GRID + HIDDEN CITY
LAYERED QUESTIONS
What in our past IS worth preserving, and how does it shape our city’s future? STORY by Nathaniel popkin
PHOTO by Peter woodall
If,
as the architect Rem Koolhaas writes in Delirious New York, “creation and destruction are the poles defining the field of Manhattan’s abrasive culture,” in Philadelphia, it is adaptation and accretion that nourish our urban experience. We feed on the peeling and unpeeling of layers, on acts of discovery that bind us—in sometimes powerful ways—to the ideals and aspirations of those who came before us. At the heart of this grappling with our inherited streetscape is the confounding and deeply ambiguous practice of preservation. Historic—or landmarks—preservation came into modern consciousness in the 1950s after the demolition of two monumental icons of the railroad age, Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station and New York’s Penn Station, and the loss of countless neighborhoods to new highways and expanding universities and hospital centers. The preservation movement galvanized various democratic instincts all at once. In Philadelphia, it led to the nation’s first preservation ordinance in 1955, a well-intentioned but weak law that was strengthened in 1985 to protect historic buildings from demolition. But in many ways, the preservation instinct runs counter to the American mindset and those who have opposed it often base their argument in the mantra of private property rights. Though basic property rights are routinely regulated through zoning, height and use limitations, etc., it is preservation that draws this kind of ideologically narrow response. In a kind of opposite ideological tact, for decades progressive thinkers, including Koolhaas, have seen preservation as distinctly reactionary, 18 gridphilly.com
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steeped in nostalgia and myth. One of my favorite books to set up the conflict between the desires to preserve the old and build the new is the novel Return to Dar al-Basha, by Tunisian writer Hassan Nasr, about the emotional power of Tunis’ old city (one of the world’s largest sites of preservation). “That old house and all those old neighborhoods need to be torn down,” says a character in Nasr’s book, “so they can be rebuilt with structures that have the amenities that correspond … to modern life … These old neighborhoods were built on injustice … exploitation and tyranny … the oppression of women, on the expropriation of workers’ rights.” Part of the critique, which I share, is that preservation begs us to defer to this not so gentle past, whose building materials we assume were stronger and more beautiful and craftsmanship better. But the danger of quieting the equally powerful instinct to build anew is that it saps our own confidence and architectural vision. In Philadelphia, where developers, fearful of risk, so often pander to the past, the field of contemporary architecture has been stunted by mimicry. Originality has been shunted. As the past—as if it were architecturally uniform—forcefully weighs down on present-day designers, the regulatory mechanisms for preservation have withered, creating an odd reality: great old buildings are routinely demolished while new ones are made to look old. Developers have recently been exploiting loopholes in Philadelphia’s preservation ordinance; meanwhile the underfunded Historical Commission is hard
strapped to add new buildings and districts to its protected list (New York, the cradle of destruction, has more than 100 protected and promoted historic districts. Philadelphia has nine). But the broken system is an opportunity for Philadelphians to expansively reimagine what they hope to achieve with preservation and to decide within the scope of present-day desires, among them sustainability and green construction, how best to build on our past. There are very strong reasons for wanting to protect buildings related to the development of 20th century African-American culture, Italian-American, Chinese-American, and Jewish neighborhood life in particular and immigrant life in general, and the mills and factories that for 150 years defined the rhythms of city life and lend our present-day neighborhoods scale and density. There is emerging support for the preservation of large and small examples of mid-century modern architecture, perhaps especially those that emerged from the modernist instinct to break with the past. Very few of these kinds of buildings are at present protected in Philadelphia. How we go about preserving them within the collected layers of the Philadelphia cityscape is a wonderfully challenging and sometimes exasperating task that is likely to absorb us for years to come.
This former auto showroom was converted into an office building in 1963 and then a homeless shelter in 1987. Last summer, it was repainted and and restored as headquarters for Stephen Starr’s catering business.
nathaniel popkin is co-editor of Hidden City Daily, senior writer of the film documentary Philadelphia: The Great Experiment, and author of Song of the City: An intimate portrait of the American Urban Landscape and The Possible City: Exercises in Dreaming Philadelphia.