>
> On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Ken Follett wrote:
>
> > Bruce Marcus wrote:
> >
> > > at the risk of committing a bit of heresy.
> > >
> > > I think that a good deal of the preservationist ethic of the last
several
> > > decades has to considered as having been divorced from aesthetic
criteria.
>
> Of course, I also see vehement criticism in e.g., the New York Times
about
> "what happened to the HISTORY in historic preservation?" complaining that
> preservationists were showing too much concern with vernacular buildings
> and neighborhoods unconnected with any textbook narrative of American
> history or Great Architecture.

Since no one wants to allow me to martyr myself as a heretic I'll have to
reverse myself.

Larry got me to thinking about my deepest feelings as a preservationist.
Certainly I believe in protecting buildings of historic importance, and
will cry out against the destruction of architecturally significant
structures of all styles. But what most excites me to be personally
involved in is just what the Times decried, the safekeeping of vernacular
buildings, especially those of the earliest period. Its probably why I
settled in northern NE, not So. Beach or SF or Racine. As a woodworker
these anonymous buildings speak to me in ways that no other buildings can.
I can wander through them and read not only the technology of their
construction but the cultural and economic matrix through which they
evolved. I can look at their framing and find evidence of the regional and
even national influences on their builders. I can look at trim details and
know of the social class and pretensions of their original owners. They are
statements about history and culture that come alive to me in a way that
connects me to their inhabitants quotidian existence as no palace of
peerage or industry or politics ever could.

> I noticed this also when I was on the East Lansing Historic District
Study
> Committee.  Invariably I was about the only one who was concerned with
>the  historic significance of a building in the history of the community
or the
> country; whether or not a designation was agreed to by the other
>committee  members depended almost exclusively on how good it looked.  >A
little peeling paint or a later porch addition was fatal.

That's not quite what I was getting at. Rather, I can point to numerous
efforts throughout NE where pretty dismal structures were preserved as sort
of acts of municipal vanity without regard to cost, usefulness in terms of
community need, or attractiveness. Many of these projects were so ambitious
that they involved creating usable space far beyond what could be justified
in terms of the community.  Very often in cities with marginal economies,
as the citizens of Lewiston Maine are trying to do, huge amounts of
development money are poured into resuscitating structures in some ill
thought-out hope that that's all that is needed to turn the city around,
when the same funds could be much better spent elsewhere.

> So, down at the grass roots, I'd say the aesthetic considerations still
> hold a lot of sway in preservation.

That's not aesthetics- that's middle-class myopia.


> But our view of what is aesthetically appealing does change over time.
> What Charles Dickens might have seen as a huge ugly building might look
> tiny and quaint and charming to us today.  I like 19th century factory
> buildings from what seems to me to be an aesthetic point of view, even as
> I recognize that many of them were miserable places for those who worked
> in them 100 years ago.

I like many of them also, on many grounds, but is it worthwhile or
necessary to save every one of them?
>
> I'm not an admirer of Robert Moses either, but I see no contradiction
> whatsoever in preserving something in contradiction to the ideology that
> inspired its creators.

I agree with Larry here!!! I am, after all a Jew who was taught to love
poetry deeply by reading Pound and Eliot.

> (1) I'm uneasy about the idea that the ideas of newcomers to a community
> should be ridiculed and devalued just because they're newcomers.  After
> all the newcomers and the young people are the future of the area.

It is possible to mediate between the needs and fears of the two factions.
Its hard, but the community benefits in the end. From my experience in my
little community, newcomers tend to be just as blind to the virtues of the
old-timers as is the opposite. If you can get them to sit down and figure
out what it is that they both want from community its usually possible to
get them to move toward each other enough to compromise. Its rare that the
dynamic of change or stasis is really the issue, since basically many of
the reasons the newcomers chose to come are the same reasons that the old
residents chose to stay. Mostly its the fear of the "other".

Bruce (who is about to put his money where his mouth is, since, unless
someone dares to take out papers against me, I'll be Second Selectman of
Alna sometime in March).