In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Preservation and Negotiation of History and Identity in Lexington, Kentucky
  • Bryan D. Orthel (bio)

I want modernism to emerge as a distinctive patterning of mental and technical possibilities. . . . “Modernity” means contingency. It points to a social order which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a projected future—of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature, or infinities of information. This process goes along with a great emptying and sanitizing of the imagination. Without ancestor-worship, meaning is in short supply—“meaning” here meaning agreed-on and instituted forms of value and understanding, implicit orders, stories and images in which a culture crystallizes its sense of the struggle with the realm of necessity and the reality of pain and death. . . .

We know we are living a new form of life, in which all previous notions of belief and sociability have been scrambled. And the true terror of this new order has to do with its being ruled—and obscurely felt to be ruled—by sheer concatenation . . . that is, by a system without any focusing purpose to it, or any compelling image or ritualization of that purpose.

— T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea1

In the fall of 2010, visitors to downtown Lexington, Kentucky, saw an unusual urban contradiction. An entire city block in the figural and physical heart of the city was empty.2 Instead of buildings, the block was covered with grass and fenced like a horse paddock on one of the farms surrounding the city (Figures 1 and 2). Dynamically painted, full-size, fiberglass horses—a public art project—stood on sidewalks and outside prominent buildings throughout downtown. The public art project coincided with the World Equestrian Games hosted by Lexington that year.3 Several of the fiberglass horses appeared to stroll the sidewalks adjacent to the empty block. The block was opened for concerts and other gatherings during public celebrations. A passerby on Main Street could have seen a herd of people enjoying themselves within the fence, while horses outside the fence wandered the streets. Not only were roles reversed, but the city had been turned inside out. A block of the city developed almost since the town’s founding had been cleared and transparently, if paradoxically, transformed into a version of the agricultural landscape threatened by the city’s continued, sprawling growth. This “pastured” block—both as re-created pasture and sanitized history—represented a continuous, ongoing fight over the city’s identity. Buildings had been demolished; history destroyed; the relationship of powerful subsets of the community questioned; and the city’s status quo interrupted. The events surrounding the pastured block reveal deep questions about how Lexington residents interact with each other and understand who they are as modern individuals. These events exist in a context of other community struggles that address race, economics, and the politics of space. The pastured block demonstrates the residents’ twenty-first-century fight for identity through understanding of the past and what they imagine the future will be.

Initial reaction to the pastured block’s narrative may focus on destruction and loss. Few preservationists would initially describe the outcome as good. Fifteen buildings dating from the 1820s to the 1940s were torn down in preparation for something new. Yet this essay argues the story of the pastured block was in effect good [End Page 23] preservation. Lived experiences and human interactions surrounding the demolition of the buildings were (and continue to be) active preservation. Put another way, preservation operates as social outcomes separate from the survival (or change) of physical landscape or material culture. Preservation exists as knowledge, information, and understanding about ideas of self-identity. The preservation of Lexington as a community—and the preservation of individuals living as a social community—was advanced by changes brought on by the block’s demolition. The debate about the block extended beyond a typical part of the community concerned with old buildings. People actively engaged with their own understandings of history. Preservation happened in how these individuals thought about the past and the future as both related to them. They pushed their ideas into public fora (e.g., neighborly discussions, social media...

pdf

Share