Preservation has evolved from a rarified special interest to an institution — an ethos — entrenched in our culture. But has it become too conservative, even elitist?
New York’s historic preservation community has been in celebratory mode this year, marking a half-century since the passage of the city’s Landmarks Law. Observances will go national next year, with the fiftieth anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act. The Museum of the City of New York is honoring the occasion with a splendid exhibition, “Saving Place: 50 Years of New York City Landmarks,” curated by Donald Albrecht and Andrew Scott Dolkart, which is accompanied by a handsome catalogue and a series of smart public programs.
Earlier this year I attended a panel discussion at the museum on “The Politics of Preservation.” There panelist Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, cut through the generally congratulatory mood by declaring that historic preservation in New York is “under siege,” facing its gravest threats since 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the city’s landmarks ordinance in the famous Grand Central Terminal case. To which my response was: Really? Can this be true? Or is this just the latest posture of a movement that seems always to be in need of a crisis?
I would like to argue that a more potent threat to the ongoing political viability of historic preservation is the perception that the preservation industry has become a conservative, indeed revanchist force; that it is elitist and sometimes even racist in its abetment of gentrification. How did this happen? Historic preservation in New York, according to the favored creation myth, was born in the postwar era as a progressive grassroots movement — Jane Jacobsian community activists and cultural advocates battling City Hall and greedy developers to prevent the desecration of their neighborhoods. Now the movement is too often viewed, justifiably, as being simply anti-development. The current dispute over contextual zoning brings this issue to the fore. Bill de Blasio — probably the most progressive mayor since Fiorello LaGuardia — has made the production of affordable housing the number-one priority of his administration. To this end, he proposes tweaking zoning regulations to allow developers to increase the size of new residential projects, with special bonuses for low-income or senior housing. In practice, this would allow apartment buildings in contextual zoning districts — which often overlap with or surround historic districts — to exceed current height limits by some calculated degree. The response to this proposal on the part of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Historic Districts Council, and other preservation groups has been vehement opposition — a position that makes it all too easy for both housing advocates and the Real Estate Board of New York to portray the preservation community as the enemy of affordable housing and, by extension, the common people.
What has brought us to this unhappy impasse? On one level it is the result of supply and demand. In 1964 James Marston Fitch founded the country’s first academic historic preservation program, at Columbia, which began granting graduate degrees in 1973. Cornell and the University of Vermont started their programs in 1975; Boston University and Eastern Michigan followed in 1976 and 1979. More programs rolled out in the ’80s and proliferated in the ’90s, and over fifty-five institutions now grant historic preservation degrees. (The pace has slowed in the 21st century, as sustainability has taken over as the vogue within architecture and planning schools.) Thus hundreds of newly-minted preservationists — a term that did not exist as a professional title when I was in school — enter the job market every year and, simply put, they need stuff to preserve. .....