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…
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.
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.
Authenticity after 60 years
In my investigations over the last 15 years into the limitations of the National Register of Historic Places I often suggested the use of “authenticity” instead of “integrity” in judging whether a property qualified for listing. In creating the National Register in 1966, U.S. heritage experts had chosen to go with “integrity” instead of “authenticity” which was more common internationally. Integrity is more mechanistic, and defined by architecture, which makes sense given the heavy influence of architectural practice on the U.S. preservation movement from the 1930s through 1960s. In dealing with the broader range of heritage sites in the 2000s, I thought deferring to “authenticity” could help address the diversity deficit in the National Register of Historic Places. You can see my 2016 blog about integrity and authenticity here.
Now that we are more than 60 years removed from the Venice Charter of 1964, it is interesting to note that “authenticity” has itself undergone a transformation away from a formalistic architectural definition and toward ideas of heritage as defined by the communities who steward them. To quote from the most recent World Heritage discussion of authenticity:
“Over time, the understanding of authenticity has undergone significant evolution from a
material-based notion to a pluralistic, functional, traditional, spiritual, intangible, culturally
relative and value-based concept, reflecting the diversity of human societies, the different
ways in which heritage is created, used, and remembered, as well as reflecting the
evolution of the notion of heritage.” Authenticity in the context of the World Heritage Convention: Evolution and Impact, 25th Session of the General Assembly of States Parties to the Convention concerning the protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, November 2025.
This is similar to what I have been saying in presentations and book chapters since 2010: Heritage conservation is a four-step process of Identifying, Evaluating, Registering and Treating historic resources. Heritage conservation happens when a community determines what elements of its past it wants in its future. As noted in the Burra Charter, the community whose heritage is being conserved needs to be involved in each step of the process – Identification, Evaluation, Registration and Treatment. If we bring community into the process too late, or if we assume as professionals that we are better qualified to Evaluate or determine Treatments, we will come up short. How you conserve Mount Taylor and how you conserve a Victorian house museum are not equivalent.
Mount Taylor, NM last month.
Villa Finale, the month before
Authenticity received its first definitional challenge about 1980, just a few years after the operational guidelines for World Heritage were established, following Western architecture-based practice that focused on design, materials, workmanship and setting. That challenge was Warsaw, Poland, completely rebuilt after World War II thanks to precise documentation done forty years earlier. The materials and workmanship were not authentic. But it was extremely important to the community. The next challenge came in 1992 when Japan brought with it an understanding of the integrity of process, rather than product. The Shinto temple is a thousand years old even as it is rebuilt from scratch every twenty years, because the tools and craftsmanship are one thousand years old.
Meanwhile in the West, we see no problem restoring an 18th century house with epoxy, nail guns and other tools and techniques that did not exist at the time, because we revere the object more than the process.
The shift toward a more holistic – and genuinely international – approach began with the Nara Document on Authenticity in 1994. To the original four aspects of authenticity were added form, substance, use and function, traditions and techniques, location, and spirit and feeling. The key idea was that authenticity had to be defined within a cultural context. And while that definition is not universal, the process – Identify, Evaluate, Register and Treat – is.
Another 30 years has passed, and authenticity has continued to evolve. By the 2000 expert meeting at the Great Zimbabwe, authenticity was linked explicitly to living traditions, stewardship and ritual. Many cultures do not place as high a value on material remains as they do on speech, memory and community values. In May of this year, the International Conference on Cultural Heritage in Africa: A Dialogue on the
Concept of Authenticity was held in Nairobi, Kenya discussed how African heritage is dynamic, community-centered, and deeply rooted in both tangible and intangible values. A similar discussion is planned for Southeast Asia.
The other problem, as you might imagine, is that “authenticity’ has no equivalent in Japanese, Arabic and certain African languages. Different societies conceive of continuity, value, trust and authority in different ways. As the document notes, the challenge may be existential: How do you ask for proof of Outstanding Universal Value if values are culture-based and not universal?
Heritage Conservation in 2025
In chaotic times, one might think that the preservation of historic sites might be a respite from chaos, but as with all firehoses, the current recrudescence has soaked all sectors. I was in Washington DC last week for our annual Preservation Action Advocacy Week, which seemed like many of the others, despite the steady drumbeat of the 24-hour news cycle trying to make sense of the firehose. We met with six congressional offices and were well received in all, because for a long time historic preservation (heritage conservation) has had bipartisan support. Texas has had a very good state historic tax credit for the last decade, so our pitch to retain the federal one hit home for the Texas congressional delegation.
The firehose of course refers to the huge quantity of executive actions that have affected most domestic and foreign sectors. In terms of “preservation” the obvious initial impacts are loss of staff at historic sites of the National Park Service, overriding of Section 106 review due to a declared energy emergency, and loss of preservation staff in many other federal agencies, including the GSA which oversees real estate, USDA, Transportation and others. Given that the firehose has been on for less than two months, and given that some firings or overridings are reversed, it is very hard to assess the damage at this time. Of greater concern would be any permanent dismantling of federal review processes, most of which are carried out by states and other sovereign entities.
The role of heritage conservation is to preserve the histories of all communities that make up a place. And the act of heritage conservation is a process by which a community determines what elements of its past it wants in its future, and how those elements are preserved. This process can exist at any and all levels but it only really is effective at the community level. And, as one of our speakers (Valerie Grussing of NATHPO) noted: “Community moves faster than government.”
I have worked in the heritage conservation field for 42 years, working for non-profits the whole time. I have occasionally been hired for specific projects by government entities, mostly at the municipal level. So it is at the level of the blessed community that we must continue our efforts to uncover and conserve the history we find in our local places.
Brackenridge Park
I have been on the Brackenridge Park Stakeholders Advisory Committee for the last half year and was one of the facilitators at the public hearing January 8 which drew some 114 people for two hours of discussing what Guiding Principles should be used for evaluating future projects in Brackenridge Park. We will be having another public meeting January 30 where we will share the revised criteria. There is also an online survey you can fill out before then here.
Urban parks have inherently competing interests within them. They are designed to preserve and promote nature. They are also designed to promote recreation. Those two elements can be at odds. They are home to wildlife, but also part of human life and again, those two uses will be in conflict at times. The Guiding Principles are designed to help negotiate these inherent conflicts. Here is what I said at the meeting, according to the San Antonio Express-News: “When you are dealing with a place where people are doing things, and there’s also nature and wildlife, there will always be conflicts at some point. So, respect for compromise is one of our guiding principles.”
Here is a bird eating a fish in Brackenridge Park recently, so we have those conflicts as well.
Brackenridge Park is kind of unique. The Brackenridge Park Conservancy (founded by the Conservation Society of San Antonio in 2009) did a Cultural Landscape Report for the park a little over a year ago. See, unlike most parks – Central Park in Manhattan, or Jackson Park in Chicago – the park was not undevelopable land that was transformed by a landscape architect into a community amenity. That is how most urban parks are formed.
Central Park. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted AFTER he visited San Antonio.
Brackenridge Park is actually a natural area near the source of the San Antonio river that was preserved as a park. The largest part of it was donated to the city by George Washington Brackenridge in 1899. He owned it because he owned the first public water system in town, so it is kind of a real estate development story, but it is still unlike most urban parks in that many elements of the landscape are NOT designed.
The 1877 Pump House in Brackenridge Park, built for the first public water system.
Consequently, the Cultural Landscape Report and our Guiding Principles include reference to 12,000 years of human interaction with the park, long before it became part of New Spain. One of the reasons we are in this whole community process was the strong reaction to proposed tree cutting by citizens concerned with both the environment and traditional spiritual practices of indigenous people. I covered the tree issue, and my own participation in traditional cultural practice regarding trees here last year.
View from the river to the golf course. Like many urban park golf courses, it is one of the oldest in the area.
So, unlike most urban parks, there are portions of Brackenridge Park that are arguably “wilderness”. “Wilderness” is where both natural area conservation and historic preservation began 150 years ago.
Here. Well, also Yellowstone. 1872.
Today the wilderness model of natural area conservation is as outdated as the house museum model in historic preservation. Over a decade ago the two started coming together to create a new, more practical and less Puritanical approach to conservation as a whole, as I described here in 2013.
Goats in Brackenridge Park in 2023 to help clear undergrowth. Sheep – designed to eat grass and thus “mow” the lawn areas, were part of the original 19th century design of many large Chicago parks.
Brackenridge Park not only has 12,000 years of human history, but a lot of interesting cultural practices as well, such as Easter weekend, when many many families camp out in the park for three days.
So the whole exercise is setting up principles and criteria to help negotiate between natural, cultural and other environmental wants and needs. As I explained at the opening of the public meeting, these goals will be in conflict and the principles and criteria are a way to balance their competing interests.
Well, that is a lovely waterfall! But unlike some parts of the park, there is nothing natural about it. This is an industrial site – a quarry – that was transformed into a Japanese garden over a century ago. This part of Brackenridge Park was designed, and it was an adaptive re-use of an abandoned industrial quarry. Heck, there are even lime kilns surviving from when the dimension stone gave way to gravel.
The Japanese Tea Garden is one of the highlights of San Antonio I always bring visitors to see. I am a frequent user of the park and my bike rides through it at least once a week offer a variety of natural and cultural highlights. We begin coming up the concrete ditch along Avenue A next to the golf course, which again is not a very natural landscape.
We continue across the Mulberry bridge and past the Witte museum. Last year the egrets had taken over the next section of trees to the level of public health hazard.
We then stop to enjoy the river flowing over the Low Water Crossing, built in 1937 for automobiles to get from one side of the park to the other. Probably not ideal for water quality to have cars splashing through there, and it hasn’t been allowed in some years. We will often see the Zoo mini train in the distance at this point.
We then follow the river south through a portion of the park that is undesigned save for picnic tables and walkways and a road. In addition to dog walkers and picnickers we occasionally see trapeze artists and jugglers in a small meadow as we near Mulberry Avenue again.
We follow the river south of Mulberry along Avenue B between the golf course and the River Road neighborhood until we come to another 1937 crossing, scheduled to be replaced. Here the artificial waterfall attracts migratory waterfowl.
Soon we are back in the neighborhood reveling in the aftermath of the forest bath and commenting on what we may have seen – tents, jugglers, low riders, family picnics, fishers and historic buildings. It is a swirl of competing uses that is richer for its complexities and contradictions. One of the participants in the January 8 public meeting said, we should maintain the “romantic and quirky” character of the park.
Joske pavilion, 1920s.
San Antonio Update September 2023
Here is the Sommers saloon as it looked 2 months ago, then a month ago, and now.
Which is sad, and saving the stones is not true preservation. But it is puro San Antonio, because this is a place where preservation of something is the first thought, even if that is preservation by relocation or reconstitution. You can argue that those are not true preservation solutions, and you would be right. But in this city, landfill is never the first option. The plan is to have some of the best architects in town re-use the old limestone and caliche for a new development.
I continue to worry about the Hughes House, 312 W Courtland. We worked to save it and found two willing buyers a year ago. They did landmark it and get a zoning change for a wine bar, but vandals/obdachlos broke in last winter and now it is for sale again. In addition to its architectural beauty, it was the home of Russell Hughes, known as La Meri, whose dance was internationally known.
This is when 503 Urban Loop burned in February 2022 on the coldest night of the year. The building was a very famous brothel and then spent a century as Catholic institutions helping women and children in the impoverished Laredito district of San Antonio. We worked with Esperanza Peace and Justice Center and Westside Preservation Alliance to landmark it and were delayed again and again until it burned. Now, the purported developer of an 8-story building there is selling the site. The landmarking process is supposed to insure three things:
- Archaeological investigation of whole site
- Preservation of any items recovered at a local museum
- Permanent interpretation visible from the public ROW.
Will they do it? And who is they? The new owners or the ones when it was burning? Stay tuned!
To address the surfeit of accidentally burned buildings, the City Council yesterday expanded the Vacant Building program beyond historic districts and upped the fines to $500 a day. Now maybe those Austin developers will modify their tactics. But there is still a lot of charcoal in the landscape.
Much of the carnage happens in the area just north of downtown and west of the Pearl, including the Tobin Hill Historic District. Basically everything not in that district is a candidate for demolition. The latest attempt is an interesting ensemble of five Victorian buildings that feels like a little historic district. The trick is that only two are landmarked. Can you guess which?
If you guessed Numbers 1 and 3 you are right! But they really do look like a district. Let me show you the rear building that they also want to demolish.
So this is another interesting development strategy. Pick off the buildings one by one, so that the context is diminished and you can start arguing that there is no “there” there.
I think the Folk Victorians at Number 1 (210 Lewis – not landmarked and slated for demolition!) and Number 2 (215 Poplar, landmarked) are pretty cool, and 225 Poplar (not landmarked) has that impressive double porch with Classical details. Again – stay tuned!
It will be a busy fall – November 1-3 we are having a World Heritage Symposium which will not only recall our status as one of only 25 World Heritage sites in the US, but also recall the UNESCO San Antonio Declaration of 1996, which was the Americas’ response to the Nara document on Authenticity in 1994. Together these statements led to the community- and culture-focused approach to heritage conservation that has characterized all the advances in our field in the 21st century. It is called Affirming Cultural Identity: World Heritage in the 21st century (nice title if I do say so myself).
Trees
The other night at the Beethoven Männerchor Halle und Garten the choir came out to read a poem in German and English and sing briefly to a tree. The large pecan tree will be cut down on Friday because it is cracked and a hazard. Meanwhile, a major project for Brackenridge Park was heard by the Historic and Design Review Commission following a couple of years of protests to “Stop the Chop” of older trees in the park. While the number of trees to be cut down has been halved since the protest began, the protestors remain at full strength and more than two dozen crammed the hearing room.
Why do trees have this power over people? They lie at the center of most religious traditions, not just the Germanic ones. There are sacred trees throughout Asia and Africa. Trees are oracles, places to expiate illness or sin, gods and goddesses and even human souls. You would find a similar spoken homage to the tree about to be cut along the Irrawaddy River as we saw last night along the San Antonio River. And one protestor at the hearing interrupted with “they are sacred,” voicing a human perception that dates back tens of thousands of years.
Not technically a tree but a centuries-old camelia flower, Weiboashan, Yunnan, China.
No wonder it has always been easier to landmark trees than buildings, such as I often experienced in China, where trees were tagged red and green for how old they were and more zealously preserved than any building. Same in the U.S. where real estate developers are only happy to tell you they will save trees on the site but the buildings have to go.
I am also reminded of the pisog trees of Ireland, where ribbons, articles of clothing, glasses or other objects are tied to a tree as a prayer for healing. This is also found in many other cultures, for examples Arab folklore and Greek mythology.
So is it the religious associations, the idea of a world tree, or the idea of human transference into and out of trees that causes this level of worship and attachment? Perhaps it is simply the basic environmental impulse, the mythology of the Avatar movies. Trees symbolize our entire environment, tended by avatars of our better selves, wrapped in a harmony myth.
Naiju tree gods, Ise, Japan, 2004.
Trees were symbolic to ancient Egyptians and African farmers. They are pretty darn near universal, on par with kittens and puppies. Like kittens and puppies, they symbolize “nature” but are generally farmed and thus a part of human culture. In parks especially the vast majority of trees were planted. The goal of great landscape designers was to make these places feel that they were natural even though they were designed. Parks are designed just like a Shinto temple or the Parthenon, but we tend to categorize them as “nature” because they are alive. And of course, trees breed new trees which are unplanned – like the ones now subject to removal in Brackenridge Park. Volunteers, they are called.
Framed. Farmed. Symbolic.
Frederick Law Olmsted designed the landscape above in great detail. He curated our experience and manipulated our views. Brackenridge Park was similarly designed, and the pecan tree at the Beethoven was curated and planted in the early 20th century. Yet unlike other human designs, these living things embody a mythology and passion that buildings do not.
Mural at Weibaoshan, Yunnan “Dancing under the Pine Trees”
There are of course natural areas, some great forests where the trees aren’t farmed. Occasionally burned, yes. And yes, the indigenous like the Ohlone would burn other species to focus on the oak.
Note how the forest burned here in modern times is described: “fuels had been building up for 117 years”. That is because normally (whatever that means) fires occurred every 8-10 years. Tree lovers tap into a long human tradition of tree worship, but there is an equally long human tradition of tree farming. The advocacy arguments are made in moral terms, but the moral realities are ambiguous. We have a preference for human-designed species, like dogs and cats, and we have made similar selections of our arboreal friends.
No one designs trees like the Japanese.
What I used to call “weed trees” up North are called “trash trees” here, but in either appellation the hate is great and the implication is that we humans did not design these trees into our environment. They were, as we say, “volunteers.” The lack architectural or historical value. We tend to curate our trees as we curate our cats and dogs.
I guess the Chinese crested is considered uglier than the Mexican hairless. This one is Peruvian.
Kittens, puppies, trees. In Brackenridge Park they have signs warning against the dumping of animals. They also have had a massive feral cat problem slowly being solved by humane spaying. Feral. That’s what you call your designed creatures when they escape the farm.
Christmas Tree farm, Los Gatos, California, ten years ago.
But why the zero-tolerance policy? That’s what I don’t get. Not a single speaker who protested last night admitted to the need to remove even one tree. Maybe that would violate the moral imperative. All or nothing. Asceticism. Not my vibe – heck I compromise on historic buildings all the time.
They were concerned about moving a large old live oak. I was not concerned about moving this 1880 limestone house across the street and rotating it 90 degrees. I’m crap at asceticism.
I sang the revised lyrics of Der Lindebaum to our Beethoven tree the other night and I will happily sing it to those park trees that are being removed because they are breaking down walls and threatening historic buildings. I can’t make more historic buildings.
Oldest industrial building in San Antonio. Note the volunteer trees, which are younger than me.
My students always chided me for handing out thick reams of readings and assignments, telling me I was “killing trees”. The implication was that I should do things digitally and save trees. My response? “I can plant more trees. I can’t plant the coal, uranium and lithium powering your digital device.” *
We planted all of these trees. You wait 20 years and there they are. I remember when the river birch on the right was in the back seat of the car.
Man kann den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen
- – I guess the proponents would imbue each tree with its own identity and personality, be it volunteer, trash, designed, or sculpted. They might say we can always build more houses, and just to add a layer of overlapping irony, I would respond that the new houses won’t be made of old growth wood, which is straighter, denser, and more disease-resistant than any modern farmed wood. So, there is that.
Forty Years
This week marks forty years since I began my career in heritage conservation, a journey over much time and vast space. I am incredibly blessed. Last week I got to take Sarah Bronin, the Chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation on a quick tour of preservation challenges and successes in San Antonio at her specific request. I recently visited by Zoom with my 7 roommates from the 2018 Harvard Business School Non Profit Management class and next week I will be in Washington DC lobbying for the Historic Preservation Fund, among other things.
Forty years is a long time, and a fun thought experiment is to take another 40 year chunk – for example the century before, 1883-1923 and see what changed. That period witnessed electrification, automobiles, movies, radio, analgesics, relativity, psychoanalysis and modern architecture. Mine witnessed personal computers, the internet, digital photography, smartphones, microbreweries, quantum entanglement, global warming and email. Both had global pandemics and both ended up with eight planets in the solar system.
The last forty years in heritage conservation/historic preservation have seen the rise of heritage areas in the 1980s, the expansion of historic tax credits in the 1990s, new approaches to intangible heritage and cultural history in the 2000s, to the current focus on affordable housing, climate change, diversity and historic trades. Some things persist, like the importance of public-private partnerships, public relations, and networking, and some things evolve, like architectural history and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards (we hope).
I am usually struck more by similarity than difference, but there has been some serious evolution in the field, even though you can find preservation initiatives dealing with trades, diversity, affordability and climate all the way back in the 1970s. To me the most significant shift has been the ongoing arc away from museum curation to community activism, and the attendant emphasis on the economic everyday.
In my dissertation, I traced the evolution of preservation from a museum-focused antiquarian enterprise in the early 20th century to a part of the neighborhood activist’s toolbox in the 1960s and 1970s. Historic districts, which were still a new thing in the 1960s (in the 1960s the Municipal Arts Society imagined there would be no more than three or four historic districts EVER in New York City). The next step came with the invention of Main Street in 1975 by Mary Means, where traditional architectural preservation was only 1/4 of the cocktail, combined with promotion, organization and economic restructuring. I arrived in the field in 1983 as the first heritage area was introduced in Congress, where again traditional preservation was only a 1/4 of the cocktail, combined now with natural area conservation, recreation and economic development.
I was asked in 1990 by Metropolitan Review to write an article about the coming decade of preservation and my answer was couched in terms of expanding audiences and expanding targets for preservation – more modern buildings, more diverse constituencies, and a greater focus on the community issues that had driven districts, Main Streets and heritage areas.
Architectural history had always lagged the community activists who had saved the Jefferson Market Courthouse in 1961 when all the experts hated High Victorian Queen Anne design. By the 1980s and 1990s the pesky public were not only fully on board with Victorian and 1920s bungalows, but they were already going after Mid-Century Modern and dragging the eggheads along reluctantly, as Richard Longstreth pointed out.
Probably the most dramatic fact of 40 years is that we are already trying to save buildings that were built during that period, some of which were decried at the time of construction, like the maligned and then beloved State of Illinois/Thompson Center in Chicago.
Diversity is perhaps the most important, and has been a leitmotif throughout my preservation career, from working for landmark designation of North Kenwood 1988-1993 to serving on no less than three diversity committees and task forces for the National Trust in the last 15 years. For the last ten years I have been leading panels and trying to find ways to bring more diversity to the National Register of Historic Places, efforts embraced by many that are starting to bear fruit. I am also very grateful to have been a part of the Coalition for the Woolworth Building here in San Antonio and today a part of the Alamo Museum Planning Civil Rights Exhibit Subcommittee planning that portion of the rehabilitated Woolworth Building. (See our video on the history here.)
Diversity is essential to the private sector for innovation and to the public sector for justice. It is essential to the heritage conservation field because our basic mission is not simply to save historic buildings, sites and places, but to save those places that will continue to have meaning to subsequent generations. After forty years in this fascinating field, I have seen many historic places “saved” more than once.
Since my first day I have understood that a key to heritage conservation is conveying the importance of a preservation ethic. Preservation is a process that a community uses to identify what elements of its past are essential to its future. Demographics have shifted significantly in 40 years, and the communities of today are measurably different than 1983.
Preservation is always a future oriented decision, and the diverse generations of the future are key. How do you insure that the next generation also believes in the importance of saving places? Listen to them and give them power.
Baguettes and Zoom
The ubiquitous French baguette was inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage this week, and our reaction must be: Why did it take so long? It has been nearly 30 years since UNESCO adopted the Intangible Cultural Heritage convention and started cataloging music, dance, costume, food, crafts and other elements of cultural heritage from across the globe. One would think the baguette would be high on the list but at least it takes it rightful place next to couscous, Turkish coffee and Belgian beer. Oh! And slivovitz, the plum brandy often central to Passover, just got listed as well.
For the second Fall in a row, I have been teaching a Zoom course to UTSA Architecture students on World Heritage Management. I have had the good fortune to have some great guest speakers – Dr. Paul Ringenbach, who wrote the World Heritage nomination for the San Antonio Missions, Christine Jacobs, Superintendent of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, and Nada Hosking, my former colleague and Executive Director of the Global Heritage Fund.
It has been fun to teach again after a decade-long break, and I am impressed by how well the Zoom interface works. Of course, it began due to COVID but it continued because now I can teach from anywhere. I taught a course at UIC in Chicago in the Spring, and I taught two of my UTSA courses this Fall while I was on my Fulbright Specialist trip to Bogotá.
It also allows me to relive many sites I visited and worked at around the world, collecting and reflecting on how heritage conservation happens and what it means for a community’s growth and health. We focus mostly on the cultural World Heritage sites, although several students have done papers on the Natural World Heritage Sites and we did cover Intangible Cultural Heritage as well.
I am impressed with how attentive the students have been and how effective the medium actually is for a class like mine which is essentially a lecture class with a lot of powerpoints – the students presented their own powerpoints on three occasions. I try to keep it interesting and connected with some basic themes, like my bottom line: Heritage conservation is a process that a community used to determine what elements of its past it wants in its future. And how.
The semester comes to an end next week, and I have learned a lot as well as – I hope – shared a lot. You learn by teaching, seeing the connections and themes that emerge even from projects and examples that you worked on long ago. From new questions and old questions (gentrification?) asked again in a new year. The added Fulbright Specialist tour (see previous blogs) added more students and insights to the mix.
