In a message dated 98-01-19 02:42:10 EST, [log in to unmask]
writes:

> 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.
>  Many successful projects (I'm thinking especially of the  recycling of
>  textile mill structures in the North East, but could cite other examples)
>  could certainly be justified on historical, industrial archeological,
>  environmental or other grounds, but I think it would be damn difficult to
>  justify the investment in time and cash in city after city on these
>  buildings if one were to make one's case on aesthetic grounds. Which is not
>  to say that one doesn't find the recycled structures charming, even
>  attractive, often as the result of flashy details added by contemporary
>  architects, but the vast majority of them really have no more compelling
>  aesthetic presence than  malls or housing projects.

I do not consider Bruce's comments as heresy. In another thread I mentioned my
disdain for Robert Moses era constructions around NYC. Michael Lynch, on PL,
aptly expressed the aesthetic of the Jones Beach architecture. Otherwise I
would have to say that I find very little in the mix of enough aesthetic value
to forego the needs of the local communites or commerce and infrastructure
development. Robert Moses agenda was not to preserve the historic, but one of
prorgressive development. It seems ideologically contradictory to preserve a
memorial to progressive development by inhibiting progressive development. In
Greenpoint, Brooklyn there is a Moses swimming pool wit shower house that has
been vacant for at east fifteen, possible 20 years. It is a ruin for all
intents and purposes. A place where drugs are sold and gangs split up the loot
they steal from the cars and houses. Fenced in, unlighted, dark, foreboding,
an ugly dirty-red brick fortress overlooking a large and well attended public
park. Great pickings for the socially disinclined. The community was Italian,
with an influx of Polish immigrants. There was at one time an architectural
design to demolish the pool and building and to build a modern pool facility
based on a plan to accomodate teh needs of an increasingly dense and
ethnically diverse urban environment. A place that has needs Robert Moses
could never have predicted. The Italian community was upset that the new pool
would attract the undesirable Hispanics from several blocks south into their
neighborhood. In short, what should have been a good thing was squashed.
Eventually yonger white artists began moving into the area, mifgrating from
Manhattan and the Lower East Side. The Italians have been slowly eroding their
presence, and the Polish have been moving from the northern part of Greenpoint
south. The artists are in the middle and to the west, closer to the river.
Much of these abandoned buildings are owned by developers - this is too far
south to be the Gold Coast of Long Island City, but keep waiting and it will
be the Platinum Coast eventually. I predict these factory buildings, as
interesting as they may be aesthetically, are certain to be torn down when it
is convenient to build larger buildings blocking the community from the river
and that the developers will be well positioned to realize their capital
investmentwith little resistance. In the mean time, the local kids have no
place to go swimming. You certainly cannot let your kids swim in the East
River these days. Well, the artists heard that there was a plan to demolish
the Moses pool and decided it was a local treasure of historic importance,
yeah right, few of them having any idea of the community they were landing
themselves in, and made a rush to PRESERVE the Moses pool, to the delight of
the Italians who are trying to inflate the value of their properties (we were
not allowed to invite a Jamaican friend to rent the aparment above ours
because they did not want those type, meaning black, in their house) as they
sell out to the hite artists who have no clue they are paying several times
the market value of ten years ago. There is no place for the artist's kids to
go swimming, but that hardly matters because they all tend to drive north on
the weekends (they are affluent enough, or subsidized by their parents, that
they do not have to go to Jones Beach, but again they are not quit ready for
the Hamptons - Heaven forbid if they find me in the unHamptons). Though I like
the Greenpoint area, and I like Italians and Hispanics and Jamaicans and Poles
and Blacks and artists... I think the motivations to preserve the Moses pool
are basically immoral. If this is what it means to encourage historic
preservation then it is something I want nothing to do with. I am fortunate in
the belief that there are other, nobler motivations... such as with Poland.
The most interesting question, for me, in Poland was a curiosity that we had
anything in America worth preserving at all. That was when I fumbled and
started talking about our efforts in preserving piles of pre-Columbian dirt.

>Jones Beach was determined eligible for the
National Register on May 1, 1997.  Almost everything is still there from the
Robert Moses days, including the fantastic Moorish/Art Deco West Bathhouse
(completed 1931), East Bathhouse (somehwat altered), the water tower (1929
and the centerpied of the Park), boardwalk (with ocean-liner deck design
motifs like funnel-shaped garbage cans), and the concrete parking fields for
30,000.<

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