Fast Track
The demolition of the East wing of the White House suddenly brought historic preservation into the mainstream consciousness this week, with valid recriminations from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Institute of Architects and other bastions of civil society. Now, many of those knew that, in fact, the executive does not need to follow the same preservation laws as the rest of the country, and while the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation and others opined on a restraining order, the entire 120-year old wing was gone in a week.
That is because they resorted to mechanical demolition with a (rented) backhoe, which makes for the best visuals. Given the executive predilection for reality-TV-style-theatrics above realpolitik, the choice makes sense. It wastes dollars, though, and contradicts modern practice regarding deconstruction and re-use of valuable materials, a topic I covered recently. Clearly, leadership has their broughams mired in the weird 80 years.
The demolition of the Epstein East Wing is a rare moment when historic preservation spends some brief time at the height of national consciousness, and heck, it could continue next week when some western legislator with a bee in his buckskins is holding a hearing on the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. We might not wish for that, though, because everything that rises up in this performative administration tends to fall and crash just as fast (except prices).
Yes, it is the People’s House, and yes, the approach drew the appropriate rebukes from the bastions of civil society, and yes, at the end of the day there was precious little anyone could do about it. And yes, it is dumb and artless and clumsy and cowardly. They follow the fast track because they can’t do the actual work. The renderings of the oversized replacement building work in the media, even though they don’t work architecturally, as anyone who looks closely can see. But then again, it’s probably just a pretence for rebuilding the underground bunker…..
Photos by me from March tour of WH – except the featured image – you have to guess where that is.
Remember when the buck stopped here? Good times.
DECEMBER UPDATE:
Kudos to the National Trust for Historic Preservation for filing a lawsuit last week against the demolition of the East Wing. Reality stars reign in media fights, but they fold when evidence is required.
Deconstruction and the weird 80 years
I saw a wonderful presentation by Mae Bowley at the Destination Downtown 2025 conference last week in El Dorado, Arkansas. Deconstruction is the systematic dismantling of older buildings in order to re-use their materials. San Antonio adopted one of the best deconstruction ordinances in the country a couple of years ago and Stephanie Phillips and the rest of Shanon Miller’s team got plenty of kudos.
Opening of the Material Innovation Center at the Kelly Bungalows in November, 2022.
Mae’s presentation was electric for many reasons, but the one that stood out to me was the historical one. Deconstruction is not a new thing – it is what everyone everywhere did until about 1940. Only during the last 80 years did we do something different. That different thing was demolishing buildings and throwing them in the trash. No one did that before.
And Mae provided another historical tidbit I had missed completely. Mechanical demolition with bulldozers and the like was a product of World War II, where those machines were needed to clear jungles for airfields or urban debris for troop advancement. Urban renewal started immediately after World War II, and all of a sudden we had new mechanisms – like bulldozers, which derive from tanks – for reshaping place. Urban renewal continued through the 1960s and the National Historic Preservation Act is traditionally seen as a reaction to urban renewal and interstate highways, which required the bulldozing of many, many buildings.
Now, I was aware of the economic shift that took place during this same weird 80 year period. In the early 20th century and before, buildings were commonly moved and reused. Heck, I have seen a significant building moved in San Antonio every year over the last decade. When that happened in 1900 – and it happened everywhere – the economic rationale was simple. The fixed asset of the building was worth more than the land. Even when places like Euclid Avenue in Cleveland saw demolition of mansions, it was because a new use – industry – was MORE valuable. Same in LA circa 1915.
Moving the 1880 Claudius King house in San Antonio, 2019.
Mae even illustrated the long history of deconstruction when she illustrated the deconstruction she did of a 1920s house. By the time they got under the sheathing and onto the walls themselves, they found evidence of earlier materials that had been reused. In other words, the deconstruction revealed evidence of earlier deconstruction.
Which made me think of buildings around the world built from materials scavenged from other buildings. Like this Jacobean house constructed from the stone of Fountains Abbey (Yorkshire, UK) after the dissolution of the monasteries.
Or this mosque in Delhi (India) composed of the ruins of a couple dozen Hindu and Jain temples.
Or, like, most of Rome. Or even like our San Antonio Missions, whose limestone and sandstone walls migrated over the decades into nearby buildings.
The Sisson House near Mission San Juan – this house was itself a deconstruction project last year.
Deconstruction of the Sisson House at Graf and Presa, October 2024.
Mae also spent a lot of time talking about wood – because deconstruction allows you to get some old-growth wood, which is not something that exists in the market in 2025. Old growth wood is straighter, more disease and rot-resistant and has a tighter grain. It is one of the most notable materials that can be easily recycled (once you pull the nails out). Brick, too. When I started in heritage conservation in 1980s Chicago I saw that even then demolition sites would save the Chicago brick and “send it to the South”. When I got to San Antonio in 2016, I finally saw a building made of Chicago brick. In 2009.
Also it is Ladino one of the best restaurants at the Pearl – where they re-used EVERYTHING.
I looked back and it seems I blogged about Deconstruction in 2009 and was pretty negative – I compared it to the difference between recycling and reusing. Recycling requires a lot of energy and produces a lot of waste compared to reuse. I can reuse a bottle by cleaning it, but to recycle it I have to grind it up and remelt the glass. But what I did not realize at the time was that deconstruction is something we have been doing since we first made cities and towns. And it makes sense – why should the landfill get all of the good wood?
Abundance and Scarcity: Not pie.
China has built tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail in the last two decades. When I traveled in rural Yunnan in 2004 it was an all-day drive from Kunming to Dali and another few hours to Weishan. By 2014 it was a few hours tops by road or rail. High speed rail is so successful that Chinese airlines are complaining that too few people fly from Beijing to Shanghai. Meanwhile, California’s high-speed rail proposal from the 1980s will probably never happen.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have written a book called Abundance that provides a structural reason for our drop from first-world status. They argue that the nation’s institutional architecture prevents things from happening rather than facilitating things. Klein in a podcast said we have prevented good people from achieving things, which makes bad actors who promise to break the rules popular. Hence, the political reason for our drop.
Now, this might seem like the anti-regulatory banner-waving of YIMBYS and neocons, but the Klein argument is – like I said above – about structure, not politics. Not flags but terra firma. Put simply, the regulatory web is not designed to make things happen but to study and litigate them forever. And ever.
When Sara Bronin, in her role as Chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation from 2022-2024, tried to make historic preservation more amenable to achieving things that would help society, like affordable housing and energy efficiency, she stumbled into a few canards. Turns out the preservation infrastructure has been a lot less clogged than environmental and habitiat issues. Even in her area of great expertise – zoning – preservationists have been ahead of the games, arguing for ADUs in SFR districts since the early 1990s.
And many have been there much longer – King William district, San Antonio.
One of the smartest things Klein and Thompson do is ask about where and how things get done. In China, you can relocate a million people to build the Three Gorges Dam because public input is extremely limited. In France and Spain you can build high-speed rail because while there is a public process and bureaucracy, approvals can happen and there is not endless litigation.
They also make use of two economic writers I appreciate – Ed Glaeser and William Fischel, who help explain that strange 1970s transformation when homes became expensive primary assets. We have a housing problem that is intractable because we want two things that are structurally opposite: We want housing to be cheap enough for all, and we want housing to be our primary source of tax-advantaged wealth. Can’t. Have. Both.
Now of course Fischel and Glaeser take their shots at the regulatory world as well, and a few land but most don’t because they aim at the anecdote. Klein and Thompson note the changes we are seeing to traditional single-family zoning and give a couple of good examples where projects got done – one by having a private entity build affordable housing and the other by a governor using emergency powers to rebuild a bridge in record time. These locally rare examples are what the Chinese do daily.
At the end the book was not a deep-diving revelation but a useful provoking of thought. What are our systems designed to do and not do? I myself was hoping for a clearer definition of an abundance Weltanschauung, rather than a staid critique of the regulatory web that doesn’t add much to what Fischel and Glaeser gave us over a decade ago.
Come on guys, tell us it isn’t pie. And why. The Chinese figured that out, clearly.
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.
Whan That Aprille
In medieval Europe, one of the drivers of economic development was the practice of pilgrimage to holy shrines. The practice began in the 4th century when the Emperor Constantine developed pilgrimage sites in Jerusalem which remain successful today. While pilgrimages to Jerusalem were largely ended with the Fall of Acre in 1291, Rome remained a popular pilgrimage site, as did Santiago de Compostela in Spain, which began in the 9th century with the discovery of the tomb of St. James the Great. The pilgrimage famously began at the Tour St. Jacques in Paris, and was an economic boon to sites, hostelries and businesses en route.
Tour St Jacques, Wikimedia Commons, Cormac 2008
Adrian Bell and Richard Dale have written about the economics of the medieval pilgrimage for years, and they describe the rivalries between various pilgrimage sites seeking to profit – spiritually and economically – from their respective relics. Canterbury was of course a great pilgrimage site made famous by Geoffrey Chaucer, but it had its competitors. Shortly after Thomas Becket was murdered there it became a site of miracles and marvels, leading to “St. Cuthbert performing a sudden spate of miracles at his rival shrine in Durham.”
Statue of St Cuthbert, Durham, 1987
Each of these sites had to have a relic – a piece of the body of a saint, perhaps a piece of the true cross. Similarly, Buddhist stupas and viharas often are centered on a tooth or jawbone of Sakyamuni or perhaps the bones of a boddhisatva.
Unidentified saintly skeleton, Stift Melk, Austria, 2005.
Canterbury found the most economical solution to the relic issue, since they had some of Becket’s blood, which they could almost infinitely dilute with water without reducing its miraculous capacities. Reading Abbey had a hand of St. James and was in competition with Canterbury. Bell and Dale describe how a woman who went to Canterbury for a cure was “confronted” in a dream by St. James who said she would not be cured at Canterbury but had to go to Reading, which she dutifully did. And got cured.
Holycross Abbey, Ireland, 2000
I took the three photos above, which means I also contributed to the economy of these pilgrimages during the late 20th century. I even recall having a St. Cuthbert t-shirt from Durham. I saw St. Thomas the Apostle’s forearm in Chennai when it was still called Madras. Heck, Cologne Cathedral has the bones of the Three Kings behind the altar. Pilgrimages are still an economic boon today, from Mecca to San Antonio, where the World Heritage Mission churches have been promoting El Camino de San Antonio Missions.
“Rose Window,” Mission San Jose. Actually they are pomegranates.
If it was a fight for relics in the medieval era, the competition between cities today tends to revolve around things like convention centers and sports stadiums. As reported everywhere, San Antonio recently released the miraculous Project Marvel, which includes not one, but two sports stadia, an expanded convention center, a new theater in an old theater, and perhaps a park on top of the highway.
Most aspects of Project Marvel had been rumored for a year and a half, and of course the big arena in the center is meant to be for the San Antonio Spurs and implies the demolition of the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures building (CRS, 1968) as I reported last month here.
The good thing about Project Marvel is that it is an example of Daniel Burnham’s “Make No Little Plans” comment. A big plan “stirs men’s blood,” according to Burnham, even if it doesn’t get realized in full. His 1909 Plan of Chicago did exactly that – the majority of it never happened, but some pieces did and it continues to influence urban decisions.
The bad thing about Project Marvel is that it is an example of Daniel Burnham’s “Make No Little Plans” comment. BIG planning grew to maturity in the 1960s and by the 1980s the hubris of big design was already being felt. That hubris is that not even the smartest architect can fully predict the future, so the big plans will have flaws. Also, their bigness can be a hindrance to functionality, an issue that came up today when the Express-News noted that Project Marvel is about 10,000 parking places short of functional.
Hemisfair site with ITC circled on left. Current East Side Spurs stadium, right. Which has more parking?
Beyond parking there is traffic. A big concert in the Alamodome today will quickly back up Cesar Chavez Boulevard for a mile and a half. A big plan putting everything in the center may be bold, but it is redolent of 1960s High Modernist planning. Nowadays we prefer a more iterative, incremental approach. Why put all your eggs in one congested basket? We have a proposed baseball stadium on the northwest side of downtown, the Alamodome itself downtown, and an unused 35 acres at Lone Star. That would give you three major venues in three very well connected locations that aren’t on top of each other.
Chicago has that – a northside baseball stadium, a football stadium five miles south, a basketball-hockey stadium two miles west and another baseball stadium four miles south. Distributes the traffic, you see.
It also contributes economically to the local community, at least on the north side.
Part of the challenge of Project Marvel is that it is trying to do many things. 1. Save the Alamodome, which was a bold “build it and they will come plan” a quarter century ago but needs work. 2. Expand the convention center, because we are losing pilgrims who are choosing Reading Abbey instead. I mean conventioneers going to Austin, but same idea. 3. Do something with the Confluence Theater. 4. Build a new Spurs stadium since they have a genuine superstar. 5. Connect the East Side and St. Paul Square with a land bridge. 6. UTSA hospitality school.
What would St. Cuthbert do? It could all be done, but it might take a miracle or six.
DECEMBER 19 UPDATE:
The Texas Historical Commission has approved a demolition permit for the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures building. The approval has a stack of stipulations before the permit can be issued, so still plenty of time for an injunction. The requirements of owner University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) include HABS documentation, interpretation, the potential rehab of another neglected Hemsifair ’68 building and an executed Memorandum of Understanding with the THC. Bad news always arrives during the holidays! Over, not over.
Conserving Heritage in the wake of Historic Preservation.
Way back in 2009 I embraced Donovan Rypkema’s challenge to rebrand “historic preservation” as “heritage conservation,” which I did in a blog here. I had recently finished my dissertation on the history of historic districts, observing how the community planning movement of the late 20th century changed historic preservation from a curatorial pursuit to an exercise in democracy. To be truly democratic, more stories reflecting ALL populations needed to be told, and “heritage conservation” to me included the invaluable efforts to rescue lost history and those sites that have great community significance but little or no architecture.
Or both.
Shortly after that I began an effort which continues to this day to look at ways that the National Register of Historic Places could tell the full American story. The curatorial – and architectural – emphasis of the 1930s-1960s limited these stories. Ned Kaufmann estimated at the turn of the millennium that only 2-4% of National Register sites told the story of women and people of color, and today the number is still likely below 10%. Since 2012 I have participated in or moderated several sessions at the annual PastForward conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation looking at this issue. 2015 was a highpoint, with a panel discussion at PastForward that included two State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), a presentation at the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (thanks Brad White!) and a lecture at the Eighth National Forum on Historic Preservation Policy and Practice that was published in 2018 with specific recommendations for amending the National Register and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. The rubric was Addressing the Diversity Deficit and many people contributed valuable ideas and insights.
My initial presentations on the subject of reforming the National Register and the Secretary’s Standards were met with anger by Carol Shull, longtime Keeper of the National Register, although by 2016 she told me they were “getting better.” I can recall meeting with Julianne Polanco before she was SHPO for California and telling her I wanted to totally redo the National Register. She calmed me down and pointed out that you could do a lot of good for diversity with existing tools if you just used them properly. She was on my 2015 panel at PastForward along with Allyson Brooks, Washington state SHPO. They both used the existing tools very creatively to promote diversity. Consequently, my 2018 recommendations were reforms, not radical recasting. In fact, official National Register guidance began to shift toward heritage conservation that same year when they issued a guidance that said interior spaces that had lost all of their architectural finishes could still retain historic significance under Criterion A (history).
Like this interior of the Forum on 43rd in Chicago. Actually, it has some of its finishes. But is needs to be conserved not because of those finishes but because of the community story they circle.
In 2020 I moderated a PastForward panel that included the new head of the National Register, Sherry Frear and my San Antonio colleague Sarah Zenaida Gould, one of the founders of Latinos in Heritage Conservation (along with Julianne Polanco and many other friends) called “A Deep Dive On Integrity.” This was COVID times, so it was a Zoom panel and it managed to attract over 500 participants. In four weeks I will be on another panel with Sherry and Sarah on the issue of Integrity, at the PastForward conference in New Orleans. In addition to the diversity question, there is also the confusion of “integrity” with structural integrity. The word itself is the problem, dating to 1966 when we Americans were too scared to use the word “authenticity.”
This house has historic integrity, but not structural integrity. The Park Service will be knocking it.
So now there is a dust-up between the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, led by Sara Bronin, who has issued policy statements and comments on a whole variety of contemporary issues and how preservation should react to them. On the other side are State Historic Preservation Offices and National Park Service folks who actually implement the National Register and the Secretary’s Standards. Most recently, there is a call from ACHP for comment on a series of regulatory streamlining proposals to promote climate resilience.
Pointing to the flood level lines at Mies’ Farnsworth House, c.2009.
Like many of my colleagues in the National Preservation Partners Network, I do not find myself in one camp or another. On the one hand, some of the streamlining proposals from the ACHP comment are canards that either don’t happen (transit line and bike lane planning, review of the inside of residences, mechanical and electrical systems) or have already been accepted as reasonable or reversible (solar panels, engineered wood products). On the other hand, the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards have not been updated or reviewed in over 30 years, which is way too long.
Even in 1990 we did not regulate paint color.
On the one hand, the idea of streamlining regulatory processes is attractive. If it works. If current regulations are turning around in an average three business days, then that is not exactly earth-shattering. The issue does not seem data-driven but anecdote-driven. It feels like a series of solutions in search of a problem. Also, many of the “solutions” were long ago implemented by various agencies who are quite skilled at following the rules.
Not the Postal Service.
On the other hand, I have watched regulators argue about very silly minutiae. Admittedly, I am the opposite of the precious preservationist. I love original materials because they can’t be had today for love or money, but if they are already gone, game over. Bring on the Hardie Board and plastic lumber.
Modern wood is so bad you can see how bad it is at 60 miles an hour.
In addition to not being terribly precious, I am not an architect, so I don’t have tons of faith in technology. One of the articles of faith is that energy upgrades work. I have a lot of experience with energy upgrades whose claims are driven by sales, not data.
One of the suggested policies:
- Broadening the scope of building envelope energy efficiency improvements, including replacement windows, doors, and insulation, without further historic preservation review.
My response:
This fails to take into account three facts. First, many historic windows and doors perform as well as modern replacements. Restored old-growth windows are warrantied for 50-60 more years than contemporary products. Second, window and door ratings are based on the uninstalled product, yet most of the thermal leakage, even in new construction, happens at the frame. Third, while interior insulation could go without review, exterior insulated finish systems (EIFS) can significantly shorten the life of a building’s skin due to the method of installation and quality of materials.
Just do what Barrio Dogg did – ignore the permits and regulations and cover the building with enough goop to change the original proportions!
And then there is the profit motive. Windows and doors may be less than 10% of construction costs but they are among the biggest markups (20-25%) for contractors, so they are a profit center.
At the end of the day it is not about policies or practices, but process. Whether a given state or federal agency is fast or slow in the process is a consideration, but the larger consideration in any democracy is having a public process. If we want to tell the full American story, we need to have a place for everyone to speak.
I have always said that the brilliance of heritage conservation reviews is that unlike zoning, the resource is not graded or commodified: every review is about the individual resource and the conservation of its characteristics as defined and valued by the community. Let’s not lose that.
DECDEMBER UPDATE:
Sara Bronin, Chair of the ACHP, spoke at our Duda Forum on November 16 right after the DRAFT Program Comment on Housing, Climate and Transportation issues was released. I have taken a look at the new document and find that many of the objections I raised in my own comment on the comment were in fact addressed, and I no longer see a tendency to give blanket approval to unproven replacement windows and insulating systems. Much of the document is now focused on glossing over reviews involving repair or maintenance of windows and doors (fine) and maintenance, repair or in-kind replacement of elements like roofing, foundations, canopies and foundations (mostly fine). It encourages caulking, pointing, and weatherstripping and has benefited from some wise input regarding previously painted surfaces and low-pressure water washing. So someone listened!
Imagine that
I was intrigued by a travel guide to the Hudson River Valley that had this surprising entry: “You pass this on your way to Caramoor and it looks interesting. It’s not, really. The home of John Jay, our first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, it descended through his family through four generations and offers some basically mediocre period furnishings and a rather bizarre ballroom added in this century. Unless you are a John Jay fanatic or a distant relative of the family, this is something you can afford to miss.”
It is the Hudson River Valley, which is crowded with nature and culture, after all.
The guide goes on to share, in a paranthetic paragraph, the letter from someone chiding his dismissive description and noting that the house tells of a great man and also has a Gilbert Stuart and a John Singer Sargent. The author included the critical comment – and did not comment further. So who was right? There is certainly an audience for every house museum. The only question is how big an audience?
There are 11,000 Starbucks in the United States and 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants. Together, that is 10,000 less than the number of museums in the country, which is 35,000. Each Starbucks and McDonald’s has to turn a profit or it will be closed. While the same cold economic logic stands behind each museum, it is deflected by the noble desire to educate and enlighten an audience.
Every story is worth telling. Not every story can be told by an asset that requires $100,000 a year.
The economics of museums can be deflected for years and decades by generous donors or excellent programs or, mostly, by big endowments. The economics of museums, especially house museums, are poor at best, as I have written about here last year and here in 2012 and here in 2008. But the real question of the travel writer above is interpretive – he is basically arguing that other sites have better stories, better artifacts, better architecture.
It’s the Hudson Valley, c’mon! Look at the competition!
There is a problem of too many house museums and there always has been. The problem is not a lack of resources or the depredations of consumer capitalism. The problem is a lack of imagination. If you come across a wonderful old house with a wonderful old story, what is the LEAST imaginative way to save it? Turn it into a house museum. It requires no thought, no creative solution.
But I know the name of that soup tureen! And where to put the fork!
I have taught Preservation Planning for thirty years and my final assignment always asks students to come up with an adaptive re-use of a historic property that would allow it to survive into the future. The only caveat? It can’t be a house museum or a community center.
Damn that’s cold.
Not because those are bad things – they are wonderful things. But they require no thought or imagination. And preservation needs imagination.
Oficina de abogado o dentista, por ejemplo…..
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.
Mid Century Modern Demolition Derby
The latest raft of demolition plans in San Antonio is rendering an already hot summer unbearable. And for some reason, it is the Mid Century Modern gems that are bearing the brunt of it. San Antonio College’s Early Childhood Development building, designed by local architect William Dukes as an Osteopathic Hospital in 1958. The long, elegant building has a cellular quality softened by edges that bow in plan, and nice big windows that would be ideal for an architecture school.
Oh, and it is in great shape.
Now, you add the ongoing one-sided discussion about the Summer 2025 demolition of the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures, and…
The just-approved (conceptually) demolition of the Badge and ID Building at San Antonio airport with its wave-like folded plates and poured-in-place Y-shaped columns, and you would think everything built from Eisenhower to Nixon was under attack.
It was designed by Clarence W. W. Mayhew in 1968 according to Roadside Architecture’s article on Texas Mid-Century Modern roofs. Mayhew is well known for residential designs in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a super cool building, and immeasurably tiny for the size of the project. Still, you know how highway and airport engineers are!*
We also have ongoing concerns about this building on Main Street, a little too far south for San Antonio College to go after, but still surrounded by parking lots. (Developed by Kallison, architect Henry L. Fox, 1962.)
Now, in San Antonio, the Mid-Century Modern master was O’Neil Ford, who came here to restore La Villita in 1939 and ended up creating some of our greatest landmarks, like Trinity University ans the Tower of the Americas. He also did the Villita Assembly Building in 1959, which serves as Sauerkraut Bend and storage during A Night In Old San Antonio(R). The building is not threatened but will be extensively renovated, with more riverside access, a big glass wall and a new clerestory for the essentially windowless circular building.
Also it has a flower on top.
It is not all death and dismantlement for Mid-Century Mods in SA – we did save this 1950s house by Harvey Smith, who restored the Spanish Governor’s Palace and Mission San Jose in the 1930s. He built it for himself and even though it is in Alamo Heights, the Architectural Review Board’s unanimous denial of a permit somehow got the owner to reconsider, which is a win!
Nice to end on a positive note
*Old joke:
Q: What is the difference between a terrorist and a highway/airport engineer?
A: You can negotiate with a terrorist!
Only downtown landmark by a Mexican-American architect to be demolished
San Antonio, Texas has always been a majority Hispanic city, but for most of that history, Mexican-Americans faced legal and cultural discrimination and exclusion. Now, sadly, the only major downtown building designed by a Mexican-American architect is going to be demolished. The University of Texas at San Antonio recently announced its plans to demolish the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures building designed for Hemisfair ’68 by William Peña of Caudill, Rowlett and Scott.
The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but as smart people know, that is not enough to save it, despite the enticing prospect of 45% investment tax credits (see my recent blog here). The media speculation for the last decade has been that the site is ideal for a new Spurs stadium (Spurs IV – A New Hope) even though it is smaller than their current stadium site by a lot.
See below – that is the Texas Pavilion/ITC on the left and the current Frost Bank Center on right. Which has more parking???
The Spurs were asked to meet with the City a year ago, which has fed a bevy of speculative articles over the last year (Pro Tip: Read them carefully and see who is quoted.)
ITC in foreground, Spurs II (Alamodome) in background left.
Who was Willie Peña and why is he the only Mexican-American architect who designed a major building in downtown San Antonio?
Born in Laredo, Peña was a student at Texas A & M when World War II broke out. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge and lost a leg, earning both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star medal. The French gave him the Croix de Guerre. Finishing his architecture degree in 1948, he became the first employee of the influential Houston architectural firm Caudill, Rowlett and Scott and became a partner the next year. He became a national pioneer in architectural programming, literally writing the book (Problem Seeking – now in its fifth edition) on it.
William Peña, Courtesy CRS Center, Texas A & M University
Many of our downtown landmarks were designed by Anglo architects like Alfred Giles, James Riely Gordon, Atlee Ayres, Ralph Cameron and O’Neil Ford. The Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta designed the Central Library, and the Conservation Society has honored Humberto Saldaña for his downtown restorations, but there are no downtown buildings designed by a Mexican-American architect except the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures.
So why does UTSA want to tear it down? Probably because it is easier for them. As a unit of the State, they don’t even need to ask for a demolition permit. The demolition is currently scheduled for Summer 2025.
They will need to get the demolition money, which could easily approach the $7 million they have deferred in maintenance on the structure. They plan to move some portion of the collections to the Frost Tower and hope to build a new museum behind the Alamo for $100 million.
That means they need to net over $107 million on the sale of the land, which I suppose is doable for a $1.2 billion stadium.
Casa Navarro
Sadly, the city has erased much of the history of its most numerous population. The famed Laredito neighborhood was destroyed in the 1950s and 60s, and only a last-minute effort by the Conservation Society saved Casa Navarro in 1959. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2017, yet even today Hispanic history and design is referenced in less than 4% of National Register of Historic Places listings, even with the recent inclusion of the Texas Pavilion. In 2014, the first Spanish language TV station – Univision – was demolished downtown.
It is time for this erasure of Latino history to end.