70th anniversary of the DC Capitol Hill Restoration Society

In 2000, I first got involved in urban revitalization through the prism of historic preservation, when a preservationist reached out to me about the H Street neighborhood north of the Capitol Hill Historic District (from F Street NE to Florida Avenue NE).

I remain an ardent preservationist today, mostly because the architecture and urban design is so much more humanist and aesthetically pleasing than that of today.  Good books on the subject include Changing Places (out of print) and Cities: Back from the Edge.

It was also a great strategy for neighborhood stabilization during the many decades that center city living was disfavored and populations shrunk.  

Preservation was cheap for cities because the property owners bore the bulk of the cost of compliance--although some argue that put undue hardship on lower income households.  For the most part, cities merely paid for the regulatory function, and brick sidewalks and historically appropriate streetlighting.

It is difficult to separate out the effects of preservation and stabilization versus "gentrification."  I'd argue that gentrification results from architectural attractiveness (mostly, there are plenty examples of tear downs and McMansionization of designate-able properties) and that preservation shouldn't be criticized for its success.  "Inward investment" by preservationists shouldn't be criticized as gentrification but as reinvesting in a city where capital for housing was often unavailable.

Another criticism is that it has focused on building preservation over intangible heritage ("New York City’s Historic Preservation Movement Is Having a Midlife Crisis," Bloomberg). That by selecting certain areas to preserve, it says others aren't worth preserving, part of the argument of the book History of Urban Places.

In any case, with the rise of property rights sentiments, now at least pre-covid, the trend of city revival and the need for "more housing" amidst constrained land resources, preservation has come into attack by prominent economists and the like ("Idiocracy concerning historic preservation from both Yglesias and Glaeser," 2011), and Binyamin Applebaum in the New York Times ("Historic Preservation Is Hurting Cities," letters, "Preserving Historic Buildings," and "I Want a City, Not a Museum," letters, "Should Historic Buildings Give Way to New Housing?").

Rowhouse neighborhoods have a lot of density as this aerial photo of Capitol Hill by Al Drago shows.

I hope to write more about this in May, which is National Historic Preservation Month.  (There are some books I need to read first...)

I do argue that preservation hasn't come up with a great narrative for how to deal with growing cities.  I hope it would include design review and a focus on the "architecture of the ensemble" (Stephen Semes).  Although Patrice Frey, formerly president of Main Street America, the organization focused on preservation of town and neighborhood business districts, provides a pretty good list ("Why Historic Preservation Needs a New Approach," Bloomberg from 2019).

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CHRS celebrated their anniversary last night, and these are the themes (an approach from historic preservation at the scale of the cultural landscape) they identified as key to each decade.  I hope they provide more detail later.

1. Birth Pangs and Growth  
2. Creation of the Historic District 
3. Safeguarding a Police Station
4. Eastern Market;
5. Moving a Freeway
6. Public Education
7. Continued Outreach, and more.

Even though Capitol Hill is economically more successful than the neighborhoods it touches I thought they had a reasonable forward focus on those areas as "of interest" to preservation, CHRS, and the community.  

After all, the building stock is the same.