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.
Villa Finale Museum and Gardens
Located in the heart of King William – the first historic district in Texas – Villa Finale tells the story of preservation and the story of Walter Mathis, who worked to save more than just architecture. This unique house museum is the result of Mathis’ lifelong commitment to historic preservation, his passion for collecting artworks of a great variety, and his dogged ability to raise up a community and neighborhood from neglect to prominence. I was proud to take the first tour of Villa Finale when it opened to the public in 2010, and I am more than proud to take the helm of this exquisite site in 2025.
If you haven’t visited, we are the only house museum in King William, we have lovely gardens that stretch back to the “Sauerkraut Bend” of the San Antonio River, and we are the stewards of Walter Nold Mathis’ legacy. Mathis was a descendant of Canary Islanders, decorated World War II pilot, and a serial preservationist. He restored Villa Finale in 1967 and then went on to fully or partially restore another 14 homes in King William, which became Texas’ first historic district in 1968.
Walter Mathis was a lifelong collector, and Villa Finale boasts the largest collection of fine arts, books and antiques of any National Trust historic site, with some 12,500 items. My favorites include the Mary Bonner paintings, which I have admired for years.
Walter also collected a wide variety of items related to Napoleon Bonaparte, including an actual death mask and a wide variety of busts and statuary.
The house is open to the public five days a week and you can do either a guided or self-guided tour, which you can learn about here. We also have a great variety of events each month, including a fabulous presentation of iCatrina by Araminta Romero on October 3.
This weekend we are hosting the Texas Spirit Gathering all day Saturday, and upcoming events include an acoustic music evening November 8, a “Merry Friendmas” Christmas party for our members (join here!) and presentation on historic Christmases in King William by Sallie Schuchard Thomas and Maria Pfeiffer with Michaele Thurgood Haynes on December 7. But wait, there’s more – December 11 features a demonstration of our musical machines and then Ken Slavin brings his vocal talents December 12.
I hope to see you soon!
OCTOBER 23 UPDATE
Oh I just had to add a few more images as I begin to become better acquainted with all 12,500 items in our collection.
One of many significant examples of 18th-19th century Cusco school of iconography
School of Canaletto – Venice
Onderdonk bluebonnets. Did you know it is illegal to be a Texas artist unless you paint bluebonnets?
So many helmets…
Luster weibchen. Ja ja, doch, sicher.
Yes they were treacherous in the olden days. Ruling by Imperial Edict.
Eatonville MCM
I visited Eatonville, Florida last week as part of a consultancy. Considered the first incorporated African-American town, founded in 1887, it is known as the home of Zora Neale Hurston, the author and anthropologist who set her famous Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) there. It was also the birthplace of NFL Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, who invented the terminology of the quarterback sack. We brought a team to help put together a blockbuster event for August 2027 aiming to raise awareness of the history and culture of Eatonville. That will be the subject of a future blog, but today I would like to simply share some of the lovely Mid Century Modern homes that line the streets of this historic town.
Disappearing original houses
I was always enamored of the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas house in Springfield, Illinois, built in 1903. In what became a familiar scenario, Susan Lawrence Dana had to wait for her father to pass away before she was able to engage the pioneering architectural innovator. Not only that, but she had to promise to keep the original two-story Italianate house her father had built, including his bedroom fireplace. That fireplace is pretty much all that survived Wright’s restless creativity, as the original house vanished into gabled wings of geometric modernism.
Fun fact – AI can not manage to figure out the other FLW examples of this! So here are some remodelings that Wright did in Oak Park in the first decade of the 20th century, from knowledge.
Hills-DeCaro House 1906. The process of modernizing old houses with ribboned windows and continuous stucco finishes became so popular lots of local Oak Park architects and builders did it.
Young House, Wright redesign 1908 – mostly the wraparound porch creating horizontal emphasis with the Tudor gables still sticking up.
Now in my tenth year in Texas, I am surrounded by examples of houses that swallowed up earlier houses, shifting from simple rock houses and cabins into Victorian extravaganzas. Thanks to Professor Kenneth Hafertepe I now understand better how single-pen rock houses grew into double pens and then added upper levels.
You can see the earlier roofline. This is near Bulverde.
The King William Historic District – the oldest in Texas – is rife with big houses that swallowed up little ones. I was recently quoted regarding the Joske House, which is a masterclass in Renaissance Revival, where no pediment is unbroken, no balustrade unbowed and no basket arch unornamented.
But this was a 1900 remodeling by architect Solon McAdoo of a four-room stone house built in 1881. The famous Villa Finale – the only King William house open for tours – also began as a one-story limestone house in 1876. In 1881 a new owner added a two-story brick wing but the big change came in 1896 with the front porch and tower, which is the bulk of what attracts the eye today.
If you look beyond the porch and tower you can see the earlier houses. This actually happened a lot in King William – on Madison Street you can see several houses that began as a single story of stone and had stories of brick or frame added later, like the Elmendorf house, c. 1885 with a 1917 second story.
There are quite a lot of these on Madison Street, including this Wagenfuhr House, of which there were two and each grew a story later. This one was a one-story German rock house in 1870 that had a frame addition perhaps a generation later. Its neighboring Wagenfuhr house added a nice Victorian second story and can be seen in the featured photo for this blog.
Just down the street the Martin/Van Derlip house started as an 1870 limestone one-story and got a brick second story about 1886, smoothed together with a stucco rendering.
The famous Oge house which looks like a Southern plantation was a one story plus basement home built in 1857 and completely made over by architect Alfred Giles in 1881.
On the first block of King William, you have the Ball houses, which were identical in 1868 but one got a second story about 1904.
Some people get it – historic designation and affordability
It has been fashionable over the last dozen years to blame historic designation for the rising cost of housing in cities and towns nationwide. If your brain is in a simple, mechanistic mode, it might seem that regulations that encourage the preservation of single-family homes could limit the supply of denser, cheaper alternatives. That has a logical flow to it that can be seductive if you leave your brain in that simple, mechanistic mode. Don’t do that. It’s reptilian.
Some people do get it – my friend and colleague Paul Steinke of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia shared a recent article by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic titled Knocking Down a Fable About City Historic Districts. Inga Saffron wrote there “is no credible evidence showing that historic preservation is the reason Philadelphia has become more expensive.” She sees the culprit as zoning. When I researched the history of zoning for my dissertation, it was clear that its wide adoption in the early 20th century was driven by suburbs that wanted only single-family homes. I get it.
There has been an effort in many places (Minneapolis, Oregon) to get rid of single-family zoning because it inhibits affordability. I summarized this in a blog last year. There a strong YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement with similar goals. Ed Glaeser was a big champion of this theory in his book Triumph of the City, which I reviewed when it came out. I was not terribly concerned about his argument against historic districts because it had problems of scale, causation and even economics.
SCALE
Even the most preservation oriented cities landmark less than 5% of their buildings. That includes New York if you count all the boroughs. Yes, Manhattan might have up to a fifth of its buildings with historic status, but Manhattan is a unicorn in so many ways that unicorns should be called Manhattans instead. So, how could 4% of properties drive the cost of the other 96%?
Chicago has 60 districts and about 350 individual landmarks. The Chicago Historic Resources Survey done in the 1980s and 1990s identified 17,000 buildings that might have historic interest. So that’s a lot, right! I mean, there are about 370,000 buildings in Chicago, so we are talking 4.5%! But most of those “orange-rated” buildings get torn down after a short demolition delay, so our real percentage thirty years later is smaller.
Now, I did live in a suburb – Oak Park, Illinois – that had landmarked what looks like about a third of its footprint, beginning with the Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie School of Architecture Historic District back in the 1980s. Interestingly, its 1994 Long Range Preservation Plan called for more ADUs (called coach houses or granny flats) – that is to say: more density and a step away from single-family zoning.
As you can see, Oak Park does have a lot of big historic districts, but they do not include the apartments and highrises where a majority of the suburb’s population has lived for the last two generations. The third dimension is missing from the map. Most of the residents do not live in a historic district.
Preservation folks have been encouraging greater density in those districts since 1994. Last week the Village Board took up the issue. 30 years later. (Preservationists are always WAY ahead of the game.)
Similarly, Saffron’s article on Philadelphia noted that the Old City historic district has quadrupled in population since the district was created in 2003. And as my friend Jim Bailey notes, right in the center of the oldest historic district in Texas is a 1920s development with a density of 126 units per acre. It looks like this:
So, scale is an issue and density can work in historic districts. There is also the problem of…..
CAUSATION (ECONOMICS)
Where does real estate value come from? Location, location, location, right? I bought a Frank Lloyd Wright house in 1991 for $1, but it had a negative $40,000 value. Another one of the houses in the row recently sold for $30,000, thirty years later. Real estate is as asset whose value is entirely externalized.
Unlandmarked Bucktown in Chicago tripled in value in 1987 while contiguous Wicker Park lagged in landmark limbo. Saffron’s article points to an NYU study that showed the steepest rent increases happened in the least landmarked parts of Brooklyn. Rapidly increasing real estate values, gentrification and displacement happen in many urban areas. Generally, historic districts preserve and enhance real estate values, because they reduce uncertainty about location, location and location – you know it won’t change much. But designation always arrives AFTER rehabilitation has happened. Residents rehab and then act to preserve their investment. Designation doesn’t happen before values go up.*
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation Chair Sara Bronin has a book coming out about zoning (Key To The City)and has been speaking regularly about zoning changes that would support BOTH historic preservation and affordable housing, including provisions that: enable housing conversions, create mixed-use neighborhood centers, eliminate minimum parking requirements, encourage accessory dwelling units, and strengthen transferable development rights. As noted above and before, many of these items have been on our playlist for 30 years.
Here in San Antonio, the Office of Historic Preservation has been promoting preservation as affordable housing for some years, releasing a major study in 2019. As Donovan Rypkema, the guru of preservation economics has said for years: “You can’t build new and rent cheap.” In 2024 a million dollars will build you three and a half residential units if you are lucky. The economic challenge is on the supply side.
You can’t build your way to affordability. Better to fix – and add density – to what you have. Existing housing stock is a nonrenewable resource.
2021 – Government Hill, San Antonio
2023
*My dissertation on historic districts basically found zero examples of districts created without strong community support and without rehabilitation already happening at scale.
Early 2024 photos
Old Naval Hospital, Washington, DC
Just a collection of images from the first 10 weeks of 2024, mostly in San Antonio.
Fachwerkbau details with a bit of Prussian Blue, New Braunfels
Cruise ship in Galveston, January
Addition to historic house, Roosevelt Park neighborhood, San Antonio
Landa Library, Monte Vista, San Antonio (1928)
Fireplace detail, also in Monte Vista
Five O’Clock Tea by Julius Stewartm 1894, San Antonio Museum of Art
The alley buildings of Capitol Hill, Washington, DC.
Design Guidelines D’OH!
There are some basic principles of heritage conservation/historic preservation you will always hear from me. The first is that preservation is not a series of rules or standards but a PROCESS. It is a better process than zoning or building codes because it treats every property as an individual with its own character and history. Zoning and building treat properties as alienated commodities, one-size-fits-all.
Fortified Saxon village, Transylvania. I guess these two pictured structures are the same. Both are made of the same material and designed for both commerce and fortification. They must be identical.
Which is why preservation folks often bump up against zoning attorneys, because the whole treating-resources-based-on-their-actual-characteristics thing is especially annoying to them. After all, their expertise is commodification. You don’t have a house, you have a residential unit.
3-2 $2400 a month ignore the picture.
I taught Historic Preservation Planning for almost twenty years and one of the two final paper assignments was ALWAYS developing design guidelines for a specific historic district. The principle, which was clear since the advent of historic districts, was that you can’t really have design guidelines that apply to all historic districts in a city. Some are Victorian. Some are bungalows. Some are Mid-Century Modern. Any design guidelines that applied to such diverse districts would have to be so bland as to be useless.
This is a San Antonio historic district, so it should follow the same rules as….
this San Antonio historic district, or this one (they all look the same, right?)
I would show my students the Mid-North Historic District Design Guidelines from 1973, created at the time the historic district in Chicago was designated, because EVERYONE KNEW that each district had its own characteristics and needed its own, specifically tailored design guidelines. But that did not happen due to money. So, a perennial Master’s student assignment was born.
Mid-North historic district, Chicago
Fast forward thirty years and the Conservation Society of San Antonio gives a grant to the River Road neighborhood to craft design guidelines. I also helped them from the technical side, since my dissertation was on the history of historic districts and I have a lot of experience with design guidelines.
This is River Road. Some commonalities with bungalow districts, although with more Revival Style and fair amount of Moderne influence, especially in windows, unlike other districts from that period.
Those are the windows on the right – very particular to this area.
And they came up with an excellent document. It was set to be adopted by the Historic and Design Review Commission today but some people in the neighborhood (attorneys probably, or some other commodifiers) raised a last-minute stink so they pulled this thoughtful document from the agenda. Apparently they think that the citywide guidelines are enough, which means they missed the entire point.
Which means they think that River Road looks the same as everywhere else.
Quod erat demonstratum.
D’OH!
OCTOBER UPDATE – DUDA FORUM
I am at the Duda Forum on Historic Preservation and Sustainable Development and Kate Singleton of the City of Dallas reported on how Dallas regulates its historic districts. They have a citywide “boilerplate” for design guidelines but then they differentiate it based on the characteristics of the district. DALLAS DOES IT RIGHT! Not only do they understand that every historic district needs its own individual design guidelines, they also do it for Conservation Districts! Trevor Brown (on the same panel) described how Conservation Districts each have their own regulations that vary dramatically between districts. Some only regulate materials, some do setbacks and massing. Trevor stated that it is a “Neighborhood-driven process” which is exactly what preservation is supposed to be.
Preservation is a process whereby a community determines what elements of its past it wants in its future.
Every place has its own character and needs its own guidelines.
If you need a primer on how historic districts work, here’s one of mine from 2009.
San Antonio Update June 2023
I would always tell my students that you don’t save buildings once. You have to do it again and again. Back in the 1980s and 90s when I worked for Landmarks Illinois (it had a longer name then) we helped save the Hotel St. Benedict Flats (James Egan, 1882) four times in six years – with a National Register nomination, appeals to zoning changes, and finally a landmark designation followed by a phone call from a developer who ended up buying and restoring it using the historic tax credits and an easement donation.
Last year here at the Conservation Society of San Antonio, we lobbied San Antonio College and the Archdiocese – then the owner – to offer the building for sale. We collaborated with the Tobin Hill neighborhood group and even with this blog, which led to two persons purchasing the building for rehabilitation as a wine bar. You can see my blogs on it here and here. Now, a year later, it needs to be saved again as the owners have put it up for sale following a little rehab and some damage from intruders.
I actually discovered that people had broken in back in February when I was taking Advisory Council on Historic Preservation Chair Sarah Bronin on whirlwind tour of San Antonio preservation. I immediately alerted one of the owners, but some damage had been done and now there is a protective fence and several boarded up windows.
Damage does not always mean the end of an historic landmark, and at least the Hughes House was officially landmarked by the City Council in the interim. It also got a zoning change for the wine bar, no mean feat given its location near schools and houses of worship. Still, the process starts again, the building is a bit banged up and the future is uncertain….
In other news, a landmark I drive past every day had a fire recently, again courtesy of the obdachlos, who also tried to block firefighters from responding. Fortunately the firefighters succeeded and only a portion of the rear of the house was damaged. We were interviewed by a tv station about the house, since it is a Texas Historical Landmark and associated with Venustiano Carranza, one of the big four of the Mexican Revolution along with Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Carranza was President for most of 1915-20 (and actually got rid of Zapata). The house was built by his niece 1913-14. Both Madero and Carranza spent significant time in San Antonio early in the decade, although the houses they visited before 1913 are all demolished now. There is a statue of Madero on the River Walk near King William. So the Carranza house is our only physical connection to this history.
Fortunately the house has been secured, but thanks to the KSAT reporters, we learned that there is another building associated with this important chapter in San Antonio history, and it is right across the street. And it is being rehabbed. Now we have two buildings, whose history is intertwined!
Turns out this simple industrial structure was the publication site of La Prensa, an important Spanish language newspaper in San Antonio for a century. La Prensa was front and center during the Mexican Revolution, and having it right across the street doubles down on the value of this landmark. Here are two buildings that hosted important visitors central to a defining moment in Mexican history. They had discussions and strategized here, and the press put their words into action.
If these walls could talk……. The good news is the building is secured, so perhaps it will not suffer the fate of so many others – perhaps a dozen a year – lost to demolition by neglect.
The issue raises the larger question of why the city can’t do more to prevent the loss of vacant buildings, especially since San Antonio passed a Vacant Building Ordinance nearly a decade ago. According to KSAT News, over 250 vacant historic buildings exist in the city, and we have certainly seen many of them succumb to fire after squatters take up residence. We had the sad story of 503 Urban Loop last year, the Lone Star Brewery before that. Heck, 800 W. Russell in my neighborhood (pictured above) burned twice. Like many of the others, the owners were neither local nor attentive.
Above: Site of 212 W. Dewey owned by an Austin developer who bought like 8 houses in the Tobin Hill area which are all subject to demolition by neglect. This neglect is not a lack of capital or supply chains or anything – it is a business model, one that harms neighborhoods.
So why doesn’t the Vacant Building ordinance solve the problem? Representatives of historic neighborhoods have been asking the city that very question in recent days. If neighborhoods alert the Office of Historic Preservation about a vacant building and get it on the Vacant Building list, shouldn’t Development Services be enforcing code violations? Or, is it because it is on the list that everyone thinks someone else is taking care of it? Stay tuned!
Zoning, housing and preservation
One of the issues of the current decade is the push against single-family zoning, usually from the perspective of increasing the supply of affordable housing, but also arguably from a climate change perspective. In either case, more density is desired. So, how does preservation fit into this? Well, many of the YIMBY proponents of same accuse historic district preservation of being a cloaked kind of exclusionary zoning.
Like many such apprehensions of the historic preservation/heritage conservation field, there is truth in it — if you go far back enough in time. (Pro tip – you need to go back at least 30 years and ignore everything that has happened since).
In fact, historic preservationists have been advocating for ADUs (accessory dwelling units) in districts for the last 30 years – as a technique to insure preservation by offering additional income to owners. I remember it from the Oak Park Illinois Preservation Plan Lisa DiChiera wrote in 1993-94. We have long seen adding extra units as a way to increase density and HELP preserve beloved community fabric.
When I do my talk on the history of historic districts, I note that arguably the first modern historic district inspired by residents and not tourists was Georgetown in 1950. It literally took an act of Congress and was perceived – correctly – of causing gentrification and displacing African-Americans. Which it did. A similar thing happened a couple of years later with the first revolving fund in Charleston. Zoning itself emerges in California in the 19th century as a way to exclude the Chinese, and even the density-based New York City zoning of 1916 was adopted by hundreds of suburbs, in part as a way to exclude people.
Historic districts, however, took a different turn starting in the 1960s as they were tweaked by community activists to become something a museum curator would never recognize. This process itself also took 30 years, so that by the time I was fighting alongside community members in North Kenwood, Chicago in 1991-93 to create a historic district, the goal was quite the opposite in terms of race and income. (Race Against Renewal, Future Anterior, Winter 2005)
But it would take a little longer to push the preservation practice a little further in terms of building types. You see, in North Kenwood they refused to include any multi-family apartment buildings in the historic district. You could put in two-flats and three-flats but they excluded century-old architecturally intact six-flats and 12-flats. It would take a couple more years for the preservation community to accept the multi-family as worthy of preservation, even though I argued it in North Kenwood in 1991. When 409 Edgecombe in Harlem, New York became a landmark in the mid-90s, the whole scheme changed. Within a few years, the old Hamilton Heights historic district – which had excluded multi-family – had filled in and marched a dozen blocks up St. Nicholas with four separate additions. Multifamily was now decidedly historic.
So, if the YIMBYs accuse preservation of exclusionary zoning, you can let them know they were correct in 1915 and 1950 and there was a lingering effect into the early 1990s.
But they’ve been wrong since.
Verbal Palimpsests
“The wrong side of the tracks.” This is an idiomatic phrase that most English speakers would recognize. It indicates something is lower in status, class, wealth and even safety. It refers of course to pre-20th century urbanism, where BIPOC and other communities were segregated, redlined and denied municipal services. It is somewhat surprising that the phrase survives, because much of its urbanism has been lost over the last century plus, when the truck and the automobile introduced radical uncertainty into the location equation, causing zoning, redlining and arguable public housing and highways to keep people apart through most of the 20th century.
The redevelopment of industrial districts and railroads in the last three or four decades has further eroded the clarity of “wrong side of the tracks” in the physical world, yet the verbal palimpsest persists. Old industrial districts served by often defunct railroads have become trendy neighborhoods, from SoHo to LoDo to Third Ward. Here in San Antonio, the West Side remains both physically separated by railroad tracks and underdeveloped, but it seems only a matter of time before that physical economy changes with the growth of downtown and especially the UTSA downtown campus.
The verbal palimpsest has also survived at least two rethinkings of the century-old mechanism that eliminated radical uncertainty by “zoning” various communities. The vast majority of the 591 communities that adopted zoning in its first decade were residential suburbs, and their goal was single-family zoning. Today that is being challenged in many cities with a push for more density to battle climate change (and that can help) and unaffordable housing (not so much). Accessory Dwelling Units, ADUs, are all the rage. Of course historic preservationists were touting those a quarter century ago.
We also have an effort to preserve shotgun houses, because they are historic “small” houses and thety are affordable because they are already built. You can’t build new and rent cheap.
Interestingly, this row runs right up to the railroad tracks, which I live on the other side of. And while the tracks still have trains many times a day, the neighborhoods on both sides of the tracks are up and coming, despite the demise of the streetcars that created them a century ago. The verbal palimpsest persists, as does the physical, but both have lost their meaning in a 21st century regenerating city.