Preservation Futures: History
This article is the second in a four-part series. Follow the link to read Part 1.
At a moment when history has come under increased public scrutiny, what opportunities are there for leveraging and elevating the role of history in historic preservation’s drive to serve a more just future? How does the practice of history illustrate why the natural and built environments matter? This academic year, the Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania is convening the roundtable series Preservation Futures to explore the future of historic preservation in relation to allied fields. This article, the second in a series of four, focuses on the relationship between preservation and history.
The time is ripe to interrogate history’s role in shaping the theory and practice of historic preservation. A useful place to start is by defining the scope of the fields. And yet, as panel member Aaron Wunsch, an architectural historian, cautioned, “preservation is dogged by dichotomies that don’t serve us well,” such as academic history versus public history, buildings versus people, and stasis versus change.
A generation ago, architect and historian Dolores Hayden opened her book The Power of Place with a debate between sociologist Herbert Gans and critic Ada Louise Huxtable to illustrate these divides, then quickly debunked them in chapters demonstrating that social and material worlds are inextricably intertwined. Understanding the “built environment,” rather than “architecture” alone, as the object of preservation work has been one conceptual way to bridge this unhelpful divide. Today, however, preservation can still seem like a field dedicated to showcasing particular versions of the past, while professionals in other fields--like community and economic development--embrace change.
To consider current challenges and opportunities for the discipline of history within a professional field that illuminates the past to steward change, we — Penn faculty Francesca Russello Ammon and Sarah Lynn Lopez — assembled Wunsch, along with architectural and urban design historian Elihu Rubin and environmental historian Jared Farmer, in conversation.
The panelists proposed multiple ways for historians to innovate in order to serve more of the public. Rubin encouraged “anticipatory action.” He and his students at Yale University identified the New Haven Armory as a site for research and activism. A municipally owned building that occupies a half city block, the Armory is not slated for demolition: a trigger that often ignites research. But it is the victim of neglect. In looking to draw attention to city-owned buildings that are falling into disrepair — for which he advocates the establishment of a “mothballing” fund to stave further deterioration — Rubin seeks to ignite public memory. As a tool, he suggested employing inexpensive and ephemeral media like newsprint, as he and his students have done around the neighborhood (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The Armory Newsprint [New Haven, CT] vol. 1, no. 1, Sept. 18, 2022, reprinted May 10, 2023.
Igniting public memory can mean allowing multiple — and even seemingly contradictory — stories to coexist. This layering of histories also engages multiple publics. Rubin and his collaborators succeeded in getting the Armory included as a site on the Connecticut Freedom Trail at least in part by recognizing two events from the 1970s — decades after what preservationists traditionally would have considered the building’s “period of significance” (read: construction): the Black Expo, “a sort of Black Wall Street event about entrepreneurship”; and the May Day when the Armory’s National Guard quelled fifteen thousand people who had flocked to the New Haven Green to protest the Black Panther trials. As Rubin explained, “historians need to be attentive to how stories get generated.” Shining a light on the Black Expo and May Day allowed long-time residents of the area to “recognize that their own experiences were part of history. That they were living history themselves.”
Figure 2. Rittenhouse Street Elevation of Mount Vernon Baptist Church (originally Bethel A.M.E. Church). Photograph by Aaron Wunsch, 2019.
Figure 3. Pastor ChaChira Smith-Robinson (center), her father, Pastor Emeritus Bernard C. Smith (left), and a descendant of the Montier family, donors of the land on which the church was built. Photograph by Aaron Wunsch, 2018.
In Philadelphia, Wunsch also evolved an approach focused on community history. For fifteen years, he and his students have partnered with six African American congregations in the West Philadelphia, Graduate Hospital, and Germantown neighborhoods to help them secure public support for expensive maintenance and repairs. During the Great Migration around World War II, African American congregations began buying churches from the predominantly white ones that had built them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Figures 2-4). Now occupying those buildings longer than the initial owners had, their “claim to them as stewards is in many ways stronger than those original congregations.” Long before preservation coined the term, Wunsch argued, Black congregations were refining the practice of adaptive reuse. Here, a certain modesty is needed, whereby the historian defers to people who, as Wunsch reminded us, “don’t want to be told their own history . . . what they do want is a usable past” that will help them get funding. If maintenance and repair are framed as justice issues, how can history abet the cause?
Figure 4. Rittenhouse Street Elevation of Mount Vernon Baptist Church (originally Bethel A.M.E. Church), by Alberto Calderon using measurements gathered by fellow students in University of Pennsylvania, HSPV 601 (Recording) in spring, 2017.
Drawing upon his research on the modern history of ancient trees, Farmer proposed a yet more unusual approach. Seven years after the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the Endangered Species Act introduced parallel protections for the non-human world. “You identify single species of concern,” Farmer told the panel; “they’re vulnerable, they’re threatened, they’re often charismatic, and you try to save them at all costs. . . . But you might, in a sense, lose its ecosystem in the process.” An alternative model emerging in environmental science is to shift the focus from individual species toward whole ecosystems. “Some [species] will go extinct, but some new ones will evolve. . . . You’ll get species migrating in as the environment changes as long as you are preserving diversity and functionality.” In a similar way, he suggested, preservation has too often saved exemplary buildings while the neighborhoods around them disintegrated. Writing histories of places as “ecosystems” — as multidimensional communities — might not “freeze” a district or neighborhood but, by supporting the social and economic as was all the physical, it can preserve a community.
Such systems thinking might have other meaningful applications in preservation. In Philadelphia, for example, it could help sustain the humble but ubiquitous rowhouse. Seeing the forest for the trees in this instance requires things like facilitating technical and financial support for maintenance, such as weatherization and roof repair, across whole neighborhoods. Owners might still make updates that are out of historic character. But paying attention to entire blocks rather than individual houses helps preserve the city’s signature built fabric — along with a lot of low-cost housing and local and family history. “Every time a developer tears down a rowhouse that is fixable — by itself, that’s not a tragedy,” Farmer noted. “But if you think ahead to fifty years of tear-downs, that is an incredible preservation tragedy and you could lose the social life of the city along with this distinctive kind of architecture.”
In a similar way, a controversial new arena proposed for the 76ers basketball team threatens to replace not only the buildings in its footprint but also the ecosystem of adjacent neighborhoods — most significantly, Chinatown. And Chinatown, Wunsch pointed out, “very much needs to be framed as a preservation struggle — especially for those of us who have lived in cities like Washington, D.C., and watched what happened when things like the MCI Center [today Capital One] moved to Chinatown.” By helping to excavate the long history of struggle on such sites — powerfully etched in collective memory — historians can elevate both the histories of individual places and historical lessons from communities who have tread similar ground before.
The panel concluded by considering a false dichotomy: is the field of preservation about the past or the future? Of course, it is both. History as a practice and process has always played a central role in historic preservation and will continue to do so. Working with, and learning from, a broad set of stakeholders — rather than just assembling the material facts of a building’s origins — supports preservationists’ efforts to protect buildings and neighborhoods. Creative strategies including collective and layered interpretation, maintenance and repair, and ecosystem thinking allow owners, neighbors, and professionals to work together to identify sites of meaning, and to imbue sites with meaning. And by elevating new voices, they promise to expand the number, and types, of people shaping the city of tomorrow.
Citation
Sarah Lynn Lopez and Francesca Russello Ammon, “Preservation Futures: History,” PLATFORM, February 26, 2024.
