Staten Island has often been branded New York City’s “forgotten borough,” yet it’s one of the first places tennis was played in the United States. It’s the site of the nation’s oldest schoolhouse, of an abortive peace conference to prevent the Revolutionary War, and of what was once the world’s largest landfill. It also boasts the highest point on the East Coast and was home to the photographer Alice Austin and to Cornelius Vanderbilt (who earned the honorific “Commodore” because he operated a ferry to Manhattan). After serving as president, Ulysses S. Grant had planned to move into a mansion built there for a cotton mogul until his wife was attacked by mosquitoes on a site visit.
It is also the only one of the city’s five boroughs whose residents have ever voted to secede. (The vote, in 1993, was blocked in the State Assembly.)
The historian Barnett Shepherd devoted his career to reclaiming and restoring Staten Island’s heritage and preserving its past for the future.
As a relative newcomer to New York — he moved there when he was in his 30s — Mr. Shepherd, an ordained Presbyterian minister, founded the Preservation League of Staten Island in 1977.
He was instrumental in preserving and promoting several of the borough’s major cultural attractions, including the Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, the St. Paul’s Avenue-Stapleton Heights Historic District and Historic Richmond Town, which he oversaw as executive director and chief executive from 1981 to 2000.
Mr. Shepherd died on Aug. 6 on Staten Island. He was 87.
The cause of his death, in a nursing home, was complications of a respiratory infection, his spouse, Nick Dowen, said.
Mr. Shepherd transplanted himself to Staten Island in 1972, less than a decade after the completion of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in 1964 led to surging development that threatened the borough’s landmarks.
At Historic Richmond Town, once the seat of Staten Island’s government, Mr. Shepherd oversaw the renovation of a museum; the restoration of four buildings; the construction of the Edna Hayes Collections Care building; and the acquisition of several properties, including the Jacob Crocheron House, built around 1920, and the Stephens-Prier House, from the mid-19th century.
Snug Harbor and Historic Richmond Town typically draw hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
“His legacy will live on in every building saved, every story told and every visitor inspired by this community he helped to shape,” Jessica Phillips, executive director and chief executive of the historic village, said in a statement.
Isaac Barnett Shepherd was born on July 26, 1938, in St. Joseph, Mo. His father, Clarence Shepherd Jr., was a plant manager for the United States Gypsum Company, which manufactured construction materials, and at one point served as mayor of Diboll, Texas. His mother, Marjorie (Lancaster) Shepherd, was a milliner and an artist.
Barnett attended schools in New Jersey and Oregon. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Alma College in Michigan in 1960 and a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan in 1964.
During the tumultuous civil rights era, he opened a racially integrated Presbyterian church in Birmingham, Ala., and worked as an associate minister in Columbus, Ind. But he left the church because, he said in a 2012 interview with the New York Preservation Archive Project, “I found that personally it was not fulfilling after a number of years, that I really had the greater love for art and culture.”
After earning a master’s degree in art history from Indiana University in Bloomington in 1970, he taught at the University of Florida in Gainesville until he migrated to Staten Island, where he lived with a husband and wife who were both Methodist ministers.
“I was painting as an artist full time,” he said, “but soon ran out of money, so I had to get a job.”
He worked as a legal typist on Wall Street and a janitor at a Unitarian church. He wrote his first book, “Sailors’ Snug Harbor, 1801-1976” (1979), about the history of a Manhattan retirement home for seamen that relocated to Staten Island in 1831.
He worked with the Tottenville Historical Society to survey 250 buildings as research for “Tottenville: The Town the Oyster Built” (2008).
In addition to Mr. Dowen, whom Mr. Shepherd married in 2014, he is survived by two brothers, Clarence and Mark.
Preservation, Mr. Shepherd said in the 2012 interview, “broadens our horizons as individuals, not just in a historical way but also in a personal way. That you can stand in the shoes of other people in times past as well as becoming more sensitive to people in your present environment.”
As for why he personally liked Staten Island, he said, “We knew what was going on in the world, but we liked being out here in this quiet isolated place and away from the latest trends about everything.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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