–1973). From 1972–1982 Wolf served as chairman of the IAUS Board of Fellows and as a trustee.

Between 1965 and 1990, Wolf authored numerous studies and articles related to land use and open space planning for the Office of the Manhattan Borough President, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Pan American World Airways, and private land owners across the US. His study, "Shaker Heritage Historic District," commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Shaker Central Trust Fund, and the Historical Society of the Town of Colonie, New York, was instrumental in saving the first Shaker settlement in America, a National Register of Historic Places property. In 1987, as the consultant to the Village of East Hampton, New York, he rewrote the East Hampton Village Residential Zoning Ordinance and, in 2002, he served as senior advisor to the Town of East Hampton Comprehensive Plan.

Between 1970 and 2007, as owner of Peter Wolf Associates, Wolf represented private land owners, institutions, corporations, and communities in land use studies and land investment management projects.

Recent biography
Between 2008 and 2015, Peter Wolf Associates served as an investment manager on behalf of individuals, trusts, pension plans, and estates.

In 2010, Wolf founded and served as the chairman of the Thomas Moran Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to the restoration of the Thomas Moran House, the studio house and gardens of painter Thomas Moran and printmaker Mary Nimmo Moran, a National Historic Property. In 2012, he was appointed to the Advisory Committee of the Quiet Skies Coalition, a group that seeks to preserve the well-being of communities on the easternmost reaches of Long Island suffering from noise pollution created by increasing air traffic.

Wolf’s biography The Sugar King: Leon Godchaux, published in 2022, attracted advance praise from distinguished authors and journalists such as Walter Isaacson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Nicholas B. Lemann, Richard Campanella and Lawrence N. Powell. It unearths the astonishing rise of a forgotten penniless, illiterate Jewish thirteen year old emigrant from France who becomes one of the most remarkable and famous men in the nineteenth century in Louisiana, all while remaining illiterate. His career is twined with the achievements of two Black men.

Wolf's memoir, My New Orleans, Gone Away, was published by Delphinium Books in 2013. The book, which reached the New York Times e-book best seller list in 2016, celebrates New Orleans and explores the issue of growing up as a Jew in the South.

Public service
Wolf has served on the New York Cultural Council, the Executive Committee of the Architectural League of New York, and the Advisory Board of the National Academy of Design. He was chairman of the Van Alen Institute in New York, New York and a trustee of One to World, a program for Fulbright Fellows and other foreign students in the greater New York area. He was appointed to the New York State Advisory Board of The Trust for Public Land. He is currently an Advisory Board member of the Tulane University School of Architecture, a trustee of Guild Hall and the Village Preservation Society, both in East Hampton where he was a Town-appointed member of the Airport Planning Committee, Noise Subcommittee.

Books

 * Eugène Hénard and the Beginning of Urbanism in France 1900–1914 (International Federation of Housing and Planning/Centre de Recherché de Urbanisme, 1969)
 * Another Chance for Cities (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970)
 * The Evolving City: Urban Design Proposals by Ulrich Franzen and Paul Rudolph (Whitney Library of Design for American Federation of Arts, 1974)
 * The Future of the City: New Directions in Urban Planning (Watson Guptill Publications, 1974)
 * Land in America: Its Value, Use and Control (Pantheon Books, 1981)
 * Hot Towns: The Future of the Fastest Growing Communities in America (Rutgers University Press, 1999)
 * Land Use and Abuse in America: A Call to Action (Xlibris Corporation, 2010)
 * My New Orleans, Gone Away – A Memoir of Loss and Renewal (Delphinium Books, 2013)
 * The Sugar King: Leon Godchaux, A New Orleans Legend, His Creole Slave, and His Jewish Roots

Selected articles and essays

 * “Michelangelo’s Laurenziana and Inconspicuous Traditions,” Marsyas, vol. XII, 1964–1965
 * "Space, Time and Urbanism," Art in America, November–December 1966
 * "The Urbanization of the Skyscraper," Art in America, September–October 1967
 * "The First Modern Urbanist," The Architectural Forum, October 1967
 * “The Structure of Motion in the City,” Art in America, no. 1, January–February 1969
 * “Blue Hill: A New Concept in Office Park Development” (with E.M. Whitlock), Traffic Engineering, July 1969, vol. 39, no.10
 * "Urban Redevelopment 19th-Century Style: Older, Bolder, Ideas for Today," Design Quarterly, 85, Walker Art Center, 1970
 * "The Urban Street," Art in America, November–December 1970
 * "City Structuring and Social Sense in 19th- and 20th-Century Urbanism," Perspecta, The Yale Architectural Journal, no. 13–14, 1972
 * “Preservation, Country-Style: Land Management Comes First,” Council on Architecture, New York State Report, July 1974, vol. 7
 * "Rethinking the Urban Street: Its Economic Context" and "Toward an Evaluation of Transportation Potential for the Urban Street" published in On Streets (MIT Press, 1978), p. 189ff., p. 377ff.
 * "Forever Farmland: A Proposal for Preserving the Nation's Most Productive Soils," The Amicus Journal, Winter 1982, vol. 3, no. 3
 * "Probing Mysteries of Rural Land," APA Planning Journal, June 1982, vol. 48, no. 6

Exhibitions

 * Eugène Hénard and Urban Anticipations, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1969)
 * Another Chance for Cities, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1970)
 * Another Chance for Housing, Low-Rise Alternatives, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973)
 * Recapturing Wisdom's Valley: The Watervliet Shaker Heritage, 1775–1975, Albany Institute of History & Art, Albany, New York (1975)