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All across America,
from sleepy village to mighty metropolis, people are waking up
to the glories of our architectural past. Result: where once
the wrecker ruled, today the renovator reigns
BY JAMES NATHAN MILLER
From Reader's Digest
A CITY WITHOUT OLD BUILDINGS, it has been said, is like a man
without a memory. Yet in the 1950's America's cities began a
massive campaign to get rid of their old buildings. Urban renewal
became the catchword used by city governments trying to reverse
the "flight to the suburbs." Decaying neighborhoods
were leveled and then replaced with brand-new, master-planned
communities.
The idea sounded fine, but ignored two basic facts. First, many
of the neighborhoods torn down weren't decaying at all, they
were just run-down. Second, they often contained the cities'
finest buildings.
St. Louis was typical. During the 19th century its merchants
had commissioned scores of splendid structures. They were built
to last, and in the 1950s many of them were still standing. Though
down at the heels, they were at least as structurally sound as
the glass-and-aluminum towers that would replace them. Moreover,
the old structures had high ceilings, thick sound proofing, spacious
halls, beautiful marble, wood and metal ornamentation delights
that the new buildings didn't pretend to provide.
Since rehabilitating an old building usually costs considerably
less than demolishing it and building a new one of the same quality,
everything seemed to favor saving the best of the old. Everything,
that is, but the "experts," whose standard prescription
for fighting urban decay was demolition. Across the country from
New York City's Pennsylvania Station to Detroit's Neo-French
Renaissance city hall to hundreds of Victorian frame houses in
San Francisco, the old buildings continued to fall. The destruction
was backed by local politicians who welcomed federal subsidies
aimed at stopping the hemorrhage of their constituents. Downtown
real-estate owners saw a bonanza in the "upgrading"
of their properties. So did the contractors, unions and manufacturers
who did the tearing down and building back.
When preservationists took these groups to court, they found
the deck stacked against them: tax laws rewarded an owner for
demolishing his building and penalized him for rehabilitating
it.
As the destruction spread, so did the rebellion against it. In
the beginning the protesters had been mainly historians and architecture
buffs. But starting in the late 1960s they were joined by young,
middle class families who bought and lovingly reconditioned beat-up,
turn-of-the-century houses in "bad" neighborhoods.
(In New York this was called "brownstoning"; in Baltimore,
"homesteading"; in San Francisco, "red-brick chic.")
More and more people began asking two key questions: Why are
we destroying these great old buildings? And what's so hot about
the peas-in-a pod towers we've been putting up n their place?
By the early 1970s even architects and city planners had stopped
preaching demolition. The new catchwords became preserve, conserve,
recycle, rehabilitate.
Baltimore was typical of the awakening. In the 1950s and early
1960s the city had condemned hundreds of its brick row houses
to make room for highways and urban-renewal projects. Then, in
the late '60s, "we suddenly realized we were tearing up
our heritage," says Kathleen Deasy of the city's Department
of Housing and Community Development. In 1974 Baltimore began
what it called a homesteading program, under which it has been
selling many of its condemned houses for $1 apiece to anyone
with the money to fix them up.
The dramatic story of how Boston's 350-year-old waterfront was
saved from the wreckers is today cited in architectural textbooks.
In the 1950s the City had a standard demolition plan for eliminating
its blighted areas, which included old warehouses and produce
markets along its harborside. But the plan ran into delays, and
the waterfront effort lagged while redevelopers concentrated
on other areas.
In the '70s, when the city finally got around to the waterfront,
it had radically changed the original plan. Instead of demolishing
the wharves and warehouses, it would preserve them and fit new
apartments and office buildings inside their old skins. Result:
Boston today has one of the happiest, most people-oriented waterfronts
in America. The renovated Marketplace attracts over a million
people a month more than Disneyland and takes in some $80 million
annually.
With figures like those, it's not surprising that rehabbing old
buildings for fun and profit has become one of the country's
great growth industries. According to Building Design &
Construction magazine, in 1970 an estimated 13.5 percent
of non-residential construction consisted of renovation; in 1983
the figure is expected to be 45 per cent for a total of more
than $71 billion worth of construction. Examples of adaptive
reuse are everywhere from San Francisco's pioneering Ghirardelli
Square, where an old chocolate factory has become an internationally
famous shopping center, to SoHo in New York city, where an entire
neighborhood has been transformed into a vast and splendid beehive
of renovated buildings honeycombed with loft apartments, restaurants,
art galleries and established industries.
In 1966 Congress got on the preservation bandwagon by passing
the National Historic Preservation Act, the first of a series
of laws that would eventually reverse the balance of power between
wreckers and rescuers. To keep track of buildings worth saving,
the Interior Department was authorized to draw up a National Register
of Historic Places.
Keeping a list doesn't sound like much, but it turned out to
be perhaps the most far-reaching preservation measure of all.
Suddenly, historic buildings were given something that they'd
never had before: official recognition. Consider, for instance,
what getting listed in the Register meant to approximately 600
gingerbread cottages and hotels of the old summer colony of Cape
May, N.J.
A century ago Cape May was one of the country's classiest seaside
resorts. But by the early 19605 it was going rapidly to seed,
and a bitter fight broke out between preservationists and demolitionists
as to how to reverse the trend. In 1969 the Register cited the
"variety and exuberance" of Cape May's jigsaw architectural
designs and designated the entire city a "historic district...a
showcase of late Victorian architecture."
Almost overnight, Cape May's citizens started repairing, scraping,
painting. Out-of-towners began buying up old private houses;
big hotels came back to life.
Today Cape May is a living museum of its own architectural past.
Travel publications regularly run features on it, drawing tens
of thousands of visitors each year. Houses that sold for $20,000
in 1970 now bring $150,000.
Creating the Register was just the first thing Congress did to
make amends to the old buildings. In 1976 it ruled that henceforth
any owner of a commercial or income producing building listed
in the Register would be penalized by the IRS if he demolished
it and would get special tax benefits for rehabilitating it.
Observe what this meant to the old Guaranty-Prudential Building
in Buffalo, N.Y., an 1896 skyscraper that was one of Louis Sullivan's
finest creations.
In 1974 the building was fire damaged, and three years later
the mortgage holder applied for a wrecking permit. Ten years
ago that probably would have been the end of the story. Not today.
Because the building was listed in the Register, it offered big-buck
tax breaks to a rehabilitation-minded buyer.
Under the careful eye of the state preservation office, the Guaranty
is now being meticulously restored for $12.4 million. The entrepreneurs
who put up the money will get $4 million of their investment
back in tax deferments. "Without the tax break," says
John Ferchill, the Cleveland businessman who put the syndicate
together, "we could never have swung the deal."
Today 28,000 places are listed in the Register. Since many are
historic districts with hundreds of houses, that probably adds
up to more than a quarter of a million buildings. Only 1,580
of them are listed because they're considered significant to
the nation as a whole; the rest made the Register because they
evoke a memory that's important to some village or city or river
valley, and to the people who live there today.
And that, after all, is the point of this whole architectural
rebellion: our old buildings are the chroniclers of more than
History with a capital "H." They preserve the memory
of our historical roots, with a lower-case "r."
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