A historic snow and ice storm hit Atlanta this week and I had a front row seat.
You know the day’s not going to go well when a Weather Channel crew sets up across the street from your hotel for live shots throughout the day.
[See below for updates to this post]
Teardowns and mansionization are a nationwide problem and Montgomery County has few regulatory controls to prevent property owners from demolishing older homes and building new houses that are out of scale and character with neighboring buildings.
Although Montgomery County has a historic preservation ordinance, not all old homes are historic and there are few tools currently available to residents to prevent speculators from building McMansions like the one under construction in my Silver Spring neighborhood. Continue reading
Last week we closed the books on 2010 and the first decade (more or less) of the 21st century. My last blog posts of 2010 were the final entries in my 2002-2005 survey of first generation Western Union microwave sites.
Telecommunications infrastructure is the most visible element of the information age, the third industrial revolution. They also have strong significance to those of us who work in historic preservation, especially regulatory compliance. Because of the small federal handle of radio spectrum licensing (FCC) and tower siting (FAA, FCC) broadcasters and telecom firms found themselves unwittingly and unwillingly enmeshed in National Historic Preservation Act compliance.
They joined other private sector industries, notably natural gas transmission and other energy sectors, in becoming federal agency delegates in environmental regulatory review. The new private sector involvement spurred substantial changes in the way Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act works. Notable among those changes were an explosion of Programmatic Agreements and exemptions to Section 106 compliance.
Although they are old and are demonstrably historically significant, the properties documented in my blog series and elsewhere were excluded by the FCC’s Nationwide Programmatic Agreement for Section 106 compliance and are, in legal and regulatory terms, not historic.
These telecommunications sites joined natural gas pipelines as properties that may meet academic definitions of historical significance but not the federal legal definition. As we move deeper into the 21st century, more post-World War II industrial sites — especially those in networked industries — will be crossing the 50-year antiquity threshold becoming fair game for Section 106 consideration. Will industrial archaeologists be as prepared for third industrial revolution sites as we were for first- and second industrial revolution sites?
As I finish the edits on next Monday’s post on new Silver Spring McMansions, I put together this collage showing the older building stock in my North Four Corners neighborhood juxtaposed against a map with some of the earliest subdivision plats and their dates as an overlay.
© 2010 David S. Rotenstein
They are among some of the search phrases used by people visiting the H4H blog this week. If you find any unifying threads, please let me know. Continue reading
Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington
In 2007 I stumbled into a Washington, D.C., historic preservation kerfuffle. A local preservation advocate desperately wanted the District of Columbia government to designate a large brick home in Chevy Chase as a historic landmark. Although never designated, the brick home at 3637 Patterson Street NW came to have three stories attached to it before it was demolished. This article documents the man who built the house; the building’s place in space and history; and, the historic preservation battle fought to prevent its demolition. Continue reading
Downtown Silver Spring may lose another locally owned and operated business. According to a November Silver Spring Singular blog post, the Peterson Companies are pressuring the Family Dry Cleaners to leave the prominent Wayne Avenue Shopping Center location they have occupied since 2000 when the center opened. The dry cleaner’s lease expires next March. The blogger wrote that Peterson — which manages Downtown Silver Spring under an agreement with Montgomery County — is courting CVS to occupy the space now held by the cleaners, along with adjacent spaces formerly occupied by Hollywood Video and MotoPhoto (later, an Upscale Pharmacy outlet).
Family Dry Cleaners, Downtown Silver Spring. Photo by the author, December 2010.
The Montgomery County Planning Board last night voted to create two new historic districts in Clagettsville and Etchison in the county’s Upper Patuxent Planning Area. Last night’s meeting was the second work session held on proposed Master Plan for Historic Preservation designations since an October public hearing. Originally scheduled for early 2011, last night’s session was hastily added to the agenda because a property owner in one of the proposed historic districts pleaded with the Planning Board at its last work session on the designations to decide on her property before a purchase contract expires the end of the year. Continue reading
The latest issue of the Art Deco Society of Washington‘s Trans-Lux newsletter is hot off the press (or whatever it is you call the PDF distiller). My article on Silver Spring’s 1939 World’s Fair Home:
[gview file=”http://www.historian4hire.net/pdf/Trans-Lux_Fall_2010x.pdf”]
© 2010 David S. Rotenstein
It’s been a fact of life in Washington for so long that people don’t notice — Rabbi Barry Freundel, Kesher Israel Synagogue, Washington, D.C.
Life inside an eruv, for Jews and non-Jews, is like life anywhere else. The boundary created by the eruv and the domain inside are meant to be unobtrusive and their builders strive for invisibility. I live inside an eruv and until I began than research, I was unaware of its existence or its limits. The same is true for many of my neighbors and friends and colleagues who live elsewhere in Montgomery County, Maryland. Continue reading