I was born in 1966, the year the modern historic-preservation movement entered a new chapter with the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act. But I did not think much about preservation until college, when I took a course called “Modern Architecture.” There I watched Yale’s great architectural historian Vincent Scully wield a 10-foot bamboo pole and pound a screen filled with images of New York’s Pennsylvania Station in its heyday and today, after the original building was demolished and replaced by Madison Square Garden, with the station underneath it. He growled in anger: “We once entered the cities like gods, and now we scurry in like rats.” Here was an open-and-shut case of architectural murder and its response: a movement of preservationists who declared, “Never again,” and who would stand in the way of the next threatened landmark, and the next.
That was yesterday’s preservation movement. What is today’s?
In Amherst, Mass., where I live, Emily Dickinson’s grave site shares attention with newly restored headstones of veterans of the Massachusetts 54th, the all-African-American regiment in the Civil War, who had long lain forgotten in a segregated corner of the cemetery. Some of those men now take pride of place alongside the poet at the center of a 100-foot-long American-history mural overlooking the cemetery. Meanwhile, Dickinson’s home, now a museum, is struggling successfully to move beyond the traditional focus on restoring the buildings and grounds, instead welcoming innovative programs by artists and writers to use the site as a springboard to new creativity.
In nearby Holyoke, the preservation of the city’s industrial heritage is couched not so much in aesthetic terms as in terms of climate change. By saving its sturdy 19th-century paper-industry buildings and taking advantage of the cheap, clean energy produced by the 150-year-old canal system, the city is making preservation the means to a more economically vibrant and environmentally sustainable future.
Far too often, preservation has been used as a tool to enshrine inequality between rich and poor.
In Boston, a community land trust created by the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative anchors affordable housing. New transportation is bringing increased investment opportunities and easier access to downtown, but without the social upheaval caused by displacement and gentrification. Because the land trust holds the rights to the 225 homes it administers in perpetuity, it can keep them affordable. Few of these homes are architecturally distinguished, but as symbols of a different kind of preservation effort, they are extraordinary.
This is not your grandmother’s preservation movement. The 1966 act established the National Register of Historic Places and the process by which individuals, cities, and states could add important places to it. Although a listing on the register does not guarantee preservation — and most towns can usually do little more than delay demolition of historic properties — the act represented an important step. It required that every state have a preservation officer, it spurred the creation of local historic commissions, and it established guidelines for standards of preservation and rehabilitation. Later legislation added tax incentives to encourage rehabilitation. The power to compel preservation is weak. Only legally constituted historic districts have the power to restrict changes in buildings. But 50 years on, preservation is seen as an integral function of local government and a legitimate factor in community debates about land use.
The evidence of success is everywhere. There are now more than 90,000 properties on the National Register. On Boston’s Beacon Hill but also in the city’s Southie neighborhood and the popular Quincy Market; in the industrial city of Lowell; and in small towns across the commonwealth, houses and factories, public and private buildings, have been saved and rehabilitated and are bringing in new investment. In Atlanta, not only has the Capitol building been renovated, but the defunct Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill has been refurbished into lofts, and the nearby home of Martin Luther King Jr. is a national historic site. Pike Place Market in Seattle, the Manzanar Japanese internment camp in California, worker housing in North Carolina, slave quarters in Mississippi, the Presidio in San Francisco, Latino homesteads in Colorado — all testify to a wider appreciation of the past nationwide. The preservation movement deserves its share of credit for encouraging this broader view of what should be saved. The movement has also spurred a return to the city and an appreciation of all its everyday glories: walkable neighborhoods, corner stores and rowhouses, the high density that is the foundation of a vibrant community.
Yet there are also some troubling issues.
The mainstream American preservation movement still remains largely focused on architecture — on saving what advocates deem beautiful and preventing the construction of what they consider ugly. The renewed preservation movement of the 1960s came in reaction to decades of urban renewal and a wholesale dismissal of the past. But preservationists’ lofty ideals have too often degenerated into squabbles about the appearance of new windows and the color of shingles. Preservationists have too readily worked to protect the homes of wealthy people while allowing homes and neighborhoods of the working classes to be demolished, wiping away the layers of history that make places meaningful.
The movement has been concerned primarily with places of celebratory history. Only recently has there been a push to preserve “difficult places,” the sites where slavery or segregation, racial or other violence, even genocide, have taken place. An entire ecosystem has been built around the “curatorial management of the built environment,” in the words of James Marston Fitch, one of the fathers of modern preservation, in which preservationists have emulated the museum approach to the conservation of precious objects. But what does that focus do to the history that is not about architectural gems? Is the site of the Shockoe Bottom slave market, in downtown Richmond, Va., largely paved over by Interstate 95 and parking lots, to be ignored because it lacks the “integrity” that the secretary of the interior’s standards for preservation identifies as a requirement for listing on the National Register?
The preservation movement has also too often become a handmaiden to real-estate development that gives lip service to the ideals of preservation in order to restore buildings that can be sold at huge cost to the wealthy. Preservation organizations celebrate the restoration of old homes, even when the entire community that once lived in the neighborhood has had to leave it to seek lower rents. The facades look spectacular, but the community is missing. Far too often, preservation has been used as a tool to enshrine inequality between rich and poor that is the stamp of our global age.
Preservation is not simply about the past; it can be the foundation for building more just communities for the future. The exciting, if uneven, developments we are seeing in preservation are products of a new world, unimaginable by the drafters of the 1966 law. The greatest wave of immigration to the United States — exceeding even the epic migrations of the late 19th century from China and Southern and Eastern Europe — was only just beginning. Millions of Asian and Latin American migrants have in recent decades joined the American polity, and they are now coalescing into major political and cultural forces, demanding their place at the table — and in the national story.
Economic inequality in 1966 was in decline, the product of postwar economic growth, strong unions, and President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. No one would have predicted that 50 years later, inequality would be as great as during the rapacious Gilded Age of the late 19th century, and that neoliberal economic policies would be enthroned, despite all evidence of their destructive effects. When Jane Jacobs advocated preserving the small blocks and tenement buildings of her Greenwich Village neighborhood in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she assumed the continuance of a broad middle class as well as public investments that could maintain a mixed-income neighborhood far into the future. She could not have predicted that her neighborhood would become home to a new elite, with her own modest home from the 1950s lovingly preserved by law — but selling for millions.
The early environmental movements countered the destruction of the natural environment — the emission of pollution by smokestacks, the dumping of toxic garbage. But big cars and 30-cents-a-gallon gas were the norm, and virtually no one was thinking about what we might be doing to the earth’s atmosphere, or recognizing that the effects of policies, both in the United States and abroad, would be felt within a few decades. Preservation was concerned with beauty and buildings, not an unknown problem that would come to be called climate change. We need to find ways for the preservation movement to join the conservation movement to achieve more-sustainable communities. Progress requires that we are more flexible about what constitutes “authenticity” or “integrity,” and that we value the architecture of adaptive reuse, just as our forebears did.
Perhaps most thorny of all, the new movement must not be a tool of gentrifiers but rather a means of achieving economically just communities. If we care about creating dense, and thus more sustainable, cities and towns, but reject the reorganization of cities by class, we will have to offer a new model for saving buildings and communities. This means embracing public housing as well as new forms of property ownership such as community land trusts and cooperative housing as a way to protect against the dislocations of market-based private investment. It means passing local ordinances such as the one in San Francisco that helps support longstanding community businesses, and restoring dilapidated structures as the basis for local economic development. And it means putting the “movement” back in the preservation movement by taking to the streets to protest the displacement of our neighbors. When the Boston grass-roots organization City Life conducts acts of civil disobedience to prevent low-income residents from being evicted from their neighborhoods by multinational banks, they are acting as preservationists. Traditional preservation organizations should stand with them.
This is preservation’s moment. The movement can finally free itself from the stigma of aesthetic elitism, of being the domain of the rich, of standing in the way of progress, of being obsessed with architecture. And it can find itself offering solutions to some of the most pressing problems of our world — crafting a sustainable approach to climate change, honestly confronting our difficult pasts, and reclaiming a more equitable society.
But where is beauty in this equation? In the effort to move preservation beyond “beautiful architecture,” might we lose one of the most important reasons that people want to save, visit, and learn about places? When I go over my notes from travels in the United States and around the world, I am repeatedly confronted with specific instances of beauty in old places. Our lives are marked not only by days and years, births and deaths, graduations and marriages, but also by the moments of beauty we have experienced. Each of us has a changing loop of such moments that we can recall with ease. Mine include the sudden, unexpected golden light emanating from buildings on the Campidoglio in Rome after weeks of rain, and standing in the Pantheon, that great gorilla of a building, on Pentecost, when hundreds of red rose petals floated down through the oculus to echoing cheers.
In the presence of something we find beautiful, a rich feeling rushes in before the mind can intellectualize it. “Every now and then,” writes Roger Scruton, “we are jolted out of our complacency, and feel ourselves to be in the presence of something vastly more significant than our present interests and desires.”
The emotions tied to the experience of beauty are what make the battles over places important and difficult at the same time. Individuals who find a building or landscape beautiful have an “enduring certitude,” in the words of the scholar of aesthetics Elaine Scarry, that the place must be preserved so that everyone, now and in the future, will have the same experience that they did. Individuals and groups, with the tools of law, money, and organization, have convinced society that particular buildings and landscapes are beautiful, and that the experience of that beauty matters, to us and to our children and grandchildren.
The changing tides of support for certain buildings — the brownstones of New York City, for example, were despised earlier in the 20th century but in recent decades have become the centerpieces of gentrification — might suggest that talk of beauty is frivolous, a pandering to shifting tastes. The philosopher Alain de Botton has argued that the reason styles shift over time (often allowing the demolition of once-treasured old places) is that we invest in places so much meaning about our own lives. We preserve historic buildings not simply because we care about how they look, but because overtly or invisibly, we believe they hold within them and their history “the values we want to live by.”
Our encounter with beautiful places is marked by the “moment of gasp,” as the artist Catie Newell calls it. But, in fact, it is the values and meaning — often mysterious and elusive — we attach to places that define the beautiful. Although I do not believe that scholarship or music or art can change the world, I do agree with the literary critic George Steiner that “any mature representation of imagined form, any mature endeavor to communicate such representation to another human being, is a moral act.” Yet our world is filled with great beauty surrounded by great evil, often in proximity. Many who cherished beauty committed heinous acts, participated in crimes, promoted inequity and racism — sometimes in the midst of the beauty they loved. Hitler was a budding artist before he turned to politics. If you visit the Wannsee house in the western suburbs of Berlin where the Final Solution was ratified, you are likely to find the bucolic setting, serene architecture, and lovely art on the walls unsettling. We might wish that the gasp we emit on encountering a beautiful place, a past work of awe-inspiring design, a landscape that evokes unexpected tears, would appeal to our best selves. All too often it does not. Beauty, if it propels us toward justice, does so with a faltering engine.
Scarry notes how we sometimes fail to recognize beauty in our midst because our understanding of beauty is too narrow. Yet we might start to find beauty in something we once found ugly. And we might find new concepts of beauty in, for example, the values embodied in otherwise pedestrian forms. Preservation can, if we follow this logic, bring beauty and justice in closer alignment. By preserving the places that embody our highest values, we create an urban fabric of reminders and inspirations whose histories become rallying points for action. By saving buildings that embody past efforts to achieve a more just society, preservation can offer a powerful continuing argument for those efforts today.
If the preservation movement dedicates itself to economic justice and not just economic development, it will do more than save beautiful buildings; it will preserve the architecture of our ideals.
Max Page is a professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His most recent book is Why Preservation Matters (Yale University Press, 2016).
