Unlike nearby Poughkeepsie, which was decimated by urban renewal, Kingston, New York, has suffered more from neglect than demolition. The 350-year-old town remains mercifully intact, albeit with an abundance of empty storefronts, crumbling mortar, and flaking paint. Visiting Kingston, I felt a sense of suspension, of being out of time. But as author Melissa Holbrook Pierson says, “Change is afoot.” Upscale specialty shops are cropping up and houses are being converted into luxury condominiums. Many would see this as “progress,” but Pierson sees the underside of that word. She’s seen too many places she’s loved be wrecked, spoiled, or altered beyond recognition.

Her most recent book, The Place You Love Is Gone, carries the subtitle Progress Hits Home, and the double meaning is intentional. Progress touches down everywhere, even the precincts of our earliest memories, and when it comes, she argues, it can smash those places to pieces. Often, Pierson wishes progress, in both the physical and temporal sense, would stop. This radical position admittedly makes her a curmudgeon, but it also makes her something of a fearless expresser of uncomfortable and rarely articulated sentiments.

Pierson is the author of three books of nonfiction—The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles, Dark Horses and Black Beauties: Animals, Women, a Passion, and the aforementioned The Place You Love Is Gone, which Anthony Swofford, in the New York Times, called “A social history, a history of place (actually, three places: Akron, Hoboken and Kingston, N.Y.), a water history, a personal history, a moral history, [and] a survey of ‘lonely cabin’ writings,” and praised its “acerbic wit and highly refined sense of injustice.”

In Kingston’s old shopping district, Pierson and I sat down at an ice-cream parlor for a conversation, then walked around the center of town. Afterward, we drove around the edge of the nearby Ashokan Reservoir, the beauty of which is undercut by historical markers, as solemn as gravestones, reading “Former Site of the Village of West Hurley” and other places long ago submerged.

—Alan G. Brake

I. “WHO WANTS A CHEMLAWN?”

THE BELIEVER: Do you consider yourself a travel writer, a kind of “place writer,” a nature writer, or—

MELISSA HOLBROOK PIERSON: All of those things. I don’t think of myself as fitting into a category. But I had to be careful in all of my books not to repeat things, because I have these ideas, and though the subjects were disparate, the same idea would come up through different portals. And I think—Look, we’re physical objects, we think of ourselves as these kind of free-floating brains, but the brain is such a little part. It’s way smaller than we like to...