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?

Back to the future

A few weeks ago I attended a Newport city council meeting, held for the purposes of reviewing the Historic District Commission’s task force recommendations on how best to improve &/or streamline the city’s historic preservation procedures. During the course of the discussion, several of the participants expressed concern about new preservation guidelines potentially impacting owners of non-historic properties, which as near as I can tell gets defined around here as being anything built after 1940. Why, it was asked, should the owners of undistinguished, dated buildings like 1950’s ranch houses be subjected to the same preservation standards as the owners of important historic Victorian or Colonial homes? Why couldn’t they be exempted? Why did they have to suffer the same amount of fuss and expense and oversight that dogs the owners of more historically prestigious buildings?

A couple of days later, by chance, I had to go see my dentist, whose office is over on Gibbs Ave. He’s a smart man – film buff, Buddhist, Obama fan - and I always enjoy talking to him, even if it is usually just about my teeth. Anyhow, on my way over, I noticed some construction taking place a few doors down from him. For as long as I’ve lived in Newport that particular lot has been occupied by a large, low, clean-lined and expensive looking brick ranch house. Now two new bombastic, view-blocking McMansions were rising up out of the dirt instead. Too bad, I said to him, that they had to tear down that house on the corner. He laughed. Oh, it doesn’t matter, he said, it was just a 50’s ranch.

Does nobody in this town GET that today’s 50’s ranches are tomorrow’s historic properties? Today’s present is tomorrow’s history. We are tearing down the future’s past. Fifty years from now these buildings will no longer be ranch houses, they’ll be Ranch Houses, and people will be snapping up what few are left standing and restoring them to within an inch of their lives. Not to mention selling them for a lot of money. The 50’s ranch speaks to and is expressive of its own historical moment as surely as Colonial houses represent the 1700’s or Victorian houses reveal the 1800’s.

The pattern of architectural destruction is dismally predictable…Throughout the 19th century Colonial buildings beyond number were torn down because they didn’t conform to the new aesthetic standards of the Victorian era. Then the Victorian buildings got torn down because they didn’t conform to the more modernist standards of the 20th century. When I was a child I used to hear otherwise intelligent & sophisticated people speak approvingly about tearing down those “hideous old Victorian piles”. Down with the Victorians! Down with the Colonists! Down with the past! Then when I got to Newport in the late 1970’s, the old workers cottages of the early century were the excrescence requiring immediate removal. Now the mid-20th century buildings are what’s being torn down. Meanwhile, the buildings that have managed to survive this ongoing architectural auto-de-fe are being breathlessly restored and preserved, from whence they will be traded on the real estate market with the kind of fervor inspired in children by Pokémon cards. It makes my head spin just to think about it.

Because the bottom line is this: the vast majority of these “historic houses” – whether Colonial, Victorian, or Early 20th – have no actual intrinsic historic value other than the fact of their survival of the wrecking ball. They are significant only in that they managed to escape the destruction that eliminated so many of their peers. Most are not architectural masterpieces. Washington didn’t sleep there. They were homes built by and for tradespeople, the middle class, the everyday Joe. They were small shops, farms, schoolhouses, vacation places. The vast majority were not designed by architects, but were simply erected by builders and carpenters with absolutely no artistic agenda in mind, just a job to do. A great deal of what we are so frantically trying to preserve is nothing more than the vernacular architecture of previous eras. Indisputably our sense of our own past would be immeasurably poorer without these buildings. So why are we so determined to deprive the future of us?