In 1961, walking tours in New York were still so novel that the New York Times, on June 12 of that year, found “50 Guided Around Wall Street Area in Historical Tour” to be newsworthy. I myself have on several occasions led 50 people on a historical tour of Wall Street, and not once did the Times run a news story about it. The “tour guide” was Henry Hope Reed Jr. (In later years, the “Jr.” would disappear from his name.)

Mr. Reed basically invented the New York City architectural or historical walking tour, in 1956, for the Municipal Art Society. He then led his tours for the Museum of the City of New York. Those walking tours helped build the constituency for the preservation movement, which led to the Landmarks Law of 1965, and to a general revolution in urban consciousness that has yet to be adequately chronicled, yet should not be underestimated.

In 1960, the Times ran a piece, by Cynthia Kellogg, noting “The most ardent fans of Manhattan’s newest outdoor sport, the architectural tours of the Museum of the City of New York, are women.” Women “outnumber men two to one in the group that, every other Sunday afternoon, follows in the footsteps of a modern Pied Piper, Henry Hope Reed.” Kellogg went on, “Before too long, the women in his wake are clucking righteously over the housekeeping habits of the city, which, with a new pride of ownership, they regard as an extension of their own living rooms.” Mr. Reed’s walking tours indeed made New Yorkers – men as well as “clucking” women – feel a pride of ownership in the city.

Henry Hope Reed emerged as a public figure in the 1950s not simply as a vocal enemy of Modernism in art and architecture but as one of the few who was clearly not a philistine. His 1959 book “The Golden City” stands as the clarion manifesto of anti-Modernism. Borrowing a rhetorical tactic from Augustus Pugin’s influential 19th-century pro-Gothic tract “Contrasts,” Mr. Reed juxtaposed images of classical and Modernist designs, such as the old and new wings of the Yale Art Gallery, or the flagpoles of the New York Public Library and of the Seagram Building. Critics chided the approach as simplistic, but that, I believe, merely showed their unease at what was, in fact, a powerful polemic.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the establishment cast a wary eye on advocates of the classical – in 1962 the ultra-establishment Progressive Architecture referred to Mr. Reed’s “necrophiliac architectural leanings.” Even Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” is often cited as an anti-Modernist tract, was a critic of Modernist planning rather than Modernist architecture. Indeed, in her book she praises the way Vanderbilt Avenue shows a striking vista of the Union Carbide Building.

The former Union Carbide Building, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is one block north of Mr. Reed’s favorite skyscraper in New York, the former New York Central Building, at the foot of upper Park Avenue. When in the early 1960s the Pan Am Building, the largest office building that had ever been built, was inserted between Grand Central Terminal and the New York Central Building, it turned most New Yorkers – yes, most New Yorkers – were firmly against Modernist architecture, which no longer seemed a refreshing breath of modernity but rather an arrogant intrusion upon a once better-looking and more soul-nourishing city.That the Pan Am Building’s exterior was largely the design of Walter Gropius, the panjandrum of international Modernism, merely underscored for many the bankruptcy of the Modernist project.

The pendulum of taste swings back and forth, alas. In the “postmodern” 1980s, when classicism became chic among architects, Mr. Reed was often cited in newspaper and magazine articles as having been triumphant in his once seemingly quixotic quest to bring back classicism. In recent years, however, young architects and students are as apt as not to admire the Pan Am Building, and the most energetic force in the preservation world is Docomomo, an international organization seeking to document and preserve important Modernist buildings.

That does not mean that Mr. Reed, now nearly 90, has grown any more quiescent. Indeed, he disliked most of what was done in the 1980s in the name of “classicism” as much as he disliked Modernism. Nonetheless, the 1980s may have failed in architecture because designers wished to “do classicism” but lacked the rigorous and very specific training required for it.

To help rectify that situation, Mr. Reed helped found Classical America in 1968. In the 1970s, this organization began to offer courses in drawing the classical orders – courses that had been stripped from the curricula of every architecture school in America. Later, the New York-based Institute of Classical Architecture took up the call of the classical training of architects. A few years ago, the Institute merged with Mr. Reed’s organization to form the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, of which Mr. Reed is honorary president and scholar-in-residence.

As for Mr. Reed himself, he has in recent years done the best scholarly work of his career, producing a trio of magnificent books, each on one of the greatest buildings in America. “The New York Public Library” and “The Library of Congress “have this year been joined by “The United States Capitol: Its Architecture and Decoration” (W.W. Norton, 210 pages, $50), the book Mr. Reed was born to write. With this book he makes clear that our Capitol is not merely the beloved symbol of our democracy, but also the touchstone for all the best that has been accomplished in American architecture and in the arts of decoration.

As for that latter, the arts of decoration, Mr. Reed firmly believes, and has been saying for more than half a century, that they should not be divorced from architecture. Painting and sculpture, in Mr. Reed’s view, are essential to buildings. The absence of ornamentation and decoration, of what Mr. Reed likes to call “embellishment,” in modern architecture led him to coin the term “anorexic art.”

Mr. Reed’s other great passion is landscape gardening. In 1966 Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving named Mr. Reed to a brand-new position: curator of Central Park. Few people know Central Park so intimately as does Mr. Reed. Among his books is “Central Park: A History and a Guide,” co-written with Sophia Duckworth. Mr. Reed also cowrote “The Bridges of Central Park.” It may be said that just as Mr. Reed’s walking tours helped build the constituency for the preservation movement, so did Mr. Reed’s work on Central Park (including his legendary walking tours of the park), keenly focused on the intentions of the park’s designers Vaux and Olmsted, help build the constituency for the reclamation of the park begun in the 1980s by the Central Park Conservancy.

Upon his appointment, Mr. Reed told the Times that his main responsibility was “the battle to keep things out.” (As for the Wollman Rink, alas, Mr. Reed said upon his appointment: “It’s there – how the devil can I remove it?”) Mr. Reed chastised Hoving over his allowing the park to be used for mass entertainments, specifically a 1967 concert by Barbra Streisand that turned the Sheep Meadow into “a pigsty.” Hoving retorted that Mr. Reed was a “fuddy-duddy.” Mayor Lindsay agreed with Hoving, but the New York Times editorial page smartly said that if Mr. Reed was a fuddy-duddy, then maybe we need more fuddy-duddies.

Henry Hope Reed Jr., scion of an old and distinguished family with roots in both Philadelphia and New York, was born near Washington Square. He attended Harvard in the 1930s, at the very time that Modernism was ascendant – at the very time, indeed, that dean Joseph Hudnut of the Graduate School of Design imported Gropius from Germany. Mr. Reed claims he was an undistinguished student. In what may seem an unlikely interlude in his career, he went to work on a newspaper in Omaha, and describes himself during his post college years as a “drifter.”

At Harvard Mr. Reed had befriended the architectural writer and surrealist novelist Wayne Andrews, with whom he first began to travel to look seriously at buildings. Through Andrews Mr. Reed met and befriended the architect John Barrington Bayley, who in the 1970s would design the classical addition to the Frick Collection. Mr. Reed then went to Paris to study at the Ecole du Louvre. This may be when his love of France began.

He speaks the language fluently and with the most delicately inflected accent. At the Ecole he came under the influence of two great authorities on the 17th- and 18th-century decorative arts of France, Charles Mauricheau-Beaupre and Pierre Verlet. He traveled about Europe as he had America, familiarizing himself with the great tradition of Western architecture, especially in Rome, which he toured with Bayley, then studying at the American Academy in Rome. Mr. Reed and a Paris acquaintance, architect Paul Rudolph, drove out from the city in a beat-up Citroen to see Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie, then being used as a storehouse for potatoes.

Mr. Reed says that New York has always suffered a “fear of luxurious splendor.” He cites the blank pediments of our Greek Revival buildings – early “anorexic art,” he calls them. Carriages, Mr. Reed says, were generally more splendid than houses in old New York, as he wistfully notes that Brewster of New York was one of the half dozen or so best carriage-makers in the world. Part of the wonder of Henry Reed is that one hears such things from no other person. When I asked Reed to name his favorite buildings in New York, he immediately said the University Club, on Fifth Avenue and 54th Street, designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White. (The worst? Today he will say that horrid long 54th Street wall of MoMA.) Mr. Reed’s favorite house in America is Vizcaya, in Miami, for its Diego Suarez gardens.

Mr. Reed then mentions an apartment house: 927 Fifth Avenue, at 74th Street, by Warren & Wetmore (who also designed Mr. Reed’s favorite skyscraper, the New York Central Building). This is the building made famous by the red-tailed hawks Pale Male and Lola. That building possesses one of the most perfectly composed classical facades in the city, and Mr. Reed mentions its use of Trajan’s eagles – which somehow one can’t help thinking are what attracted Pale Male to the building in the first place. Walk Central Park with Mr. Reed, and he points out birds with the same ultra-discriminating eye with which he notes the ornament on building facades. Pale Male’s attraction to Warren & Wetmore makes one think: Henry Reed and the birds, they have an understanding. Now if only we people would catch up.