I'm increasingly coming around to the take that if a society deems that a building is so historically important that it should be preserved, against all costs, then its government should acquire the building itself, and take on the burden of the additional costs itself, instead of offloading those costs onto unwilling private owners.
Yup. I live in a ""historic"" neighborhood in Sacramento, CA. Of course Sacramento isn't very old so it's just a bunch of 1910 catalog homes with a few 1960/1970 apartment buildings mixed in. IMO a much better idea would be to pick one cool Craftsman on Capitol, make it a little museum with maps & images of the original city and some info about the history of construction/catalog homes, and let people do what they will with the rest of these crappy 100-year-old houses. If preserving this history is not worth the cost of 1 measly house and the employee/maintenance cost of running a small museum, it's definitely not worth the cost of freezing huge swaths of midtown in amber.
Perhaps they should offer to do so rather than simply doing so.
If your family have been living in the same house for 300 years, you ought to be entitled to carry on living in it as long as you can afford to, rather than being forced out so it can be turned into a museum.
Well, if the family is living in the house then there’s nothing to preserve against. If the family wants to sell the house and a developer is willing to buy it to turn it into apartments, and the government doesn’t want them to, then the government should make them a better offer.
That just leads us to the situation I stumbled across and highlighted here this weekend; National Rail owns the station we were discussing, which legitimately has historical and huge architectural merit, and still wants to put a 15-story office block on top of it, as if London has no better place to put one.
Which, in a roundabout way, points out the bankruptcy of the current preservation paradigm: people are so obsessed with preserving the "green belt", which is mostly private scrub- and farmland, that they're creating an opening to toss things with real value under the bus.
Will the station no longer be a station? Or is NR just replacing a station with a station + office building combination?
If it's the latter, I don't really blame them. With regard to commuting, it's hard to imagine a more desirable location than the same building as a train station. I suspect the building will attract very high rents.
I don’t love defending the bureaucracy but I will say that the government does often apply much stricter rules to its own projects than it does to private projects. There may be exceptions based on local rules. Some of the crazy things it does on federally funded projects would not apply at all to private owners.
Then it just turns into Colonial Williamsburg, and blocks real, helpful, modern use of the valuable land in favor of maintaining a relic of a time gone by, and transforms the space into something less than a museum. Might as well be a statue.
Colonial Williamsburg is a big tourist draw. There's significant value in having a neighborhood-sized museum that preserves one of the oldest built environments in the country.
With that said.. we don't need 100+ Colonial Williamsburgs in this country.
This is all correct and a strong post. I've always been under the impression that the "historical preservation" tool was implemented as a backlash to all of Robert Moses's work in New York (specifically, the destruction of the old Penn Station). And then as usual people realized they could use it as a NIMBY cudgel. Can't wait for the logical endpoint of this... when the BQE cantilever is protected under the historical preservation declaration.
Not too far off. Read about the Domino sugar factory and the fight regarding its famous sign and how it was supposedly a “historic” part of Brooklyn.
It was finally turned into multi family housing but only after keeping aspects of the old factory in place and years of wrangling. Like this wasn’t a place some previous president was born, it was a place of punishing working conditions.
Really one of the stories that truly radicalized me against historical preservation (already leaned that way due to people like Matt highlighting the issue but this really showed me how farcical this is). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_Sugar_Refinery
We must Save Our Historic Sweatshops! Preserving the architecture is not enough. We must maintain the working conditions, wages and pay rates from the golden age of American industrial progress, lest we forget our historical roots. Workers should need community board approval to leave their jobs, and it should be granted only after a new worker with the same age, stature and ethnicity has been hired.
I mentioned this in another comment thread, but its likely that the laws designed to prevent another destruction of something like old Penn Station also would have prevented the construction of old Penn Station.
I don't think Robert Moses had anything g to do with the demolition of Penn Station - that was a private developer whose name is still on buildings in New York - Zeckendorf.
I see that name every time I go to Costco and always wondered who he/she was — thank you for supplying me with yet another tidbit I can relay to my disinterested wife.
I think the condo buildings that had the medical outpatient facility in it at Union Square are called Zeckendorf Towers. One of the escalators out of the subway is maintained by the condo, there's a sign up.
Fair... but Moses had little regard for historic preservation with any of his actions. Knocking down the old NY Aquarium was one he was responsible for, though that was 20 years earlier and didn't have the same effect.
The destruction of Penn Station came at the tail end of Moses's peak and is usually considered the inflection point that swung the pendulum the other way. That's likely an oversimplification of history, and obviously people like Jane Jacobs played a big role as well.
Brooklyn Heights became New York's first designated 'historical neighborhood', precisely to prevent Robert Moses from bulldozing the neighborhood to build the BQE. The cantilever was the result. All good in my opinion. Matt's dream of knocking down old buildings to put up the 21st century of Mitchell Lama housing will solve the housing crisis. No one will want to live there.
I agree that historic preservation designation is being abused, and that cities should be far more restrictive about designating buildings and neighborhoods as historic. But I think Matt goes too far in wanting to more or less entirely do away with historic preservation, to the point that he is not even sure that central Paris should be preserved.
Personally, I feel that not only individual buildings, but also neighborhood "feel" is important, and sometimes worth preserving.
Could we find a compromise? A process that does take cost into account? But that at the same time helps preserving some older neighborhoods. The destruction of older cities in the 1960s was very bad, and some regulatory response was well motivated. If that response went too far, then let’s revisit and rewrite, rather than take another extreme turn.
In my experience in many, many, neighborhood meetings, preserving the "feel" of a neighborhood usually means not changing anything because it makes the long-term residents uncomfortable.
Matt's take on NIMBYism as a driver of preservation is surely correct, but I think he undervalues the impact of resistance to change.
I used to live in Evanston IL. There is a historic building called the Harley Clarke Mansion. It was unusable and the city could not afford renovations. The local, very wealthy, very NIMBY neighborhood organized a fundraising drive to tear it down and put up new development! Then local activists put the issue on the ballot and the broader city resoundingly defeated the development initiative. There was no plan and now, three years later, the group that was going to fundraise to "save" the mansion pulled out.
Historic preservation can't preserve neighborhood "feel" (because that's not something you can actually preserve) only what it looks like, and since it drives gentrification it would destroy the neighborhood feel, unless it's already a wealthy neighborhood
There is truth to what you write, but I still mostly disagree. Of course a neighborhood changes as the composition of people living there changes, and as society as a whole gets wealthier and technology changes. But this does not negate that a town that preserves its historic downtown has a different feel than one that razed it and built something else. Some may feel indifferent about this, but I personally very much like the ones that preserve the older style. (Within reason, of course - only limited to truly valuable neighborhoods, allow new construction if done sensitively, etc.) YMMV.
"Within reason, of course - only limited to truly valuable neighborhoods, allow new construction if done sensitively, etc."
I think the biggest challenge is WHO decides what is "truly valuable" and what is "done sensitively." If there are people who think its truly valuable and want to buy the houses there and own them, I think that's great! Where it becomes more troubling is telling your neighbor they can't improve or sell their home because you want it to look a certain way.
I like the idea of putting this on the ballot. Do voters want the city to issue a bunch of bonds and increase taxes to buy up some old houses and preserve them?
I get what you're saying but I'm thinking more of a big city context where everything historic is already protected so it's just used by annoying busybodies and NIMBYs trying to block any new construction.
I would love to avoid jarring cycles of extreme backlash, but it's hard to see how, because the emotional core of the fight isn't about historical preservation at all. The intensity of these battles comes from the fact that, when people like their neighborhood or small town, they usually become very invested in keeping things the way they are. This isn't to say that concern about preservation is just a pretense. Most localities have a few people that are intensely passionate about it, but their passion wouldn't amount to anything if it weren't an extremely effective instrument for preserving the status quo.
I don't mean to be snide: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and change is scary, plus the benefits of development are uncertain and uneven, on the local scale. Something is lost when the built environment changes: not just aesthetics, but continuity between generations and the environment's legibility to long-time residents.
But I think most people would be satisfied with a very low dose of historical preservation qua preservation, along the lines of what Matt is suggesting, as long as their town's population stays the same (+/- 5%), their favorite institutions continue operating, and their corner store stays open.
How many town’s populations actually stay the same, within +/-5% over the course of a decade? I think a bunch of prominent cities and towns either peaked or hit a trough right around the turn of the millennium, so that an unusually large number of prominent ones happened to stagnate for a decade, but if you look at the most recent decade, or any decade of the early to mid 20th century, that sort of stagnation seems unusual.
I think you're right. That "+/- 5%" was me trying capture the pro status-quo mindset, not generating policy guidelines or establishing real-world metrics. Sorry for any confusion.
No problem at all - I think it captures the tensions in the ordinary mindset very well, that people want continued economic growth generally, and want to be allowed to have kids, but don’t realize that this means their town will have to grow and change, just as their family does.
I suspect a goodly part of the problem is that standards of living have risen so much that retirees are used to not just not having to live with the next generation, but not moving and "downsizing" at all.
So people stay in the once-growing, dynamic communities they moved to raise kids long after their own lives slip into stasis, then expect those communities to slip into stasis as well.
This is very underrated. We often take for granted that it's good for people to stay in the same neighborhoods forever, but it's probably very positive for society when a retiree leaves a highly productive area and is replaced by a working person.
Of course the best option is to just legalize housing so workers can move in without raising housing costs so much that retirees are priced out.
I think you're not really reckoning with how destructive "historic preservation" really has been. I think you're right to note that a lot of the "block busting" and destruction of cities was devastating, but mostly because of what replaced it; namely huge highways and parking lots. One of the first books Matt promoted was "The High cost of free parking" and he's written extensively on the cost to cities. The famous song lyrics isn't "they paved paradise and put up an apartment tower" it's "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot".
I think too we have to consider how new most US cities are when we talking about preserving a neighborhood. Even with the older US cities, they are literally thousands of years younger than Rome or London. I think you can make a strong case that Boston's North End and New Orleans French Quarter are the exceptions that prove the rule; these neighborhoods that actually attract a decent amount of tourists due to unique aspects and historical significance of each neighborhood.
But I can't begin to tell you how many "historic" neighborhoods in various US cities are neither "historic" nor "significant" other than being located in a prime section of a US city. I've mentioned before that I work in the Commercial Real Estate finance industry (focus on multifamily). I bring this up because my job requires me to do a decent amount of traveling to various cities all across the country. I can't begin to tell you how non-descript and generic so many of these "historic" neighborhoods really are. Like if I didn't tell you these were "historic" districts, you wouldn't know the difference.
To give an example, let's look at one of the "in the news" cities of the past 10 years; Boise, Idaho. If you read this substack, you probably know this has become one of the "hot" places to move to especially with WFH becoming more imbedded with white collar work. And it's been contentious for sure with local people holding up signs decrying all these wealthy Calinfornians moving to the area and median house prices going north of $500K (though that might have gone down a bit last 3-6 months). Now take a look at one of the areas noted as a historic district; https://www.cityofboise.org/departments/planning-and-development-services/planning-and-zoning/historic-preservation/north-end-historic-district/. Go to google maps, and do a street view of this area and ask yourself, what the heck are we even trying to preserve here. Especially considering how much housing costs have absolutely ballooned in the city.
I pick on Boise here because it's been in the news last 5 years as a new destination city to visit and live, but what I'm describing occurs in all sorts of cities across the country.
I was truly prepared for the horrifying revelation that the Baskin Robbins where Barack and Michelle had their first kiss was heritage protected. Extremely glad to find out Chicago decided to be more sensible.
I agree very much with the idea of marking the history of locations within the city - big fan of London's Blue Plaque scheme, and the idea of a modern version with a QR code and a website with much more detail makes a lot of sense: most cities could commission the history department of their local universities to produce and update the history and identify the locations of the markers.
I certainly think that any building that is preserved for historical reasons should be required to have clear markers indicating why it has been preserved and assisting passers-by to appreciate the building's historical or architectural significance.
On European cities: what tends to happen when they have an architecturally-interesting and historically-significant central district that attracts tourists is that it gets designated as the Old Town, and then a modern central district gets built nearby. So in Paris, you have the Haussmann Boulevards in the traditional city and then La Défense with the modern towers.
Rome has been through this several times - it has the Republican centre around the Forum, the Imperial centre on the Palatine, the Papal centre around the Vatican and then the post-unification centre around the Via del Corso. There's a case for yet another centre being built for the 21st century.
Edinburgh's New Town is also historically preserved (it was built 1767-1850) as well as the Old Town (medieval). That city's development has been badly constrained in recent years by not designating a Newer Town where modern buildings could be built. I have no problem with the idea of not building modern glass towers in the UNESCO area - but why not in Leith or something?
One aside though, on physical markers. I see so many that are just cheap vinyl signs which fade in sunlight and look terrible after a few years. You can see the walking tour marker in the original post is already starting to fade.
A marker made of higher-quality materials, intended to last, with much less text (and additional information via a website / app) is a much better solution. London Blue Plaques are pottery, with the text (and the blue background colour) painted in enamel and then fired. There are plaques that have been up over a hundred years and they still look good. Other UK cities use metal plaques, which are also very durable (and don't break if you drop them).
If the scheme is intended to be permanent, putting up high-quality materials in the first place is much cheaper than paying to replace vinyl signs every few years when they fade or tear.
The best practice to me seems to be the examples Matt shared from Chicago and that I shared from Boise: a very heavy stone with a metal plate attached to it.
Or just attach the metal or ceramic plate to the side of the building. As long as it gets removed and reinstated when the building is demolished and replaced, that's just as good, and you don't have to find space for the stone (which is a challenge in a dense, walkable area).
What's interesting about Sam's Stop & Shop is that it means Cleveland Park used to be on the forefront of design innovation - a place you could build something new and different like a strip mall.
By freezing everything in time in a historic district, they are destroying that spirit of innovation and new design.
The next iteration of Sam's Stop & Shop can't be innovated in this part of town, because it no longer welcomes or embraces new design or ways of doing things.
Parallel to something Lena Dunham said: New York was made cool by all of the artists and bohemians and musicians living there over the years, but the next Debbie Harry may not be able to afford to live there at all.
This isn't history's greatest cruelty but Matt's article reminded me of why apartment is so drafty. I live in San Francisco in a long-term rent controlled studio. I'm saving up to leave like all my friends did due to housing.
But for the time being I am in my apartment and have Wood Windows. Wood windows are much more drafty than modern windows. So I spend a lot of money heating up what is essentially a drafty room
The justification for lowering my QOL can be found here:
"Wood windows were originally installed on the majority of residential buildings constructed up until World War II. In San Francisco, where most buildings are viewed at close range from the street, the differences between wood windows and substitute materials are almost always easily detectable. Particularly with older buildings, these alternate materials usually stand out visually, and rarely match the character of the neighborhood. They always look like what they are: plastic or aluminum – materials that are not architecturally compatible with the building."
What percentage of people on the street notice windows? Let's be generous and say 10%. And out of that 10% what percentage can discern the difference between wood windows and substitute materials? Again, let's be generous and say 10%. So this policy is about improving QOL for the top 1% of people with aesthetic preferences. Aren't progressives supposed to be skeptical about catering to the top 1%?
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In our modern cities we've allowed people with extreme aesthetic preferences to strangle changes to the built environment unless it meets all their demands. It is madness. We would never allow the fashion industry to set standards for clothes as most of us don't care that much. And I'm sure for people who care about fashion all the ugly clothes most of us wear lower QOL. But thankfully we don't let them run the show.
With building, we've allowed the aesthetic crowd to control changes. And it is an afront. And I haven't even discussed the bad faith, preserve our parking crowd, who uses aesthetic challenges.
And one other note, yesterday was the 2 year anniversary of my father's death. He died of complications from Parkinson's Disease. He couldn't even visit my SF apartment because it was completely unsafe to enter the building.
Does the preserve old building crowd care about people like my father? As far as I can tell, no.
They love old buildings so much they'd inflict huge misery on people with mobility issues to keep these buildings up.
You bring up great points and that's an interesting link with what feels like a unnecessarily high burden for window replacements. Still ... my sense is the reason your studio still has drafty wood windows is more tied to the "long-term rent controlled status". They probably just haven't been maintained.
And as an aside being a long-term rent controlled tenant has made me more skeptical of rent control. It really doesn't do that much for anyone who doesn't want to die in their existing unit.
Rent control is terrible policy that a small class of urban progressives, mostly "professionally-educated-but-low-income-class" (PEBLI---Pebblies?) will fight to the death to preserve and even attempt to extend even though it simply does not work worth a shit.
But the poor artist types need their shithole lofts for a grand in Midtown, so here we are.
All rent control does is shift the cost. Without rent control cost is entirely money. With rent control it is money + tolerance for waiting. Part of the reason families flee rent control regimes is they can't tolerate waiting the way singles can.
It'd be nice if rent control advocates would acknowledge it does nothing for affordability but that will never happen.
Pretty much, lol. There was a thought glimmering around my head, that I almost put into the original post, that rent control disproportionately burdens people who actually contribute to society in meaningful ways and helps those who don't.
I sound like a bloody trad-con, but the broke creative equivalents of a DINK couple are just useless from a societal perspective, neither contributing any kind of real value-add in their "professional" roles nor perpetuating the species.
But that gives them shitloads and shitloads of time to spend apartment-hunting and waiting around for good things to get dropped in their laps, and rent-control rewards prime-age people who have the schedules of elderly retirees.
As far as my STEM-educated, middling-high-income, valuing-family-life ass is concerned, those people should be absolutely last on the list for everything, and it's very fortunate that a well-functioning market economy agrees with me!
Which seems to be the core of the urban hippie/progressive "end capitalism" argument, is that those people don't like being last in line for shit.
My father can spot a wooden versus plastic window from a mile away and can tell you what kind of glass is in it too. He appreciates the charm of an old house with its original fixtures, and thinks that people who keep up their old houses are carrying forward a valuable legacy. But it pains him to see an old treasure of a house that has fallen into disrepair. And he also loves double paned windows and how efficient they are, and thinks that most people should have them. So some small number of old houses should be left to a small number of people who are actually passionate about being caretakers of them, but not more.
It tells us that Harrison was named for the first President Harrison, William Henry.
The fact that this list isn’t an official government list but a private person’s research, and is pretty hard to find, totally supports your point.
(Other super minor point: I thought that the reason people landmarked the Park and Shop, and in fact created the entire Cleveland Park historic district, was opposition to larger buildings in that spot. Former long-time preservation board chair Tersh Bosberg once said that in a community meeting, but I can’t find any online documentation of that right now.)
I’ve long thought that the rules should say that the landmark protection should relate meaningfully to the thing being commemorated. So if the building is of genuine meaningful architectural distinction, maybe it should be preserved so people can appreciate it (covers the Eiffel Tower for sure), but if just someone famous once slept there, then a plaque probably does it or something else that maintains as much historicity about that as one can given the person won’t sleep there forever. But to just lock the whole building in time doesn’t do anything to help people remember that the famous person was once there. A statue would though.
The schools naming thing is interesting because there was a fairly prominent push in DC to review all the school names in the wake of the BLM protests, and to rename them if the namesakes were found to be problematic. The problem was that they're mostly named after such obscure minor bureaucrats that it was difficult to find any historical context for them, and to my knowledge they only ended up renaming Woodrow Wilson High and West Elementary, which was named after noted torture enthusiast Joseph West.
Unfortunately, to preserve the architectural history of early strip mall design, you probably actually need the strip mall. Though maybe it’s fine if you cantilever a giant building over it perhaps like the Rainier building in Seattle.
"Unfortunately, to preserve the architectural history of early strip mall design, you probably actually need the strip mall."
What about a really high-resolution video? Digital 3D models? Or just pick up the building and physically move it to a new parcel, like Hamilton, OH recently did with its train station?
Are you referring to the mess surrounding the Giant up on Wisconsin & Newark? That was an awful mess that lasted a good decade or more before anything got built.
Step one in the perversion of historical designation preservation laws was when people opposed to any kind of change in the neighborhood, on idiosyncratic personal sentimental reasons such as aesthetic preference, realized that historical designation laws could be used as a kind of aesthetic super-zoning law or community review board. In Pennsylvania, at least, my understanding is it's against state law for a municipality to use its zoning code to enforce arbitrary aesthetic preference. But enforcing aesthetic preference is what historic designation laws are all about, assuming your preference aligns with the status quo that's being preserved.
From that realization it was a short distance to step two -- municipalities actually using historical designation laws on a pretextual basis, as de facto aesthetic zoning laws and a loophole to avoid the general ban on using public zoning laws to enforce arbitrary aesthetic preferences. I'm aware of at least one municipality in Pennsylvania that has taken this to the extreme of designating the *entire borough* as historic -- a particularly precious example, in the eyes of the boomers and older gen Xers who live there now, of ordinary 1920s to 1970s suburban development outside Philadelphia. What this means in practice is that the municipality now has a legal lever to make aesthetic demands as a condition of permitting new construction (even though that's illegal under state zoning laws), lest the new construction destroy the historical character of the neighborhood.
We have a similar situation in my neighborhood. A historic old art deco theater was demolished in the 70's to make way for a Safeway, and there was a huge outcry. It was justifiable -- it was a beautiful old theater -- so a very stringent "historical review" -- of every project within a certain radius of the old theater was instituted.
This historical review also applies to my neighborhood, which was developed in the early 1900's and consists primarily of old craftsman-style bungalows. The neighborhood is lovely, but the homes are small and modest -- the original footprint of the homes is around 1000 square feet, usually 2-3 bedrooms, 1 bath. As our family grew, (we have three boys) needed more space, so we decided to add two more bedrooms, a bath and family room -- about 1300 square feet.
I am a government employee on a modest income, so we wanted to economize wherever possible, such as using lap siding milled out of pine instead of redwood. But the local ordinance required we used "original materials," so we had to spend more on the redwood siding (not to mention wood-frame windows). Moreover, there was a preservationist busybody who lived on the other side of town and challenged EVERY remodel in our area with a design review hearing, which added an extra $3000 to the project. The changes he wanted were modest, but essentially aesthetic choices based on his interpretation of what would be "historically accurate". These changes would not have been visible from the street, but our architect wisely advised us not to fight it, as it would be cheaper to redraw the plans and add windows.
The process added several thousand dollars to our budget, which given our income, was a stretch. And what was gained? The house looks great, but not significantly different than if we had gone with a less expensive version. The preservationist got his way, but to what end? Our house is not particularly architecturally or historically significant. Moreover it is not a museum, it is a home where we chose to raise our family, and changing it should not have been a financial burden filled with obstacles thrown up by tangentially interested parties.
"Moreover, there was a preservationist busybody who lived on the other side of town and challenged EVERY remodel in our area with a design review hearing"
I feel like this sentence needs to be highlighted more. Because I think this describes A LOT of what slows down development in jurisdictions across the country. Most famous is the way CEQA is abused on CA where one "busybody" can bring a lawsuit and slow development for years.
I don't know who coined this recently but I've really come to like the idea that we're living the age of the "heckler's veto". I think this was originally applied to Twitter and is sort of a close cousin of "Twitter is not real life". Namely, one random person with a 100 followers can say something nasty to a public figure and get themselves 15 minutes of fame, but also derail a conversation. But how this also applies to housing where as you say one "busybody" can balloon construction costs for an entire neighborhood.
Based on your story here I am thinking that you live in Sac like me. I also live in an older neighborhood although luckily we are not subject to any design review for historical accuracy. When we remodeled our 1927 Tudor to add a second story and room for our kids to have their own rooms we were able to add all the changes behind the front of the house so you only see the new architecture from the sides and while I wanted the end product not to be jarring, I did think it was funny to be sacralizing elements of homes that were built by middle class people in the style of the time and not by people striving for artisanal perfection. I don't think that they would be able to make any sense of the idea that their designs had to be preserved for all time.
Yes, hello, I also live in Sacramento. You nailed it: these were working and middle-class homes when they were built, and the idea that they were seeking aesthetic perfection would have been absurd to the original owners.
All of our changes are behind the house as well and the combination of architect and contractor made the addition to the house looked just as if it were part of the original. I guess that’s a bonus for the neighborhood, though, I’m not sure how it would matter to anyone else or their houses’ values, since the addition is barely visible from the street.
I think it’s nice when a remodel can capture the flavor of the original, especially if most of the neighborhood has stayed to the true original design. But that doesn’t need to be a prerequisite for “allowing“ people to remodel. After all, designs are essentially an aesthetic choice. And unless you’re talking about a home that has real historical significance and it’s not simply old, I don’t know why it’s anyone else’s business.
Personally, I am more interested in the behavior of my neighbors than the style of their houses. Are they considerate? Do they maintain their houses and yards? Do they contribute to the neighborhood community? Again, I consider my home a place to live and raise family and possibly provide a legacy for my children. But preserving the historical legacy of the neighborhood? That’s not important to me.
Early 1900 bungalows are nice. I get why people like them. And they’re often the oldest houses in west coast neighborhoods. On the other hand a lot of them are Sears houses. The early 1900 version of the cookie cutter development house. I always roll my eyes when people talk about the need to preserve these neighborhoods as they are. They’re the early 1900 equivalent of the houses our culture is perpetually mocking.
I'm glad you succeeded in staying in the neighborhood. Maybe it's even the one I'm thinking of, which is fascinating to walk through because the gardens are studded with "old hippie" art and other creative notions: the flavor of the neighborhood spans many decades. Development in that neighborhood will consist of ADUs (accessory dwelling units) and probably smaller multi-family housing on old retail plots.
Those bungalows can be gentrification targets: when they are restored they are cozy and breathtaking at the same time. However, since the restoration is house-by-house the neighborhoods tend to remain a bit more economically diverse. It's good single-family housing stock for when we Americans realize we can live in less space (although with three boys I completely get it!) Some families pass homes like this down to the next generation.
Well, we have lived here for 25 years, and have seen many fights over nearby development (don't get me started!). When we moved here, ADUs were impossible, but now the city actively encourages them. Several of my neighbors have built ADUs, and the feared impacts -- usually whining about parking and traffic concerns -- have never materialized, and several have expanded the size of their homes without upsetting the balance or "feel" of the neighborhood.
I won't comment on "gentrification" (whatever definition you want to use) but when we moved here, this was an affordable neighborhood, with many legacy families and renters. I would not be able to afford to buy in this neighborhood now, which truly is a California story...but I don't see that as a reason to limit development or improvement of neighborhoods.
Nevertheless, it is very diverse here: there are a variety of residents across age, class, ethnic, racial, and sexual orientations, and there is a good neighborhood community. There are several rental properties, but they are well-maintained properties and the renters are part of the community. I feel fortunate to live here.
One problem you only hint at (since it's not our problem) is the difficulties faced in European cities. Rome doesn't just have the Colosseum; the whole damn city is fraught with uber-historical sites. The problem is perhaps more severe in Athens (each subway stop has a little window showing a small sample of archaeological recoveries made during excavation for that site). The old city of Jerusalem goes a step beyond this, and I imagine much of Iraq is even moreso, even after the war.
I've told this anecdote a few times, but they were building a new metro tunnel across the straits to connect the European and Asian metro systems together, and they discovered the Harbour of Eleutherios, the ancient port of Constantinople along the route - including 23 shipwrecks, all over a thousand years old, many of them near-complete galleys from the fifth and sixth centuries. This resulted in a four-year delay to construction while hundreds of archaeologists conducted one of the biggest digs in history to remove the discoveries from the part of the site that the metro line needed to pass through.
Most European cities aren't this bad, though. Paris and London are Roman cities, but neither was especially large or important in Roman terms, and both were secondary in their countries until around 900AD (to York, Tamworth and Winchester in England, to Aix-la-Chappelle and Bordeaux in France), so there's only one thousand years where there's lots of history rather than two or three thousand. Even in countries that were major parts of the Roman Empire, the modern major cities are often different from the ancient ones. The major modern cities that were also major ancient cities are Marseilles, Milan, Rome, Naples, Athens, Thessaloniki and Istanbul.
Many European cities have a medieval "Old Town", but that means that the archaeological issues aren't so crippling, as at least you know exactly where the old buildings were (right under the new ones, or in some cases they're still there). That reduces the problem to a historic preservation one, but for medieval buildings, that's usually straightforward: cities in that period had walls, everything was built inside the walls, and the walled area is very small, so you just designate the area inside the walls for historic preservation and build your modern city outside. The same pretty much applies for Renaissance cities like Florence or Baroque cities like Prague. They don't sprawl because they were limited by walls and by walkability. So you just designate that area for preservation and build outside it.
What do you mean by "this bad" regarding the Istanbul metro tunnel? That ancient port sounds like an incredible piece of history, and well worth the delay to preserve the archaeological riches.
If by "this bad" you mean simply "high probability of uncovering archaeological riches that need preserving" then sure, okay.
That's exactly what I meant - perhaps "this difficult to build in" would have been better phrasing.
And yes, the Harbour is amazing, well worth preserving, and there is tremendous research coming out from the work done on it.
There are various groups that have built and sail ancient-style galleys (triremes and quinqueremes, mostly) and I know there's a lot of attention on the ships from the ancient Byzantine port so that they can improve the authenticity of the builds. There are lots of debates among naval historians about the actual capabilities of ancient-era galleys, and having authentic replicas that people can experiment with will definitely give us a far better understanding of what was going on in battles from Salamis to Lepanto.
Even Mussolini preserved the Torre Argentina block in Rome with its truly remarkable ancient temples when it was uncovered during his ruthless march of destruction.
Yeah. As a good illustration of this, Matt has expressed the frank view that the Dissolutions of the Monasteries were good for economic development. But the Dissolutions are also often seen as a cultural catastrophe, and the survivors, successors, and ruins are all counted among humanity's priceless cultural heritage. And they affected lots of areas not comparable to London, Rome, or Paris--England has 4,000 Grade I listed churches.
An interesting anti-parallel I often think about is that the Revolution is actually what saved the gardens of Versailles. Marie Antoinette was going to replace them with an early 19th century English garden (she was ahead of the times). I’m not sure what the lesson of that is.
My consolation is that the Dissolution only involved the one island. Similar abbeys survived across the channel. (And would we have had Queen Mary instead of Queen Elizabeth?)
I think Athens has relatively few historical monuments standing because for most of the modern period it was very small. When it became capital of Greece in the 1830s it was basically a village, just a few thousand people clustered around the Acropolis. (Today, this is the Plaka neighborhood.) Modern Athens was built in the 19th and 20th centuries, really.
Thank you for doing the legwork on when the Baskin Robbins / Dunkin Donuts merger occurred so that we could have footnote 2. I enjoyed that.
I'm increasingly coming around to the take that if a society deems that a building is so historically important that it should be preserved, against all costs, then its government should acquire the building itself, and take on the burden of the additional costs itself, instead of offloading those costs onto unwilling private owners.
Yup. I live in a ""historic"" neighborhood in Sacramento, CA. Of course Sacramento isn't very old so it's just a bunch of 1910 catalog homes with a few 1960/1970 apartment buildings mixed in. IMO a much better idea would be to pick one cool Craftsman on Capitol, make it a little museum with maps & images of the original city and some info about the history of construction/catalog homes, and let people do what they will with the rest of these crappy 100-year-old houses. If preserving this history is not worth the cost of 1 measly house and the employee/maintenance cost of running a small museum, it's definitely not worth the cost of freezing huge swaths of midtown in amber.
Hi neighbor!
Perhaps they should offer to do so rather than simply doing so.
If your family have been living in the same house for 300 years, you ought to be entitled to carry on living in it as long as you can afford to, rather than being forced out so it can be turned into a museum.
Well, if the family is living in the house then there’s nothing to preserve against. If the family wants to sell the house and a developer is willing to buy it to turn it into apartments, and the government doesn’t want them to, then the government should make them a better offer.
That just leads us to the situation I stumbled across and highlighted here this weekend; National Rail owns the station we were discussing, which legitimately has historical and huge architectural merit, and still wants to put a 15-story office block on top of it, as if London has no better place to put one.
Which, in a roundabout way, points out the bankruptcy of the current preservation paradigm: people are so obsessed with preserving the "green belt", which is mostly private scrub- and farmland, that they're creating an opening to toss things with real value under the bus.
Will the station no longer be a station? Or is NR just replacing a station with a station + office building combination?
If it's the latter, I don't really blame them. With regard to commuting, it's hard to imagine a more desirable location than the same building as a train station. I suspect the building will attract very high rents.
I don’t love defending the bureaucracy but I will say that the government does often apply much stricter rules to its own projects than it does to private projects. There may be exceptions based on local rules. Some of the crazy things it does on federally funded projects would not apply at all to private owners.
Then it just turns into Colonial Williamsburg, and blocks real, helpful, modern use of the valuable land in favor of maintaining a relic of a time gone by, and transforms the space into something less than a museum. Might as well be a statue.
Colonial Williamsburg is a big tourist draw. There's significant value in having a neighborhood-sized museum that preserves one of the oldest built environments in the country.
With that said.. we don't need 100+ Colonial Williamsburgs in this country.
This is all correct and a strong post. I've always been under the impression that the "historical preservation" tool was implemented as a backlash to all of Robert Moses's work in New York (specifically, the destruction of the old Penn Station). And then as usual people realized they could use it as a NIMBY cudgel. Can't wait for the logical endpoint of this... when the BQE cantilever is protected under the historical preservation declaration.
Not too far off. Read about the Domino sugar factory and the fight regarding its famous sign and how it was supposedly a “historic” part of Brooklyn.
It was finally turned into multi family housing but only after keeping aspects of the old factory in place and years of wrangling. Like this wasn’t a place some previous president was born, it was a place of punishing working conditions.
Really one of the stories that truly radicalized me against historical preservation (already leaned that way due to people like Matt highlighting the issue but this really showed me how farcical this is). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_Sugar_Refinery
We must Save Our Historic Sweatshops! Preserving the architecture is not enough. We must maintain the working conditions, wages and pay rates from the golden age of American industrial progress, lest we forget our historical roots. Workers should need community board approval to leave their jobs, and it should be granted only after a new worker with the same age, stature and ethnicity has been hired.
Not entirely sure you're far off from the core ethos of "MAGA".
I mentioned this in another comment thread, but its likely that the laws designed to prevent another destruction of something like old Penn Station also would have prevented the construction of old Penn Station.
I don't think Robert Moses had anything g to do with the demolition of Penn Station - that was a private developer whose name is still on buildings in New York - Zeckendorf.
I see that name every time I go to Costco and always wondered who he/she was — thank you for supplying me with yet another tidbit I can relay to my disinterested wife.
I think the condo buildings that had the medical outpatient facility in it at Union Square are called Zeckendorf Towers. One of the escalators out of the subway is maintained by the condo, there's a sign up.
Fair... but Moses had little regard for historic preservation with any of his actions. Knocking down the old NY Aquarium was one he was responsible for, though that was 20 years earlier and didn't have the same effect.
The destruction of Penn Station came at the tail end of Moses's peak and is usually considered the inflection point that swung the pendulum the other way. That's likely an oversimplification of history, and obviously people like Jane Jacobs played a big role as well.
How could we countenance the destruction of those historic freeways! :)
Has already happened. https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1453/route-66-corridor-preservation-program.htm
Brooklyn Heights became New York's first designated 'historical neighborhood', precisely to prevent Robert Moses from bulldozing the neighborhood to build the BQE. The cantilever was the result. All good in my opinion. Matt's dream of knocking down old buildings to put up the 21st century of Mitchell Lama housing will solve the housing crisis. No one will want to live there.
Ex Mitchell Lama housing goes for big bucks now. The problem with Mitchell Lama was New York was falling apart.
I agree that historic preservation designation is being abused, and that cities should be far more restrictive about designating buildings and neighborhoods as historic. But I think Matt goes too far in wanting to more or less entirely do away with historic preservation, to the point that he is not even sure that central Paris should be preserved.
Personally, I feel that not only individual buildings, but also neighborhood "feel" is important, and sometimes worth preserving.
Could we find a compromise? A process that does take cost into account? But that at the same time helps preserving some older neighborhoods. The destruction of older cities in the 1960s was very bad, and some regulatory response was well motivated. If that response went too far, then let’s revisit and rewrite, rather than take another extreme turn.
In my experience in many, many, neighborhood meetings, preserving the "feel" of a neighborhood usually means not changing anything because it makes the long-term residents uncomfortable.
Matt's take on NIMBYism as a driver of preservation is surely correct, but I think he undervalues the impact of resistance to change.
I used to live in Evanston IL. There is a historic building called the Harley Clarke Mansion. It was unusable and the city could not afford renovations. The local, very wealthy, very NIMBY neighborhood organized a fundraising drive to tear it down and put up new development! Then local activists put the issue on the ballot and the broader city resoundingly defeated the development initiative. There was no plan and now, three years later, the group that was going to fundraise to "save" the mansion pulled out.
So a vacant old building is just sitting idle?
Since 2015.
https://dailynorthwestern.com/2023/02/02/lateststories/harley-clarke-mansion-faces-uncertain-future-as-artists-book-house-withdraws-from-project/
Ugh
Historic preservation can't preserve neighborhood "feel" (because that's not something you can actually preserve) only what it looks like, and since it drives gentrification it would destroy the neighborhood feel, unless it's already a wealthy neighborhood
There is truth to what you write, but I still mostly disagree. Of course a neighborhood changes as the composition of people living there changes, and as society as a whole gets wealthier and technology changes. But this does not negate that a town that preserves its historic downtown has a different feel than one that razed it and built something else. Some may feel indifferent about this, but I personally very much like the ones that preserve the older style. (Within reason, of course - only limited to truly valuable neighborhoods, allow new construction if done sensitively, etc.) YMMV.
"Within reason, of course - only limited to truly valuable neighborhoods, allow new construction if done sensitively, etc."
I think the biggest challenge is WHO decides what is "truly valuable" and what is "done sensitively." If there are people who think its truly valuable and want to buy the houses there and own them, I think that's great! Where it becomes more troubling is telling your neighbor they can't improve or sell their home because you want it to look a certain way.
I like the idea of putting this on the ballot. Do voters want the city to issue a bunch of bonds and increase taxes to buy up some old houses and preserve them?
I get what you're saying but I'm thinking more of a big city context where everything historic is already protected so it's just used by annoying busybodies and NIMBYs trying to block any new construction.
I would love to avoid jarring cycles of extreme backlash, but it's hard to see how, because the emotional core of the fight isn't about historical preservation at all. The intensity of these battles comes from the fact that, when people like their neighborhood or small town, they usually become very invested in keeping things the way they are. This isn't to say that concern about preservation is just a pretense. Most localities have a few people that are intensely passionate about it, but their passion wouldn't amount to anything if it weren't an extremely effective instrument for preserving the status quo.
I don't mean to be snide: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and change is scary, plus the benefits of development are uncertain and uneven, on the local scale. Something is lost when the built environment changes: not just aesthetics, but continuity between generations and the environment's legibility to long-time residents.
But I think most people would be satisfied with a very low dose of historical preservation qua preservation, along the lines of what Matt is suggesting, as long as their town's population stays the same (+/- 5%), their favorite institutions continue operating, and their corner store stays open.
How many town’s populations actually stay the same, within +/-5% over the course of a decade? I think a bunch of prominent cities and towns either peaked or hit a trough right around the turn of the millennium, so that an unusually large number of prominent ones happened to stagnate for a decade, but if you look at the most recent decade, or any decade of the early to mid 20th century, that sort of stagnation seems unusual.
I think you're right. That "+/- 5%" was me trying capture the pro status-quo mindset, not generating policy guidelines or establishing real-world metrics. Sorry for any confusion.
No problem at all - I think it captures the tensions in the ordinary mindset very well, that people want continued economic growth generally, and want to be allowed to have kids, but don’t realize that this means their town will have to grow and change, just as their family does.
I suspect a goodly part of the problem is that standards of living have risen so much that retirees are used to not just not having to live with the next generation, but not moving and "downsizing" at all.
So people stay in the once-growing, dynamic communities they moved to raise kids long after their own lives slip into stasis, then expect those communities to slip into stasis as well.
This is very underrated. We often take for granted that it's good for people to stay in the same neighborhoods forever, but it's probably very positive for society when a retiree leaves a highly productive area and is replaced by a working person.
Of course the best option is to just legalize housing so workers can move in without raising housing costs so much that retirees are priced out.
I think you're not really reckoning with how destructive "historic preservation" really has been. I think you're right to note that a lot of the "block busting" and destruction of cities was devastating, but mostly because of what replaced it; namely huge highways and parking lots. One of the first books Matt promoted was "The High cost of free parking" and he's written extensively on the cost to cities. The famous song lyrics isn't "they paved paradise and put up an apartment tower" it's "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot".
I think too we have to consider how new most US cities are when we talking about preserving a neighborhood. Even with the older US cities, they are literally thousands of years younger than Rome or London. I think you can make a strong case that Boston's North End and New Orleans French Quarter are the exceptions that prove the rule; these neighborhoods that actually attract a decent amount of tourists due to unique aspects and historical significance of each neighborhood.
But I can't begin to tell you how many "historic" neighborhoods in various US cities are neither "historic" nor "significant" other than being located in a prime section of a US city. I've mentioned before that I work in the Commercial Real Estate finance industry (focus on multifamily). I bring this up because my job requires me to do a decent amount of traveling to various cities all across the country. I can't begin to tell you how non-descript and generic so many of these "historic" neighborhoods really are. Like if I didn't tell you these were "historic" districts, you wouldn't know the difference.
To give an example, let's look at one of the "in the news" cities of the past 10 years; Boise, Idaho. If you read this substack, you probably know this has become one of the "hot" places to move to especially with WFH becoming more imbedded with white collar work. And it's been contentious for sure with local people holding up signs decrying all these wealthy Calinfornians moving to the area and median house prices going north of $500K (though that might have gone down a bit last 3-6 months). Now take a look at one of the areas noted as a historic district; https://www.cityofboise.org/departments/planning-and-development-services/planning-and-zoning/historic-preservation/north-end-historic-district/. Go to google maps, and do a street view of this area and ask yourself, what the heck are we even trying to preserve here. Especially considering how much housing costs have absolutely ballooned in the city.
I pick on Boise here because it's been in the news last 5 years as a new destination city to visit and live, but what I'm describing occurs in all sorts of cities across the country.
I was truly prepared for the horrifying revelation that the Baskin Robbins where Barack and Michelle had their first kiss was heritage protected. Extremely glad to find out Chicago decided to be more sensible.
I agree very much with the idea of marking the history of locations within the city - big fan of London's Blue Plaque scheme, and the idea of a modern version with a QR code and a website with much more detail makes a lot of sense: most cities could commission the history department of their local universities to produce and update the history and identify the locations of the markers.
I certainly think that any building that is preserved for historical reasons should be required to have clear markers indicating why it has been preserved and assisting passers-by to appreciate the building's historical or architectural significance.
On European cities: what tends to happen when they have an architecturally-interesting and historically-significant central district that attracts tourists is that it gets designated as the Old Town, and then a modern central district gets built nearby. So in Paris, you have the Haussmann Boulevards in the traditional city and then La Défense with the modern towers.
Rome has been through this several times - it has the Republican centre around the Forum, the Imperial centre on the Palatine, the Papal centre around the Vatican and then the post-unification centre around the Via del Corso. There's a case for yet another centre being built for the 21st century.
Edinburgh's New Town is also historically preserved (it was built 1767-1850) as well as the Old Town (medieval). That city's development has been badly constrained in recent years by not designating a Newer Town where modern buildings could be built. I have no problem with the idea of not building modern glass towers in the UNESCO area - but why not in Leith or something?
One aside though, on physical markers. I see so many that are just cheap vinyl signs which fade in sunlight and look terrible after a few years. You can see the walking tour marker in the original post is already starting to fade.
A marker made of higher-quality materials, intended to last, with much less text (and additional information via a website / app) is a much better solution. London Blue Plaques are pottery, with the text (and the blue background colour) painted in enamel and then fired. There are plaques that have been up over a hundred years and they still look good. Other UK cities use metal plaques, which are also very durable (and don't break if you drop them).
If the scheme is intended to be permanent, putting up high-quality materials in the first place is much cheaper than paying to replace vinyl signs every few years when they fade or tear.
The best practice to me seems to be the examples Matt shared from Chicago and that I shared from Boise: a very heavy stone with a metal plate attached to it.
Or just attach the metal or ceramic plate to the side of the building. As long as it gets removed and reinstated when the building is demolished and replaced, that's just as good, and you don't have to find space for the stone (which is a challenge in a dense, walkable area).
Every place in Italy that was mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy has a plaque with the relevant quote from the poem.
Actually, not Leith, the public transport there is terrible and not easily fixed. The probable right answer is somewhere like Bankhead
What's interesting about Sam's Stop & Shop is that it means Cleveland Park used to be on the forefront of design innovation - a place you could build something new and different like a strip mall.
By freezing everything in time in a historic district, they are destroying that spirit of innovation and new design.
The next iteration of Sam's Stop & Shop can't be innovated in this part of town, because it no longer welcomes or embraces new design or ways of doing things.
Parallel to something Lena Dunham said: New York was made cool by all of the artists and bohemians and musicians living there over the years, but the next Debbie Harry may not be able to afford to live there at all.
This is a very astute point.
This isn't history's greatest cruelty but Matt's article reminded me of why apartment is so drafty. I live in San Francisco in a long-term rent controlled studio. I'm saving up to leave like all my friends did due to housing.
But for the time being I am in my apartment and have Wood Windows. Wood windows are much more drafty than modern windows. So I spend a lot of money heating up what is essentially a drafty room
The justification for lowering my QOL can be found here:
https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/documents/publications/Standards_Window_Replacement.pdf
"Wood windows were originally installed on the majority of residential buildings constructed up until World War II. In San Francisco, where most buildings are viewed at close range from the street, the differences between wood windows and substitute materials are almost always easily detectable. Particularly with older buildings, these alternate materials usually stand out visually, and rarely match the character of the neighborhood. They always look like what they are: plastic or aluminum – materials that are not architecturally compatible with the building."
What percentage of people on the street notice windows? Let's be generous and say 10%. And out of that 10% what percentage can discern the difference between wood windows and substitute materials? Again, let's be generous and say 10%. So this policy is about improving QOL for the top 1% of people with aesthetic preferences. Aren't progressives supposed to be skeptical about catering to the top 1%?
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In our modern cities we've allowed people with extreme aesthetic preferences to strangle changes to the built environment unless it meets all their demands. It is madness. We would never allow the fashion industry to set standards for clothes as most of us don't care that much. And I'm sure for people who care about fashion all the ugly clothes most of us wear lower QOL. But thankfully we don't let them run the show.
With building, we've allowed the aesthetic crowd to control changes. And it is an afront. And I haven't even discussed the bad faith, preserve our parking crowd, who uses aesthetic challenges.
And one other note, yesterday was the 2 year anniversary of my father's death. He died of complications from Parkinson's Disease. He couldn't even visit my SF apartment because it was completely unsafe to enter the building.
Does the preserve old building crowd care about people like my father? As far as I can tell, no.
They love old buildings so much they'd inflict huge misery on people with mobility issues to keep these buildings up.
You bring up great points and that's an interesting link with what feels like a unnecessarily high burden for window replacements. Still ... my sense is the reason your studio still has drafty wood windows is more tied to the "long-term rent controlled status". They probably just haven't been maintained.
I offered to pay out of pocket to fix it with modern windows. They couldn't
And as an aside being a long-term rent controlled tenant has made me more skeptical of rent control. It really doesn't do that much for anyone who doesn't want to die in their existing unit.
Rent control is terrible policy that a small class of urban progressives, mostly "professionally-educated-but-low-income-class" (PEBLI---Pebblies?) will fight to the death to preserve and even attempt to extend even though it simply does not work worth a shit.
But the poor artist types need their shithole lofts for a grand in Midtown, so here we are.
All rent control does is shift the cost. Without rent control cost is entirely money. With rent control it is money + tolerance for waiting. Part of the reason families flee rent control regimes is they can't tolerate waiting the way singles can.
It'd be nice if rent control advocates would acknowledge it does nothing for affordability but that will never happen.
Pretty much, lol. There was a thought glimmering around my head, that I almost put into the original post, that rent control disproportionately burdens people who actually contribute to society in meaningful ways and helps those who don't.
I sound like a bloody trad-con, but the broke creative equivalents of a DINK couple are just useless from a societal perspective, neither contributing any kind of real value-add in their "professional" roles nor perpetuating the species.
But that gives them shitloads and shitloads of time to spend apartment-hunting and waiting around for good things to get dropped in their laps, and rent-control rewards prime-age people who have the schedules of elderly retirees.
As far as my STEM-educated, middling-high-income, valuing-family-life ass is concerned, those people should be absolutely last on the list for everything, and it's very fortunate that a well-functioning market economy agrees with me!
Which seems to be the core of the urban hippie/progressive "end capitalism" argument, is that those people don't like being last in line for shit.
My father can spot a wooden versus plastic window from a mile away and can tell you what kind of glass is in it too. He appreciates the charm of an old house with its original fixtures, and thinks that people who keep up their old houses are carrying forward a valuable legacy. But it pains him to see an old treasure of a house that has fallen into disrepair. And he also loves double paned windows and how efficient they are, and thinks that most people should have them. So some small number of old houses should be left to a small number of people who are actually passionate about being caretakers of them, but not more.
Here is a great list of how DC schools got their names: https://nothingmorepowerful.blogspot.com/2017/08/who-dcs-schools-are-named-for.html
It tells us that Harrison was named for the first President Harrison, William Henry.
The fact that this list isn’t an official government list but a private person’s research, and is pretty hard to find, totally supports your point.
(Other super minor point: I thought that the reason people landmarked the Park and Shop, and in fact created the entire Cleveland Park historic district, was opposition to larger buildings in that spot. Former long-time preservation board chair Tersh Bosberg once said that in a community meeting, but I can’t find any online documentation of that right now.)
I’ve long thought that the rules should say that the landmark protection should relate meaningfully to the thing being commemorated. So if the building is of genuine meaningful architectural distinction, maybe it should be preserved so people can appreciate it (covers the Eiffel Tower for sure), but if just someone famous once slept there, then a plaque probably does it or something else that maintains as much historicity about that as one can given the person won’t sleep there forever. But to just lock the whole building in time doesn’t do anything to help people remember that the famous person was once there. A statue would though.
The schools naming thing is interesting because there was a fairly prominent push in DC to review all the school names in the wake of the BLM protests, and to rename them if the namesakes were found to be problematic. The problem was that they're mostly named after such obscure minor bureaucrats that it was difficult to find any historical context for them, and to my knowledge they only ended up renaming Woodrow Wilson High and West Elementary, which was named after noted torture enthusiast Joseph West.
Unfortunately, to preserve the architectural history of early strip mall design, you probably actually need the strip mall. Though maybe it’s fine if you cantilever a giant building over it perhaps like the Rainier building in Seattle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainier_Tower
"Unfortunately, to preserve the architectural history of early strip mall design, you probably actually need the strip mall."
What about a really high-resolution video? Digital 3D models? Or just pick up the building and physically move it to a new parcel, like Hamilton, OH recently did with its train station?
To be fair, there is what appears to be an official DC government website that also gives information on the source of school names (including Harrison Elementary): https://ddot.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/op/publication/attachments/Whats%2520in%2520a%2520Name%25202010.pdf
Oh, that’s terrific.
Are you referring to the mess surrounding the Giant up on Wisconsin & Newark? That was an awful mess that lasted a good decade or more before anything got built.
Step one in the perversion of historical designation preservation laws was when people opposed to any kind of change in the neighborhood, on idiosyncratic personal sentimental reasons such as aesthetic preference, realized that historical designation laws could be used as a kind of aesthetic super-zoning law or community review board. In Pennsylvania, at least, my understanding is it's against state law for a municipality to use its zoning code to enforce arbitrary aesthetic preference. But enforcing aesthetic preference is what historic designation laws are all about, assuming your preference aligns with the status quo that's being preserved.
From that realization it was a short distance to step two -- municipalities actually using historical designation laws on a pretextual basis, as de facto aesthetic zoning laws and a loophole to avoid the general ban on using public zoning laws to enforce arbitrary aesthetic preferences. I'm aware of at least one municipality in Pennsylvania that has taken this to the extreme of designating the *entire borough* as historic -- a particularly precious example, in the eyes of the boomers and older gen Xers who live there now, of ordinary 1920s to 1970s suburban development outside Philadelphia. What this means in practice is that the municipality now has a legal lever to make aesthetic demands as a condition of permitting new construction (even though that's illegal under state zoning laws), lest the new construction destroy the historical character of the neighborhood.
That sounds like something Media would do, but I’m not aware of it having done this specific stupid thing.
I moved from Central NY to a Mainline suburb a few months ago. Could you give a hint on the area you're describing?
I think it’s probably Newtown, up in Bucks.
Is it not Doylestown?
To my knowledge only the Mercer complex is on the register. Newtown has a third of the borough labeled as a historic district.
They have it marked historic to not confuse it with the 20 other Newtowns in SE PA. :)
We have a similar situation in my neighborhood. A historic old art deco theater was demolished in the 70's to make way for a Safeway, and there was a huge outcry. It was justifiable -- it was a beautiful old theater -- so a very stringent "historical review" -- of every project within a certain radius of the old theater was instituted.
This historical review also applies to my neighborhood, which was developed in the early 1900's and consists primarily of old craftsman-style bungalows. The neighborhood is lovely, but the homes are small and modest -- the original footprint of the homes is around 1000 square feet, usually 2-3 bedrooms, 1 bath. As our family grew, (we have three boys) needed more space, so we decided to add two more bedrooms, a bath and family room -- about 1300 square feet.
I am a government employee on a modest income, so we wanted to economize wherever possible, such as using lap siding milled out of pine instead of redwood. But the local ordinance required we used "original materials," so we had to spend more on the redwood siding (not to mention wood-frame windows). Moreover, there was a preservationist busybody who lived on the other side of town and challenged EVERY remodel in our area with a design review hearing, which added an extra $3000 to the project. The changes he wanted were modest, but essentially aesthetic choices based on his interpretation of what would be "historically accurate". These changes would not have been visible from the street, but our architect wisely advised us not to fight it, as it would be cheaper to redraw the plans and add windows.
The process added several thousand dollars to our budget, which given our income, was a stretch. And what was gained? The house looks great, but not significantly different than if we had gone with a less expensive version. The preservationist got his way, but to what end? Our house is not particularly architecturally or historically significant. Moreover it is not a museum, it is a home where we chose to raise our family, and changing it should not have been a financial burden filled with obstacles thrown up by tangentially interested parties.
"Moreover, there was a preservationist busybody who lived on the other side of town and challenged EVERY remodel in our area with a design review hearing"
I feel like this sentence needs to be highlighted more. Because I think this describes A LOT of what slows down development in jurisdictions across the country. Most famous is the way CEQA is abused on CA where one "busybody" can bring a lawsuit and slow development for years.
I don't know who coined this recently but I've really come to like the idea that we're living the age of the "heckler's veto". I think this was originally applied to Twitter and is sort of a close cousin of "Twitter is not real life". Namely, one random person with a 100 followers can say something nasty to a public figure and get themselves 15 minutes of fame, but also derail a conversation. But how this also applies to housing where as you say one "busybody" can balloon construction costs for an entire neighborhood.
Exactly! If the busybody cares so much, they should be the ones to pay the additional costs of preservation-compliance.
If that busybody had to pay $10,000 for every project they want to mess with, they'd go away pretty fast.
Based on your story here I am thinking that you live in Sac like me. I also live in an older neighborhood although luckily we are not subject to any design review for historical accuracy. When we remodeled our 1927 Tudor to add a second story and room for our kids to have their own rooms we were able to add all the changes behind the front of the house so you only see the new architecture from the sides and while I wanted the end product not to be jarring, I did think it was funny to be sacralizing elements of homes that were built by middle class people in the style of the time and not by people striving for artisanal perfection. I don't think that they would be able to make any sense of the idea that their designs had to be preserved for all time.
Yes, hello, I also live in Sacramento. You nailed it: these were working and middle-class homes when they were built, and the idea that they were seeking aesthetic perfection would have been absurd to the original owners.
All of our changes are behind the house as well and the combination of architect and contractor made the addition to the house looked just as if it were part of the original. I guess that’s a bonus for the neighborhood, though, I’m not sure how it would matter to anyone else or their houses’ values, since the addition is barely visible from the street.
I think it’s nice when a remodel can capture the flavor of the original, especially if most of the neighborhood has stayed to the true original design. But that doesn’t need to be a prerequisite for “allowing“ people to remodel. After all, designs are essentially an aesthetic choice. And unless you’re talking about a home that has real historical significance and it’s not simply old, I don’t know why it’s anyone else’s business.
Personally, I am more interested in the behavior of my neighbors than the style of their houses. Are they considerate? Do they maintain their houses and yards? Do they contribute to the neighborhood community? Again, I consider my home a place to live and raise family and possibly provide a legacy for my children. But preserving the historical legacy of the neighborhood? That’s not important to me.
Early 1900 bungalows are nice. I get why people like them. And they’re often the oldest houses in west coast neighborhoods. On the other hand a lot of them are Sears houses. The early 1900 version of the cookie cutter development house. I always roll my eyes when people talk about the need to preserve these neighborhoods as they are. They’re the early 1900 equivalent of the houses our culture is perpetually mocking.
I'm glad you succeeded in staying in the neighborhood. Maybe it's even the one I'm thinking of, which is fascinating to walk through because the gardens are studded with "old hippie" art and other creative notions: the flavor of the neighborhood spans many decades. Development in that neighborhood will consist of ADUs (accessory dwelling units) and probably smaller multi-family housing on old retail plots.
Those bungalows can be gentrification targets: when they are restored they are cozy and breathtaking at the same time. However, since the restoration is house-by-house the neighborhoods tend to remain a bit more economically diverse. It's good single-family housing stock for when we Americans realize we can live in less space (although with three boys I completely get it!) Some families pass homes like this down to the next generation.
Well, we have lived here for 25 years, and have seen many fights over nearby development (don't get me started!). When we moved here, ADUs were impossible, but now the city actively encourages them. Several of my neighbors have built ADUs, and the feared impacts -- usually whining about parking and traffic concerns -- have never materialized, and several have expanded the size of their homes without upsetting the balance or "feel" of the neighborhood.
I won't comment on "gentrification" (whatever definition you want to use) but when we moved here, this was an affordable neighborhood, with many legacy families and renters. I would not be able to afford to buy in this neighborhood now, which truly is a California story...but I don't see that as a reason to limit development or improvement of neighborhoods.
Nevertheless, it is very diverse here: there are a variety of residents across age, class, ethnic, racial, and sexual orientations, and there is a good neighborhood community. There are several rental properties, but they are well-maintained properties and the renters are part of the community. I feel fortunate to live here.
One problem you only hint at (since it's not our problem) is the difficulties faced in European cities. Rome doesn't just have the Colosseum; the whole damn city is fraught with uber-historical sites. The problem is perhaps more severe in Athens (each subway stop has a little window showing a small sample of archaeological recoveries made during excavation for that site). The old city of Jerusalem goes a step beyond this, and I imagine much of Iraq is even moreso, even after the war.
Istanbul is another city that has this problem.
I've told this anecdote a few times, but they were building a new metro tunnel across the straits to connect the European and Asian metro systems together, and they discovered the Harbour of Eleutherios, the ancient port of Constantinople along the route - including 23 shipwrecks, all over a thousand years old, many of them near-complete galleys from the fifth and sixth centuries. This resulted in a four-year delay to construction while hundreds of archaeologists conducted one of the biggest digs in history to remove the discoveries from the part of the site that the metro line needed to pass through.
Most European cities aren't this bad, though. Paris and London are Roman cities, but neither was especially large or important in Roman terms, and both were secondary in their countries until around 900AD (to York, Tamworth and Winchester in England, to Aix-la-Chappelle and Bordeaux in France), so there's only one thousand years where there's lots of history rather than two or three thousand. Even in countries that were major parts of the Roman Empire, the modern major cities are often different from the ancient ones. The major modern cities that were also major ancient cities are Marseilles, Milan, Rome, Naples, Athens, Thessaloniki and Istanbul.
Many European cities have a medieval "Old Town", but that means that the archaeological issues aren't so crippling, as at least you know exactly where the old buildings were (right under the new ones, or in some cases they're still there). That reduces the problem to a historic preservation one, but for medieval buildings, that's usually straightforward: cities in that period had walls, everything was built inside the walls, and the walled area is very small, so you just designate the area inside the walls for historic preservation and build your modern city outside. The same pretty much applies for Renaissance cities like Florence or Baroque cities like Prague. They don't sprawl because they were limited by walls and by walkability. So you just designate that area for preservation and build outside it.
What do you mean by "this bad" regarding the Istanbul metro tunnel? That ancient port sounds like an incredible piece of history, and well worth the delay to preserve the archaeological riches.
If by "this bad" you mean simply "high probability of uncovering archaeological riches that need preserving" then sure, okay.
That's exactly what I meant - perhaps "this difficult to build in" would have been better phrasing.
And yes, the Harbour is amazing, well worth preserving, and there is tremendous research coming out from the work done on it.
There are various groups that have built and sail ancient-style galleys (triremes and quinqueremes, mostly) and I know there's a lot of attention on the ships from the ancient Byzantine port so that they can improve the authenticity of the builds. There are lots of debates among naval historians about the actual capabilities of ancient-era galleys, and having authentic replicas that people can experiment with will definitely give us a far better understanding of what was going on in battles from Salamis to Lepanto.
Even Mussolini preserved the Torre Argentina block in Rome with its truly remarkable ancient temples when it was uncovered during his ruthless march of destruction.
Yeah. As a good illustration of this, Matt has expressed the frank view that the Dissolutions of the Monasteries were good for economic development. But the Dissolutions are also often seen as a cultural catastrophe, and the survivors, successors, and ruins are all counted among humanity's priceless cultural heritage. And they affected lots of areas not comparable to London, Rome, or Paris--England has 4,000 Grade I listed churches.
An interesting anti-parallel I often think about is that the Revolution is actually what saved the gardens of Versailles. Marie Antoinette was going to replace them with an early 19th century English garden (she was ahead of the times). I’m not sure what the lesson of that is.
My consolation is that the Dissolution only involved the one island. Similar abbeys survived across the channel. (And would we have had Queen Mary instead of Queen Elizabeth?)
Rome actually has a lot of historical buildings and monuments standing. Athens does not in comparison. Iraq has very few.
Potential archaeological sites is a separate question and not necessarily incompatible with new construction.
I think Athens has relatively few historical monuments standing because for most of the modern period it was very small. When it became capital of Greece in the 1830s it was basically a village, just a few thousand people clustered around the Acropolis. (Today, this is the Plaka neighborhood.) Modern Athens was built in the 19th and 20th centuries, really.