Erasure primer (Vol. 2)

Two years ago I published a post in this blog illustrating how maps produced by grassroots historic preservation organizations are used to erase communities of color. Yesterday I did a public program on history and historic preservation in Silver Spring, Maryland. For the first time, my slide deck included maps produced by the Maryland Historical Trust, the state historic preservation office, that have erased historically-Black Lyttonsville.

Maryland Historical Trust online mapping system. Screen capture April 14, 2019.

The Maryland Historical Trust maps are from a geographic information system (GIS) layer illustrating all properties documented in the agency’s official record of historic places in Maryland: the Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties (MIHP). The database includes long-form MIHP forms and brief determinations of eligibility for listing in the National Register of Historic Places produced by entities complying with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act:

The Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties (MIHP) is a repository of information on districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects of known or potential value to the prehistory and history of the State of Maryland. The Inventory was created shortly after the Maryland Historical Trust was founded in 1961, and now includes data on more than 13,000 archeological sites and 43,000 historic and architectural resources. The MIHP includes information about both standing structures and archeological resources. Inventoried properties contribute information to our understanding of Maryland’s architecture, engineering, archeology, or culture. — Maryland Historical Trust website.

Many of the properties in the Maryland Historical Trust’s database in proximity to Lyttonsville are simply platted subdivisions recorded in Montgomery County land records for which histories were written and the existing buildings and landscapes were evaluated for their historical significance. Some of them, like the adjacent “Pilgrim Church Tract,” are completely illegible: “Today, the Pilgrim Church Tract is filled with 16 lots, several of which have been expanded, combined, and resubdivided since the 1960s,” wrote a consultant in 2012 who was working for the agency building the Purple Line light rail. “The area is almost entirely covered by paved parking lots and late-twentieth century warehouses ….” Yet, the space first inscribed in a plat filed in 1892 is visible in historic preservation records and maps.

“Littonville.” Montgomery County Land Records, Plat Book 1, Plat 36.

The MIHP database is the product of decades of grassroots and informal research as well as professional studies done by academics and government agencies, including the Montgomery County Planning Department, the Maryland Department of Transportation, and others. Yesterday’s program was held in Lyttonsville, in the Gwendolyn E. Coffield community center. While the map from the MIHP website was on the screen I asked the people in the audience to find Lyttonsville in it. Though a settled place since 1853 and platted in 1901, Lyttonsville didn’t appear in the MIHP map. Like the maps, books, and programs produced by the local historical society, Lyttonsville was invisible to Maryland’s official historic preservation agency.

Lyttonsville vicinity, Maryland Historical Trust base map screen capture (April 8, 2019) annotated by David Rotenstein.

Maryland Historical Trust map with 1901 Lyttonsville plat overlay. Arrow indicates Lyttonsville.

Erasure: “The practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible” —Parul Sehgal, “Fighting ‘Erasure.’” The New York Times, February 2, 2016.

© 2019 D.S. Rotenstein

Housing Opportunities Commission statement on River Road Moses Cemetery

Delivered to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission.

STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID ROTENSTEIN
February 6, 2019

Good afternoon. My name is David Rotenstein and I am here to speak in support of preserving and commemorating the River Road Moses Cemetery site. The last time I appeared before the HOC in October 2018, I delivered a report I had prepared documenting the site’s history and its eligibility under multiple criteria for designation in the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation and the National Register of Historic Places. Today I am here to clear up some misinformation about that report and my statement to the HOC at that time.

The first time I wrote about African American cemeteries and their preservation was in a 1992 article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer (Attachment A). Since then I have written many articles for academic and popular publications that deal with African American history and historic preservation.

Let those African American graveyards rest in peace. The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1992.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1992.

I believe the River Road Moses Cemetery deserves the utmost respect and care so that it will suffer no further disturbances. It should be a space of reflection, reverence, commemoration, and learning to celebrate the lives of the people who once lived in River Road and its affiliated communities. I wholeheartedly support the objectives stated by the many of the people advocating for its protection and commemoration. However, I cannot abide by the methods they are using to smear and demean everyone they perceive as opponents — HOC staff and commissioners, Montgomery County officials, academics who don’t tailor their findings to suit their needs, and ordinary citizens.

HOC protest, November 2017.

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and her allies have a fraught relationship with the truth regarding the cemetery and its many issues. In recent months they have fabricated information about my work and my former association with them. These fabrications have been broadcast on the radio and disseminated in press releases and social media posts. These passionate advocates for preservation and commemoration are now using the same tactics they have accused Montgomery County government, real estate developers, and members of the general public of using in the displacement and erasure of the River Road African American community and the cemetery. Furthermore, their resistance to a more inclusive approach that draws on examples from throughout North America, like the one cited in my 1992 article, involving similarly desecrated sacred sites is puzzling. It’s almost as if they are trying to reinvent the wheel using a sharp multi-edged geometric shape instead of a smooth circle.  The tactics they are using taint the advocacy, diminish its efficacy, and create an unfortunate precedent for future efforts.

In addition to the 1992 article, I have prepared a timeline for the HOC and others to compare against information disseminated by members of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition and it is appended to this statement. I am prepared to answer any questions the Commission may have.

Thank you.

Download the complete February 6, 2019, handout.

Protestors arrested at the Feb. 6, 2019 Housing Opportunities Commission meeting.

Creative mitigation Silver Spring style

Mitigation is the term of art used to describe how federal agencies prefer to resolve adverse effects to historic properties. More jargon, I know. Yet, mitigation is a fact of life for every American who lives in an old place. This post is about mitigation and the Talbot Avenue Bridge in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Historic properties are buildings, structures, objects, and sites that are determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires agencies to identify properties eligible for listing in the National Register before a proposed action like a new road, bridge, railroad, pipeline, or power line is built. If eligible properties are identified in an area that will be impacted, agencies are required to evaluate what effects the action will have on the properties. Effects range from complete demolition to partial alteration to the introduction of visual impacts. It’s a complicated thing.

Pittsburgh Wool Company, before demolition(1998) and during demolition (2000). The Pittsburgh Wool Company was the last wool pullery in the United States. A historic business founded in the early 20th century, it occupied a former tannery building constructed in the 1880s.

If the proposed action is found to adversely affect historic properties, i.e., alter the characteristics that make them historic (important), then the agencies are required to resolve the adverse effects. The process, from the identification of historic properties to determining why they are historically significant to resolving adverse effects to them, is a legally-mandated consultation process. In other words, people living in and around the historic properties must be consulted at every step along the way.

Work inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company prior to demolition.

Oftentimes, this consultation never happens. Or, it happens in a perfunctory and highly limited way that is inconsistent with the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. As a result, mitigation all too often simply involves a transaction in which the federal agency or its state and local partner (or private sector entities like telecommunications firms) buys the right to demolish something old and historic.

Pittsburgh Wool Company mitigation products: Heinz History Center exhibition (left) and Historic American Engineering Record drawings (right).

This compensation (sometimes derided as bribery) involves more perfunctory actions: completing a community historic resource survey, funneling money to a local museum, writing reports that no one will ever read, etc. Once the mitigation is decided upon, the agency is free to demolish the old building or structure.

This is what happened with the Talbot Avenue Bridge. The bridge was determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and a mitigation plan was developed to resolve the adverse effects introduced by the construction of the Purple Line light rail line.

Purple Line Community Advisory Team, Talbot Avenue Bridge Design Meeting, August 30, 2018.

Purple Line Community Advisory Team, Talbot Avenue Bridge Design Meeting, August 30, 2018.

The bridge was determined historically significant for its associations with the railroad; the adverse effect is demolition; and, the mitigation was the completion of more documentation prior to demolition.

Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 22, 2018.

Two years ago, Silver Spring residents learned more about the bridge’s history and its ties to local African American and civil rights history. Since then, folks have taken things into their own hands by raising awareness of the bridge’s history and by appropriating the bridge for public programs. These programs have included community meetings, a pop-up museum, and a centennial celebration festival that attracted more than 200 people on a warm fall afternoon in 2018. And beyond the space, we can include the composition of a song to commemorate the bridge, the production of a documentary video, and the various visual artworks that have been created among grassroots mitigation created.

Converting abandoned infrastructure into festival space. Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 22, 2018.

As these events were unfolding, I was invited to participate in a “diamond session” panel on historic preservation at the 2018 American Folklore Society meeting in Buffalo, New York. Diamond sessions are like pechakucha for folklorists. Each presenter is limited to showing only 21 slides that are precisely timed to be visible for only 20 seconds. The objective in these sessions is to move the focus off of the speaker and to spur discussion.

My AFS presentation was titled, “More than Old Metal and Wood: The Talbot Avenue Bridge.” The abstract published in the meeting program book reads:

For 99 years, the Talbot Avenue Bridge carried cars, bikes, and pedestrians across railroad tracks in Silver Spring, Maryland. The bridge connected two very different neighborhoods: a historically Black hamlet and a Sundown suburb that developed around racially restricted residential subdivisions. Though eligible for the National Register of Historic Places as an engineering structure associated with the B&O Railroad, historians neglected to explore the bridge’s social history. This presentation demonstrates what happened when the bridge’s links to Jim Crow segregation were revealed to white residents, the press, and local government officials.

The video below is a rendering of the presentation.

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein

History denied is history that is stolen

I feel like it sort of takes away somewhat from the church and the lodge hall because it’s so much taller than they are and they are the historical properties, not the tower. — neighborhood resident, August 2002.

A historic church, fraternal lodge, and tower in the heart of a Southern African American neighborhood, 2002.

This evening the Montgomery County Planning Board is poised to approve a new site plan for a proposed self-storage facility in Bethesda. The property where the facility is proposed once was part of an African American cemetery used by a Washington, D.C., benevolent organization during the first half of the twentieth century.

Like its counterparts throughout the United States in the federal, state, and local governments, the Montgomery County Planning Board and its staff in the Montgomery County Planning Department have failed to adequately take into account impacts to a historic African American property and a living community associated with it: the Moses Cemetery. An ethnocentric bias towards the cemetery is evident in all aspects of the County’s planning efforts dating back to the agency’s first involvement with the site as it was preparing the Westbard Sector Plan. Continue reading

Is Montgomery County Planning tainted by racism?

Montgomery County, Maryland, goes to great lengths to promote its communities as diverse and progressive. Yet, actions by such institutions as the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission undermine those assertions with racialized land use policies and historic preservation plans that omit, marginalize, and alienate the county’s communities of color. Patterns apparent over the past 20 years suggest that the agency, which was founded by a white supremacist real estate developer and Democratic Party boss, structurally hasn’t moved very far from its 1920s origins as a machine for building suburbs where power and authority remain concentrated among the white middle and upper classes.

Framing Structural and Institutional Racism

In September 2016, a historic preservation planner with the Montgomery County Planning Department’s Historic Preservation Office approached a group of residents from the  Lyttonsville community in the lobby of the Montgomery County Council Building in Rockville. The planner and the residents of the historically African American community were there to attend a hearing for the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan.

The planner began speaking enthusiastically about her research in a neighboring community that had been developed by Jewish developer Sam Eig: Rock Creek Forest. She told the Lyttonsville residents that in her research on Eig and the subdivision she found that Eig did not attach racial restrictive covenants to the properties.

The following morning I emailed the planner and asked her about what she had told the Lyttonsville residents. She replied:

What I was telling [Lyttonsville resident] was that Sam Eig developed Rock Creek Forest, without restrictive covenants. He also donated land there for two churches and the Jewish Community Center (?and maybe for the Red Cross). MCHS has  information on Sam Eig.

Continue reading

Montgomery Modern madness

Montgomery County historic preservation planners have begun exploring, analyzing and recording local mid-century modern buildings and communities, part of an effort we call Montgomery Modern. — Montgomery County Planning Department website

A few years ago the Montgomery County Planning Department’s historic preservation staff began an initiative it calls “Montgomery Modern.” The initiative has included a massive public relations campaign to raise public awareness for, and appreciation of, Montgomery County’s mid-twentieth century architecture. Montgomery Modern has included bus tours and bike tours of residential subdivisions and architecturally significant office buildings, churches, and public buildings. And it’s yielded a book written by one of the agency’s historic preservation planners.

In its zeal to highlight other’s peoples’ buildings, the agency appears to have overlooked its own headquarters: the Maryland-National Capital Planning Commission’s Montgomery Regional Office (MRO) at 8787 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring.

Continue reading

Revive the old ones

I came across this 1937 planning newsletter article titled “Revive the Old Ones” while working on a project in the Library of Congress. Its message is as applicable in 2014 as it was in 1937.

Planning_Nov1937

Credit: American Society of Planning Officials News Letter, Nov. 1937. Library of Congress, http://lccn.loc.gov/sf81006025.

Walt Whitman on teardowns and historic preservation (Updated)

Walt Whitman, c. 1854. Credit: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-08542 Walt Whitman, c. 1854. Credit: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-08542

Thanks to a Facebook post on Ann Peters’ new book, House Hold: A Memoir of Place, Elizabeth Jacox (one of the proprietors of TAG Historical Research) turned me onto a remarkable essay by Walt Whitman. “Tear Down and Build Over Again” was published in the November 1845 issue of The American Review.

The Whitman essay is an incredibly early exploration of place attachment and urban redevelopment in New York City. The work is new to me so I can’t definitively say if what the poet was describing qualifies as gentrification. I need to learn more about the neighborhood(s) and the rebuilding Whitman described. On first glance, it certainly does appear to meet many definitions of gentrification. Whitman’s essay has neighborhood upgrading (through reinvestment in a neighborhood that appears to have suffered from disinvestment), displacement, and all of the hallmarks of new build gentrification. Whitman wrote,

Continue reading

Greyfields: a historic preservation gray area

Too frequently historic preservationists have failed to appreciate the entire urban landscape … Parking, as part of urban history, should not be rejected out of hand by any history aficionado — John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture

The National Council on Public History has published a new article on History@Work titled Blacktop History: The case for preserving parking lots. It examines the suburban parking lot as an unloveable yet important historic resource type.

Free Public Parking Big Factor In Silver Spring Success Story. The Washington Post, Nov. 27, 1949.

Free Public Parking Big Factor In Silver Spring Success Story. The Washington Post, Nov. 27, 1949.

Continue reading

Separate and unequal: Preserving Jim Crow

Equalization schools were the South’s futile attempt to cling to Jim Crow segregation. They were built throughout Georgia, South Carolina, and other Deep South states as a last ditch effort to forestall court-ordered public school integration. According to Georgia architectural historian Steven Moffson, his state had the greatest number of schools built to preserve the separate but equal doctrine that ultimately was dismantled under the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

Decatur’s Beacon Elementary and Trinity High schools were among the hundreds of equalization schools built in Georgia after World War II. They were constructed in 1955 and 1956 on the site where the city had maintained its African American school, the Herring Street School, since the early twentieth century. In early 2013, three years after receiving a $10,000 historic preservation grant that should have led to the property’s protection, the City of Decatur began demolishing parts of the two schools to build a new police headquarters and civic plaza. Continue reading