class war at 40 Broadway

Last week a preservationist friend gave me a big blue button that says “Newport Needs Its Past”. Evidently someone was giving them out at a recent city council hearing on whether or not Newport should hire a new historic preservation officer to replace the one who vacated the post last fall. You’d think that filling the post ASAP would be pretty much of a no-brainer for a town whose economic lifeblood is historic tourism & whose future fortunes are almost entirely dependant on the success of that industry, but alas the world is not always a rational place, and numerous and vocal are the objectors to this plan. Their arguments run along the usual predictable lines. Can’t afford it. Don’t need it. Too much government interference in private life. No one’s going to tell ME whether I can replace a window, etc. Like so much else in life, increasingly (to me at least) these arguments seem to be less about the ostensible subject under discussion – i.e. the filling of the vacant position – than a thinly disguised battle over other issues, in this case between the economic interests of blue vs white collar Newport, the people with the chain link fences pitted against the people with the wrought iron fences. Both sides believe that they should get the final say on how things look around here. And it strikes me – committed preservationist that I am – that the opposing side does indeed inadvertently raise some very uncomfortable theoretical questions for us vis-à-vis our “Newport Needs Its Past” campaign: Who’s past are we preserving? And whose past are we erasing in the interests of saving whatever it is we deem worth saving?

I think you could make the argument that Newport is as architecturally rich as it is precisely because every period was allowed to express itself, because new things were built on top of old things, existing buildings were repurposed, utilitarian and cosmetic fixes were patched in willy-nilly with little regard for aesthetics and controls…which of course resulted in exactly the kind of organic aesthetic that the Wrought Iron Fence People now want to protect. But ironically, it was precisely the Chain Link Fence Person mentality that brought this aesthetic into being – the patch it up, make it do, make it work, piece it together approach favored everywhere by the working poor, for the simple reason that they can’t afford to adopt any other. For every William Vanderbilt that summered in Newport, there were fifty Irish maids who made his life possible. For every John LaFarge or William James who lived and worked here there were a hundred illiterate fishermen who’d never heard of them. From 1639 on, every cultured illustrious Newport inhabitant has been shadowed by a crowd of thousands of working class nobodies. Slaves. Servants. Fishermen. Seamstresses. Grocers. Carters. People who lived in small cheap houses in poor neighborhoods and saved pieces of string & old newspapers and never gave a thought to the aesthetics of architecture or the picturesque, because they would have been luxuries so out of reach & impractical that they weren’t even understood to be options. Chain Link Fence People everywhere, of every era, usually find survival more to their taste than aesthetics.

All of which brings me back to paradox of the button again. Yes, Virginia, Newport Needs Its Past. Newport needs preservation. But let’s not be stupid or naïvely idealistic about it. Let’s not pretend our commitment to preservation isn’t preventing other social truths from being expressed. Let’s not pretend that a lot of class conflicts don’t lie at the heart of this debate. And let’s not stop asking ourselves how true to reality – to any reality, of any period – is a preserved Newport, and if a preserved Newport is even an authentic one?