Whose Heritage? Architectural Preservation and Disabled Access in Boston and San Francisco

How do disability and preservation converge in the contemporary American landscape of laws, professional design expertise, and popular imagination? Because buildings are the quintessential sites of memory, making and remaking them to include formerly excluded groups generates new social narratives. Due to entrenched ideas about the threat posed by disabled access accommodations to heritage sites, disputes frequently arise over rebuilding cherished architecture, shaping the way publics balance conserving cultural heritage with collective ethics of care.

This essay examines two such controversies: a wheelchair ramp in the Board of Supervisors chamber in San Francisco City Hall and the plan to install wheelchair curb ramps in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood. Combining discourse and material analysis of the two projects, this essay dismantles hardened oppositions between “authentic” heritage and disabled access positions, and offers new readings of architectural heritage, forms of remembrance, public space, and the social shaping of the disabled subject. In particular, this essay discloses how politicization of access through the idea of lost architectural heritage reframes access as optional, suspending (indefinitely) the implementation of civil rights.