Changing the Physical and Social Environment: Encouraging Historic Preservation
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WHAT DO WE MEAN BY HISTORIC PRESERVATION?
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WHY ENCOURAGE HISTORIC PRESERVATION?
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WHEN SHOULD YOU ENCOURAGE HISTORIC PRESERVATION?
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WHO SHOULD ENCOURAGE HISTORIC PRESERVATION?
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HOW DO YOU ENCOURAGE HISTORIC PRESERVATION?
The Urban Land Institute’s case study of the 21c Museum Hotel in Cincinnati provides an inspiring example of a city’s historic preservation effort succeeding in economically, culturally, and socially revitalizing a previously dangerous and undeveloped neighborhood. The historic downtown building was decrepit and uninhabitable prior to renovation, but the efforts of the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation have transformed the site into a cultural hub frequented by tourists and locals.
Historic community buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes embody the intentions, assumptions, and lives of those who built or lived or worked in them. They have stories to tell about what the community was and how it became what it is, and that help us understand who we are. Preserving those stories can be an important part of building a healthy community. In this section, we’ll look at historic preservation – maintaining and celebrating community history by maintaining the buildings and other elements of the community that are linked to it.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY HISTORIC PRESERVATION?
In simple terms, historic preservation means safeguarding the existence and appearance of historic elements of the community.
TYPES OF HISTORIC ELEMENTS
Structures
Houses, commercial and industrial buildings, barns, bridges, monuments – any man-made structure that has some historical value or significance.
Historical value resides in the historical element itself. It may be valuable as an example of a style of architecture or an industrial process that’s no longer used, or simply for its age. Many houses that were unremarkable when they were built, for instance, have gained historical value because they’ve lasted, and are among the few left from their time. A log house in Randolph County, AR, built in the 1820’s, is important historically because it’s believed to be the oldest house in the state – one of the few that has survived intact from the early days of white settlement.
Historical significance usually has to do with a link between the element and a particular historical event or series of events. Many historically significant buildings, like the Obecni Dum, are architecturally important as well, but they don’t have to be. The 18th Century stone farmhouse at Valley Forge, PA that was George Washington’s headquarters through part of the American Revolutionary War is no different from hundreds of other surviving houses of the period in that area, but is important specifically because it was Washington’s headquarters.
Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods may be historically important because of their architecture, or because they still present a picture of a previous era. Some Los Angeles neighborhoods (parts of downtown, Country Club Park) retain the Art Deco style of the 1920s and '30s. The center of the town of Ainsa in the province of Aragon in northern Spain is an almost perfectly preserved medieval village, with buildings dating from the 11th Century that still function as residences and shops.
In the United States, Acoma Pueblo (also known as sky city) in New Mexico is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America. This mesa-top village and surrounding land-base has more than 250 dwellings and nearly 5,000 tribal members. None of the pueblo dwellings have modern conveniences like electricity or running water; most inhabitants no longer live on the pueblo full-time but maintain their ancestral home and return for special cultural occasions to celebrate their Native American heritage.
Landscapes
A landscape itself may be either historically valuable or historically significant. The modern Tuscan landscape of hilltop villages surrounded by vines and olive groves is little different from the landscapes seen in Renaissance paintings, and is valuable as a window into the past. The battlefield at Gettysburg, PA is historically significant because it was the scene of the turning point of the American Civil War.
Building or landscape features
Neon or tavern signs, 18th or 19th Century wall plaques from insurance companies, pre-World War II gas pumps, stone walls snaking through forests that were once farm fields, 1,000-year-old trees, murals – all of these and many other features may be historically important. A Boston sign that may be the world’s largest steaming teapot (with seemingly real steam) is so distinctive that when its downtown block was rebuilt, the teapot was mounted on the new building that occupied its old spot, where it remains today, even though the tearoom that it advertised has been replaced by a Starbuck’s coffee shop.
Culture
Although historic preservation most commonly refers to the preservation of physical places, it can also apply to aspects of cultural heritage. In the state of Missouri, for instance, the state Humanities Council has recognized the vast impact of German settlers throughout the state, and has named a specific area along the Missouri River the German Heritage Corridor. The corridor was designated to help increase tourism to the communities and small towns in this region, but a larger part of this effort focuses on education, genealogy, and the impact of the mass emigration in the 1800s.
ELEMENTS OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION
The term “historic preservation” actually includes four different possible activities, according to the U.S. National Park Service (NPS), which oversees the Dept. of the Interior’s historic preservation program.
Preservation
Preservation is preserving a place as it is in the present. It assumes that all historic features, materials, etc. will be kept where it’s humanly possible to restore or repair them, and will be maintained as they are in the future. Preservation values not only the origin of a building, but its occupants over time and the uses to which it was put, and assumes that all evidence of them will be preserved, as well as the original character of the structure.
Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation fixes up a deteriorated historic property often for a use other than its original one (some former textile mills in the Northeast have been turned into condominiums, for example). Like preservation, it puts a premium on retaining and repairing historic features, but allows more leeway for repair and replacement of elements that have been severely damaged by time.
According to the NPS, “Both preservation and rehabilitation standards focus on the historic materials and features, finishes, spaces, and spatial relationships that give a property its historic character.”
Restoration
Restoration means putting a building or landscape back the way it was originally, or at a historically significant time in its past. That means eliminating any repairs or alterations that came after that period, including additions to the building and other major features, and re-creating, with historic materials and techniques, missing features that are known or obvious.
Reconstruction
Reconstruction is the creation of a historically accurate copy of either a specific historic property that no longer exists or an example of one from a chosen historical period. The reconstruction may use traditional techniques and materials, but the materials will be new, and therefore different from the actual materials that would be found in an original structure. (Two hundred-year-old pine has often grown so hard that it’s difficult to drive a nail into it, for instance, while new pine is very soft.)
Reconstruction is usually employed as part of a historic exhibit of some kind, although an occasional private homeowner may build a copy of an older house, simply because of preference. A house in New Salem, Massachusetts is an exact copy of a 17th Century house in Old Lyme, Connecticut. The carpenter-restorer who built and lives in it used its construction to refine his understanding and mastery of the 17th-Century building and masonry techniques that went into the original.
Any of these four activities could conceivably be applied to any of the elements of historic places that are candidates for preservation.
There is often real tension between those who favor preservation and those who see restoration as the more appropriate way of dealing with historic places. In one small New England town, there was a three-year struggle over an 1819 house on the common. Its neighbors largely wanted it preserved as it was, with an early 20th Century addition and a balustrade (railing) around the roof. The historic trust that had purchased the house wanted it restored to its 1819 appearance, and especially wanted to get rid of the inauthentic and disintegrating picket fence that ran along two sides of it.
Most residents saw the fence, covered in the summer with a profusion of rambler roses, as a feature that defined the character of the town. When the trust removed the balustrade, the addition, and the fence, in defiance of the town’s Historic District Commission, neighbors on the common declared war. Ultimately, the house was resold to a private owner who replaced the balustrade and the addition, and allowed the town to rebuild the fence (with money from local fundraising).
Similar controversies are not unusual, and can be difficult to resolve, since there are often good arguments on both sides.
Some factors to be considered might be:
- The uniqueness of the structure or landscape (either as a historical place or in its current condition or position)
- Its community significance
- Its possible future
- Its current use
- Its state of repair
- The cost of preservation vs. that of restoration
- The wishes of the community
- Restrictions imposed by tax incentives or other funding
- The availability of the expertise to carry out careful preservation or restoration
More.
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