Historic Preservation

[FISHMANPET]

A historic designation I can get behind: http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/283393561.html

[mattaudio]

Streetscapes: Fast-food outlets are unloved and omnipresent
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/ta ... 63761.html

[Anondson]

An April Fools campaign to protect our awful public spaces.

http://www.pps.org/blog/april-fools-2015/

Thought about posting this in a Peavey Plaza thread.

[FISHMANPET]

It's a joke, but if ugly spaces aren't historic then how is anything historic? Or is it just a facade for protecting things someone finds desirable? If we're really truly protecting our history for the sake of protecting our history, we have to remember that not all history is good.

[FISHMANPET]

A bit of a long read on preserving some grain silos near the UofM campus: https://www.minnpost.com/politics-polic ... -elevators

Haven't gotten through it yet, but it certainly sounds like these are worth preserving under our current standards, as the last steel silos in the state. But if there's no economic use for them why are we forcing a private company to bear the burden of an uneconomic structure? If it's truly worth preserving, we should socialize that loss and have the government buy it or subsidize it or something.

[trigonalmayhem]

Everything is historic! Never build anything new and keep everything the same forever! Certainly that will never lead to anything bad. If you have to build something I heard there was a parking lot somewhere you should use first. /sarcasm

[RailBaronYarr]

Copying the thoughtful post from the 2008 Bryant thread:

I'll admit that I find it very difficult to understand or credit arguments against historic preservation. I'm a classicist; everything I study and write about professionally is only available to me because thousands of people over two millennia each, individually, made the choice to preserve the past. Knowing, then, the fragility of things (and how many things were carelessly or expediently lost, much to our disadvantage today) I almost always err on the side of preservation unless there are very good reasons to do otherwise.

I think the discussion of this particular house somewhat clouds the picture here, because really what we're speaking of are general principles. Let's take an extreme example: imagine that Silvio Berlusconi wants to tear down the Colosseum in Rome to build a supertall residential tower. Should he be allowed to do it? I assume (hope) that most people here would respond in the negative, and certainly there are objective arguments to be made that the Colosseum brings more benefit to Rome than some ungodly number of residences would, either through tourism or placemaking or whatever. But I suspect too that, whatever justifications people have, the real reason is more visceral; the Colosseum has been placed into a category of places that have inherent value, that are important simply because they survived and because of what they tell us about the past. The economic arguments might be good on their own, but even if no-one ever visited the Colosseum, would anyone be okay with it being demolished?

I use the Colosseum as an example precisely because its inviolability is a deeply modern thing, something that would have been alien less than a century ago. For millennia people people used the building as little more than a quarry, and much of it is in the walls of the buildings of that part of Rome. Those people didn't see themselves as destroying an ancient monument, they were driven by the same sort of rational arguments that RBY is advancing; that they needed affordable housing (materials) more than they needed the great edifices of centuries past, and in 1000 AD, the Colosseum was Just Another Roman Building, no more in need of preservation than any other. It is only in the absence of all of those other buildings, which were smaller or less durable and therefore no longer survive, that the Colosseum appears so particularly valuable to us.

This leads to an ontological question. If we accept the Colosseum now as an inviolable historical artifact, at what point did it make the transition from building? Was it always so from the day it was built? Did it only gain significance once the rest of historical Rome was stripped away? Does it only have meaning when it is convenient for us to give it meaning? A resident of Rome in 1000 AD would be precisely the wrong person to answer these questions, because the only perspective from which he can see his world is his own. He doesn't know what will happen in 1000 years or 100 or 10; he only knows that he needs stone. Spoliation of the Colosseum made perfect sense from his perspective. But it's monstrous from ours.

I'm not trying to say that Milwaukee Ave is the Colosseum, by any stretch. But arguments of economic or political exigency are dangerous; they lead us in directions whose ends we cannot see. The Gateway demolition was perfectly rational at the moment, to clear out the detritus of the past and make way for the new. But in destroying the entire historic core of Minneapolis, it made it all but impossible for future generations to truly appreciate the circumstances under which this city developed and the people who lived here before us. Because of those demolitions, the people who worked in the Metropolitan Building or lived in one of the flophouses along Washington are in some ways more disconnected from us, more difficult to understand and sympathize with, than the residents of ancient Rome. Our understanding is at best intellectual, mediated through colorless photographs and fading memories. In demolishing the Gateway, we denied ourselves the opportunity to learn from its successes and failures; instead, we can only reckon with the legacy created de novo.

I firmly believe that anything, once created, has value in itself that has to be reckoned against the benefits of whatever we wish to replace it with. This is our past; this is who we are and who we once dreamt of being. We should be respectful of that. Does that mean rejecting any new development, preserving every tumbledown shack, or locking the entire city in place forever? Of course not. But it means that we should seriously and soberly weigh the benefits of the moment against what people to come will think of us. We owe it to the future to be responsible stewards of the past.

[amiller92]

Here are some general "facts"/talking points:

*We all like new development, especially smaller-scale residential developments like this one (for the most part)
*We all like historic homes/architecture and want to preserve as much of it as we possibly can (for the most part)
*There are laws and regulations that dictate what we can/can't do to a property
*We live in a capitalistic democracy, where making money is emphasized more than quality/quality improvement
*The property owner has the right to do what they want to their own property (within reason)


It just sounds like this project touches on a lot of the above facts/points, and some of them conflict with one-another. Personally I like this project as a stand-alone project, but if we were to see dozens or hundreds of these projects pop up I can see the need for some intervention and preservation. In and of itself, however, I'm not terribly concerned about any precedent this project is setting.

I thought this was a good post and agree with it overall, but wanted to push back on the second point, which didn't seem appropriate in the other thread.

I do not want to preserve as much as we possibly can. We can preserve nearly everything, and that's way too much. Preservation -- at least government enforced preservation -- should be relatively rare and reserved only for those things that already have historic value. If the thing to preserved is an example or a type or a style, it should be preserved only to the extent that there is a real danger of there no longer being things of that category to see. And even then, we should be asking in each instance whether the memory of the thing can be adequately preserved in images, models, etc.

Memories are important, but lives and livelihood are substantially more so. The costs of over-preservation -- high housing costs, sprawl, segregation, etc. -- just vastly outweigh the costs of under-preservation (lost memories). In part because those memories will eventually be lost regardless, but also because a place is constantly changing as the people occupying it change anyway.

[David Greene]

The costs of over-preservation -- high housing costs, sprawl, segregation, etc. -- just vastly outweigh the costs of under-preservation (lost memories). In part because those memories will eventually be lost regardless, but also because a place is constantly changing as the people occupying it change anyway.

Not that I disagree with your overall post but I do want to point out that we preserve things so we *don't* lose some of those memories.

Take the Metropolitan. We have images. But it's not the same. At the time most people thought it was a great idea to get rid of it. What do we think now?

I am very much in favor of saving things we don't necessarily value today precisely because those are the places most at risk. I don't particularly like 1950's architecture but I see value in preserving it.

This isn't an all-or-nothing thing yet people tend to make those arguments to push the conversation further in their direction. It's akin to candidates going hard right or left for the primary and moderating for the general election. We need more rational discussion, not hyperbole and extremes. Just making a general note, not directing it at you in particular.

[FISHMANPET]

Historic preservation can be coopted by those who wish nothing to change ever, so I think it's relevant in the context of historic preservation to discuss the costs of using it to protect everything.

I think generally "save old things" is one of those "common sense" views that a majority of people support, but it's support is a mile wide and an inch deep. There's just a lot of things that a lot of people haven't put much thought into, which is fine. But it's very easy to manipulate those people for nefarious purposes, like changing nothing ever. So again I think it is relevant to the discussion.

[amiller92]

Not that I disagree with your overall post but I do want to point out that we preserve things so we *don't* lose some of those memories.

Over a long enough time scale, we will lose those memories regardless of what we do with preservation.

Take the Metropolitan. ...At the time most people thought it was a great idea to get rid of it.

Did they? Or did the people in the position to make the decision think so? I don't know.

What do we think now?

Honestly, I think it would probably be gone by now anyway, but that's just a guess. Depends on how the structure would have held up over time.

But I actually really dislike the Metropolitan and the Gateway District being used as the examples in preservation discussions. They aren't at all what we're discussing now, as no one is advocating tearing things down with no plan to replace them. The first and biggest mistake of that era was in getting rid of stuff for its own sake. I don't know what was in the water back then, but I think everyone now agrees that's a terrible idea.

It's also an entirely different question from whether to use the force of law to keep stuff because it's already there.

I am very much in favor of saving things we don't necessarily value today precisely because those are the places most at risk.

What's the risk? We will at some point down the road wish we had more of those things?? The price of that is having to live with the thing that isn't wanted for so long. And that's not at all hypothetical. That's a real cost that society pays on the off chance that the future will feel differently.

That thinking also misses the fact that in the real world the way a thing goes from not valued not to valued in the future is scarcity.

[BoredAgain]

....

But I actually really dislike the Metropolitan and the Gateway District being used as the examples in preservation discussions. They aren't at all what we're discussing now, as no one is advocating tearing things down with no plan to replace them. The first and biggest mistake of that era was in getting rid of stuff for its own sake. I don't know what was in the water back then, but I think everyone now agrees that's a terrible idea.

....

There are in fact ongoing projects where people tear things down without a plan for replacement. The biggest example that comes to my mind is over in St Paul where they are tearing down buildings built into the river bluff because no-one currently sees value in the buildings and St Paul thinks that a developer will come along if the buildings are removed. There is currently no plan for replacement other than the long term neighborhood planning documents.

[amiller92]

There are in fact ongoing projects where people tear things down without a plan for replacement. The biggest example that comes to my mind is over in St Paul where they are tearing down buildings built into the river bluff because no-one currently sees value in the buildings and St Paul thinks that a developer will come along if the buildings are removed. There is currently no plan for replacement other than the long term neighborhood planning documents.

That's true, and there are individual abandoned houses that get torn down from time to time too.

[David Greene]

Isn't it also true for the building next to Bobby & Steve's on Washington? That's actually a nice building being destroyed for a parking lot IIRC.

[mattaudio]

There should be a mechanism to prevent places from getting torn down and replaced with non-places (parking lot). That mechanism shouldn't be historic preservation, it should be financial punishment for bad actors like Bobby and Steve's. Land value tax?

[acs]

How about just having a rule that any new project must increase the tax base of the land it's on? Even a run down old building has more taxable value than a parking lot.

[Tiller]

A land value tax would be great anyways. Property taxes out, LVT in! Preserving a few structures would be a bonus.

[MNdible]

Land value tax?

Property taxes out, LVT in! Preserving a few structures would be a bonus.

I'm not necessarily opposed to a land value tax, but don't conflate it with historic preservation. While it would discourage tearing down old buildings for parking lots, it would encourage tearing them down for any number of other things.

[Wedgeguy]

Just need to raise the tax rate on tear down parking lots. Walked by there last weekend, and All I can say is they do NOT need that much space for parking, Unless they plan on it looking like a 3 rate used car lot. Maxwell's should get after the city if it starts to look junky. All of us should get after the city if the place looks like it did last weekend. This should not be another Post Road hangout for cab driver's.