The only tech that works is advertising
I did not intend to write a third blog in a row complaining about technology, but here we are, in 2026 in the days of the slow internet. Lots of sludge getting in the way of getting work done. I have had to bring on social media managers for one of my non-profits and the advice in 2026 is you need to get the information out 5-7 days in advance if you have any hope of it finding its way into people’s feeds by the time of the event. Yes, you can “boost” it, which means making it an advertisement. Advertisements are the only part of the current technology ecosystem that works. Mostly.
Let’s say you want to read an article. You need to plan on 1-2 minutes of embedded, pop-up, banner and border ads for every 2-3 minutes of reading time. Thanks to their advanced design, you will accidentally click on one in every 25 or so interactions, and be brought to a horrible place you don’t want to be. If I read an article in a magazine or newspaper, I will read it about 40% faster because the ads are stationary.
The internet is slow. It used to be faster. That’s because of the ads.
Now, if I search in a browser for something, I FIRST get their branded AI bot, which gives you 80-85% accuracy of a middle of the road mediocre sampling of the issue in its most frequently discussed form. That is kind of fast, and somehow doesn’t have ads but I usually skip right to Wikipedia, which reads like an actual printed thing and gives me more information faster.
Advertising is the only aspect of technology where efficiency is maximized. Everything else – especially information – is much slower nowadays BECAUSE IT NEEDS TO BE so the advertisement ecosystem can function at highest efficiency.
My favorite aspect of the slow internet of 2026 is when your phone spies on you, hears you are looking at something – POS system, refrigerator filter, slide scanner, matcha or whatever – and then gives you five to ten thousand ads for that thing. Even after you already bought it. They haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe they can sell you six.
Many of these ads are designed to put you to work for them. I have these FB ads for POS systems that have morphed into surveys – the original ad is blacked out and all it wants to know is how much I bill per year, and it won’t even give me a proper ad until I agree to go to work for them. I call it the GAG economy.
The POS system argybargy is quite hilarious because I realized today that I have two completely separate sales reps trying to sell me the same POS system, which was recommended by ANOTHER system (that is basically advertising) since they did not work with the billing system we are using. The most humorous part of this unending sales pitch is that I only agreed to talk to them because we are currently using four different systems for ticketing and donations and memberships. I wanted to reduce that number. Turns out, REDUCING THE NUMBER OF APPS you need to use is NOT part of the ecosystem. You need to buy more. Feed the machine. And 75-100 companies are selling one of them. But not all of them.
The inherent value of capitalism is its efficiency, but it has lost that in the internet era. All it can do is whomp you with more and more ads, because that feeds the machine the money it needs to run. But it is running very inefficiently. Like sludge.
The other HILARIOUS thing about contemporary inefficiency is that even ad-free apps COPY the sludgy rhythms of the advernet. I tried to open an email just now and lost 10-15 second because the email app has to send me a notification of the new email. So I have to WAIT for that notification to go away so I can finally open the email. 15 seconds gone and I don’t get that time back because even the app wants to advertise itself. At the expense of efficiency.
Every app wants to send you notifications, which would add an UNBELIEVABLE amount of time to every online task. You have 100 apps and they each want to be your one and only true love. And they are psychotic loves who don’t know when to let go or stand back.
And no one can figure out a better system that MORE ads and MORE texts and MORE notifications? Any engineers here, or are we dependent on MBAs who only know how to SCALE and not how to get things done?
Oh, and this blog thinks I can’t write. Not because I can’t, but because they want to sell me Yoast SEO. But that would slow me down. Why would I want that?
Giddyap!
LINKS to my last two blogs: AI SLOP and ARE AI THE SEA PEOPLES?
WEDNESDAY UPDATE:
This is how bad the algorithms are now that AI is driving everyone to the same lane on the same road. I’m in Google News curious about how the Chicago Cubs are doing in the wild-card race in MLB with only a few games left. Google provides me with a grid of FORTY EIGHT (48) articles, every single one of which is about how the games will be rescheduled due to the Nor’easter coming this weekend. That is the ONLY STORY. The one I want – which would be easy to find in an analog newspaper – does not satisfy the large learning model. How dumb.
Are AI The Sea Peoples?
Remember in the olden days for doctor’s visits you had to fill out all of these forms 15 minutes before the appointment and then fill them out again and then repeat them verbally after that? Thanks to technological advances, it now takes 30 minutes to fill out the same forms the same number of times because you also have to download two apps and create two passwords and four identity queries only to have the doctor tell you to lay off the technology because you have carpal tunnel syndrome.
Oh, and then they want you to fill out a survey. The process is demonstrably slower thanks to technology. That’s not precisely true – it is demonstrably slower because of all the ads and popups and other digital demons trying to monetize the technology. And then there is the technology trying to monetize itself by creating unnecessary layers. I get to update this website in WordPress, but with another website I work on, it was constructed in WordPress with another app called Elementor that someone got someone to pay for because it did something that the original app didn’t do and now we are back to 30 minutes for a 15 minute task.
There is so much sludge on the internet now that opening links takes forever – I was trying to register for a conference and by the time the form came up there were three because I must have hit the button three times in my impatience. Here’s my favorite: If you ever try to look at once of these listicles on Ranker or Weird History you better be sure that the list is no more than 12 items long, because otherwise the endless hulking sludge of ads will kill the listicle before you ever get to Number 13, leaving you with a whiteout screen with nothing on it. Only way out of the whiteout is to quit the app and reboot.
I think Odysseus was surfing the web rather than the Aegean and Tyrrhenian because he got whacked by more popups than my YouTube account. He goes from the 15 minute task pre-AI to the 30 minute task post-AI to 10 years getting from Troy to Ithaca without even visiting Saratoga Springs. At least at the movie theater all the ads were before the movie.
And since Odysseus the movie had a minutelong scandal a couple weeks back, here is my take:
As a historian, I am sometimes critical of movies that are replete with anachronisms (Braveheart) but on other occasions (Elizabeth and Marie Antoinette) they aren’t true to historical events but they somehow manage to capture the essence of the historical figure. So, I am not a purist, and I am less likely to be a purist about a lengthy lyric transmitted orally for five hundred years. The tiny fragment from the third century BC currently on display in New York City has three lines that aren’t in the standard text, so we are not dealing with hard evidence here. I do agree that Nolan removed the humor (and most of the sex) from the lyric, but he didn’t pervert or subvert the essence of the story. (also John Leguizamo steals everything he is in.). He also avoided a surprising amount of CGI, like in the Giants scene where he used actual people tall and short.
The Odyssey is set at the beginning of the Bronze Age collapse, caused by the ill-defined “Sea Peoples” referenced in the movie, which leads me to posit: AI are the Sea Peoples of today. AI are doing their best to precipitate our collapse through misinformation and the pandemic of endless mediocrity. Not to mention making everything take longer and go slower.
Now, if this is a parallel to the Bronze Age collapse, we should have first seen the collapse of the palatial economies and ensuing diaspora of craftspersons and landscapers. But the damn McMansions are still there with their armies of workers. Everywhere.
Nowadays we have a very visible ultrarich predator class, which would seem to parallel the Bronze Age rulers on their own private islands throughout the Aegean and Mediterranean, and, indeed, private islands are a thing. But their economic collapse has not happened. Granted, the predator class has seized power and is trying desperately to win a culture war by making everything dumber and gaudier.
And more boring. AI will like totally try to sell you the most popular thing even when you instruct it otherwise, because it is impressed ONLY be quantities of data. Not by quality. Quality can be singular and special and lonely, which is the opposite of a big dataset. So, I asked AI for “museums that only had a few objects.” AI gave me “tiny museums” like the Mmuseumm in New York which is an elevator shaft full of ordinary objects. I corrected its error and AI was very apologetic, acknowledged I was correct and then came up with a couple museums in the UK. So I had to prompt AI for a third time, telling it to look in Japan. It finally came up with the Teshima and Chichu, which is what I was looking for. It also corrected me that the Miho (below) actually has a large collection, even though it only displays a small number of items. So, three for me, one for AI.
Ok that AI adventure was a bit of a slog – hard to get away from the stuff that is highly advertised and thus a bigger dataset. I mean you could fix that, but that is not necessarily in the interest of the predator class – they need you dumb. And they need you to think AI graphics look good. If I was 13, I would think they look good. If I was a gamer, I would think they look like game graphics, which have a cachet. So, a contemporary counterpart of the Bronze Age collapse – a dumbing down of culture – does seem plausible.
Teshima art museum – home to one artwork. The artwork is also made of water. Like AI is. But less water.
Just learned today that AI can manage country and pop songs, but is a complete disaster with Baroque counterpoint. I guess music isn’t math after all…
AI Slop
The phrase “AI Slop” is already commonplace, and it inspires me to invent more neologisms like “Cry me a data center” or “Grok willing and the creek don’t pop-up”. I have written all 670 blogs over the last two decades without AI, or have I? I am a late-adopter with Post Technology Stress Disorder and you can see that in my blogs from the aughty-aughts. Heck, you can see it from a couple of months ago when I ranted about how real retail service companies cannot ever, ever change an old email or recognize a different phone number, no matter who is dead. And they are willing to give up months of revenue just to carry that rotting corpse further.
So what do I think of AI? My first reaction to AI writing was that it was like a 14-year-old who has been asked to turn in a three-page essay but only has one page of material. Repetitive. You see it in tons of social media posts which look like proper long-form discussions but hammer the emotional hinge of the story like six times in 400 words. That is the written version of the AI image that has the wrong number of fingers or arms. Of course, both of those examples are a year old so I suppose by now AI is like 15 and knows how to draw hands better.
This is a real life photo from 12 years ago no AI.
I have attended one workshop and one training in AI in the last 24 hours so here is what I learned, mostly from Huy Pham and Paul Kim, whom I first saw present on this issue almost a year ago in Arkansas.
AI is a marketing term for the latest iterations of pattern recognition technology. Basically it looks at large amounts of data and identifies patterns and recurring themes. So, like you learned in computer science 40 years ago – GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. Huy and Paul work for APIAHiP (Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation) and if they ask AI about Asian sites in the National Register of Historic Places and if AI looks at all 100,000 nominations and sees less than 1% it will tell you basically NO. There aren’t any. Not significant. Not important.
Since AI is basically pattern recognition, everything it produces will tend toward the mean, the median, the average and ordinary. It is not a place to look for exceptionalism or new ideas. Culturally, it has a flattening effect. What is new about it in the last few years – as opposed to the pattern recognition software of 20 and 30 years ago – is the Large Language Model. Basically you give it tonnes more examples. So it gets even meaner. It cannot provide conclusions, only predictions. It reflects what is common, not what is true. Garbage in, garbage out.
I guess I’m not a big fan
If you want the National Register of Historic Places to identify underrepresented stories, you need to do it yourself, because it requires not lots and lots of old data, but a new approach. You need to reconceptualize the process, which is not something in AI’s wheelhouse. Garbage in, garbage out.
“Hallucinations,” however, are in AI’s wheelhouse. They will confidently answer a nonsense question like “Who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1956?” and even provide fake citations from nonexistent journals, as we have seen recently. It seems the AI doesn’t know how to say “I don’t know” which is a prerequisite of real intelligence. It eagerly answers queries because – like the 14 year old – it can’t not. Even if it is hallucinating.
If you get the “Nobel Prize in Economics,” you will get it here, in Stockholm, but it will actually say Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and it only began in 1969. Four of the five original Nobel prizes are also delivered in Stockholm under the terms of Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will, with the Peace Prize awarded in Oslo.
Presents predictions as conclusions. Repeats what is common rather than what is true. Hallucinates.
No wonder the predator class and the oligarchy are so enamored of it.
More microdosing and unlocked tranches than Sand Hill Road.
So, does AI work with historic preservation? I have always said that the beauty of historic preservation is that it treats every resource as an individual, with individual characteristics and individual significance that cannot be commodified. Zoning treats properties as a category, like grain being graded and loaded into a silo. It becomes a commodity sans terroir. Pattern recognition technology might be suited for zoning or other commodifying tasks, but telling the story of a place is specific and nonfungible.
Terroir.
So, to answer the question: AI can help if you need to find out how many 1926-29 Tudor Revival houses in the Monte Vista district have casement windows or how many National Historic Landmarks are shaped like elephants.
But if you are nominating a site with a story that has not been heard before – AI doesn’t know. Because it hasn’t been told. And it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
Why doesn’t someone get AI to do the dishes or wash the floor? Something useful, you know?
106 under attack
I have regularly taught on online one-hour course for public officials on how to navigate Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Section 106 is a consultation process that reviews federal undertakings for their effect on historic resources. This makes it a regulation, so knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers with no knack for capitalism think of it as an obstacle. Skilled practitioners recognize it as a way to find solutions that satisfy constituents and guarantee return.
There is no law that prevents demolition of landmarks. Full stop. There are only laws that make it more difficult. But not impossible. In my class I share the story of the USPS in 1991 which decided to tear down a Daniel Burnham building. They knew how Section 106 worked, and that a federal agency can always out-wait the process and tear down the building. So they did.
This is when I was out standing in my field.
The virtue of Section 106 is that it may take time, but it saves lawsuits and conflicts that come afterwards. This week, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is proposing eliminating this consensus-building process, presumably at the behest of the aforesaid Neanderthal-adjacent. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has publically opposed the move, as has the National Preservation Partners Network. Here is our statement.
Position Statement: Opposition to Proposed Changes to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act
Issued: July 23, 2026
Who We Are
The National Preservation Partners Network (NPPN) is a coalition of statewide and local preservation organizations and preservation professionals working alongside State Historic Preservation Offices, Certified Local Governments, and Tribal partners to protect historic and cultural places in communities across the country. Our members work directly with the Section 106 process on a daily basis — advising project sponsors, sitting at the consultation table, and helping communities and federal agencies reach outcomes that work for everyone. We offer this statement as practitioners with on-the-ground experience with the process.
Summary
The existing Section 106 process reduces conflict, identifies problems early, creates predictable outcomes, and avoids costly litigation. It is a process that works — not despite its consultation requirements, but because of them. The National Preservation Partners Network (NPPN) therefore opposes the draft rewrite of 36 C.F.R. Part 800 — the regulations implementing Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) — that was circulated by the Vice Chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) on July 17, 2026, for an expedited Council vote by July 24, 2026. NPPN urges the ACHP to withdraw the draft, restore the deliberative process it previously committed to, and preserve the collaborative consultation framework that has worked for sixty years.
Statement of Position
NPPN believes the proposed rule, both in the manner of its introduction and in its substance, is an unwarranted departure from the collaborative, multi-party consultation model that Congress established when it enacted the NHPA. NPPN calls on the ACHP to:
- Withdraw the current draft and restore the previously adopted 30/60-day process for developing and reviewing any revisions to Part 800.
- Reject an unassembled, one-week vote on a rule of this magnitude, and instead ensure Council deliberation occurs in a transparent, recorded public forum.
- Preserve the core consultative structure of Section 106 rather than replacing it with a model of unilateral agency control.
- Engage Tribal Nations through genuine government-to-government consultation on any changes affecting places of religious and cultural significance.
- Engage with the broader preservation community and the public in order to improve the Section 106 process without endangering or destroying historic places.
Background
For six decades, Section 106 has required federal agencies to identify historic properties, consult with State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (THPOs), Tribal Nations, local governments, and other interested parties, and consider alternatives before undertakings that affect historic properties move forward. It has never functioned as a veto over federal projects; rather, it has provided a structured process for balancing infrastructure, energy, housing, broadband, and disaster-recovery needs against the preservation of the nation’s irreplaceable historic and cultural resources.
Earlier this year, the ACHP adopted a resolution directing its staff to develop a public timeline for revising Part 800 within 30 days and to give Council members 60 days to submit comments before any regulatory action proceeded. That process was never completed. Instead, on the afternoon of Friday, July 17, 2026, the Vice Chairman distributed a nearly complete rewrite of the regulations and asked Council members to cast an unassembled, email-based vote within one week — abandoning the process the Council itself had adopted. The Council set a deadline of Friday, July 24, 2026, for that vote; the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Council member, has already voted no. If approved, the draft would move to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review before publication in the Federal Register, triggering a 30-day public comment period.
Why Section 106 Benefits Everyone — Not Just Preservationists
Section 106 is not an obstacle that pits preservation against progress. In practice, it does the opposite. Section 106 works because it creates better projects: earlier identification of issues, fewer late-stage surprises, negotiated solutions, greater public confidence in federal decision-making, lower litigation risk, and greater certainty for project sponsors. Federal agencies, applicants, local governments, Tribal Nations, and the public all rely on the same process to get to “yes” on projects that serve infrastructure, energy, housing, and disaster-recovery needs. Weakening that process does not make federal projects move faster or cost less — it removes the mechanism that prevents costly conflicts and litigation from happening.
Key Concerns with the Proposed Rule
A shift from consultation to unilateral agency control. The draft replaces the collaborative consultation process with a single Section 106 report prepared by the federal agency, which would then be circulated for comment. SHPOs, THPOs, Tribes, local governments, and other consulting parties would react to a completed agency analysis rather than helping shape it — removing a substantive planning process. Agencies would decide unilaterally whether competing priorities, such as budget and schedule, outweigh historic preservation concerns.
Narrowed participation. Local governments and Certified Local Governments would no longer be entitled to consult, and preservation organizations and members of the public would lose recognized status. Public involvement becomes discretionary, with agencies deciding whether public input is worth the time and cost. Collaborative, negotiated solutions are lost.
Broad new exclusions from review. The proposal would exempt whole categories of projects — including state- or locally administered federal programs, actions involving minimal federal funding or control, and projects carried out under delegated authority. It would align many NEPA exclusions with Section 106, removing review of projects that currently receive it.
A narrowed definition of “effect.” The draft limits adverse effects to those that are foreseeable, closely tied to the undertaking, and involve material physical alteration. This curtails consideration of setting, visual impacts, and other indirect effects, and raising serious questions about how places of Tribal religious and cultural significance would be protected.
A narrowed definition of “historic property.” The proposal excludes certain cultural landscapes — mountains, valleys, and ethnographic landscapes — from protection. Combined with the loss of Traditional Cultural Landscape protections and the elimination of “avoidance, minimization, and mitigation” as an operating standard, these changes will reduce protection for Tribal sacred sites and Traditional Cultural Properties and disregard practical, positive alternatives that preservation review makes possible.
Mitigation becomes optional. The current process encourages negotiated Memoranda of Agreement among consulting parties. The proposed rule makes Memoranda of Agreement optional and allows agencies to make unilateral decisions without the agreement of consulting parties, likely leading to conflict.
Legal vulnerability and more delay, not less. The proposed regulations contradict both the National Historic Preservation Act and ACHP’s own rules and procedures. The internally inconsistent draft contains many errors, inviting regulatory confusion. Stripped of the well-established consultation process that has long produced negotiated, durable outcomes, agencies and applicants should expect more legal challenges and delays, not less — undermining the efficiency the proposal claims.
The draft is a complete rewrite that places decision-making authority in the very agency proposing the undertaking. It discards the independent expertise SHPOs, THPOs, Tribal Nations, local governments, and the public bring to federal decisions. Under the narrowed definition of “historic property,” federal agencies would no longer be required to take into account adverse effects to significant cultural landscapes like the Grand Canyon.
Call to Action
NPPN encourages its members and the broader preservation community to:
- Track the rulemaking closely and prepare to submit substantive comments once the rule is published in the Federal Register.
- Contact their Members of Congress to express concern about the proposed rule and the process by which it was introduced.
- Contact State Historic Preservation Officers, Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, and state and local elected officials to coordinate a unified response.
- Submit written comments during the forthcoming public comment period via regulations.gov once the docket number is available.
Conclusion
Section 106 has succeeded for nearly sixty years not despite its consultation requirements, but because of them. NPPN urges the ACHP to reject an accelerated, closed-door process for rewriting regulations and to engage the full preservation community — Tribes, SHPOs, local governments, preservation organizations, and the public — to uphold, rather than dismantle, Congress’s intent in enacting the National Historic Preservation Act.
NPPN’s opposition to this draft is not opposition to reform. NPPN stands ready to participate in a collaborative review of Part 800 that improves efficiency, provides greater clarity, reduces delay, maintains consultation, honors Tribal sovereignty, preserves public participation, and fulfills Congressional intent. We welcome the opportunity to work with the ACHP to that end.
Sources: Cultural Heritage Partners, “War Room for Threats to Section 106” (July 2026); National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, “The End of Section 106 as We Know It?” (July 20, 2026); Arizona Preservation Foundation, “ACHP Proposes New Federal Regulations that Devastate Protections for Historic Properties” (July 2026); National Alliance of Preservation Commissions, member advisory on proposed Section 106 regulatory changes (July 2026); National Trust for Historic Preservation, “Section 106 Is Under Threat: What You Need To Know” (July 2026).
America 250 One Nation Under Roofs
This is the title of our new exhibit in Villa Finale Museum & Gardens Mathis Gallery building, which features items from the permanent collection that relate to the history of the United States. As the nation attempts to meet this milestone, our museum, under the direction of Curator Sylvia Gonzalez-Pizaña, has pulled both fine art and patriotic artifacts from the house. Some of my favorites include a collection of memorabilia from the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876. It is nice to view these items – normally arrayed on the second floor of the house – with more room to breathe and be seen.
There are also artifacts from the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and 19C Stafforshire flatback porcelains that purport to be Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They look a bit more like Prince Albert and Benjamin Franklin, but hey.
The founder of our museum, Walter Mathis, was a genuine World War 11 hero, flying 65 missions in the European theater – primarily B-25s, and earning a series of medals, some of which are on display in the gallery and some of which are still on display in the house. He also collected Currier prints of the Mexican War 1846-48, some of which are now on display in our America 250 exhibit, along with examples of his excellent collection of early maps of New Spain, Mexico and Texas.
Not all of the artifacts are antique – Among a collection of busts of U S Presidents is one of Abraham Lincoln from the 1970s – manufactured by Avon to contain aftershave!
One item I encouraged Sylvia to include was a signed portrait of William Howard Taft, the only person to serve as both US President and Supreme Court Justice. It is a family heirloom given to Walter Mathis’ grandfather who founded the Coleman Pasture Company along with the Taft family. Taft’s brother had a ranch house called La Quinta where the President stayed in 1909. The photo of Taft was signed in 1924 when Walter Mathis’ aunt was wife of the La Quinta superintendent.
Some of my favorite artworks from the collection are also in the Mathis Gallery for the America 250 show, including the stunning Julian Onderdonk painting of Matagorda Bay, which is my favorite of the several Onderdonks in the collection. My top favorite artist is Mary Bonner, and some of her amazing graphic prints are visible in the show. She had a knack for creating dynamic motion out of line and contour that reminds me of Windsor McCay among others.
You can tour the exhibit for FREE during normal hours (10-4 Tuesday-Saturday) and also of course see “the rest of the story” in the museum for the price of admission. Or, if you are a Friend of Villa Finale, the house is free! While 250 years is no Han Dynasty or Roman Empire, it is still a major achievement, and it might go on even longer!
Truth is no stranger to fiction
There is actual information on the internet amid the drivel and some of it challenges our basic conception of how media works. The idea is that something happens in real life, and then it is conveyed through media. From 30,000 year old cave paintings to AI modified images, we assume that the message and the medium are antecedent to the act. Except that the message IS the medium, and there are a surfeit of examples where the media created its own reflection in real life and then people perpetuated it as ritual or tradition. In other words, the media message came first and real life second.
Peer pressure c. 1000 BC
I was just reading on History Facts about how the practice of kneeling on one knee (ahem, the left please) became a tradition in marriage proposals. While kneeling to a superior power or religious entity (ahem, the right please) goes back to Alexander the Great and infused the feudal era, the modern marriage proposal actually derives from … the movies. Specifically, silent movies, since the economy of kneeling action meant you didn’t need to waste dialogue cards on the act. Yes, kneeling was an aspect of courtly (often Platonic) love, but the specific association with marriage proposals postdates film.
A more recent example is illustrative. In the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, the titular character’s opening sequence happens within Mexico City’s Day of the Dead parade. Except there never had been one. Then the Mexican government launched an actual Day of the Dead parade – inspired by the movie – in 2016. In the decade since it has become a huge tourist attraction. The scene was also a nod to the Junkanoo scene in Nassau Thunderball (1965), but of course Junkanoo already existed.
Twenty years ago, the book The Da Vinci Code inspired mass tourism to various sites in France, Scotland and Rome to the extent that places like Saint-Sulpice Church had to post signs countering the book’s conspiracy theories. Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland got 38,000 visitors a year before the book, 80,000 a year after and 176,000 after the film came out. It still gets 140,000 visitors a year, with over half citing the book and film as the reason.
Twenty two years ago the movie Sideways caused California vintners to rip up their Merlot vines and replace them with Pinot Noir due to the character’s preference. I still prefer Pinot Noir, so that film definitely changed my behavior.
It took over a century for someone to finally create a real 221B Baker Street in London, now a museum to the most portrayed literary character of all time, who has statues on multiple continents. Kinda like Hercules or Athena Nike.
Just do it.
Everyone has heard of Leonardo da Vinci and many museums have one or more of his paintings from the Italian Renaissance. Which is the most famous? If you said “Mona Lisa” then welcome to the world after 1911. 1911 was the year the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Its image was plastered on newspapers throughout the world until its recovery in 1913, elevating it from one of many Leonardos to OG status, which it did not have before 1911.
I mean this one’s pretty good. Ermine is pretty good too.
Harvey Page
I was prepping for a King William walking tour for the 65th Nationales Saengerfest (Nord-Amerikanischer Saengerbund) and I noted that the Berman/Kinder House of 1906 on Madison Street was by the architect Harvey Page. The name sounded familiar and I realized I had been in another of his buildings less than a year ago – but it was in Washington, D.C. The Metropolitan Club, a veritable master class in Renaissance Revival.
Page practiced in his hometown of Washington, D.C. from 1880 to 1897, spent a couple of years in Chicago, and settled in San Antonio about 1900, where he practiced and lived until his death in 1934. In addition to that house in King William (which has been altered since his original design) he did several notable buildings here, including the stunning Temple Beth-El (1927) which I see every day in the neighborhood.
I have visited Washington, D.C. a lot, and have run into some of his work there, including the landmarked Harvey L. Page Block near DuPont Circle. His career, like William Carbys Zimmerman in Chicago, spanned the period between Queen Anne (below), the various Classical Revivals of the turn of the century, and the emergence of the modern as seen at Temple Beth-El. Page did a Craftsman Style house in 1906 that hinted at modern, just as Zimmerman was completing the Joseph Downey House in Chicago.
Downey House, Chicago, 1906. I took this picture in 1998.
In San Antonio, Harvey Page contributed some major buildings in addition to Temple Beth-El, like the Great Northern Railway Depot (1907) with its deliberately Mission-inspired campanulate facade and towers, the Mausolus-worthy Greco-Roman Scottish Rite Cathedral (1924) and several houses, including the quirky Clegg House (1902), which is surrounded by San Antonio College.
Despite the one Craftsman Bungalow and Temple Beth-El, Page never did venture too far into Modernism. Most of his mid-1920s houses in rapidly growing Monte Vista and Alamo Heights tended to stick to the historical styles popular at that time. Even our Frank Lloyd Wright-trained George Willis shifted from Prairie Style to historicism by 1921, as detailed in my blog a few years back.
Even in this stone Craftsman from 1906, Page could not resist a little Mission Style flare with the campanulate dormer. He did do a stucco Craftsman at 210 Encino, but it is impossible to photograph. Page died here in 1934 after a productive career. Six of his houses, including the Berman/Kinder, Clegg and his own home at 331 W Woodlawn are including in the San Antonio House Registry.
The Culture of Heritage Conservation
What is the culture of heritage conservation and how has it evolved? I’ve spent over four decades in this field and have studied its earlier history as well, so I have some thoughts. In my current position, I see a lot of the history of this culture. Here I am in a mansion saved by a collector who donated that house and his phenomenal collection of over 12,000 items of fine and decorative art to the National Trust. Arguably that is the heritage conservation culture of the first half of the twentieth century, an antiquarian concern with preserving artistic treasures.
Walter Mathis, who restored Villa Finale, was part of this culture. A collector from childhood, he had an eye for fine and decorative arts and a collectors mentality. But he did more than save one house as a treasure and fill it with other treasures. He saved a whole neighborhood – restored partially or fully another 14 properties and even bought nondescript commercial buildings to help finance the preservation of his museum and the neighborhood writ large. Here are a few of the other houses he preserved:
Famously Walter Mathis found “like-minded” individuals to help him restore and occupy houses throughout the district. “Like-minded” meant they were urban pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, people who valued a walkable historic neighborhood adjacent to downtown. People who were not enthusiastic about the shopping malls and sprawl housing that characterized the majority culture of that time. They may have been artists or collectors of art, but they were also urban pioneers, an evolution of the preservation culture that came before.
These cultural outliers and upstarts existed in every city, from New York’s Greenwich Village and Brooklyn Heights, to Chicago’s Old Town, Denver’s Larimer Square, Boston’s Beacon Hill and Back Bay, Charleston’s Ansonborough; from the heavenly bungalows of Pasadena and LA to the moss-covered staircases of landmark-laden New Orleans. In addition to residential districts like King William, Brooklyn Heights and Old Town, there were also districts that transformed industrial and commercial buildings into new urban pioneer communities, like the Third Ward in Milwaukee and LoDo in Denver. This was not simply an antiquarian culture. It added something new, but old at the same time.
In a sense, the culture of these historic districts reflected the old-time architecture, because the cultural values of the pioneers and early settlers were urban and urbane – the values of walkability, a life-work balance that emphasized community, and a community that emphasized working together to achieve things no individual or family could. Jane Jacobs commented on this in 1960, and Herbert Gans solidified it two years later. You could argue it was a reaction against the postwar culture’s invention of the nuclear family and its attendant zoning and transportation.
Successful historic neighborhoods are always highly organized, often with permanently staffed organizations. That began in King William in 1947 with the creation of the King William Conservation Association, which sought to save the old Victorian German neighborhood and preserve its original values. By 1967 there was a new King William Association made up of urban pioneers who wanted to raise families, restore houses, enjoy music and the arts and live in beauty and shade just minutes from downtown. The King William Conservation Association faded away in 1975, but the King William Association lives today. The culture has evolved.
They have festivals and promotions and events that cement the community culture and allow it to grow. King William has its King William Fair during Fiesta, but it also has its First Friday art walks. It has Ruby City art museum and the Blue Star arts complex, formerly an industrial site. In a city of parties, it is party central. And here we are and here I am.
The world economy rests on a dead cell phone
Ah, the joy of two-step verification! I have just spent an hour unsuccessfully trying to log in to my business Amazon account, all because COMMERCE is dependent on a dead cell phone. No use trying to call customer service, for they will insist on sending a text to the dead cell phone. You will not be able to sign in online, because the account does not have a number (well, it does, but it is not used for anything). It does, however, have a cell number. If that cell phone is lost, dead, deleted or no longer employed, you have now successfully exited the economy.
Now, I did speak to a very nice gentleman who understood my problem before putting me on silent hold for 20 minutes. The website shows you how you can update your account information, but only AFTER you have signed in, which means you still need that cell phone. You cannot sign in without it. All of the online customer service is similarly dependent in its entirety on that dead cell phone and the ethereal unrequited beauty of two-step verification.
What happens to the phone that gets flushed? The employee who retires? There was briefly an option to have them call a landline instead of texting a cell, but the algorithm resists that option with a ferocity that would make Longshanks blush. Then, just to make sure you are defeated, they make you wait before sending another code, by which time it is too late. Code by Kafka, I guess.
We shouldn’t be giving Amazon custom anyway, but I did try. And it isn’t just them. Every vendor in the world rests their entire customer relationship on a single cell phone number. That number can only be changed/edited if it is still working! It is like a massive inverted pyramid of relationships and transactions and accounts and credit cards, none of which can function without the dead cell phone being reanimated.
I can’t even turn on my work computer without two-step verification. I need my cell phone. I have used two-step verification for years when teaching at the local Uni, so I know how to do it. The challenge at work is that business accounts are similarly dependent on personal cell phones. You call the Amazon help line – from a landline – and the automated voice asks to send you a text. It does not give you any other option. If that old line is long gone, so is your account. All of the ways to recover the account will require that cell phone.
This seems a strange and fragile way to run an economy.
APRIL UPDATE: I learned this week that when they drain the San Antonio Riverwalk every two years, they find about 500 cell phones. That’s a lot of business not getting paid. Wonder how many cell phones are lying in the Strait of Hormuz rn?
Oh, and just went through this with AT & T – we wanted to make sure the issue – which caused a TWO MONTH ABSENCE OF SERVICE – did not happen again, so we closed the old account and opened a brand new one. We made sure no personal cell phones were involved, so we could prevent this clusterfracas from happening again. No dice. Neither Apple nor AT & T will allow a business to be a business – it needs to be some individual’s phone. And they were willing to lose two months of custom just to maintain this silly, flimsy system. I would say bring back the party line, but Que será, será.
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act
Last week the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation put out a call for review of the Section 106 process. What is Section 106? Well, it is basically the federal review process for properties listed on (or eligible for) the National Register of Historic Places. I have taught this process to public officials for decades, and I have been party to the process in many cases, including several projects here in San Antonio.
Foundations of 1875 St. James AME Church as uncovered in 2020. Below is the result of the Section 106 process, completed 2022.
In a time characterized by assaults on civil institutions small and large, a “review” of this process, which has existed in some form for nearly 60 years, is cause for concern. Section 106 is a type of regulation, and regulations are often categorically opposed by self-styled populist politicians and struggling subpar businesspersons. The nuanced reality is that any consultative process will tend to improve outcomes.
With the notable exception of the Milton Historical Society, a Section 106 review that was a perfect storm of bad outcomes. I was hired by the National Trust to figure out what went wrong here 20 years ago. Architect, client, and agency were all at fault. In that order.
Almost a year ago, the Executive began trying to get around regulations like Section 106 through imaginary energy crises, military readiness, and other performative red herrings. Heck, they even demolished a federal building illegally (and of course performatively, without a long-range plan – see my blog about it). But this is not to put Section 106 under one political banner, because in 2024 Section 106 was being challenged as an impediment not to knuckle-dragging capitalists, but to progressive causes like climate change and renewable energy. And bike lanes. I blogged about it here.
There is also an exception being drawn up for military housing, which makes sense intuitively.
Well of course I’m going to pick an architecturally significant example of military housing.
Your intuition is not wrong, but it has no context. The context is that military housing is like all things military – it never has to justify its budget. That means that the housing got “improved” regularly in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. That means it has lots of layers added, with each having the potential to become a unique mold biome. And of course those of us involved in actual Section 106 reviews in a city with lots of military bases knows that this has been an issue for more than a decade. Not new.
Tile looks 1930 but that sink looks scallopped in the awful 80s.
Here is how Section 106 works:
1. There is a federal project. This could be obvious, like a highway or a building, or it could be a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to build along a navigable waterway.
2. There is – or is not – a historic resource.
3. There is – or is not – an effect on that resource.
4. If there is an adverse effect, you oughta try to do something about it.
5. If nothing can be done, you go ahead anyway.
Here is one of my favorite results – the Solomonic baby sliced in half:
The LITERAL bottom line in the process is that the project can proceed, something the Post Office knew back in 1991 when the above article appeared. They knew they could tear it down after they went through the process. (BTW photo proves that I was out standing in my field).
Or you can just repackage the project into different phases that do not engage Section 106 as much.
At her request, I spoke to National Trust for Historic Preservation CEO Carol Quillen last summer about this issue and what should be done. After all, Section 106 has not been revised in over two decades. The conclusion I shared with her is the same I reached years ago in the effort to get the National Register of Historic Places to reflect the diversity of American history. The issue is rarely the law or regulation itself, but the practice of its implementation.
Ah yes, Federal Building West. We encouraged them NOT to worry about the original 1974 bathroom in the basement.
As with many current initiatives from the federal government, it appears that they are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. In over 40 years of dealing with historic preservation review at the federal, state and local level, I have consistently seen that at least 97 percent of reviews are dispatched in a few days. My friend and Washington State SHPO Allyson Brooks provided statistics from last year. They did 5,371 reviews with a response time of 3.7 days. 45 of the projects were “adverse affects”. It could be that there is not a problem, or perhaps there is that one guy with a problem who wants to make everyone pay for it.
Moreover, most federal agencies have executed Programmatic Agreements that essentially resolve potential Section 106 issues in advance, and provide an agency-specific and resource-specific process for dealing with the rules in a more streamlined way. But that doesn’t play well in a media landscape designed for third graders.
Our National Historic Landmark army base is a decade older than Fort Sheridan in Chicago.
So what specifically is the ACHP looking to review?
1. Defining the undertaking and establishing the area of potential effects
I suppose this is to fend off surprises by limiting the scope of the undertaking. The old newspaper clipping above is a case where the new building did not require the demolition of the old building per se. It’s just that, in order to stage the construction of the new building, the old one had to go.
2. Assessing indirect and cumulative effects
I guess this is to try to limit the review to immediate effects rather than long-term or indirect ones. I can’t imagine this affects a large number of cases. One of the interesting ones I witnessed – which was resolved by the Advisory Council in favor of the military, was the issue of cutting trees at the 1930 Randolph Air Force Base. The Air Force wanted to cut down trees to limit bird strikes, and the SHPO wanted them to keep original trees. The Air Force won, and yes, it took a while.
3. Managing review/scope of review for long linear projects with limited federal involvement
This could be for projects like San Pedro Creek or Brackenridge Park that are primarily projects of state and local agencies and the federal role is a permit. Again, Programmatic Agreements can help with this.
4. Managing timelines for review.
Yeah, well that would be good. In fact, this is the big one. European countries have more stringent regulations than we do, and their businesses are used to going through the process. It must be worse there, right? No. See, they have a process which has an endpoint. The US has so many lawyers that projects can get tied up forever not by the regulations, but the ancillary and attendant lawsuits. There is no endpoint in a litigious environment. That doesn’t happen in Europe.
They are better at trains too
You can tweak the regulations all you want, but unless someone sets an example of NOT filing frivolous lawsuits, the timelines will get longer not matter how short the laws are. Anyone know anyone who could set such a noble example? Bueller? Bueller?
My prediction is that the review will cause more problems than it solves. If you go digging into a legal process that is slow 3% of the time, you will reduce the quality of outcomes at the very least, and likely harm that high-performing ratio.
JULY UPDATE
Well, the Advisory Council has flouted its own process, in order to flout the process. Like a suicide bomber! See my latest blog and the preservation community response.