Looking (and Getting) Past Crisis Moments in Preservation

For the past year, the Preservation Green Lab has been working in Louisville, Kentucky, to advance building reuse and historic preservation as tools to achieve sustainable, healthy and equitable development. This type of systemic change can take decades—as we in the preservation world know so well. Building by building, block by block—local preservation organizations save something, a preservation-friendly developer saves something. But to really change the course of development patterns in a neighborhood, historic commercial district or city requires more than the work of a dedicated group of preservationists. It requires changing the ethic around reuse and reinvestment, raising awareness of what older buildings contribute to environmental and economic sustainability and social well-being. And it may also require those of us in the preservation movement to be a bit more flexible in pursuing our long-term preservation and community development goals.

The Preservation Green Lab has been applying reuse and redevelopment models to various buildings and neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, including the small-scale commercial buildings along Main Street.

PHOTO BY ANDY SNOW.

I am proud of the progress the Green Lab has made in Louisville in just over a year. We have set up a pilot project in the NuLu commercial district that will deliver economic resilience to small businesses through money-saving energy efficiency retrofits. We’ve led a diverse group of stakeholders through a strategic planning process to create policy recommendations that will bring better building reuse outcomes if adopted by city officials. We’ve brought to the city our unique spatial analysis tools, which use available data to gather a baseline understanding of the city’s built fabric; show how the older, smaller portions of the city contribute positively to social, economic and cultural outcomes; and identify areas of opportunity for both market-driven and nonprofit community-based developers.

However, along with so much progress, we have also dealt with a number of crisis moments—emergency situations such as overnight demolitions and unexpected new threats to specific buildings. These moments, known so well to those of us who work in the field, mark critical points in our work and are key to determining how we might be able to proceed in the long run. These situations not only take our eyes off the prize, but they also feed into the reputation we have as those yelling “No!” at the 11th hour to every proposed change. Where did we come from? Why do we care about this, now?

Reacting to crisis moments, or major threats, has been a part of preservation work for so long, it feels like it’s in our DNA. The movement got its start saying “No!” So how do we change? And what is it about how we react to the crisis moment that might be holding us back? To explore these questions, I reached out to partners that the Green Lab is working with across the country.

TAKING THE LONG VIEW

Even though much of our work is rooted in the past, the preservation movement has always been about the future. Whether we are saving monuments to notable people in our nation’s political history or the small-scale commercial buildings along Main Street, the actions aren’t really about us—they’re about ensuring that the buildings that have made us who we are stick around to influence the lives of those who will come after us.

In this way, preservation is a forward-looking endeavor. We are actively determining what will survive for the next generation and, in doing so, assigning worth to the things that live and mourning the things that die. But this mentality of asking “What will survive?” contributes to the popular notion that preservationists want to save all the buildings. However, we can’t save all the old places, even in the most preservation-friendly cities in the world. Growth requires change, and to deny that growth is happening, or that it can be good and welcome, is at best naive and at worst offensive to those...