Creative Destruction

I got a question about Creative Destruction at my lecture at the Chicago History Guild a couple of weeks ago and my first response was: “that is the hottest thing in preservation scholarship.” It has been for over decade, actually, from Max Page’s Creative Destruction of Manhattan and Michael Holleran’s Boston’s Changeful Times to the recent release of Randall Mason’s Once and Future New York. Dan Bluestone has also contributed to this scholarship, as have many of the pieces in Future Anterior and other journals.

I think many people confuse creative destruction with the concept of creativity and the tabula rasa, and thus come to the curious conclusion that preservation stifles creativity. This noxious notion doesn’t pass the sniff test: any child can draw on a blank canvas – it takes real creative skill to express yourself in context.

What creative destruction really means is the selective erasure of certain landscape elements (including buildings) in order to reinforce a particular story. It has happened a lot in preservation history, with perhaps the most famous example being the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1920s and 1930s, where lost historic buildings like the Governor’s Palace were reconstructed from scratch while historic buildings from the 19th century were demolished in order to “restore” the place to a more perfect vision of its Colonial past.

In Mason’s Once and Future New York he notes that this is NOT how we think of historic preservation/building conservation today. Today we approach it from the point of view of avoiding waste, maintaining identity and depth in a fast-paced society, and conserving precious resources. A building is an incredible amount of embodied energy and destroying it is like throwing out gasoline or burning forests.

But that is not the history of saving buildings. A century ago, during the Progressive Era, the preservationist impulse arose – as it often does – in response to rapid changes in society and the landscape. The United States was becoming an urban society for the first time, and immigrants were pouring in, causing cultural consternation among the established classes.

In this environment, landmarks were preserved as moral and cultural lessons. Most of the buildings saved in the 19th and early 20th centuries had connections to Revolutionary War heroes or other “founding fathers.” Those preserving them were explicit in their motives: they wanted to keep American culture in the face of foreign influences and they wanted stability in contrast to the uncertainties of modernization.

Mason recounts how the preservation project became the creation of a memory infrastructure designed to reinforce a certain narrative of American history and American society. And, in many cases, to actively erase the foreign immigrant presence, as in the development of the Bronx River Parkway, which restored an idealized version of nature to be appreciated from automobiles by, among other means, removing immigrant settlements along the route.

Creative destruction thus served the purpose of shaping historical narratives embodied in built forms. It didn’t matter if those forms were built out of brick and stone or forests and streams. Mason’s other examples included City Hall Park, a major preservation effort that focused not only on saving the early 19th century City Hall but on removing later buildings like the Tweed Courthouse that had been added to City Hall Park, obscuring the original landmark and conveying unpatriotic messages about corruption.

By the time Colonial Williamsburg opened in the 1930s, preservation had been professionalized, largely by architects. It had also expanded its focus beyond associations with founding fathers to include architectural landmarks. And the same approach of creative destruction helped shape architectural narratives. The practice of restoring an historic landmark to a certain date may involve “creative destruction” of later additions, again in the service of a more coherent narrative or more coherent design. In the case of sites like the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio or the Gaylord Building, reconstructing the original appearance enhances a visitor experience, and ideally the interpretation documents everything that happened.

Reading Mason’s book I started thinking about our own more current memory infrastructure, which has evolved over the last 50 years to incorporate more social history, more vernacular architecture, and a massively broader understanding of the American experience. For my entire life the memory infrastructure has been almost the exact opposite of the jingoistic solipsisms of the Progressive Era preservationists: it has been all about diversity and immigration. A quick visit to one of the most important preservation projects of the last 20 years – Ellis Island – is proof of that, as is the POTUS.

Of course this doesn’t mean the old sites are no longer seen. No, they have been reinterpreted. At National Trust sites like Woodlawn, Belle Grove, Montpelier, Cliveden, Drayton Hall, Oatlands or Shadows-on-the-Teche, the history of the enslaved population in the 18th and 19th centuries has become a central part of the interpretation. And rather than creative destruction, that expanded narrative results from creative investigation – archaeology of slave quarters, research into a great variety of historical records, and contacting ALL of the descendants of those who lived and worked at these sites. Unlike the preservationist project of 1910, which involved winnowing and narrowing the story, our current memory infrastructure requires an ever expanding field of relevance and revelation. And it is growing.

postscript: Creative destruction also refers to conditions in capitalism where technologies or systems are superceded, which is not terribly relevant to buildings and landscapes still used and usable.

Miami Beach

all photographs copyright Felicity Rich

In my role as a Trustee of the National Trust I attend three meetings a year and while the meetings themselves are intense and plentiful, we do reap the benefits of visiting stunning historic places in great American cities. This weekend we were in Miami Beach, which seems quite the posh destination, and it is. Thanks to preserving buildings.

photograph copyright Felicity Rich

In the 1970s and 1980s South Miami Beach had serious issues of crime and drugs. It also had blocks and blocks of fantastic but run-down Art Deco hotels that had opened in the 1930s when Miami Beach became a vacation destination. A few visionary developers, including National Trust Trustee Tony Goldman, started restoring these buildings and today South Beach draws tourists from all over the world to its beaches and protected, restored Art Deco district.

Friday Tony hosted us on The Hotel rooftop for drinks before we visited another Trustee’s stunning contemporary rooftop condo with views of South Beach.

photograph copyright Felicity Rich

There was a great symmetry to this meeting because our President Dick Moe is retiring and this was the site of his first National Preservation Conference in 1992. That was also my first conference, as a staff member of Landmarks Illinois. That was in the wake of Hurricane Andrew and there was much cleanup yet to do but Miami impressed me at the time. It was also sad because this year we lost Floyd Butler, who had founded the Young Urban Preservationists, a way to teach inner-city kids, and he and I had spent much time together in Miami in ’92.

photograph copyright Felicity Rich

Thursday we had dined at the home of Arva Moore Parks McCabe, a pioneering local preservationist, who last night related how she came to the Trust in 1973 seeking help saving a house in a historic district and the Trust sent her to Oak Park, Illinois. It worked, and she and others of the Dade Heritage Trust have saved much in the meantime, including a fascinating effort by Trustee Jorge Hernandez and others to save the Miami Marine Stadium, one of the National Trust’s 11 Most Endangered properties last year.

photograph copyright Felicity Rich

The Miami Marine Stadium is a 1963 concrete composition that is part of an outdoor marine arena unlike any I have ever seen. The folded slabs of the roof and bleachers projecting over the water recall the most visionary concrete designs of the 1950s and 1960s and even in despair the building impresses.

photograph copyright Felicity Rich

Local preservationists have defied the odds and the authorities to make significant progress towards its eventual preservation. We had the honor of touring the site by boat with the architect who designed it as a young man, Hilario Candela.

Then we had a lovely dinner at Vizcaya, the stunning Italianate Deering mansion on the shore in Miami, an over-the-top historic house and gardens that is open to the public and which the National Trust helped local preservationists save from over development a few years ago. The whole place is made from coral stone and there is a massive boat folly across from the terrace that reminded me of Cixi’s folly, the marble boat in the Summer Palace in Beijing. Vincent Scully whom we awarded the Louise DuPont Crowninshield Award in Nashville was there and I got to speak with him.

photograph copyright Felicity Rich

It was interesting to hear Dick Moe and Arva Moore Parks McCabe and others talk about a Miami that “got no respect” from the preservation movement back in the 1970s, because my first exposure to the place in ’92 was all about preservation. How saving and rehabilitating buildings revitalized a community down on its heels and made it an international destination. Almost a generation later, the Miami Marine Stadium presents the same opportunity. Every generation can reclaim its unique and valued connection to place. If it chooses to.

Dolkart’s Row House Reborn

I just finished reading Andrew Dolkart’s new book “The Row-House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City, 1908-1929″ (Johns Hopkins 2009) and I loved it. Dolkart tells a story that is fascinating from several perspectives in the history of building conservation, and he tells it very well. The book springs from a simple fact: people started rehabbing rowhouses in New York (and elsewhere) in the early 20th century. Sometimes these rehabs respected the original exterior of the buildings, essentially following current preservation practice for locally designated historic districts. Sometimes they heavily altered the exterior, following emergent fashions for “Colonial” or Mediterranean renaissance stylings. This involved chopping off no-longer fashionable stoops and window surrounds and other extraneous Victorianisms.

Near Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village. Photo copyright Felicity Rich 2006.

You see these rowhouses everywhere, and Dolkart has unearthed tons of period commentary and reportage on the conversions: they usually involved complete interior remodeling of partitions, kitchens, and the like. They also often involved exterior remodeling that typically eliminated the stoops for new groundfloor entrances; shaved off many of the window and door mouldings; rendered the facades with stucco; often added multipane, casement or studio windows; developed rear gardens in an early and successful attempt at gentrification.

93 Perry Street facade. The archway at left leads to the garden and rear building in this 1928 rehab by local architect Floyd McCathern. Dolkart includes a 1932 photo in his book. This photo is copyright Felicity Rich 2006.

Dolkart’s investigation therefore explores one of the philosophical issues that constantly recurs throughout the history of conserving the built environment: when does something become historic and WHEN are we trying to restore things too? Clearly changes to rowhouses that happened in 1912 or 1922 are now “historic,” yet Dolkart notes that many such changes are eliminated with the full approval of landmarks agencies when owners propose restoring a rowhouse to its original condition of the 1840s or 1880s.

Dolkart’s contribution is significant in his detailing of how these remodelings were considered in terms of architecture and real estate development. He first details the many projects of Frederick Sterner, who redesigned many houses for himself and other high-end patrons, transforming the East 60s from an immigrant area to an island of elite pied-a-terre. Dolkart crafts a compelling architectural context for these conversions as representing a distinct social and aesthetic history that is implicitly worthy of some preservation.

The Parge House on East 65th, Frederick Sterner’s final house. The use of ornamental relief in the exterior stucco (pargetry) was a feature of Sterner’s work. Photograph copyright 2006 by Felicity Rich.

Dolkart devotes a significant section to Greenwich Village, which I studied as part of my dissertation. The Village is fascinating for two reasons, both of which are central to Dolkart’s story of early 20th century creative rehabilitation. First, the Village had a strong artistic identity, an identity I explored in my dissertation, relying on many of the same sources Dolkart cites (and critiques). This artistic identity was turned into both heritage tourism and real estate speculation, as the artistic identity of the community became a rationale for rehabilitating buildings by adding artist’s garrets, large studio windows and the like, even as the buildings were being rehabilitated beyond the means of most artists to rent or own.

Greenwich Village – another photo copyright 2006 by Felicity Rich. I guess she was noticing these buildings a few years back…

In my dissertation I dealt with Greenwich Village because it was central to the adoption of local landmarking and preservation in general but it lacked traditional architectural integrity, and these 1910s and 1920s row-house rehabs are part of the reason it was originally proposed to be 18 separate historic districts. Thanks to a centuries-old artistic identity and the concept that landmarks designation would help make the district more architecturally cohesive over time, it became a single district in 1969. I used it as an example of the community-planning impulse in landmark designation, which has at least two aspects: first, the motive to preserve not simply architecture and history but community in the largest sense, and secondly a future-orientation focused on community improvement and employing landmark designation as the motor and model for that improvement. Certainly many of the 1910s and 20s rehabs have been “fixed” since the designation of Greenwich Village, which is why Dolkart began looking at this issue in the first place.

My only critique of the book is its perhaps natural limitation – an Epilogue of less than 10 pages called “Beyond New York City” with brief mentions of Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston. In my work I compared the ongoing conservation development of Greenwich Village – “Zoning Bohemia” – to its Chicago counterpart of Old Town, certainly smaller and about 10-15 years behind its Big Apple cousin. But as soon as I started reading the book it immediately brought to mind the same type of 1910s and 1920s rehabs in Chicago’s Old Town, like this:

Now this is of course one of the now-famous and independently landmarked homes that Sol Kogen and Edgar Miller fabricated out of existing building stock in the 1920s. But Old Town also has stuccoed, Mediterranean-Revival-roofed houses on Lincoln Park West and altered Italianates with casements and studio rooftops – all added during the transformation of the district into an artistic enclave in the 1920s. There was even a wave of 1960s rehab that inspired the district itself in the 1970s, and much of that did not follow traditional architectural preservation standards.

I am grateful that Andrew has written such a nicely researched and crafted book and I hope it inspires us to look at the early waves of rehabilitation and how they thought about buildings and communities. It was a welcome, enjoyable and inspiring read.

JANUARY 19 update:

Here are the buildings on Lincoln Park west I was thinking of. I haven’t researched these so I don’t know when they were altered, but the first (actually on Menomonee at the foot of Lincoln Park West) has extra-long windows, a rendered upper facade, and diamond panes in the lower windows:

Next, a few houses north on Lincoln Park West, are these two old Italianates made into Spanish Colonial houses with render, a pent tile roof, and adobe-like walls. Again, I haven’t done the research but I am guessing 1920s.

And of course the Crilly Court gardens remind one of the many rear garden schemes Dolkart found in Manhattan. This is where the Old Town Art Fair started in the 1940s, 15 years after Greenwich Village started its art fair.

There are quite a lot of 1960s-70s rehabs in Old Town, when the area become popular and started lobbying for landmark protection.

Sharp Building 2009

Most people think of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as the institution that resided above and below the museum it gave birth to over a century ago. Yet for over 30 years the school has had its own building and in the last 20 years the School has grown even more, filling five different buildings in the Loop and occupying space in even more.

In 1976 the School occupied the Walter Netsch modernist building on Columbus Drive behind the museum, and 12 years later it purchased the Champlain Building, now the Sharp Building. A couple of years later it bought the old Illinois Athletic Club building (1908, Barnett, Haynes and Barnett) as a dorm, later converting it into classrooms and renaming it the Maclean Building.

A few more years and SAIC turned the Chicago Building (1904, Holabird & Roche) into a dormitory, which was particularly gratifying to me because I had helped save it from demolition in 1989 when I worked at Landmarks Illinois.

The School also saved a 1917 Christian Eckstorm Building on State Street and incorporated it into a new dormitory by Larry Booth, a building I had the pleasure of teaching in last year.

But I want to talk about the place I have taught for the last 15 years, the Sharp Building at 37 S. Wabash.

The Sharp Building was originally built in 1902 for the Powers school, which taught clerical skills like German, stenography and bookkeeping. My Research Studio students – first year BFA candidates – are working on an exhibit interpreting the history of the building, which is appropriate since it has just been restored.

This is also the building where we have our Master of Science in Historic Preservation studios, lab, resource center and faculty offices. We used to be on the 13th floor but now we are on the 10th, where we have two large studios overlooking the corner of Monroe and Wabash Streets.

The building’s entrance and ground floor has just been restored to the original Holabird & Roche design, which involved recreation of the elaborate terra cotta entrance, largely destroyed in the 1933 remodeling as the Champlain Building.

The restoration also involved bringing back the brick piers which originally defined the ground floor, lost in the 1947 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill transformation into a TWA ticket office.

That’s 1947.

That’s today.

There is a lot of fascinating history here: When TWA was selling airplane tickets here in 1947, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was on the 9th floor designing the Farnsworth House.

Thirty years later, my father had a travel business in the building. The TWA ticket office turned into a restaurant and then later into a bank and again into a restaurant before closing a half dozen years ago. Our program began in the building in 1993, the same year it was DENIED landmark status. Later in the 1990s it was landmarked as part of the Jeweler’s Row district. A controversial project saved the facades of three Jeweler’s Row buildings for the new 80-story Legacy highrise. That project is responsible for the restoration of the Sharp Building’s ground floor, which has just debuted this month.

It is exciting for our historic preservation graduate students to work in a building that is seeing such a sensitive restoration, expecially after the disappointing replacement of most of the original windows a decade ago.

That’s the BEFORE – note the profile and depth.

That’s the AFTER – butchered and blinded. And they’re aluminum which means they are REALLY COLD right now. This was one of the events which kicked off my window rants back in ‘01. Our class even produced alternatives to replacement, to no avail.

The lobby has bits of each period – we apparently still have – in storage – the elevator doors decorated with relief French and Indian figures during the 1933 remodeling by onetime SAIC dean Hubert Ropp, who also designed lunette murals, long lost to a dropped ceiling.

My BFA students are exploring all of these themes as well as the history of the corner of Monroe and Wabash, which includes the legendary Palmer House hotel, and the Sullivan facades recently revealed on Wabash Avenue across the street, on buildings incorporated into the Louis Sullivan designed Carson Pirie Scott store at the turn of the last century.

It is a great place to work, and an especially great place to teach the many arts and sciences of heritage conservation.

Vagueness and Landmarking

AND THE HAMMER OF JUSTICE COMES DOWN

Earlier this year a Chicago lawsuit hobbyist with lots of money and neighbor-management issues got the Illinois Appellate Court (“Precedent? We don’t need no stinking precedent!”) to strike down the Chicago Landmarks Ordinance based on its “vagueness,” so naturally someone else thought they could pull the same sort of isolationist garbage elsewhere, namely Seattle.

They just LOST BIG TIME. Read about it on PreservationNation:

Turns out the Washington Court of Appeals rejected the “vagueness” challenge by recognizing the OBVIOUS: Landmarking is a process that encourages the preservation of historic sites, districts and structures, based on the criteria that those sites, districts and structures possess. This is not vague, it is entirely specific: you cannot detail what needs to be preserved in all situations because each sites, district and structure has its own individual characteristics that make it significant. Landmarking treats buildings like individuals, not categories.

The court said it better than I can, explaining that the supposedly “vague” standards, “gain specificity from application to a particular landmark and particular proposal.”

Or even better, they noted that because “each landmark has unique features and occupies a unique environment, it is impracticable for a single ordinance to set forth development criteria or standards that could apply to every landmark.”

This is what I have been saying all along (see my post “Appellate Nuttiness” on January 31, 2009).

Now, I understand that people, and even judges, are more comfortable with absolutes and doctrines and everything being the same. But everything isn’t the same, or I could use my Epson printer inks in the Hewlett Packard, but I can’t.

Turns out a vagueness challenge is one of the first things you learn, sort of a Lawsuit 101. See Gary Cole’s blog here.

Here is what the court said:

“The doctrine of vagueness does not require a statute to meet impossible standards of specificity”

The crude medicine of basic zoning and building codes offer predetermined absolutes and specific standards: you must set back 5 feet, you are limited to this square footage, you are required to have this many exits, etc. Everything is the same and every building is treated the same, and you know what is going to happen before it happens and there is no vagueness. It is the sort of straightforward rules and procedures one needs to successfully operate a pre-school day care facility.

But for grownups, the world has nuances.

People are individuals, not numbers.

Communities are individual as well.

Oak Park does not equal Evanston and Palo Alto does not equal Santa Barbara and Mystic does not equal Marblehead and Nashville certainly is not equivalent to Knoxville.

Within Chicago, the Villa does not equal Wicker Park and the landmark review process will not follow the same path on an Astor Street Georgian Revival that it will on a South Shore Foursquare.

Landmarking is a PROCESS, and reviewing changes or additions to landmarks is also a PROCESS, and the rules are defined individually for each landmark. Every Chicago Landmark, when designated by the City Council, includes a list of significant architectural and historical figures so that every owner knows what is important about their building. But what is appropriate for a bungalow may not be for a Queen Anne, and vice versa.

Here’s one for individualism. Thanks, Washington state.

WEDNESDAY UPDATE FROM SAIC HPRES STUDENT MITCH BROWN:

“Connor is denied on each and every count. I hope the good judges of Illinois’ Supreme Court read the decision.

Deprivation of substantive due process – NOPE, landmark preservation is a legitimate state interest.

Regulatory taking – NOPE the safeguarding of the public interest in legitimate in this sphere (they got RFRA wrong)

Hidden indirect tax, fee – NOPE even had the SLPB required the stipulations Connor’s alleges (which they didn’t) it would’ve been in the service of mitigation in protection of the Ordinance 11022.

Wrong application of the Law 20 – NOPE as the hearing examiner properly applied SMC since under SMC and Standard 9, Connor’s proposal would adversely affect the landmark and there were alternatives available. Connor’s argument rests on his insistence that the “owner’s objectives” are not subject to review (who is this guys lawyer!?) “A party who purchases a property subject to agreed upon landmark controls cannot thwart those controls by defining his objectives under SMC entirely in terms of the return he wishes to make on the property” (hearing examiner with court concurrence)

“The Landmarks Preservation Ordinance is impermissibly vague because it does not tell me exactly what I can do with my property” – REJECTED – Can Conner ascertain the requirements for an acceptable project? – YES – The LPO contains both contextual standards and a process for clarification and guidance as to individual sites.

LPO and Ordinance 11022 describe specific features to be preserved with corresponding contextual standards for application.

“The doctrine of vagueness does not require a statute to meet impossible standards of specificity” I like this one the best.

“Clear Error” NOPE – Court reviewed hearing examiners review which was based on publicly passed Ordinance 11022, not the Report on Designation used by the Board.

Scope of the Designation? Is the site protected? Connors – ” ‘Satterlee House and Satterlee Residence’ is proof the city council intended only the house and not the site to be recommended…!”

Lets all hope Hanna and Mwroka’s cases are as ham-fistedly argued as Connor’s was.

Preservation as the road to recovery

One of the gratifying things about being in the historic preservation/heritage conservation field is that it is future-oriented. Usually the position preservationists take – which may seem radical at the time – becomes the mainstream position later. So all those blogs of mine earlier this year about preservation as the road to economic recovery? Here is it from the AIA today:

http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek09/1218/1218rc_historicpreservation.cfm

“Embracing the Economics of Historic Preservation: Reusing and
renovating already-constructed buildings can lead the way out of this
recession”

Thanks to Joan Pomaranc at AIAChicago for forwarding this!

Roger Brown Study Collection

I have blogged several times about Hull House and its approaches to interpretation of historic sites – in fact, “Hull House Again” is my most-visited blog post. I have also blogged about the Gaylord Building on several occasions, where I served as Chair of the Site Council for six years. Another role of mine this decade has been as a member of the Roger Brown Study Collection Steering Committee, involved in the preservation, interpretation and educational implementation of the property and collection at 1926 N. Halsted in Chicago.

The site itself is an increasingly rare but once common two-story 1880s building that originally had a storefront and 3 apartments. A successful and influential Chicago painter associated with a 1970s-80s group labeled the Imagists, Roger and his partner George Veronda converted 1926 N. Halsted into a studio and home beginning in the 1970s. Over the course of two decades Roger produced much of his work here in his first floor studio and amassed a nearly overwhelming collection of art from the fine to the folk to the kitsch to the ephemeral that bedecks the second floor, the staircases and nearly every available space.

The place is literally packed with the collection as Roger had displayed it, or more appropriately, lived with it. My students both graduate and undergraduate really appreciate the place as a four-dimensional example of an artistic environment and as a stunning project of conservation and interpretation.

I serve on the Steering Committee with a roster of famous artists who knew and worked with Roger, and whose works are included in the collection, including Gladys Nillson, Jim Nutt, and Barbara Rossi. Nick Lowe from Arts Administration and Policy, is doing an amazing project documenting – and creating miniatures of – Roger Brown’s California home and collection, to be at Hyde Park Arts Center this spring.

The incomparable Lisa Stone curates and manages the collection, and like her South Halsted counterpart Lisa Lee, has made the site an educational experience of uncommon depth. You always experience something new there. I had my students sketch whatever they liked in the studio and when I reviewed their sketches a couple of weeks later I saw things I had never seen.

What strikes me about historic sites are the accidental details, the mundane but telling forensics of the everyday. At Roger Brown I always show everyone the medicine cabinet, still filled with toothbrushes, Maalox, cotton swabs and other typical accoutrements. I saw the house shortly after Roger donated it to the School of the Art Institute in 1996, the year before his death, and was struck at that time by its time capsule quality: underwear stacked neatly in the closet, toothbrushes in the medicine cabinet, spice containers in the kitchen. The details of everyday life.

The fact that I can still see that medicine cabinet is oddly comforting. At times we feared that the School would deaccession the building. While the collection might be saved in that scenario, to have the collection in its original context is geometrically more educational. Somehow the medicine cabinet is that slice of everyday which grounds and makes real the rest of the collection.

It is striking the various educational programs that have taken place in the building. Our historic preservation graduate students restored the storefront in Neal Vogel’s class and cleaned graffiti from the side in Bill Latoza’s class and have helped document the collection and assess the building. This past Spring we did an interpretive project for the adjacent Armitage-Halsted District and met with Alderman Vi Daley in the building during and after the project.

Like Hull House, the Roger Brown collection is not simply preserving a place and its objects: it is preserving the purpose of a place by extending that purpose. Roger Brown made art in this building and a world of art and artists swirled through its interior for two decades: after he moved to California the gallery Intuit occupied the first floor. The School of the Art Institute is not simply preserving the building, it is preserving the importance of the building by extending that artistic and educational mission dozens of times every single semester with students of every age and background. That is what our field – heritage conservation – is all about.

Maintenance

My children come into the house and throw their bags, coats and shoes on the floor and proceed to tread upon them. They go running around outside with their socks on, quickly ruining said socks. They lean back on chairs and ottomans and I have had to repair the ottomans four times in the last year. They leave doors and windows open, lights on and leave candy wrappers on bookshelves. This is what kids do, and we try our best to correct these habits.

But we have bad habits of our own. It is cold today, and I need to close the storm windows, and that attic window I meant to repair this summer is still loose. I shoveled the front steps but I didn’t shovel the back steps. I need to call someone about the right front burner on the range and perhaps I need to change a water filter and I definitely should get someone to check on the furnace and radiators. Another summer project left undone – painting the outside of the attic windows. At least we got those chimney caps on last year.

The point of this exceedingly boring rundown is one of the most important aspects of conserving historic buildings: maintenance. I have to thank my high school friend Jenny Brezon Fluteau, who emailed from the south of France, where she and her husband make wine and champagne. She said she had a big old house that had been poorly maintained and could use help. I replied that I had the same house. When people complain about the expense of historic preservation, what they are usually talking about, in fact, is the expense of deferred maintenance. The $100 problem ignored until it becomes a $1,000 problem. Or a $100,000 problem.

My favorite $1,000,000 problem was one I encountered during the effort to save St. Mary of the Angels church in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The massive brick walls were cracking and the interior of the dome was flaking paint and plaster. It was water damage, and everyone knew it was because the building was old.

No, it wasn’t. It was because the building had not been maintained. This is a pandemic problem with houses of worship, usually operated by people NOT trained in the management and maintenance of buildings. And they are very big, very complicated buildings. At St. Mary’s, a variety of roof patches over the years – perhaps done by well-meaning parishioners – had led to a buildup of roofing tar in the gutters, which were blocked. So the water was running through the walls.

It was a million-dollar problem caused by the poor – and repetitive – application of a $100 solution. It was not because the building was old. In fact, it was still standing BECAUSE IT WAS OLD. They built things very well in the 1910s and many of those buildings can stand an incredible amount of abuse. They can stand much more abuse than my recently purchased ottomans, or the kids’ snowboots, or their socks.

In reality, a well-maintained house built in the 19th or early 20th centuries (and even many well-crafted homes from the later 20th century) is less expensive than a new vernacular house IF IT IS MAINTAINED. That is a big “if” because it almost never is.

We live in the ether of the myth of maintenance-free. NOTHING, nowhere, ever, is maintenance-free. Our myth of maintenance-free is a byproduct of the consumer culture that encourages replacement. New replacement windows are maintenance-free because when they break, you throw them out and buy new ones. A new boiler is maintenance-free until it gets old. Same with a new fridge or a new door or a new floor or a new paint job or the Mount Olympus of maintenance-free mythology; artificial siding. You will never paint again because the siding will disguise the disintegration of your walls until it is time to replace EVERYTHING.

There is a design issue here as well. Prior to 1930, almost every building was designed to be repaired, and its components were designed to be repaired. IN the postwar consumer culture, our economy depended on REPLACEMENT rather than REPAIR. It was economically advantageous to buy things that needed replacement, and those things included houses.

I have spent two decades telling anyone who would listen that most new houses are not built to last as long as their 30-year mortgages. NO ONE has ever told me this is wrong. It is an economic and technological fact, by and large. You can’t sand and refinish a floor that is studs, layers of plywood and carpet.

Good stuff can be repaired. Good clothes can be mended, and shouldn’t be thrown on the floor and trod upon, as I try to tell my children. Good appliances can be repaired. Good houses can be fixed as well. And they shouldn’t be neglected for years.

Historic houses are often so darn good that they can still be fixed feasibly EVEN after years of neglect. But that is usually what makes them expensive – the years of neglect. If I get to all my projects on my house, and bring it back from the neglect it has suffered, I will still need to remain vigilant and spend money and time on it every season of every year. Buildings, like cities and like people, need constant care, feeding and attention. Especially if you are worried about spending a ton of money.

Chicago photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel once said that the only enemies of historic buildings were water and stupid men. If you let the water in, the building quickly deteriorates. If you keep the water out (that is why you always fix the roof first) you have time to address other issues. But the best thing is to MAINTAIN the building over time, like the auto enthusiast who worries about changing the oil and the brake fluid and the transmission fluid and rotating the tires. Most massive building problems start out as little leaks and flakes and tiny failures that are ignored – usually for frightfully long times. Building conservation is not inherently expensive if it is approached as an ongoing task of maintenance. If it is a rescue operation after the passage of a catastrophic amount of time, then it can be.

Owning in an historic district

I own a house in a historic district and last year I blogged about how thankful I was for that fact. Real estate is an asset whose value is largely external – it comes from its location, which is to say, its surrounding buildings and environment. Because my house is in a historic district, its value is assured. Economic studies for over 40 years have confirmed this fact in communities across the United States.

If you look at the history of historic districts – which I did in my dissertation – you find that the first modern historic districts emerged in the 1950s in communities that were concerned about drastic changes to their environment and thus the value of their homes. Urban renewal was one threat, which proposed outright demolition. The other threat was posed by postwar zoning ordinances, which dramatically increased density and thus owners of brownstones or single-family homes faced the prospect of massive highrises next door.

So homeowners in places like Beacon Hill in Boston and Brooklyn Heights in New York did what their forefathers did a generation earlier with zoning: they crafted legislation to protect their environment and thus their home value. Often they also secured downzoning – this happened in Greenwich Village in 1961, and in Chicago’s trio of lakefront landmarks in the 1970s – Astor Street, Old Town, and Mid-North.

Now, some people, motivated by greed or some sort of Ayn Rand ideology, argue that they don’t want historic districts because it will limit their value. How can this be true? Well, we have the examples of teardowns, where people are able to cash in on windfall profits because they can tear down a house and build a bigger one.

The libertarian ideology goes right out the window as soon as you realize that what allows the teardown is zoning: it’s just another government handout. In fact, the zoning that makes teardowns possible and profitable ALSO protects the value of some of those teardowns by insuring that I can’t build an abbatoir next door. Indeed, that it why a Supreme Court Justice (Sutherland) as conservative as Scalia upheld zoning in 1926. So people who bought houses wouldn’t have knackering houses next door.

Historic districts were born at the same time as zoning and for the same reasons and they are in fact simply a more precise and surgical tool compared to zoning, which can sometimes be a blunt instrument. They also secure value, and I will not be surprised when some teardown neighborhoods hit the skids when McMansions start falling apart in 2020 during the height of the baby bust. After all, I have seen how they were built.

There is a vital economic principle at work in historic districts: uncertainty. The reason people get all NIMBY about things and fear change is simple: they fear uncertainty. This has economic agency because uncertainty discourages investment and consumer confidence and other things that are seen as positive for a growing economy. This is another stick in the eye of free market ideologies, because in reality, markets only operate well under conditions of security and certainty. Bandits and plagues and earthquakes are generally BAD for markets. Historic districts, like other zoning devices, create a sense of certainty that insures value over the long term, even if it might discourage short-term windfall profits.

Historic districts create another alchemy which led me to question one of the basic assumptions I have been talking about here. Ownership. We want the certainty of a stable environment to preserve our home value, an argument Dartmouth economist William Fischel has made excellently. But I also studied historic districts in Manhattan, and found a strange condition. People wanted historic districts and the certainty of an attractive, healthy and wealthy environment, but they didn’t own. A majority of the residents of places like Greenwich Village and Hamilton Heights were renters, not owners when they sought historic status. Moreover, I found that renters were investing tons of sweat equity in Greenwich Village rentals from the 1910s onward. This counters the ownership and equity theory.

Why? I think it comes back to the certainty principle. You might have equity, but that is an abstract concept. And in the 2009 world of upside-down mortgages, it has proved often illusory. But where you sleep and eat and the buildings and streets you travel to work and shop and recreate – those are real. They are certain, and you derive value from your environment whether or not you accumulate value in it. You can’t take it with you. But you can have it with you all the time you are here.

As long as I live in a historic district, I will have this value and this certainty.

Eco-nomics

Y’all should be members of Preservation Forum, because then you get Preservation Forum magazine (go to www.preservationnation.org) which has the latest and greatest articles on preservation as a movement and a science.

We are used to thinking of preservation as a movement, an advocacy position, and indeed historically preservation was an odd position to take in the postwar world of “new is better.” Preservation was not only an advocacy position, it was a David-and-Goliath (or Don Quixote-and-Windmill) proposition in the era of urban renewal and even today preservationists can seem pretty powerless – witness the thoughtless and willful destruction of the Michael Reese Hospital campus in Chicago right now.

But preservation is increasingly a science. Since the 1980s we have touted the economic virtues of preservation as it creates heritage tourist destinations. For the same period of time we have touted the benefits of preservation tax incentives for developers. As early as the late 1970s, the preservation movement was thinking of preservation as an energy-saving device, and for a couple of years preservationists have touted the fact that buildings that exist are greener than those not built yet.

But in 2009 you need even more, because we are now in the wiki-world of cloud computing and data-driven nobody-in-silos-anymore webwise decisionmaking. Last summer I blogged about how the world now offers data for everything – and it would not only be reasonable but RESPONSIBLE for those about to demolish Michael Reese Hospital to count and quantfy their pollution, their contributions to landfill, and to tell us exactly WHEN the replacement buildings would be paying off their debt to the ozone layer. (See A Sustainable Proposal July 23, 2009 and Test The Proposal a day later)

But Preservation Forum is already on it. The current issue “Broadening Perspectives” features several excellent articles on the latest in the MOVEMENT, and it turns out the latest in the movement is all about economics and ecologics and their interplay. Check out this pull quote: “Density Data would tend to indicate that tax credit projects are reducing VMTs at a rate of between 30 and 40 percent.”

Cool. That isn’t simply the 1990s data we got on how preservation contributes twice as much per dollar invested to a local economy as highways and new construction, or how many billions in investment and jobs tax incentives have contributed. Nor is it the 2000s data on how historic buildings are more energy efficient ALREADY. It is both combined into a supercool algorithm. Investing tax incentives in preservation projects not only contributes to the economy, it helps the environment by reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled, since historic buildings are in already built-up, reasonably dense locations that are walkable or served by public transit.

In the state of Maryland, $1 billion was spent on tax credit preservation projects from 1996 to 2008. This obviously did a lot for jobs and taxes, etc. It also, according to the article by Evans Paull, meant a reduction in CO2 emissions of between 16,000 and 21,000 metric tons a year. $1 million in tax credits equals 100 metric tons of CO2 saved. Awesome.