Introduction: The Future of Preservation

We on the committee have wanted to know what is happening in the field of historic preservation; the present trends in saving what can be saved, and the losses from destroying what deserves to be saved. We have tried to discover what we must do to rescue from certain destruction what remains of our legacy from the past, and how best to do that rescue work.

So, 49 years ago, wrote Albert Rains and Laurance G. Henderson, chairman and director, respectively, of the Special Committee for Historic Preservation, in the preface of With Heritage So Rich. As many in our field know, this evocative and eclectic 1966 volume of essays, poetry, photography and policy recommendations laid the foundation for the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) later that year, and jumpstarted our movement in its present incarnation.

But this groundbreaking work did not emerge fully formed. In fact, With Heritage So Rich was the culmination of many meetings and high-level discussions about the future of preservation, beginning in Williamsburg, Virginia, three years earlier, at a national conference cosponsored by Colonial Williamsburg and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In this issue of Forum Journal, as well as in recent discussions at Kykuit, the University of Massachusetts– Amherst and elsewhere, we want to try to catch that lightning in a bottle again, and think deeply about the future of the preservation movement.

At the time of With Heritage So Rich, preservationists faced a number of challenges endemic to that moment. Everywhere from southern towns to college campuses to Kennedy’s Camelot, there was a sense of accelerating change—a welcome liberation from the burdens of the past. The Space Age was in full swing too—Mercury and Gemini flights were in the news, Star Trek and The Jetsons on the television—and the nation’s eye was fixed on a sleek silver-and-chrome future that had little use for the trappings of history.

This cultural embrace of Tomorrowland extended well past Disney theme parks. With interstate highway construction and suburbanization at full throttle, historic buildings and neighborhoods were under constant threat of demolition to make way for Progress, usually in the form of more, wider and faster expressways and burgeoning sprawl.

In the nation’s cities, grassroots activists fought comprehensive and would-be Utopian “urban renewal” schemes that replaced vibrant city blocks with monolithic, single-use development. The razing of New York City’s beloved Penn Station in 1964, to make way for Madison Square Garden, became a potent symbol of loss that galvanized preservationists all over America to fight for the historic places that matter in their communities.

Two years later, With Heritage So Rich inspired positive change, and then the National Historic Preservation Act officially enshrined the values, tools and benefits of saving places into federal law. What ensued thereafter, as author Stewart Brand put it in How Buildings Learn, was “a quiet, populist, conservative, victorious revolution.”

Preservation became, according to architectural historian Vincent Scully, “the only mass popular movement to affect critically the course of architecture in our century.” Writing in 1990, James Marston Fitch, a pioneer of professional preservation education and practice, declared that “preservation is now seen as being in the forefront of urban regeneration, often accomplishing what the urban-renewal programs of twenty and thirty years ago so dismally failed to do. It has grown from the activity of a few upper-class antiquarians…to a broad mass movement engaged in battles to preserve ‘Main Street,’ urban districts, and indeed whole towns.”

Twenty-five years later, Fitch’s assessment rings even more true. Across the country, 15 million Americans and counting are now taking action in their communities to save places they love. Preservation now has a seat at the table in discussions of urban planning, zoning policy and municipal growth. We have shown—and can empirically verify—that instead of being an obstacle to a vibrant and sustainable future, putting our historic fabric to work for communities is the key to attaining it.