Place, Race, and Story

Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation

Ned Kaufman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135889715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Storia dell'architettura

In Place, Race, and Story, author Ned Kaufman has collected his own essays dedicated to the proposition of giving the next generation of preservationists not only a foundational knowledge of the field of study, but more ideas on where they can take it. Through both big-picture essays considering preservation across time, and descriptions of work on specific sites, the essays in this collection trace the themes of place, race, and story in ways that raise questions, stimulate discussion, and offer a different perspective on these common ideas.

Including unpublished essays as well as established works by the author, Place, Race, and Story provides a new outline for a progressive preservation movement – the revitalized movement for social progress.

PART I
Place, Race, and Story: Basic Issues

INTRODUCTION: NEEDS AND OPPORTUNITIES

The following chapters were originally drafted at the request of organizations representing three distinct groups of professionals—academics, lawyers, and government officials—but they should be perfectly accessible to general readers interested in preservation. They introduce the basic themes of this book.

Chapter 1 is about the concept of place. More and more preservationists are appreciating the importance of place, and practitioners as well as scholars are seeking to understand what factors are most important in defining places. But the research remains compartmentalized among a dozen different fields: environmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, folklore, cultural geography, public health, landscape architecture, urban planning, transportation planning, community planning, and so on. Here, claims are made for the economic services provided by places; there, for their affective qualities. Some researchers stress the formative influence of places in early childhood, others their organization as markets. What we lack is a comprehensive description of what place is. Even more fundamentally, we lack a broadly accepted language of place: a persuasive and flexible vocabulary to describe the characteristics of places, explain why they are important to people, and argue for their protection. An interesting example of this absence was noted some years ago by the sociologist E. V. Walter, who pointed out that the English language does not even have an adjective corresponding to the noun “place.” The word “spatial” emerged from “space” in the nineteenth century, but, seeing no future in the word “platial,” Walter instead proposed “topistic,” from the Greek topos, together with the noun “topistics” for the study of what he called placeways.¹ These coinages have not caught on. In any case, until we have a language of place and know how to use it, we will not have a public policy consensus in favor of sustaining places.

The need for a language of place is not merely academic: it is made urgent by the wrenching changes made to places across the country every day. Chapter 1 suggests that the social value of stability in places remains underestimated, even by preservationists. But it also argues that people need and deserve more control over the future of their own places, whether the result be to promote, in some cases, stability or, in others, change. The right to choose between these two options is an important dimension of environmental equity, and one that is very unfairly distributed. Sharing it more equitably will help people preserve their places and their heritage; some ways of doing this are discussed in Chapter 9.

Chapter 2 introduces the idea of storyscape to the discussion of place. It is a simple idea, which starts with the concept of story sites. A story site is a place that supports the perpetuation of socially useful or meaningful narratives. It may provide space for carrying them out or simply call them to people’s mind when they visit or use it. The stories may be about history, tradition, or shared memories. They may be recollected or passed on to other people: if passed on, they may be either told or reenacted—the difference is between going to a diner with friends every Sunday morning and telling someone, “That’s where I used to go for brunch on Sundays.” Story sites include all really successful historic sites, but they also include many places that preservationists and planners overlook. In general, their value to people—and specifically their heritage value—cannot be estimated simply by looking at them: one has to talk to people and observe how they behave. By putting together all of the story sites in a neighborhood, city, or region, one arrives at a storyscape, which is simply a landscape or cityscape seen through the lens of stories, memories, and traditions. In Chapter 2 I explain the ways in which story sites and storyscape are valuable to society, as well as the reasons why preservationists should identify and protect them. I also discuss some of the legal mechanisms available for safeguarding them. But those mechanisms are severely inadequate. Historic preservation law does not really recognize story sites: environmental law, surprisingly, does somewhat better. But a new framework is needed to recognize and protect storyscape.

With Chapter 3 I turn to race. What is the diversity deficit? It is the gap between the nation’s racial and ethnic diversity and the preservation profession’s lack of diversity. Just as diversity characterizes both the nation’s past and its present, so the absence of diversity affects both how preservation portrays the past and how it organizes itself professionally in the present. This admittedly broad statement, to which there are of course exceptions, is based on reviewing actual preservation programs and on interviewing many heritage experts outside the profession’s white mainstream. Chapter 3 helps readers see the current state of historic preservation as these experts see it and introduces readers to some of what they have been accomplishing outside its mainstream. This chapter also proposes specific steps that can be taken to close the diversity deficit. While this represents a challenge, it also offers a tremendous opportunity to carry out important preservation work, creating new partnerships, launching projects that will expand the nation’s stock of heritage, and engaging in intellectual exchanges that can revitalize the profession.

NOTE

1. Eugene Victor Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 20–21.

CHAPTER 1
Placing Preservation

The following chapter originated as the keynote address for a symposium called “Senses of Places: Urban Narratives as Public Secrets,” and held at Pace University’s Institute for Environmental and Regional Studies in New York City in 2004.

In pondering the phrase “urban narratives as public secrets,” it occurred to me that the greatest public secret of all is place itself. We live in place: it is as fundamental an aspect of our environment as air, water, or the ground. We talk about place all the time. We can distinguish between different kinds of places—urban, suburban, and so forth. Yet we don’t really know what place is. It is as if we could distinguish among different kinds of fruit—grapefruit, peach, or banana—without having a clear concept of “fruit” itself. Perhaps place is not a thing at all. Maybe it is just a quality—placeness, as one might say, or place-itude. That would explain why we are not always certain when we have left one place and entered another—a sort of confusion that never occurs with a fruit. We are in no doubt about when we have stopped eating a kumquat and bitten into a grape. And yet, when we have crossed City Hall Park, we may not be certain whether we are still in the same place or in a different place. And if we are still in the same place, then what happens when we cross Canal Street? How about Houston Street? For that matter, what happens when we go home at night? At what point do we enter the place of home? Is the neighborhood a place? The house or apartment? The dining room? A chair? These questions may seem trivial. But all sorts of public policy decisions hinge on how we answer them. And these decisions are not trivial at all.

The fact is, we live in place and depend upon place, yet for the most part we take our places for granted and do not think much about how they got there, what we owe to them, or what is required to maintain them in the way we like. This would not be a problem if powerful actors in our society were not also operating almost constantly on place, shaping and reshaping it in profound ways. They build and tear down buildings, construct highways, install sodium-vapor lights, erect fences and gates, extend runways, move bus stops, restore fire towers, clear paths, and fortify streams with riprap and beaches with jetties. They adopt rules that preserve this building while allowing that one to be demolished, that encourage the development of thirty-story buildings but prohibit forty-story buildings, that steer investment in this direction but not in that. They create and approve plans to turn thousands of acres of field and forest into spreading suburbs. They declare other land to be wilderness, or they permit the construction of roads so that it cannot be declared wilderness. Our places are being dramatically transformed—often not for the better—and all of this with hardly a thought, much less a consensus, about what place really is, what it does for us, or what we need from it.

I recently had occasion to confront my own ignorance on this subject, thanks to my colleagues at Pace University, where I had the opportunity to serve as visiting scholar in environmental studies. To my seminars I brought some proposals about law, policy, land use, and concepts of property. I wanted to explore these concepts with students and faculty and thought I would begin by simply laying down a few basic concepts about place—about what place is—before getting to the meat of the issue. But the participants’ persistent questions soon made me realize that I myself had taken too many things for granted. Just what was this thing I called place? And how did I know? I quickly realized how little, in fact, I knew.

I also realized how much work still needs to be done in findings ways to talk about place—ways that people will understand and recognize as true. Given the rapid pace at which the places of North America are being transformed, this kind of study may seem to be an unaffordable luxury. Yet before the national policy debate about places can be reoriented—before we can even have a meaningful debate—we will need better arguments with which to oppose such conventional wisdom as: change is the inevitable price of progress, which is always good; those who seek to preserve (fill in the blank) are simply standing in the way of progress; and democracy depends upon the unhindered operation of markets, whose decisions are always right. I am not suggesting that the defenders of places, whether they call themselves environmentalists, historic preservationists, or community advocates, should walk away from the struggle because their tools leave something to be desired. I am calling upon the ranks of intellectuals to help them out, to work with them to create the conceptual underpinnings of a new and persuasive argument on behalf of places. This is the only way we will ever turn the tide.

Where to start? Perhaps by putting up two views of place that usefully bracket much of what we might want to say about this most basic of concepts. First, a passage from Tony Hiss’s The Experience of Place, a book that electrified some New Yorkers when it appeared in 1990. The author is describing a stroll through New York’s Grand Central Terminal:

I came out of the East Side IRT subway into the more southerly of the two straightaways and immediately found myself part of a stream of people, four and five abreast, all of them looking straight ahead and moving at a fast New York clip toward the concourse along the right-hand side of a tunnel only twice the width of the stream itself. Toward me along the left-hand side of the corridor … came a second stream of people…. I felt hurried along. My breathing was shallow and slightly constricted; my neck and shoulders were tight…. Then these two streams of people crossed a second pair of streams, running at a right angle to them. The stream I was in entered a space with a slightly higher, cross-vaulted ceiling, and I had a moment to feel alarmed in retrospect, wondering why no one had bumped into anyone else during the crossing…. In another step, I was in the concourse. I knew this first not by sight but by body sensation, sounds, the absence of a smell, and breathing. I felt as if some small weight suspended several feet above my head that I had not till then even been aware of, had just shot fifteen stories into the air. I straightened up, my breathing slowed down, and I noticed that the scentless air around me was warm…. All the sounds that reached me seemed to have been fused into a single sound. Vast and quiet, it seemed to be evenly distributed throughout the great room. This sound, pleasant in all its parts, regular in all its rhythms, and humorous and good-natured, seemed also to have buttoned me into some small, silent bubble of space. I felt that I wasn’t quite walking but was paddling—or somehow propelling—this bubble across the floor.¹

Next, a passage from A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky. Published in 1947, this was one of the first great western novels. It established the Montana school of writing and became a formative influence on how people have written about western places:

When they were going again his thoughts went back. As a man got older he felt different about things in other ways. He liked rendezvous still and to see the hills and travel the streams and all, but half the pleasure was in the remembering mind. A place didn’t stand alone after a man had been there once. It stood along with the times he had had, with the thoughts he had thought, with the men he had played and fought and drunk with, so when he got there again he was always asking whatever became of so-and-so, asking if the others minded a certain time. It stood with the young him and the former feelings. A river wasn’t the same once a man had camped by it. The tree he saw again wasn’t the same tree if he had only so much as pissed against it. There was the first time and the place alone, and afterwards there was the place and the time and the man he used to be, all mixed up, one with the other.²

These two experiences of place could hardly be more different. Hiss is all about sensory perception. Guthrie is all about memory. Is one more right than the other? Not necessarily. I myself have moved from a Hiss position to one more like Guthrie’s. I remember how, many years ago, I took a group of fourteen-year-olds from small towns and suburbs in the Poconos to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. None of these children had ever been in a building remotely like this magnificent stone cathedral, with its spacious vaults and, soaring overhead, the great dome. I wanted them to sense the reverberant volume of air above their heads, to take in the sound that distant footfalls made on stone floors under that echoing vault. My understanding of place, in short, was much like Hiss’s.

After we had spent some time in the church, I took them up into the dome, and we walked around the base of the lantern and looked out over all of London. We talked about how different it felt up there from inside the church. After I returned, the group leader seemed perturbed. She asked again and again if everyone was all right—an odd question, I thought, since it was evident that all the boys had enjoyed the experience. I learned later that one of my adolescent charges had a history of suicide attempts; no one had thought to tell me this before the outing.

Had I been more perceptive, I would have taken from this episode the realization that places can mean very different things to different people: that what looks to one person like a grand place to climb up to might strike someone else as the perfect spot from which to jump off. The difference lies in what each brings to the encounter, and in this sense Guthrie is clearly right: the place doesn’t stand alone, even if a man has never been there. Yet it was only later that I began to appreciate the importance of story—memory, tradition, legend, association, inner narrative—in place. I do not want to jettison the sensory or the aesthetic, but I now find it necessary to emphasize what I shall call the Guthrie point of view, partly because it has been so little acknowledged in the public debate—and because its acceptance can so dramatically deepen our appreciation of place.

Beyond sensory perception and memory, there is a third way of looking at place. This third way holds Hiss and Guthrie together the way a single pair of manacles might hold two prisoners. Here is how John Logan and Harvey Molotch explain this third way:

Any given piece of real estate has both a use value and an exchange value. An apartment building, for example, provides a “home” for residents (use value) while at the same time generating rent for the own...