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by Gretchen Buggeln, Valparaiso University, VAF President
The Chicago VAF conference this past June began with an excellent and provocative lecture by Professor Davarian Baldwin that centered on the fate of Chicago’s Checkerboard Lounge blues club. In the Q&A following the talk, Louis Nelson, architectural historian at the University of Virginia, raised important questions about the way we think about historic preservation in the United States, the language of the Historic Preservation Act of 1966, and whether VAF members could and should push for a new definition of historic preservation. Nelson's remarks sparked a lively conversation that rippled through the conference.
by Davarian Baldwin, Trinity College
editor's note: Dr. Baldwin’s June 3, 2015 talk is excerpted below. Look for an expanded version to appear in a forthcoming volume of the VAF’s journal Buildings and Landscapes!
In 2003, the University of Chicago (U of C) took notice of its black neighbors to the near north and their struggles to convert the historic Checkerboard Lounge blues club into the centerpiece of Bronzeville’s urban heritage tourism development plan. In a startling turn of events, the U of C went on to not just buy but relocate the Checkerboard from its 43rd Street location to a university-funded shopping district in the school’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Outraged, Restoring Bronzeville members charged a “theft of culture.” The university retorted that the purchase of the neglected institution was an act of Black Historic Preservation that would, not coincidentally, also anchor an “entertainment district” to benefit university life near campus.
To the casual observer, the “transfer” of the Checkerboard Lounge from Bronzeville to the U of C confines may seem anecdotal at best and trivial at worst. But this struggle over the Checkerboard lounge in fact speaks to a larger battle of competing urban plans for “neighborhood destinations” within the rise of what I am calling “UniverCities.”
My larger project, UniverCities: How Higher Education is Transforming Urban America highlights the larger emergence of colleges, universities and their affiliated medical centers (“the meds and eds”) as the dominant employers, real estate holders, policing agents and health care providers in all of the country’s major metropolitan areas.
On one hand, colleges and universities look for new sources of revenue in the face of shrinking state expenditures for higher education. On the other hand, cities compete with each other to recruit viable “anchor institutions” that can network an attractive urban experience of concerts, coffee shops, and eateries amidst a fully-wired, entertainment-based dense foot traffic collage of consumers and residents. The interests of municipal and urban higher education leaders have converged in the shared quest to capture the consumer dollars of empty nesters, young professionals, and tourists venturing back into cities after decades of divestment.
This reality gives added nuance to Richard Florida’s celebration of the “creative city” whereby cities are serving the interests of the “meds and eds” in exchange for redesigning urban neighborhoods into the model of the university campus. Tax-exempt institutions of higher education become the perfect facilitators of capital in the new urban economy because they are presumed to serve a public good and therefore their expanding non-educational and profit generating investments are rarely subject to the same kinds of public scrutiny and economic oversight as other industries. Colleges and universities are seen as “saving the city.”
Moreover, university-based urban planning is often first tried out on the struggling neighborhoods of color that surround these campuses, largely because a history of racial inequality has rendered the real estate as low in value while the residents struggle to establish political influence.
But the case of Bronzeville, the University of Chicago, and the Checkerboard Lounge also points to competing uses of “historic preservation” as part of various efforts to draw capital into re-designed “neighborhood destinations” as part of the new creative economy. The convergence between higher education, community preservation, and economic development is happening in major cities across the country; including New York, Los Angeles, and Boston alongside Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Providence among others. The best collaborations build new cultural institutions and bolster economic development, from museums and public security to small business incubators and technological innovation. At the same time, such endeavors tend to replace affordable rate with market rate housing, create property tax deserts, build an army of low-wage “creative class” workers (janitors, cooks, groundskeeper), and use public funds for private development with little public oversight.
For the last 100 years, Chicago’s South Side has been at the center of an urban planning model now fully emerging right before our eyes. The U of C has gone as far to use the language of “historic preservation” to justify their practices of land acquisition, campus expansion, and community control. And as the interests of municipal leaders, higher education administrators, and local residents converge, there must be a critical assessment and plan of action that directly engages these UniverCities, their assets and consequences.
I am preparing more detailed thoughts on the larger implications for historic preservation within this creative economy through an essay, “‘It’s not the location; it's the institution’: The Politics of Historic Preservation in the New Creative Economy,” for the VAF journal Buildings and Landscapes. To be sure the consequences of this story are far from simply academic. These observations can lead a new level of coordination between academics, planners, architects, preservationists, and policymakers about current implications of this UniverCities landscape for various community stakeholders.
Below are three thoughtful and thought provoking-responses to Professor Baldwin's keynote address from Louis Nelson, Jennifer Baughn, and Jennifer Cousineau. Please join in the conversation and leave your comments below.
by Louis Nelson, University of Virginia
2016 is the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act. For many of us in the world of historic preservation, this is a fantastic time to reflect on the great work this legislation has enabled and our part in it as practitioners and academics. But it also presents the opportunity for us to open a dialogue about how we might want to shape historic preservation practice in the coming 50 years. I have one point for consideration that I think demands some thoughtful debate. I am not very well versed in front line preservation practice, but it does seem to me that the parameters set out in the Historic Preservation Act still depend so heavily on architectural/material integrity that it does much to undermine our recognition of marginal communities, those who by choice or by condition do not leave any easily legible mark in the materiality of our built environment. The most poignant examples that come to mind are the spaces of the enslaved on Southern plantations and, after the Civil War, the innumerable free black communities whose landscapes have retained their small building footprints but whose actual houses have been improved through the years. We demand the preservation of the Great House, but the enslaved village is allowed to fall into ruin. We demand the preservation of late nineteenth-century main street facades, but the back alleys, the shadow landscapes, are ignored. If anyone cares about the preservation of these kinds of spaces, it is the membership of the VAF. So to that membership I ask a question: What changes in legislation will attend to these concerns? How can we insist that our Federal Government recognize the dignity of all Americans, not just the privileged?
by Jennifer V. O. Baughn, Chief Architectural Historian, Mississippi Department of Archives and History
The narrative I heard in Davarian Baldwin's thoughtful keynote address was a familiar one to preservationists everywhere: a modest yet significant building and a scrappy local preservation group go up against an institution with money, power, and influence. Modest and scrappy lose. The local group used traditional preservation language and arguments to save their building, while the University of Chicago employed skewed marketing-speak to argue that they were saving an "institution" while knocking down that institution's building. That this kind of spin won the day proves nothing except that money and power and influence will usually win the day.
In my nineteen years at the Mississippi SHPO, I have worked to preserve white-columned mansions, African American schools, country churches, synagogues, civil rights sites, and houses that floated off their foundations in Katrina. In all these cases, and more, the traditional preservation language and standards of the National Preservation Act of 1966 have served well; they have been able to stretch when needed and yet remain focused and detailed to remain useful. Sometimes, I admit, the National Register criteria make me want to beat my head against a wall, but in my more rational moments, I understand that the program will not maintain the level of public respect and acceptance it has if it is seen as flimsy and changeable.
What we need, instead of a change to the criteria, is broader scholarship about marginal communities so that more and better National Register nominations can be developed. VAF could assist in this by sponsoring field schools that return year after year to dig into the history and contexts of our minority places. Importantly, these need to happen not just on the East Coast, but in the under-studied areas of the South and Midwest. In ways that the under-staffed SHPOs cannot, these field schools could delve into why a place is significant, what buildings and culture have been lost and what remains, and develop an integrity standard that would be foundational to National Register listing. A final project would be a completed National Register nomination that we can present to our review boards. Just this year in Mississippi, we hope to consider a nomination for Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Neshoba County, a 1970s church that was rebuilt after two arson fires in the civil rights period. This nomination, which we hope will be just the first of many that recognize the "rebuilding" period after the tumultuous 1960s, will be researched and prepared by students from Delaware State University led by Robin L. Krawitz.
It's important to remember that National Register listing does not equal preservation; it is just the first step in preservation. Like many ideas and programs, preservation struggles in poor and depopulated communities. Even when grants help, buildings can be lost because there is no use for them or no income to maintain them. But I wouldn't be in preservation if I hadn't seen it succeed on the Gulf Coast, in rural communities, and even in struggling Jackson. The traditional criteria, honestly but creatively applied, can provide a spark for, if not racial reconciliation, at least the beginning of a respectful conversation between groups that historically have not been on equal terms.
Some Thoughts on Heritage Practice in Canada
by Jennifer Cousineau, Archeology and History Branch, Heritage Conservation and Commemorations Directorate, Parks Canada:
Having been active on the front lines of federal heritage practice for six years, I can fairly observe that Canada, like the US, is due for a re-think as regards its principal policy instruments. As of this moment, federal heritage professionals use criteria that depend heavily on architectural and material integrity. Large, permanent, architect-designed, relatively intact buildings pass through the system with more ease than places that cannot be so described. Like Jennifer Baughan in Mississippi, I have seen all kinds of sites successfully achieve National Historic Site status in Canada, from immigrant districts to ordnance buildings and from the humble to the fantastical. What remains a challenge, in particular for someone trained in the VAF tradition, is that many of these are designated despite a perceived lack of architectural merit or integrity, even when these are fully present to those trained to recognize them.
The First Baptist Church at Amherstburg, an excellent example of the kinds of buildings designed and treasured by mid-nineteenth-century African Canadians, was designated a National Historic Site of Canada, but not principally on the strength of its architecture. In such a case, a complex and flexible design might appear on first glance humble, unspectacular, and much like many other such churches in the region. A lack of valuation of the vernacular, the typical, the marginal, the ephemeral, and the changed, tends to elicit evaluations based on cultural or associative values, with the result that meaningful elements of the built environment can sometimes be overlooked. This does a disservice not only to proponents, but also to the broader public. Stated another way, the scholarship and fieldwork produced over more than three decades by members of the VAF and other like-minded folks has yet to fully be absorbed in federal heritage practice north of 49th parallel. While it true that designation should not be the end, but one of many means to achieving a vibrant sense of place, legislation, policies and criteria that reflect both time-tested ideas and pressing new ones can be excellent tools for creating meaningful, sustainable places.
With respect to the various actors in heritage conservation, some important differences between Canada in the US emerge. Canada is a larger country with a much smaller population, strung out, with a few important exceptions, in one long line close to the international border between British Columbia and Nova Scotia. Historically, and often out of necessity, Canadians have relied on the public sector to provide services that have linked them to each other and knit them into a nation. Among these were essential services such as the post-office and the railway but also cultural services that have had the potent effect of disseminating ideas about what it means to be Canadian. With a relatively small private sector, and an increasingly creative third (non-profit) sector, a fruitful approach to the future of heritage might be to ask how we can all work together more effectively. Perhaps the most important question, in light of recessionary economies and reticence to enlarge the public sector, is who will lead?
Dear VAF members, I wanted to call your attention to a short but important amendment to the description of the Cummings Prize that the VAF Board of Directors approved at its November meeting. The board chose to insert the four underlined words in the last sentence of the prize description: “Edited collections of previously published materials are not eligible.” I quote my thoughts on this question below as background on the issues under discussion. Remember that if you have a candidate for the Cummings Prize, the deadline for nominations is next Monday, December 15th. Please let me, or the Cummings Prize committee chair, Matt Lasner, mlasner@hunter.cuny.edu, know if you have any questions. Regards, Chris Wilson, VAF President Excerpt from VAF President’s Report, Fall Board Meeting, November 1, 2014, Chris Wilson: Cummings Prize. Elaine Jackson-Retondo, in her Cummings committee report and our discussions at the Spring [2014] board meeting, raised the question of whether or not multi-authored, edited books should be eligible for the Cummings Prize. I think there is a distinction to be made between a book that is primarily the conception of the editor(s), often including previously published work (such as the pivotal book, Common Places), and a multi-author book, that is conceived together and executed by a group of authors, even if one or two of those authors coordinate the manuscript preparation and are credited as editors. The former is what is envisioned in the Cummings guidelines, “Edited collections are not eligible.” I suggest that the latter, multi-author books created from scratch, are something else and should not be excluded. Such multi-author, team projects strike me as being vernacular in their collaborative spirit. The increase of collaborative team projects in Digital Humanities will only make this question more important in the future. So that rather than the current total prohibition of edited books, I suggest we consider amending the guidelines to something like, “While edited collections are not eligible for the prize, a book consisting of predominately new material created by a group of collaborating contributors is eligible. Anyone nominating such an edited book should elaborate in their letter of nomination on the integral nature of the authors’ collaboration.” [The board in its wisdom as noted above, found a briefer, more straightforward way to address this question.]
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