Futures of the Past

Sometime in the next few months, Richard Moe will retire as president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a job he has held since 1993. Moe, who is 72, announced his retirement in the fall but said he would wait for the group to name his successor. When he does depart, he will leave behind an organization, and a movement, that has completely transformed in the 17 years since he arrived in the captain’s quarters from a career in politics and the law.

A couple of big milestones helped to define Moe’s years at the National Trust. In the mid-1990s, he led the group to stop taking a large chunk of its annual budget from Congress; at the time, that was worth about $7 million, but, he said, the purse had too many political strings attached. The trust began raising funds in new ways, and since then, its yearly budget has nearly doubled, to $55 million, and its endowment has soared to around $200 million, up from $33 million. And in a fight that gained national headlines in the mid-1990s, the trust beat back an attempt by the Walt Disney Co. to build a theme park near Civil War battlefields in Virginia.

Other achievements have been slower and steadier. Observers credit Moe with taking preservation to the people by funneling money and encouragement toward state, regional, and local preservation groups, and building a solid network of activist affiliates in preservation. The National Trust’s mission changed not by drifting from its core imperatives of saving great old buildings, but by expanding what that core might plausibly include.

Gradually, preservation has grown from a relic-focused connoisseur’s concern to a multifaceted populist movement dedicated to preserving more ineffable forms of history and threatened ways of life. Its daily work now bleeds into a number of disparate fields where common causes are to be found, such as community development (a shift that began as early as the 1960s), environmental protection, public health, land conservation, and cultural heritage. It was never called merely the National Trust for Saving Historic Architecture, after all.

“The trust has tried really hard to connect preservation back to other dynamics in society without alienating its core constituency,” says Randall F. Mason, chairman of the graduate program in historic preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. “The more preservation engages with the other big, urgent questions in society and the built environment, the better.”

Mason believes that one reason Moe’s tenure has been so successful is that Moe came not from preservation, but from politics—that is, “some other energy center.” In a recent interview with ARCHITECT, Moe confessed that when he landed at the National Trust, “I knew nothing. I didn’t spend a day in preservation.” (He was, however, a history buff and had written a book on Civil War soliders.)

As for Moe’s successor, at press time, no names of candidates had been credibly leaked. But with the transition at the trust likely to happen before the end of spring, now is an interesting time to outline what kind of realities define the organization as it moves into the next decade. Most of them are so intertwined, however, that it is hard to consider them on their own.

Saving older, denser neighborhoods by opposing sprawl.

An endless mission, so far as anyone can see. The fight against the Disney park was aimed in large part at protecting sensitive battlefield sites, but it also helped to cement the group’s role in discouraging relentless expansion of subdivisions into the undeveloped edges of metropolitan areas. For the National Trust, fighting suburban sprawl has at least two major motives behind it: It helps prevent the further withering of older, denser city centers, and it helps reduce carbon emissions that may contribute to climate change.

The trust’s Main Street Center, now at work in more than 1,600 cities and towns, began as a pilot in the late 1970s to try new approaches to revitalizing older business districts, some of which had been left for dead by interstates, malls, and industry abandonment. Success stories include the Federal Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, which has recaptured business lost to the city’s Inner Harbor development: organizers claim 270 net jobs created, 84 new businesses, and a vacancy rate of 4 percent, down from 20 percent. Likewise, Emporia, Kan., counts $40 million in new investment in its downtown, about $33 for every Main Street dollar spent.

For the National Trust, the key was to take not just a building preservation angle but to look at land-use practices in a broader context. “You can revitalize and rehab buildings, and do marketing events out the wazoo,” says Kennedy Smith, a preservation and planning consultant in Arlington, Va., who ran the Main Street program for 13 years until 2004. “But if a community isn’t changing its planning and land use, it really doesn’t matter.”

The trust’s work for older districts and against sprawl takes numerous angles. Royce Yeater, the director of the group’s Midwest office, is helping to direct a campaign called Helping Johnny Walk to School, which encourages municipalities to renovate older school buildings and to plan new schools in the centers of communities, rather than at their edges. The grant-making program helps retain existing schools; promotes closely knit neighborhoods and physical activity among kids; and also helps fight sprawl.

“Once you get into it, it’s amazing how unified these issues become,” Yeater says. “We’re solving multiple problems at once.”

Promoting building reuse as a means of fighting climate change.

People who work in preservation like to say that reusing an existing or historic building is inherently more sustainable than building from scratch, regardless of whether demolition is involved. There is a lot of frustration, however, about the importance accorded to preservation in the dominant third-party sustainability rating system, the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) LEED certification.

In interviews, a number of preservation professionals lamented that for most of LEED’s existence, reusing an extant structure got a project one point toward its final score, the same amount given, many observed, for using recycled carpets. Barbara Campagna, a staff architect for the National Trust who oversees its historic sites, has been working for the past three years with the USGBC. She notes that the newest version of LEED raises the possible points for retaining a structure to four, and there’s another gain for historic buildings under the category Sustainable Sites, which can be worth up to six points. For now, that’s about as good as it gets because there are a number of problems to work out.

“One of the basic issues is that there is very little data on existing buildings” and the environmental impacts they show over time, Campagna says. “There is a lot of data on new buildings in the past 10 years. So while preservationists go around saying, ‘Our buildings are the greenest,’ there is no data to support it.”

Arguments in existing buildings’ favor are largely anecdotal—and LEED is a science-based rating system. The trust hopes to use lifecycle assessments of existing buildings to determine their long-term impacts. Most of a building’s environmental effects occur during its operation and maintenance, not during construction; so the first challenge is to figure out what impacts can be measured empirically, such as resource use and carbon emissions. There are other challenges, such as whether to measure “squishy” factors (e.g., Is there a psychological benefit to living in historic surroundings?).

Once a consensus can form around ways to measure preservation’s environmental impacts, then the trick will be coming up with defensible data that may—or may not—show preservation’s inherent benefits for the planet.

Conserving the recent past.

Nothing changes faster than notions of what’s old. The past 10 years have seen more agitating on behalf of modernist structures that are reaching the age of 50, which is the general eligibility age for the National Register of Historic Places. Not that the agitation is universal: As these structures start to show their age and outlive their intended uses, modern styles of architecture (Brutalism in particular) don’t always command the love of the public at large or of local governments.

In Chicago, the city government is tearing down the work of Walter Gropius at the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital complex on the South Side. The vacant campus was to be cleared for the Olympic Village if Chicago had won its (unsuccessful) bid for the 2016 games, but the city has gone ahead since last fall and begun demolishing all but two of the buildings—constructed from 1948 to 1958—anyway, despite scathing opposition and in hopes of attracting a developer to the site.

“We cannot save all buildings. It costs a tremendous amount of money,” Mayor Richard M. Daley told the Chicago Tribune. “How are you going to reuse it? Who’s going to pay for it?”

The issue of 1960s architecture looms conspicuously in Los Angeles, where perennial development pressures put 1960s buildings at risk—both signature structures and more mundane architecture that contributes to the larger urban fabric. The Los Angeles Conservancy has been pushing its The Sixties Turn 50 campaign to get the public thinking about the importance of the period. “We don’t want to be saving what’s left of the ’60s,” says Linda Dishman, the conservancy’s executive director. “We want to start that awareness now.”

One of the trickier issues will be how 1960s ranch-house neighborhoods nationwide are treated by preservationists and planners, says Yeater. “The sprawl that started all of our frustrations is now becoming historic,” he says. “Some suburbs recognize that, but it goes back to the sustainability issue. They’re going to be very difficult to sustain.” But any efforts to fix extant suburban patterns “will run smack-dab into the fact that those neighborhoods are becoming historic,” Yeater says.

“By the 50-year threshold, we’re up to 1960 now,” he adds. “I hope I die before I get to the ’70s.”

Promoting diversity and localism.

Hector Abreu, a preservation consultant and educator based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, has noticed over the past 20 years how many more women and minorities have entered the preservation professions. “When I started, it wasn’t a very diverse field,” he says. By 1997, however, when he started teaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design, “We had a lot of women—over 60 percent of the student body at one point—and also African-Americans and Latinos.”

Abreu also tried to make his students aware of the ways preservation projects can quickly transform the demographics of neighborhoods, especially in lower-income areas that are being revitalized, often at the expense of immigrant residents. Although preservation planners may set out to restore a single building, “we’ve almost become these advocates for social change,” which can have effects both good and ill.

It is often said that all preservation is local, but now, with the saturation of the Internet in society, preservation has turned hyperlocal. Frederick Bland, an architect and the managing partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, has served since 2008 as a member of New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Much of the conversation about preservation is now occurring online. “Everything is shared instantly, and everybody knows everything all the time,” Bland observes. “You used to wait for the community meetings and so forth.”

Michael Allen runs the website Ecology of Absence in St. Louis, Mo., which has a huge following locally but also globally. It was Allen who last year revealed the identity of a secretive developer who has amassed 1,200 acres of real estate near downtown. When residents aren’t getting answers from elected officials about development issues, Allen says, “They can get it to the Net and get it blown wide open.”

Tim Whalen, the director of the Getty Conservation Trust, has been impressed at the way ordinary neighborhoods in Los Angeles have mobilized to gain designation as historic overlay zones, a system the city has had in place since 1979. So far, 24 neighborhoods have become historic zones, and more than a dozen proposed zones are awaiting approval.

“Neighborhoods came together and said, ‘We don’t want greater density and the changes we see around us,’” Whalen observes. “These aren’t wealthy neighborhoods. The demographic was diverse. These are people coming together to save places and community life.”

All of these forces that are reshaping preservation play well into Richard Moe’s strategy for decolonizing the movement away from the National Trust’s ornate mansion on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. His successor would be wise to keep advancing preservation’s relevance in a similar fashion.

“It used to be that preservation appealed to a number of people who loved old buildings, and for the most part, they were individual buildings,” Moe says. “But now it appeals to a much broader range of people, and not just for aesthetic reasons.” He has seen the trust become a mainstay in areas he hadn’t thought possible, playing decisive parts in social and economic issues, he says. “I hope my successor will continue to look for those possibilities.”