Historic Preservation and Folklore: Dismantling Preservation’s Diversity Deficit By David S. Rotenstein
Panel, Historic Preservation and Public Folklore: Successes, Challenges,
and Failures in Responding to Community
American Folklore Society 2019 Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland
October 17, 2019
INTRODUCTION
I began exploring displacement, gentrification, and erasure eight years ago this weekend. My unanticipated trip down this research road began when I spent all of Wednesday October 19, 2011, documenting the demolition of a small home in Decatur, Georgia. That led me to inquire about the property’s history. What I learned there led to questions about the neighborhood’s housing history and where the suburban neighborhood’s African American residents were going. Those queries moved me to ask how history and historic preservation are produced in that neighborhood; in the city of Decatur; and, in comparable suburbs throughout North America.[1]
Along the way, through two states and the District of Columbia, and nearly 200 interviews later, I met lots of people whose families have called Decatur, Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington home for generations. I befriended people like Veronica, Charlotte, Patricia, Harvey, and Elmoria who navigate spaces where their stories have been erased and marginalized. They are places where the histories of white supremacists have been memorialized in commemorative landscapes and historic preservation plans. My friends will die in these places never knowing what it is like to be fully part of the communities they call home. Continue reading →
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.
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.
Erasure: “The practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible” —Parul Sehgal, “Fighting ‘Erasure.’” The New York Times, February 2, 2016.
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.
Yesterday evening, the Purple Line Transit Partners and Montgomery County’s Department of Transportation closed the Lyttonsville Place Bridge. The six-month closure will allow for the demolition and reconstruction of a new bridge to accommodate the Purple Line light rail.
Though local news outlets have covered the controversial bridge closing for the past several months, not a single journalist has written about Lyttonsville residents’ claims that the bridge closure and a detour using a street closed during urban renewal in the 1970s is environmental racism. And, no journalists have covered the community’s search for a civil rights lawyer to take up their claim that the detour and bridge closing violate the National Environmental Policy Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by introducing impacts to the community that should have been evaluated under the law’s environmental justice requirements. Continue reading →
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.
On Wednesday January 20, 2016, weather forecasters issued a blizzard watch for the Washington, DC, area. The following day, the notice was upgraded to a blizzard warning. The National Weather Service has named the event ‘Winter Storm Jonas”; Washington Post meteorologists have named it “Snowzilla.” For me, Snowzilla it is. Seriously, does the name “Jonas” inspire fear and awe?
Anywhere from 1.5 to 2 feet of snow was predicted. Mass transit is shutting down for the weekend. There’s a run on grocery and hardware stores — even Washington City Paper reported that a local Trader Joes had sold out of all its veggie flaxseed tortilla chips. Pepco, the electric company, announced that we could be spending days in a pre-electric living history museum.
Clearly, this is the BIG ONE. Besides staging firewood and all the necessary supplies (except the flaxseed anythings) to cope with the storm, I’ll be documenting the event as it unfolds. So sit back, grab something to eat and drink, and watch the end of the world from the comfort of your browser window. Continue reading →
A Maryland Realtor emailed to let me know that Silver Spring, Maryland’s 1939 World’s Fair Town of Tomorrow home is on the market. Built as a marketing gimmick and used as collateral advertising for the New York fair, the home has had only two owners since it was completed in the summer of 1939.
Construction progress photo. The Washington Post, June 11, 1939.
When it comes to evaluating impacts to historic properties, why are historic preservationists so hung up on views from roads? What about views from railroads and other heavily traveled transportation corridors?
I’ve often wondered why architectural historians and others evaluating impacts to historic buildings, structures, and landscapes by construction projects limit themselves to looking at how a proposed project will look from the road.
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 →
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.
