On Sat, 8 May 1999, Mark Rabinowitz wrote:

> One only has to travel through the abandoned Bush terminal warehouses a
> couple of miles away along the Buttermilk Channel to see the results of the
> alternative.  The blocks and blocks of empty buildings, still struggling to
> find new uses, have remained empty and unused due to the same nostalgia.
> The only viable conversions so far allowed have been from warehouses into
> prisons which, I imagine, were intended to house the population that once
> worked in them.
> The lack of viable storage, transportation, deep ports, rail lines and
> inexpensive property together with high labor rates have ended the
> manufacturing and shipping in Brooklyn while the brownstone neighborhoods
> have all been enjoying renaissances.  Its seems eminently logical that
> these spaces be converted to uses that are in demand and that this
> development allow for new and, hopefully, innovative architecture,
> something we sorely lack.  It seems to me that nostalgia is more of an
> enemy to preservation than a friend.

I agree with most of this (plus Christopher Gray's commentary) except the
last line.  You can't really generalize very far from NYC's weird zoning
code.  Most cities would be *eager* to see disused industrial zones reused
as upscale residential.  Only in New York is this seen as a problem by the
powers-that-be.

Nostalgia is hardly preservation's enemy.  Over the past century or so,
nostalgic property owners refrained from knocking down their buildings
with each passing fad, so that they exist for us today.  Nostalgic voters
supported the enactment of historic district ordinances by nostalgic city
councilmen.  Nostalgic lawmakers enacted and strengthened the National
Historic Preservation Act.  If you think that pure economics, or coolly
rational academic/intellectual preservation drove those things to success,
you don't get out much.

We can scorn nostaglia as something downscale and anti-intellectual (at
least, as seen by U.S. elites), but we should understand that it is a
large part of our political base.

Speaking as a political preservationist, I prefer not to saw off the
branch on which I sit.

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com