The Vacant Stare
Nothing to see here, move along, please.
In my last blog, I took the new leaders of historic Oak Park to task for forgetting why the Village is an attractive place and proposing the demolition of three nice old buildings (one of which definitely rates as a landmark) on Madison Street. The proposed demolition is part of a road-bending plan that completely redeveloped several blocks. Continue Reading
Oak Park Amnesia
Oak Park Avenue in the 1970s
Well I have been back in Oak Park for over half a year now, and it just got listed as the coolest suburb in the Chicago area, in large part for its incredible historic architecture (over two dozen buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright – more than ANYWHERE, and tons more by other Prairie architects) and a rising restaurant and nightlife scene.
Panama Papers and Preservation
A home last summer in my former hometown of Los Gatos. $3 million. That is normal in Silicon Valley. In fact, in Palo Alto, the median home price is well over $2 million.
I am going to jump on current events, namely the release of terabytes of data from Panama implicating an international host of politicians and businesspeople and celebrities in whacking great amounts of money laundering. These range from the obvious beneficiaries of oligarchy like the Russian and Pakistani leadership to the unexpected (Iceland?) and I am sure the contortionist rhetoricians of our endless political winter will try to tie in some of our own candidates and their corporate backers. I of course will focus on preservation. Continue Reading
San Francisco and the heritage of cultural innovation
The Mission, recently
Heritage conservation is about place even more than buildings, which are large and important but not exclusive constituents of place. “If these walls could talk” is also true of streets (I did a course for over a decade called “If These Streets Could Talk”) and sidewalks and trees and mountains and streams and streetlamps benches and on and on…. You also have certain places that have an enduring character despite the passing of decades and technologies, these places just seem to imbue activity in a similar way over time, causing us to assign that “character” to place. Continue Reading
Integrity and Authenticity
My favorite example: where Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man. Authenticity? Integrity?
I will presenting at the 7th National Symposium on Historic Preservation Practice this weekend at Goucher College, on the Diversity Deficit and the National Register of Historic Places. I have written often about this subject over the last five years, but lately my recommendations are getting more specific. One of those has to do with the concept of Integrity, which I have previously proposed needs to be replaced with Authenticity. Continue Reading
What Survives?
I recently saw the report of a “phylogenetic” study of fairytales that determined that some fairytales were 6,000 years old, reaching into the Bronze Age. We have long known that certain tales – Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, flood myths – are shared across hundreds of cultures and geographies. I read the report (linked here) the same day I went to see the ancient Greek show at the Field Museum, where many tales are illustrated in the more durable forms of pottery and stone.
Lathrop Homes, 3 years after
Full disclosure: Four years ago, I was the Historic Preservation consultant for the Julia C. Lathrop Homes in Chicago, a very important 1937 federal housing project. This past Thursday the Chicago Plan Commission approved the current plan for the project, which I ceased to work on when I left Chicago in July 2012. I took the opportunity to compare the plan to my April 2011 Preliminary Report and to the project at the time I left.
Main Street and Community Preservation
This coming week I will be lecturing about Main Street, a National Trust for Historic Preservation initiative that began in the 1970s as a way to help preserve historic downtowns throughout America in communities of every size. This was in the era when suburban shopping malls had become the centerpiece of American life, drawing attention and dollars away from the smaller shops and services of the old downtowns. Continue Reading
Everything You Know Is Wrong, Part II
Who doesn’t adore their own adolescent brain?
Eight years ago I wrote a blog with this title, to remind us that we often think our way past reality. Despite our ongoing technological revolution the human mind still has a series of fallback postures that fail to perceive reality but instead distort it – simplify it, really – to make it fit into categories more satisfying to our adolescent brains. Continue Reading
Codes and Coding
I was reading an article from the excellent CityLab feed titled: 14 Incredible Objections to a Single Boulder Housing Development and I reposted in on Twitter with the intro: Every reason but the real one. The list had included typical arguments about density, traffic and parking and esoteric ones like “pet density”and “firefly habitat” but of course the real reason is that it is affordable housing and homeowners nearby don’t want to live near poor people. Or black people. Continue Reading