An old piece on historic preservation

from 10/2004, before I blogged, from the H-DC list:

It is very frustrating that preservation advocates, and I include myself among them, don't seem to do a very good job about explaining the value of historic preservation in the city. It is just as frustrating that residents fail to see what ought to be hitting them in the head, that architectural distinctiveness and history are the defining characteristics of the City of Washington, providing us with a unique sense of place, which makes our city worth living in, and are as well the source of the city's "unique selling proposition" that makes it attractive to others.

Personally, I feel that the city government isn't really committed to preservation either, by and large seeing it as a hindrance. Merely a handful of City Councilmembers seem to be committed to preservation, and many seem quick to attack preservation if it means pandering to their constituents. (The Tenleytown Fire Station is a case in point. That fiasco had everything to do with the fact that the Fire Department seemed to be over its head in terms of its skill in construction contracting, and little if nothing to do, fundamentally, with historic preservation. Nonetheless, Kathy Patterson put forth a bill to gut historic preservation protections for "public safety facilities" even though the Department of Defense and other municipalities such as NYC seem to manage just fine [having to follow historic preservation rules].)

This failure to explain and lack of commitment to preservation is doubly ironic though, because the only reason the city weathered 30-40 years of disinvestment and outmigration and a serious decline in population is because of the existence of historic residential building stock, which attracted a wide variety of people willing to live in great buildings, despite the serious decline in the provision of quality municipal services in all ways, shapes, and forms, that accompanied the decline in population.

That's why some of the statements in the anti-historic preservation website you reference are so laughable. I can't imagine there exists one historic district across the United States where because of designation "The resale value of your home could decline" as is stated. I refer people to Donovan Rypkema's _The Economic Benefits of Historic Preservation_ for a much more thorough discussion of this issue. The general point about designation is that it reduces risk and increases value because of the baseline created for design review, etc.

The reason that I have become such a "zealot" for preservation is that time and time again it is proven that substantive, sustainable, and successful center city revitalization results _only_ from activities that are preservation-based. (See for example, _The Living City_ and _Cities: Back from the Edge_ both by Roberta Gratz, or _Changing Places_ by Richard Moe and Carter Wilkie. For a discussion of this with regard to "community development" which typically has been urban clearance and renewal based, see _Organizing for Community Controlled Development_ by Patricia Murphy and James Cunningham.)

The anti-designation website seriously misstates the process for creating historic districts, and these arguments are used all across the city. It is impossible for a "secretive" band of neighbors to create an historic district without anyone knowing about it. There is a specific process required that includes a vote by impacted property owners. The vote has to be at least 50% + 1 in order for the process to continue to the next phase, which is consideration by the Historic Preservation Review Board.

Note: this requirement as well as documentation of every building, WAS NOT required when many of the historic districts in the city were created years ago, i.e., Le Droit Park, Anacostia, and Capitol Hill historic districts.

It is much much more difficult today as a result and this is complicated by the fact that the federal Historic Preservation Fund, which funds survey efforts, is woefully underfunded, plus the city can (and does) use this money for activities other than survey, which makes it difficult to undertake survey efforts because of the cost and time involved in conducting the research. Figure on a minimum of ten hours/building [Note: this was before the creation of a permits information database], plus photography, and the research and writing of a neighborhood history, and you get some idea of how daunting a process this can be.

There are organizations in other parts of the country that to my mind do a much better job in explaining the value of historic preservation than we do in DC.

First, the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh (www.cdcp.org) in their "Homeowner Resources Section" has some incredible slide shows that demonstrate how people can do "good jobs" or "bad jobs" in renovating, and the kind of impact this has on their neighbors, as well as the value of their home. They publish five 2-page documents on "Your Home," "Your Roof," "Your Windows," "Your Walls," and "Your Porch" because "Anything you do to the outside of your home affects not only the value and character of your own house, but also the entire neighborhood."

Certainly, those of you who live in neighborhoods like mine, where people tear off porches, install inappropriate windows, take out tin ceilings, take the wooden clapboards off houses and replace the facade with brick, build cinder block additions, or truck in prefabricated execrable buildings and plop them in as infill across the street from 1880s-1890s Victorian brick buildings understand this full well. In this vein, CDCP needs to add a "Your Door" piece--aren't we all sick of seeing these Home Depot doors with their fake stained glass populating more and more houses in undesignated but eligible neighborhoods?

Second, the Landmark Society of Western New York publishes a great book called Rehab Rochester which discusses historic house architecture as well as how to take care of your historic house in architecturally appropriate ways. If you think of the historic building stock we have in the city as the architectural legacy that is left to us in stewardship for the future, a book like this is important in explaining to people why our historic neighborhoods matter. The book is available to purchase as well.

This book is comparable to books published by other preservation organizations and even to _LeDroit Park Conserved_ and Anacostia Conserved_ which were published in 1979 by DHCD and are lamentably out of print, but they are available at Washingtoniana and probably the City Museum research library.

Third, the State of Ohio Historic Preservation Office has a great, great, great program called "The Building Doctor" which is a two-part program. The first part explains the relevant history of architecture, preservation, the Secretary of Interior's Standards for renovation, etc., and the second part is "field-based" where preservation staff go out and assess particular houses and/or commercial structures. Recognize that this program goes all across the state, so it's a bit different than we'd need for our 67 square mile city. The reason that I like this program so much is like the others referenced above, it explains why historic preservation matters, using both architectural history and community history to explain these issues. (The _Old Building Owners Manual_ and _Caring for Your Old House_ are companion books to this program which are available for purchase.)

Last week, I attended the National Trust for Historic Preservation annual meeting, and two of the workshops I attended really stressed the necessity of sussing out the themes and stories of your house museum/historic site/heritage area/historic district.

I love the buildings, but it's the stories that resonate with people. And I think we need to do a better job as preservationists in explaining these stories as well as combining the stories, history, and the economic and preservation of neighborhood character and architectural distinctiveness into successful arguments in favor of historic preservation throughout the city.

In fairness to us preservation advocates, who toil away often with little support and in face of organized opposition (note that in areas facing serious development pressures, opposition is fomented and/or organized by development interests, the pro-development land use bar, community development corporations, and other folk), it is difficult to argue in favor of saving "old buildings" in a society that reveres the new, and the prevalent attitude that "new" means "improved" and that suburbanization of the center city is the best course of action for revitalization. James Kunstler explains all this far better than I ever could, in _Home from Nowhere_ and _Geography of Nowhere_.

Similarly, I find it incredible that after 43 years, the precepts laid out by Jane Jacobs in _Death and Life of Great American Cities_ are still studiously ignored and/or explained away by professionals and government officials that should know better. Frankly, in these campaigns to get "everyone" in a city to read the same book, I think we should read _Death and Life_ or Gratz's _Cities: Back from the Edge_ just so that all caring citizens of this great city could begin to operate from the same place in consideration of fundamental development issues that face all of us as concerned residents of the City of Washington, the baseball stadium being a
case in point.

A good read for today, again by Donovan Rypkema, is "Planning the Future, Using the Past: The Role of Historic Preservation in Building Tomorrow's Washington, DC." (Another great paper
by Rypkema is "Affordable Housing and Historic Preservation: The Missed Connection.)

In our city, it all starts with L'Enfant.