Two Takes: Tom Lee on Historic Preservation
by DCist Tech Director Tom Lee
At just over ten thousand words, Larry Van Dyne's Washingtonian article about the history of historic preservation in the District is indisputably thorough. But just about everything else about the article is up for debate. Despite his comprehensive accounting, Van Dyne is careful not to express an opinion of his own — although a reader will inevitably develop her own, if only because of the piece's length. Faced with a list of preservation projects that somehow manages to include two steakhouses, even the most sentimental architecture fan could be forgiven for thinking that this all seems like a hell of a lot of historic preservation.
Of course, after an election season spent listening to the same stupid joke about grizzly bear DNA testing over and over, I'm hesitant to rely on this sort of context-free line item gotchas — maybe they really are particularly culturally significant steakhouses. But those buildings' specific merits aside, it is easy to see how the impulse toward historical preservation can, or could, get out of hand. I've got some pack-rat tendencies myself: when faced with some piece of the cherished past — say, my groundbreaking first-grade report on armadillos — it's never hard to come up with reasons why it would be nice to save it.
But this impulse can become problematic when applied to buildings. Not only are the immediate costs associated with preserving a building vastly larger than for other items of artistic or historical interest, but the future cost of preservation is often overlooked. Thanks to the city's height restriction, D.C. is already unusually short on usefully-located building space. Writing off desirable plots of land like the one occupied by the Christian Science Church from contributing to the city's economic, housing and social needs — forever, in theory — is a sufficiently extreme measure that we should approach it with extreme caution. Trading that much productive capacity for vaguely-defined cultural and aesthetic benefits ought to make anyone wary.
Photo used with permission under a Creative Commons license with Flickr user ElvertBarnes
Still, I don't mean to make real estate development sound like an unalloyed good. A couple of weeks ago I was in Houston, a city that's been built without zoning. The resulting product of unfettered entrepreneurial enthusiasm is closer to a plot for an especially ironic episode of The Twilight Zone than it is an explicit argument about land use, but for my purposes it'll do. I have no doubt that, left to their own devices, D.C.'s developers would construct a hellscape every bit as tacky and unlivable as Houston's. (I'm still sore about those video billboards in Chinatown and the developer's response when confronted about their blaring soundtrack: he said he was trying to emulate the sophisticated big city experience of Times Square — where, incidentally, the billboards don't actually talk).
In the end, I'm not sure that the current detente reached by area preservationists and developers is a bad one. Compromises like the townhouse facade at Red Lion Row seem like pretty good ideas — they let us keep some local exterior architectural ambience without paying the opportunity cost of a musty, unvisited interior manned by a bored attendant and an empty donation box. When entire buildings are worthy of preservation but too valuable to keep, we should try to move them to less valuable locations. If the goal is simply to maintain the city's aesthetic atmosphere, we should take advantage of developers' seemingly bottomless enthusiasm for building in this tight commercial market to extract exterior design concessions (and money to move the aforementioned buildings).
There's a balance to be struck, and although I didn't enjoy having to wait years for my landlord to replace some leaky and apparently-historical windows, on the whole it seems like D.C. has arrived at a reasonable set of attitudes about preserving its buildings. If we ever develop a more reasonable set of attitudes about how tall those buildings are allowed to be, perhaps the diminished crunch for downtown real estate will make it easier to justify the preservation of places like the Christian Scientists' brutalist masterpiece.