I’m glad that the limits of tearing down the old were acknowledged. Old stuff does become part of our cultural heritage. I’m a YIMBY, but also happy that old, dense, beautiful historic neighborhoods like Greenwich Village still exist. They would have been bulldozed decades ago if people didn’t fight for them. A YIMBY utopia can potentially seed a “tragedy of the commons” where a public heritage is pillaged. This possibility is just as legitimate an object of analysis as the balance of supply and demand.
Can we at least agree that if we let people tear down old places what gets built in its place has to be beautiful and the not the soulless, boring building that are popping up everywhere with no thought to how they fit into the neighborhood or design language of the city.
However little this will be read a day or two after posting, I actually have a (not very) historical tidbit about that very strip mall: When I worked there in 1992-93 it was called Jemal's Park & Shop (not Sam's) -- I guess it was owned by a developer of that name who still seems to be around, or whose family is still around. Most if not all of the stores are different -- what is currently Calfornia Tortilla (according to Google Maps) was Pizzeria Uno, which I helped open as a waiter in August or September of 1992. Uno's was there for a good while but eventually closed, as did most of the places I remember from that era, in the strip mall and surrounding blocks: Yenching Palace; the historic Roma restaurant and its bar, Poor Robert's; Ireland's Four Provinces; and of course the great, great Uptown theater. Time marches on!
Worry not, a handful of us are still reading through the articles and comments at a slow, boring pace. I’ll see myself out now.
That’s interesting that you comment on the literal stores in the place. My local historical preservation committee is very focused on the architecture- masonry, artwork, sometimes old styles of furnaces or boilers- but is perfectly happy with the intended use of the site being changed. They also unanimously approve a lot of major modifications like skywalks, interior reconstruction, add-ons, conversion to apartments, or moving an entire historical building elsewhere. I wonder what the different scopes of various committees are & if there’s any superset/definition of “historical preservation”.
Interestingly, Sam's Park and Shop and the building across the street are both TWO story commercial (Sam's has the underground Target). The entire strip to the South, from Porter to Macomb is single story commercial. The point, perhaps, still stands that it's not mixed use. But, it seems sad for Sam's to be picked on because it's technically a "strip mall" with all of the connotations that such things have for non-Californians. The rest of Cleveland Park's commercial center is just as poorly used.
I don't see much point in putting up signs about buildings that used to exist in a neighborhood of all steel and glass towers. I don't think I would get much of a sense of history from being there. Might as well have signs about what sort of dinosaurs used to roam there.
The Colosseum is very old, very distinctive, and very famous. The rowhouses in Logan Circle are not very old, not very distinctive, and not at all famous. The Colosseum is worthy of preservation. The rowhouses in Logan Circle are not.
Unless cities are interested in preserving their populations, traffic patterns, and economies in the same frozen state as the buildings, the buildings (or "built environment) could and should change to keep pace with the times.
Every place has knocked down its original buildings and replaced them with something else. It was fine until someone decided "no, THIS era is it, this is what our city must be forever". It's absurd and arbitrary. Somebody's trash is always someone else's history (and vice versa).
I am somewhat extreme here, but I feel given all of the other tools available, the idea that we must actually save entire buildings (or homes) "the way they were" is somewhere between silly and dangerous. This is amplified by the "well, you have to keep the exterior the same, but you can change the interior or non-street-facing part all you want" implementations in many cities.
In places like San Francisco, perfectly good land sits idle or underused because there are "historic laundromats" or something. Working-class people cannot replace their windows cheaply and easily with newer, better, energy-efficient ones because the city has decided their neighborhood is "historic" and has arbitrary "aesthetic standards" enforced through permitting.
Excellent article. I lean heavily towards historical preservation, so it’s good to think about. I admit I am generally confused about how releasing control of a building/its facade/etc to general public will result in a cost benefit analysis. Where I live, the three buildings most recently lost by the historic preservation committee were both turned into empty dirt lots by their owners- the cheapest option to prevent vagrancy- and no plans to fill them have been made. Meanwhile, the building across from my work was required by the committee to be refurbished and is now affordable housing.
Note, this applies locally to me, and not to New York:
WAIT. Thinking about this helped me put together actual words for my immediate flinch reaction to tearing down an old building for an apartment. Historical masonry is construction that has lasted long enough to become historical buildings (tautology, but bear with me). Many of these have hundreds more years in them given basic maintenance and upkeep. However, the goal of foreign developers right now is to buy plots, expand for as cheap as possible by tearing down something with higher basic upkeep and putting up new structures that are laid out for offices or apartments, are bigger, and have much higher maximum profit margins. The structures that go up are cheap and ugly, and they have a lifespan a tenth of their predecessors. The remaining lifespan of the building and hence the local land value is squeezed out and relocated to wherever-the-foreign-investor-lives, completely leaving the city. Allowing short-term gains for long-term loss is really poor planning for any municipality that’s not Dubai- and that’s ignoring the fact that citizens will have to live with some economically maximized construction that the investor cobbled together despite clear reduced living conditions. Homes without windows are one extreme example from Matt, but there are plenty of other horrors that have already been implemented locally: cuts to ventilation that increase lung problems, cheap lighting that increases light pollution, small triangle rooms, roofing and siding that isn’t designed for the local climate & requires rooftop snow removal, excess noise, minimal network equipment for apartments in non-white neighborhoods, small empty concrete courtyards, cheaper interiors, etc.
As a longtime reader of your work who's lived in Hyde Park his entire life, I'm getting a lot of physic disconnect from hearing you write about that sign who I've seen probably 600 times. before.
"Historical Preservation" is a kind of presentism, "Our" history is more important than the history of people 50, 100, 200 years in the future or 50 100 200 years in the past.
I'm a sucker for old buildings, so I'm always going to blanch at the idea of tearing things down; however, I think my bigger issue with a lot of the destruction that has taken place in the past (or that continues to happen) is that the replacement structures so often lack things that allowed a neighborhood to exist.
Those rows of low-rise buildings in downtown Dallas that have long been torn down took storefronts and a small amount of housing and replaced it with sprawling atria for megabuildings with limited access and no street-facing retail (and, usually, no housing) at all. Or, very often, they're replaced with parking lots or garages with no retail or housing at all.
This could turn into an encyclopedia of horrors. One I observed up close was the attempt of the minority in a condo that opposed a new windows project to try to get the Historical Perseveration Board to stop. [Fortunately unsuccessful, but costly to both sides.]
Good as usual except I doubt the "parking" as the sole explanation of Sam's. It's more the general anti-change, hyperlocal externalities of which parking is just one and the failure of the political system n general to give much weight to the widely but diffusely dispersed benefits of development.
Of course the key is your almost throwaway comment abbot not applying cost benefit analysis to the decision making process.
The Minetta thing reminded me of the story of another place in NYC: Maiden Lane in the financial district. New York was originally a Dutch settlement, New Amsterdam, in what is now the southernmost part of downtown New York. Though relations between Dutch settlers and the local natives were initially amicable, good times never last, and the Dutch eventually had to build a fortified wall across the island to prevent native counterattacks.
There was a small stream just north of the wall that was used by the inhabitants of New Amsterdam to do their laundry on sunny days - a chore assigned to unmarried young women. When the single men of New Amsterdam saw women carrying laundry through the gate that gave access to the footpath to the stream, they put on their best clothes and waited outside the gate to try to socialize when laundry time was over. The men had a name for the footpath: Maagde Paatje - Maiden’s Path.
Now the wall is gone though the street that once ran along the inside of the wall still exists - you’ve maybe heard of it: Wall Street. A few sort blocks north of Wall Street, Maiden’s Path became Maiden Lane.
Regarding historical preservation, 59 Maiden Lane is a 44-story office building built in the 1960s. There is plaza in front of the building with a small seating area and a few sad little trees along its western edge. A bronze plaque is affixed to the wall noting that there once was a house at 57 Maiden Lane where Thomas Jefferson lived when he was Secretary of State under President Washington. I suppose it would be moderately interesting if that house had been preserved, but as Matt’s essay points out, forgoing the development that replaced it would have been a very high price to pay.
Other historical buildings in the area are truly significant and should be preserved, at almost any cost, as long as the United States endures: Federal Hall, where the first Congress met and George Washington took his oath of office; Trinity Church - architecturally significant and its cemetery is the final resting place for Alexander Hamilton and other prominent early Americans; Saint Paul’s chapel where George Washington worshipped (he found Trinity Church to be too ostentatious) and which also played a prominent role on 9/11; and Fraunces Tavern, secret meeting place of the Sons Of Liberty, and host of a dinner for General Washington and his officers on Evacuation Day - the end of the Revolutionary War.
I’m glad that the limits of tearing down the old were acknowledged. Old stuff does become part of our cultural heritage. I’m a YIMBY, but also happy that old, dense, beautiful historic neighborhoods like Greenwich Village still exist. They would have been bulldozed decades ago if people didn’t fight for them. A YIMBY utopia can potentially seed a “tragedy of the commons” where a public heritage is pillaged. This possibility is just as legitimate an object of analysis as the balance of supply and demand.
With VR the “cost” of bulldozing old, marginally relevant, historical buildings has never been lower.
Can we at least agree that if we let people tear down old places what gets built in its place has to be beautiful and the not the soulless, boring building that are popping up everywhere with no thought to how they fit into the neighborhood or design language of the city.
However little this will be read a day or two after posting, I actually have a (not very) historical tidbit about that very strip mall: When I worked there in 1992-93 it was called Jemal's Park & Shop (not Sam's) -- I guess it was owned by a developer of that name who still seems to be around, or whose family is still around. Most if not all of the stores are different -- what is currently Calfornia Tortilla (according to Google Maps) was Pizzeria Uno, which I helped open as a waiter in August or September of 1992. Uno's was there for a good while but eventually closed, as did most of the places I remember from that era, in the strip mall and surrounding blocks: Yenching Palace; the historic Roma restaurant and its bar, Poor Robert's; Ireland's Four Provinces; and of course the great, great Uptown theater. Time marches on!
Worry not, a handful of us are still reading through the articles and comments at a slow, boring pace. I’ll see myself out now.
That’s interesting that you comment on the literal stores in the place. My local historical preservation committee is very focused on the architecture- masonry, artwork, sometimes old styles of furnaces or boilers- but is perfectly happy with the intended use of the site being changed. They also unanimously approve a lot of major modifications like skywalks, interior reconstruction, add-ons, conversion to apartments, or moving an entire historical building elsewhere. I wonder what the different scopes of various committees are & if there’s any superset/definition of “historical preservation”.
Interestingly, Sam's Park and Shop and the building across the street are both TWO story commercial (Sam's has the underground Target). The entire strip to the South, from Porter to Macomb is single story commercial. The point, perhaps, still stands that it's not mixed use. But, it seems sad for Sam's to be picked on because it's technically a "strip mall" with all of the connotations that such things have for non-Californians. The rest of Cleveland Park's commercial center is just as poorly used.
I don't see much point in putting up signs about buildings that used to exist in a neighborhood of all steel and glass towers. I don't think I would get much of a sense of history from being there. Might as well have signs about what sort of dinosaurs used to roam there.
The Colosseum is very old, very distinctive, and very famous. The rowhouses in Logan Circle are not very old, not very distinctive, and not at all famous. The Colosseum is worthy of preservation. The rowhouses in Logan Circle are not.
Unless cities are interested in preserving their populations, traffic patterns, and economies in the same frozen state as the buildings, the buildings (or "built environment) could and should change to keep pace with the times.
Every place has knocked down its original buildings and replaced them with something else. It was fine until someone decided "no, THIS era is it, this is what our city must be forever". It's absurd and arbitrary. Somebody's trash is always someone else's history (and vice versa).
I am somewhat extreme here, but I feel given all of the other tools available, the idea that we must actually save entire buildings (or homes) "the way they were" is somewhere between silly and dangerous. This is amplified by the "well, you have to keep the exterior the same, but you can change the interior or non-street-facing part all you want" implementations in many cities.
In places like San Francisco, perfectly good land sits idle or underused because there are "historic laundromats" or something. Working-class people cannot replace their windows cheaply and easily with newer, better, energy-efficient ones because the city has decided their neighborhood is "historic" and has arbitrary "aesthetic standards" enforced through permitting.
Excellent article. I lean heavily towards historical preservation, so it’s good to think about. I admit I am generally confused about how releasing control of a building/its facade/etc to general public will result in a cost benefit analysis. Where I live, the three buildings most recently lost by the historic preservation committee were both turned into empty dirt lots by their owners- the cheapest option to prevent vagrancy- and no plans to fill them have been made. Meanwhile, the building across from my work was required by the committee to be refurbished and is now affordable housing.
Note, this applies locally to me, and not to New York:
WAIT. Thinking about this helped me put together actual words for my immediate flinch reaction to tearing down an old building for an apartment. Historical masonry is construction that has lasted long enough to become historical buildings (tautology, but bear with me). Many of these have hundreds more years in them given basic maintenance and upkeep. However, the goal of foreign developers right now is to buy plots, expand for as cheap as possible by tearing down something with higher basic upkeep and putting up new structures that are laid out for offices or apartments, are bigger, and have much higher maximum profit margins. The structures that go up are cheap and ugly, and they have a lifespan a tenth of their predecessors. The remaining lifespan of the building and hence the local land value is squeezed out and relocated to wherever-the-foreign-investor-lives, completely leaving the city. Allowing short-term gains for long-term loss is really poor planning for any municipality that’s not Dubai- and that’s ignoring the fact that citizens will have to live with some economically maximized construction that the investor cobbled together despite clear reduced living conditions. Homes without windows are one extreme example from Matt, but there are plenty of other horrors that have already been implemented locally: cuts to ventilation that increase lung problems, cheap lighting that increases light pollution, small triangle rooms, roofing and siding that isn’t designed for the local climate & requires rooftop snow removal, excess noise, minimal network equipment for apartments in non-white neighborhoods, small empty concrete courtyards, cheaper interiors, etc.
As a longtime reader of your work who's lived in Hyde Park his entire life, I'm getting a lot of physic disconnect from hearing you write about that sign who I've seen probably 600 times. before.
"Historical Preservation" is a kind of presentism, "Our" history is more important than the history of people 50, 100, 200 years in the future or 50 100 200 years in the past.
Our history will be even older (and more valuable) in the future. Stone Henge was historical to the late ancient Druids and is even moreso to us now
I'm a sucker for old buildings, so I'm always going to blanch at the idea of tearing things down; however, I think my bigger issue with a lot of the destruction that has taken place in the past (or that continues to happen) is that the replacement structures so often lack things that allowed a neighborhood to exist.
Those rows of low-rise buildings in downtown Dallas that have long been torn down took storefronts and a small amount of housing and replaced it with sprawling atria for megabuildings with limited access and no street-facing retail (and, usually, no housing) at all. Or, very often, they're replaced with parking lots or garages with no retail or housing at all.
You'll be happy to know your piece made and appearance on our CP Listserv.
This could turn into an encyclopedia of horrors. One I observed up close was the attempt of the minority in a condo that opposed a new windows project to try to get the Historical Perseveration Board to stop. [Fortunately unsuccessful, but costly to both sides.]
Good as usual except I doubt the "parking" as the sole explanation of Sam's. It's more the general anti-change, hyperlocal externalities of which parking is just one and the failure of the political system n general to give much weight to the widely but diffusely dispersed benefits of development.
Of course the key is your almost throwaway comment abbot not applying cost benefit analysis to the decision making process.
The Minetta thing reminded me of the story of another place in NYC: Maiden Lane in the financial district. New York was originally a Dutch settlement, New Amsterdam, in what is now the southernmost part of downtown New York. Though relations between Dutch settlers and the local natives were initially amicable, good times never last, and the Dutch eventually had to build a fortified wall across the island to prevent native counterattacks.
There was a small stream just north of the wall that was used by the inhabitants of New Amsterdam to do their laundry on sunny days - a chore assigned to unmarried young women. When the single men of New Amsterdam saw women carrying laundry through the gate that gave access to the footpath to the stream, they put on their best clothes and waited outside the gate to try to socialize when laundry time was over. The men had a name for the footpath: Maagde Paatje - Maiden’s Path.
Now the wall is gone though the street that once ran along the inside of the wall still exists - you’ve maybe heard of it: Wall Street. A few sort blocks north of Wall Street, Maiden’s Path became Maiden Lane.
Regarding historical preservation, 59 Maiden Lane is a 44-story office building built in the 1960s. There is plaza in front of the building with a small seating area and a few sad little trees along its western edge. A bronze plaque is affixed to the wall noting that there once was a house at 57 Maiden Lane where Thomas Jefferson lived when he was Secretary of State under President Washington. I suppose it would be moderately interesting if that house had been preserved, but as Matt’s essay points out, forgoing the development that replaced it would have been a very high price to pay.
Other historical buildings in the area are truly significant and should be preserved, at almost any cost, as long as the United States endures: Federal Hall, where the first Congress met and George Washington took his oath of office; Trinity Church - architecturally significant and its cemetery is the final resting place for Alexander Hamilton and other prominent early Americans; Saint Paul’s chapel where George Washington worshipped (he found Trinity Church to be too ostentatious) and which also played a prominent role on 9/11; and Fraunces Tavern, secret meeting place of the Sons Of Liberty, and host of a dinner for General Washington and his officers on Evacuation Day - the end of the Revolutionary War.