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149  “They Tore Down Paradise, and Put Up a Shopping Mall” How Speculators and Rouseketeers Created a Bubble As the Rouse Company plans became public in 1979, Huxtable washed her hands of the Seaport. “What surely will be lost,” she knew, “is the spirit and identity of the area as it has existed over centuries.” She was even more dismayed that a shopping center was “at the end” of historic preservation’s rainbow. An editor of Progressive Architecture dismissed such criticism as “sheer snobbery.” Time magazine’s critic Wolf Von Eckardt used a false dichotomy, claiming, as did Hightower, “The alternatives are Colonial Williamsburg or continued decay.” Ironically Hightower had recently praised Huxtable as “distinguished and constantly incisive.” But he told Stanford that her hope of preserving the “enduring charm of the place” was “too much of an opiate,” and he confessed to “rather perversely enjoy[ing] the harsh anvil of New York’s insistent, often angry, scolding criticism.”1 Almost deafening, that anvil rang. While CB1 feared losing its own Les Halles, an open-air market that Paris demolished in 1971 to create a tourist trap, a Seaporter played off Joni Mitchell’s popular tune, “They tore down paradise, and put up a shopping mall.” Huxtable rejected any comparisons with Boston’s Quincy Market because the seaport had “a more fragile, discontinuous group of small structures” than the three large buildings at Quincy Market. Fearing the worst, she predicted that the Rouse Company “would push the museum’s facilities upstairs and around corners,” which happened in Boston with a branch of the Museum of Fine Arts. Kent Barwick , whom Mayor Koch appointed LPC chairman, was as uncomfortable thinking that the Boston mall reflected his era’s concept of preservation. Before the deal was approved, an unsigned New York Times editorial, likely penned by Huxtable, criticized the museum’s misrepresentations of the project and its vague details. Regretting that “the Seaport has sold its birthright ,” she asked it to “leave something” behind of its “tough, plain, honest and genuinely evocative” waterfront. Critics were already citing Jane 150 “They Tore Down Paradise, and Put Up a Shopping Mall” Jacobs, who had warned that “all big plans are inevitably big mistakes.” Harborplace was as problematic, said Paul Goldberger, who replaced Huxtable as the Times’s architecture critic. The Rouse Company promised to create spontaneity and diversity in Baltimore, but it introduced the suburb ’s order and conformity. Historian Nicholas Bloom dubbed Rouse “the Trojan horse of the suburban reentry into the center city.”2 Hounded by critics, Hightower defensively touted the credentials of James Marston Fitch, who served on his restoration committee and supervised the Museum Block’s restoration. With Charles Peterson, Fitch had founded Columbia University’s graduate historic-preservation program in 1964. Embracing history, technology, and craftsmanship, he was a maverick . While many colleagues scoffed at the idea of either teaching about or working in preservation, Fitch saw things differently and liked to turn his classes loose with such topics as “what made a clipper ship a thing of beauty.” Retiring from Columbia in 1979, he became director of historic preservation at the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle (BBB). His work on the Museum Block became, said Richard Blinder, “our bridge” not only to Ellis Island’s Immigration Hall but to Grand Central Terminal.3 Fearing public wrath, the Seaport expected that “the public approval process would be intense, demanding and highly critical,” and trustee Robert Hubner urged his colleagues to “react strongly to adverse reports.” Unlike the spirited debate in the Reporter about its 1973 plan, the museum kept Seaport free of disparaging comments and, despite its cash crunch, hired a public-information director to encourage “enlightened reporting.” The National Trust followed suit. Regarding the Seaport as “a high priority ,” it gave not only “continuing advisory and technical assistance” but friendly coverage in Historic Preservation. Riding a wave set off in 1976 by federal tax incentives for rehabilitating historic, income-producing properties , the Trust was promoting private-sector leadership. In an upbeat cover story, Patricia Leigh Brown quoted Hightower, who argued that the Rouse plan would give the seaport “the critical mass of visitors that it needs to survive.” Yet she did not ask if visitors paid an admission fee or simply shopped at the mall. Nor did she question Fitch’s remark that Rouse was just a “bigger and more powerful” Peter Schermerhorn. But she did mention historian Thomas Bender’s contention that the new seaport was destroying...

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