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John Freeman Gill

Biography

John Freeman Gill

John Freeman Gill is a native New Yorker and longtime New York Times contributor whose work has been anthologized in THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF NEW YORK and MORE NEW YORK STORIES: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. He is the architecture and real estate editor of Avenue magazine, for which he writes "Edifice Complex," a monthly column exploring the biographies of historic New York City buildings and their occupants.

His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Observer, the International Herald Tribune, Premiere, the website of New York magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere.

A summa cum laude graduate of Yale University, where he won two prizes and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he received an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

He lives in New York City with his wife, three children and a smattering of gargoyles. 

John Freeman Gill

Books by John Freeman Gill

by John Freeman Gill - Fiction

Both his family and his city are crumbling when 13-year-old Griffin Watts stumbles headlong into his estranged father’s illicit architectural salvage business in 1970s Manhattan. Griffin clambers up the façades of tenements and skyscrapers to steal their 19th-century architectural sculptures. Desperate for money to help his artist mother keep their home, and yearning to connect with his father, Griffin fails to see that his father’s deepening obsession with preserving the treasures of Gilded Age New York endangers them all. As he struggles to hold his family together and build a first love with his girlfriend, Griffin must learn to develop himself into the man he wants to become, and discern which parts of his life may be salvaged --- and which parts must be let go.