Spiffing Up The Urban Heritage

By Kurt Anderson

Back when city planning was still a matter of deciding which neighborhood to carve up with the new freeway and how many grim apartment towers to insert in a newly leveled megalot, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency decided to move its offices. The agency was stuck in an unfashionable downtown building on grubby, declining Spring Street, so in 1955 the city's official redevelopers fled to new quarters.

Such prescience. Such vision.

During the 1980s Spring Street, like so many other neglected, down-and-dirty streets around the country, is shuddering back to life, becoming a gleaming circa-1920s boulevard. Many of its handsomely scaled old masonry buildings were renovated: derelict art moderne office buildings became cool art moderne apartment buildings, and the art deco stock exchange was reborn as an art deco disco. There were more than two dozen major restorations in all -- including what had been the CRA's office building. The CRA, as it happened, had helped foster this revival. So in 1980 back came the urban-planning bureaucrats to their original building, back this time as historic preservationists, back to the very downtown district they had abandoned a generation earlier.

How did Americans manage to forget for so many years that downtowns are invigorating and old cities grand? That the dignity and Gemutlichkeit of 18th century buildings and 19th century streets are incomparable? That the physical past is worth preserving? Did a majority of Americans in 1970 actually prefer Century City to San Francisco? Were people fetched by the shiny new discord of Houston suburbs more than by shabby, genteel New Orleans, by the glass and steel of downtown Minneapolis more than by the brick and stone of downtown St. Paul?

If so, then the nation has had a great change of heart. The change has been so complete that it is difficult today to remember how recently people were blithely ripping out and throwing away the warp and woof of America's cities. In only 20 years, marvels James Marston Fitch, an internationally known preservationist, "the whole balance has radically changed in our favor. I'm astonished at what a complete turnabout there has been in the whole climate of public opinion."

The bad old days were just yesterday, after all. It was in 1978 that the Supreme Court upheld New York City's right to designate Grand Central Terminal a landmark, thus saving the beaux arts wonder from having a gargantuan 54- story modernist tower built over its waiting room. And it was a mere 20 years ago, give or take, that St. Louis razed 40 quaint blocks of riverfront warehouses; that Pasadena, Calif., tore up a fine commercial neighborhood to build a standard aluminum shopping mall; that Madison, Wis., let Burger King raze an 1850s stone house for its headquarters; that New York City tore down McKim, Mead and White's glorious Pennsylvania Station.

So the tide has turned. Today it is almost obligatory for a city to have a fine old theater or train station or office building that has been saved, spiffed up and put back to good, if not necessarily its original use -- a building that 20 years ago would have been pulled down without a second thought. Buying paperbacks and chocolate-chip cookies in what used to be a warehouse and watching stand-up comedians in what used to be a stable and living in what used to be a factory are now, happily, coast-to-coast cliches, not novelties. As ever, there are trade-offs: such transformations, especially as they become pandemic, can seem overbearingly glib, clean and cute.

Yet Louis Sullivan's 1895 Guaranty Building in Buffalo and the Peabody hotel in Memphis, a grand 1920s confection, have been restored perfectly, and they are not flukes but two redemptions among dozens, among hundreds. Downtowns are being preserved, piece by piece, and have been rediscovered, city by city, as places to live as well as work. "Almost every city, down to the third tier -- places like Dayton and Toledo -- has done something," says Northwestern University Urbanologist Louis Masotti. "It's not a fad. It's a demographic phenomenon. The 1980s have been the decade of the cities' revival."

The economic prosperity of the mid-'80s has of course helped stimulate both new construction and renovation, particularly in those cities blessed with high employment and booming industry. And some of the new downtown buildings are impressive. On the other hand, many cities have not revived. Detroit is still comatose, Gary, Ind., is not much healthier, and development in Oakland is lagging. Even in cities where renovation is rampant, gentrification has caused disgruntlement. Inhabitants of South Boston and East Los Angeles are not quite as excited as they might be about the exposed-brick, freshly baked, Benettonian fabulousness across town in Quincy Market and on Melrose Avenue.

But the new urbanity has footholds all over the place, and preservationism has achieved extraordinary momentum. Cincinnati's city council made charming West 4th Street a historic district last year. Among the latest local projects: the conversion of a down-at-the-heels Renaissance Revival textile building into offices. The former Tivoli Union brewery in Denver, a pseudo- Bavarian fantasy, is a giddy complex of shops, offices, restaurants and movie theaters. The vast old Bullock's department store in downtown Los Angeles has been turned into the country's largest wholesale jewelry mart, and Houston's art deco Alabama Theater has merely exchanged one muse for another. The place is now a bookstore. Pioneer Square in Seattle, with its raffish characters, is proving that preservation and up-market transformation do not necessarily mean the death of funk.

The new attitude toward cities and old buildings seems altogether uncharacteristic of the U.S. -- delightfully un-American, in fact. Americans are supposed to have a deep distrust of cities and a Babbitty, hard-charging faith in the new and improved. Indeed, preservation on today's scale was an unthinkable Luddite fantasy a scant generation ago.

With the proliferation of postwar suburbs, which sucked millions of families out of the cities, downtowns quickly lost their old pizazz. Then the redevelopment binge of the '50s and '60s came disastrously close to indulging the American antiurban instinct to the point of no return. Political pressure to build new housing for the inner-city poor was intense. Urban renewal, a well-intended and wrongheaded federal mission, in those days meant tearing down quirky, densely interwoven neighborhoods of 19th and early 20th century low-rise buildings and putting up expensive, charmless clots of high-rises. Or, even worse, leaving empty tracts. (The resistance of Charleston, S.C., and Savannah to Great Society efforts to clear their slums accounts for those cities' remarkably intact historic districts today.) In the mid-'60s, 1,600 federally supported urban-renewal projects were under way in nearly 800 American cities. Not only in Viet Nam was the U.S. Government proposing to destroy the town in order to save it.

But urban renewal had its rearguard critics, and vital downtowns had their influential advocates. The right laws were passed. Cases were won. In 1965 New York City passed the Landmarks Preservation Law, setting up a commission that could restrict any changes to designated historic buildings; a year later, Congress enacted its version, which established the National Register of Historic Places and provided preservation grants to states.

Meanwhile, a whole generation of middle-class travelers was discovering the civilized pleasures of European cities as well as domestic oases like Washington's cozy Georgetown and Santa Barbara's adobe Pueblo Viejo. In San Francisco, always the belovedly quaint U.S. city, there was the novel Ghirardelli Square, a shopping center created near the Bay from a group of old factory buildings.

Elsewhere, a few eccentric real estate gamblers started buying old buildings in godforsaken downtowns. Frank Akers paid $4,200 in 1969 for his first two buildings in Portland, Me. The area, Akers says, "was loaded with winos and pimps and seedy waterfront characters. Everybody said I was crazy." Today, of course, downtown Portland is loaded with architects and lawyers and high- butterfat ice-cream stores.

At about the same time, Americans were realizing the need to protect the natural environment, and for some of the same quasi-spiritual reasons, they discovered that old buildings had a level of craftsmanship and stylistic integrity seldom achieved in modern buildings and a patina that could not be faked. The upper classes had always prized antiques and reveled in the old. For the first time, the upwardly ambitious American middle class acquired that aristocratic penchant.

The rediscovery, however, is not merely a matter of fashion and status seeking. It is more visceral than that. "We feel better," the architecture critic and preservationist Brendan Gill has written, "when we find ourselves in the presence of the past, with its evidence of the mingled aspirations and disappointments of our ancestors." Walking along an old street among old buildings, the implicit history and sense of continuity are both reassuring and invigorating. The graceful proportions of facades are not arbitrary but the result of craft wisdom worked out over generations of trial and error. The scale of buildings and streets, based on human size and pedestrian stride, makes intuitive sense. Indeed, old sections of cities embody all sorts of folk and classical principles concerning residential density and building size and materials and zoning. In the very arrangements of alleys and building setbacks is a time-tested plan, a kind of urban genetic code.

Boston's Blackstone Block is just such a marvelous chunk of city. Wedged between restored Faneuil Hall Marketplace and city hall, Blackstone Block is a seemingly haphazard labyrinth of buildings from several centuries strung along narrow, zigzagging streets. This jam-packed patchwork is, in extremely concentrated form, the natural look of cities, of anything created over time by many hands. Certain tacit rules apparently governed the 250-year accretion of buildings in Blackstone Block -- rules about material (red brick) and height (seven stories maximum) -- but within those constraints houses and workshops were demolished and built as circumstances demanded over the years, not according to any inflexible, grandiose scheme.

Is it too Whitmanesque to suggest that it is the hurly-burly pleasures of democracy -- pluralism incarnate -- that pulled Americans back downtown? Old cities are architecturally eclectic places, where Queen Anne turrets bump up against an International Style library. On a single block, even in a single building, people work as well as live as well as shop. In good cities, infants in Apricas share sidewalks with octogenerians, Salvadoran immigrants with manicured executives. In good cities, eras and generations and races and pursuits are a jumble. Serendipity and surprise are the point.

What has come to be known as gentrification -- the migration of (mainly white) middle-class homesteaders into poor (mainly black and Hispanic) urban neighborhoods -- is neither the cause nor an effect, exactly, of the historic renovation boom. But the two trends have abetted each other. The original '60s militants of the preservation movement were the shock troops of the upper middle class, and it was a broader swath of the same class who in the '70s made living amid urban antiquity seem both virtuous and stylish. Restored carriage houses and pressed-tin ceilings have seduced more children of the suburbs back to the city than mean, shiny apartment towers.

Trendiness goes only so far. Money talks. The mania for preservation has been propelled for the past decade by federal tax laws. Developers who rehabilitate historic buildings can get back 20% of their renovation costs in the form of income tax credits, as long as they put the buildings to commercial use. Under the program, which began in earnest in 1981, an estimated $11 billion has been spent to renovate some 17,000 historic buildings in 1,800 cities and towns.

Preservation has its indirect costs as well. The owners of protected landmark structures, prohibited from tearing down their buildings, are deprived of the potential profit of building something bigger or more commercially successful. Thus Preservationist Fitch suggests that governments subsidize owners "who are unfortunate enough to own properties of significance." According to Fitch, "If the state demands that they preserve the buildings, then they should be aided in that activity."

No matter how many splendid old buildings are refurbished, downtown revivification does not necessarily follow. The historic district of Charleston is an antebellum museum of architecture, but despite the surfeit of charm and platoons of tourists, the downtown was dying in the '70s. Developers proposed an un-Charlestonian remedy: a new hulking hotel-and-retail complex. Originally opposed by some preservationists, Charleston Place -- somewhat scaled down -- has not only breathed new life into the downtown but triggered another round of restoration work.

Yet what works in South Carolina may not take in Southern California. San ; Diego's $140 million Horton Plaza shopping center, a manic postmodern pastiche, has been successful since it opened in 1985. But across the street, the spruced-up Gaslamp Quarter -- 16 blocks of eclectic Victoriana, until recently occupied mainly by bums, hookers and porn shops -- is still a gentrification wanna-be.

Preservation can set up a self-destructive cycle. When a historic neighborhood is restored, it becomes desirable and prices go up, and when prices go up sufficiently, developers think dollars per square foot, high- rise, wrecking ball. They wind up selling the view of a historic district from a condominium tower that has supplanted a piece of that history.

Not every old building can be saved. Not every old building should be saved. Except for set pieces like fussy little Colonial Williamsburg or the elegant Upper East Side of Manhattan, cities should not remain stuck in time. As Charlestonians have learned, vitality depends on at least modest infusions of new building. Even preservationists, most of them, agree in principle. Says Gene Norman, chairman of New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission: "We are not trying to create a museum city."

Yet the reflexive impulse to preserve everything, even the relatively new and banal, occasionally shows signs of getting out of hand. "People are just beginning to talk about ' '50s classics' now, which is a term that embraces some really appalling ticky-tack," says the British-born architectural historian Reyner Banham, who lives in California. "There is a tendency to overlook the aesthetic quality of a building and just keep it because it is old," says Robert Winter, a cultural historian at Occidental College in Los Angeles. "Too often the reason for declaring something ((a historic landmark)) is sentimental." Sentiment is inadmissible? Isn't the new feeling for preservation and for cities inherently romantic, clearheadedness clouded by a large dose of nostalgia?

The '60s, a generous, hopeful time, produced terrible urban policy and dispiriting architecture, while in the '80s, a gilded, ungenerous age, the nation is saving buildings and repairing cities. An uncomfortable irony, but preservation is a conservative movement. Thus it carries with it a whiff of complacency and rue.

Peter Beltemacchi, chairman of the department of city and regional planning at the high-modernist Illinois Institute of Technology, objects to the tendency toward the picturesque and fake rustic in today's preservation % passion. The Rouse Co.'s cleverly conceived "festival marketplace" developments in Baltimore, Boston and elsewhere can seem like sanitized movie- lot versions of real city neighborhoods. Often these days only a building's facade is kept intact and a new structure pasted on, a treacly, offensive kind of faux preservation that violates the spirit of the old as well as the new.

Alas, another irony: while gentrifiers as they first venture into an old neighborhood may be democratically inspired -- The diversity! The grit! -- they attract mobs of merely stylish followers who diminish the diversity and sweep away every last speck of grit. The old-line residents and the anchors of their communities -- the hardware stores, the cobblers, the taverns -- are driven out by suddenly high rents. Gentrification is not fun for everyone. Walter Reinhaus, a white graduate student, is renovating a Charles Addamsesque mansion in the middle of an all-black Chicago neighborhood. "With gentrification," he says, "it's easy to go too far. There are people and places here I deeply love. There's some of the best barbecue I've ever had. Stores are cheap, unpretentious." Thanks to him, perhaps, not for long.

Hearteningly, the fate of reviving districts is not always black and white. Preservationists are not all chevre eaters and squash players. Among the thousands of tax-delinquent houses New York City has sold off during the past five years, more than half have been bought by black and Hispanic homesteaders. The Longwood section of the South Bronx has had itself declared a historic district, and the predominantly black and Hispanic residents are restoring scores of neo-Renaissance houses. In Savannah, the National Trust has provided seed money so that 300 apartments in the Victorian historic district can be set aside for low-income residents. In a rough-and-tumble north Toledo neighborhood 165 Victorian buildings recently rehabilitated for $20 million are now occupied by more than a thousand federally subsidized tenants. And in Boston's South End, not far from Union Park, the Villa Victoria neighborhood stands as a monument to several unlikely successes. In the late '60s the row houses of Villa Victoria were to be razed and the mainly Hispanic residents moved. The houses were fixed up by the residents. The neighborhood stayed a neighborhood. The place is gorgeous.

The new popularity of the old has taught some fine lessons and a few dubious habits. The Ralph Laurenized marketing of snobby antiquity is a side effect the country could probably do without. Postmodernism has become popular along with the antique buildings that inspired it, which was fine until every second shopping-center architect became a second-rate postmodernist. Now, with historicism broadly popular, modernist architectural style is on the verge of a comeback -- but a modernism that has learned from old buildings about small scale, simplicity of construction and the pleasure of materials.

Indeed, the act of preservation -- poking around an old building, studying half-forgotten design principles up close, figuring out how to put the structure right, buttressing, straightening, sanding, replastering, painting -- is profoundly instructive. Restoring a 19th century house makes thoughtful architects and planners think differently about how they design new buildings and new neighborhoods. "The great value of doing preservation in our office," says Architect James Stewart Polshek, whose firm restored Carnegie Hall, "is that it helps reinforce in young architects an attitude about the way buildings still could be built."

Planners are discovering that regenerating the city is much harder and slower than the last generation believed, that to work, it must be a building- by-building, street-by-street evolution. The planning for New York's new Battery Park City development, for instance, quite nicely incorporates many of the old ways; visual surprise was designed in, gradual changes of scale were carefully planned, stylistic variety and overall cohesion were both encouraged. "What we've learned," Fitch says, "is that if you want to rejuvenate a city, you have got to be very careful not to throw any kind of tissue away."

Precisely. These days, who would not agree?

Charles Harper, for one. Harper is chairman of Omaha's ConAgra food- processing company and may move the firm downtown, near the city's gentrified warehouse district. But he does not want to play along with the preservationists. He says he will not put his headquarters next to "some big, ugly red buildings" just because they are historic. Harper is demanding that the warehouses be demolished. "Some people love old red brick buildings," Harper says. "Some don't."

In fact, quite a few people don't, some with the clout to act on their preferences.

Take Donald Trump. Trump, who in 1980 pulled down and smashed a set of art deco bas reliefs from an old Fifth Avenue building ("They were stones with some engravings on them"), says today that "a lot of times preservation is used as an excuse to stop progress" and "as a method of stopping anybody from progressing a city." Trump's current idea of "progressing a city" is to put up a set of nine gigantic high-rise towers, among them the tallest building in the world, on Manhattan's old Upper West Side.

No, preservation has not been carried too far. The passion for good old downtowns has not yet got out of hand. The lessons of the past two decades have not been learned too well.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles, with other bureaus