The Patina of Place: The Cultural Weathering of a New England Industrial Landscape (review)

The Patina of Place takes its place among a significant group of works that have sought to analyze the architecture and landscape of New England's manufacturing communities. Like many of his predecessors, Kingston Heath focuses on a textile manufacturing community: New Bedford in this case, located in southeastern Massachusetts. Unlike many of them, Heath focuses on a city where speculative not corporate housing dominated, in particular the wood-frame, three-family house known as the three-decker. While these houses have been the subject of much study by geographers, Heath notes that it is not his intention to write a typological study but rather to describe the successive waves of change that created and recreated the industrial landscape of New Bedford from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. The "patina" is the accumulation of these decisions and actions, evidence of the city's changing culture. By "cultural weathering," Heath means the "incremental change left on the built environment by its inhabitants" (p. xix).

Besides the introduction and conclusion, in which Heath describes his methodological approach and theoretical suppositions, the book is divided into three largely chronological sections, each in turn divided into two chapters. The most innovative is the first, an "environmental biography" in which Heath reconstructs life in a New Bedford three-decker, chiefly in the postwar years of his own childhood. He combines his own memories of the neighborhood, the yard, and the three-decker with a multifaceted analysis of 90 Nelson Street, considering how its social uses changed over time. Thereafter the text returns to a more traditional telling of the city's history, largely through a consideration of one aspect of its landscape: the housing built to accommodate the ever expanding population of mill operatives. The book's second section describes the era of corporate housing construction, and Heath proceeds company by company, considering the types and numbers of housing they provided for their workers. Section three returns the focus to the city's three-deckers, in chapters that outline the speculative process that led to their rapid domination of the landscape and considers changes to them as their occupants and their cultural values changed.

If there is a general criticism to be leveled at the work, it may stem from the decision to try and analyze both the three-decker and the city's landscape in a single volume of moderate length. There is a crowded feel to the layout, and too many of the illustrations, particularly the maps and historic views, are muddy and illegible. Because there are too few maps, the reader may be confused about the building process and unable to assess the proportion and distribution of the various housing types. The focus on industrial housing at the expense of middle-class housing creates an incomplete picture of the landscape and—of perhaps greater concern—leads Heath to underestimate the contribution made by those builders to the creation of the form and plan of the three-decker. Further, while Heath acknowledges the varieties of plan and size included within the type known as the three-decker, he persists in relying on a typology based on roof shape, an outmoded approach that fails to meet the high standard of other aspects of the work.

And a high standard it is, as Heath's distinctive approach provides an important antidote to traditional examinations of New England's buildings. Heath insists on examining the many actors in their design and their long history after construction, preferring to see the creation of these buildings "as an act of cultural production, rather than as an act of individual inspiration" (p. xxii). In his assertion that "standardized plans are imprinted with—and controlled by— local intentions" (p. xix), he recognizes the continued importance of region in the production and...