The Power of Place

   The New York Times, September 3, 1995
   Book Review pp. 9, 10.


   No Preservation Without Representation: An argument for
   recognizing the historical landscape of ordinary people.

      The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History.
      By Dolores Hayden.
      Illustrated. 296 pp. Cambridge, Mass.
      The MIT Press. $30.

   By Joseph Giovannini (A critic and architect practicing in
   New York.)


   On the Op-Ed pages of this paper 20 years ago, the
   architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable and the urban
   sociologist Herbert J. Gans squared off over historic
   preservation in New York City. Mr. Gans charged that the
   policy of the Landmarks Preservation Commission favored
   "the stately mansions of the rich and buildings designed by
   famous architects" while neglecting common buildings. Mrs.
   Huxtable argued that to call major architectural monuments
   "elitist" is to pervert and distort history: "These
   buildings are a primary and irreplaceable part of
   civilization." In a subsequent letter to the editor, Mr.
   Gans held that preservation supported by public funds must
   attend to everyone's past, and he underlined the obvious
   inequities of historic preservation simply by counting: 105
   of 113 designated buildings erected after 1875 were
   designed by prominent architects for a chosen few (25 by
   McKim, Mead & White). The numbers alone revealed
   preservation's patriarchal nature.

   This exchange occurred before "multiculturalism" even hit
   the dictionaries, but Mr. Gans, supporting "everyone's
   past" and denouncing preservation without representation,
   asked the basic question: Whose past? Dolores Hayden, who
   cites the Huxtable-Gans debate at the beginning of her
   polemical book, "The Power of Place," implicitly questions
   stories that cast city biographies in terms of white male
   heroes -- the John Wayne "conquest narratives" that have
   inspired so many equestrian statues and cannons in
   municipal parks and the preservation of buildings by
   hero-architects. She acknowledges Mr. Gans's argument and
   carries preservation beyond the single building and
   historic district into the commonplace landscape, to widen
   the social spectrum. Ms. Hayden, a professor in the Yale
   School of Architecture, maintains that multicultural
   diversity can forge a new sense of place in the city.

   If modernist architectural space is abstract, Ms. Hayden
   perceives a different paradigm: space that is occupied in
   the way that the mesas of Native Americans or the
   battlefield at Gettysburg hold story and history. She does
   not assume a modernist tabula rasa but argues that memories
   inhere in even problematic cityscapes, like those in the
   South Bronx or South Central Los Angeles -- and in ordinary
   building types. With proper interpretation, tenements have
   great potential significance precisely because they are
   common: one of them represents tens of thousands and
   therefore tells the story of millions of people.

   Discussing urban space in cultural terms, Ms. Hayden
   de-emphasizes connoisseurship in favor of space imbued with
   social and political meaning. A connoisseur's approach, she
   says, frequently marginalizes vernacular architecture and
   simply overlooks ethnic history: only 5 percent of
   designated landmarks reflect women's history and an even
   smaller percentage the history of minorities.

   "The Power of Place" is in some ways a conceptual how-to
   manual for developing an understanding of urban space
   through cultural history. Tying social issues to the
   cityscape, Ms. Hayden espouses a kind of urban preservation
   emerging for the 1990's that focuses on landscape
   preservation, ordinary building types and commemorative
   public art based on the political and social histories of
   neighborhoods. The task of preserving and interpreting this
   kind of cityscape is more complex than saving traditional
   "great man" architectural patrimonies, because the
   bottom-up effort Ms. Hayden advocates requires the
   organization of many more moving parts than are needed in
   ordinary top-down conservation drives.

   The book grew out of a Los Angeles project devised by a
   group headed by Ms. Hayden, established to celebrate
   multiethnic working-class districts and buildings. On a
   nondescript block in Little Tokyo, for example, the group
   collaborated with members of the Japanese-American
   community and succeeded in obtaining historic designation
   for 13 storefront buildings in a redevelopment zone -- the
   only intact block that still reflects the original 1920's
   and 30's character. A walking tour was developed, as well
   as public art that evokes the history of the district,
   including the painful memories of Japanese internment
   during World War II.

   While it dovetails with Mr. Gans's position for fair
   representation, "The Power of Place" grows logically out of
   Ms. Hayden's other books on communitarian architecture and
   feminist design, and draws heavily on multicultural
   arguments hardly identified two decades ago. At that time
   preservation was in its infancy, largely defining itself
   against the wrecking ball of modernism. In a book that
   deals with theory before getting down to cases, Ms. Hayden
   wisely refrains from completely dismissing the orthodox
   preservation she criticizes, and effectively repositions it
   within a more comprehensive approach that brings invisible
   histories to light. The book -- a strong, somewhat stern
   piece of advocacy -- is less radical but more robust than
   Mr. Gans's arguments because it is fortified by a
   multicultural position that is now widely acknowledged.

   Over the last several years preservationists have embraced
   an increasingly wide range of designated sites that are
   expanding the canon -- the American Museum of Immigration
   at Ellis Island, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where
   Martin Luther King was killed, and the Woolworth's store in
   Greensboro, N.C., where four black students in 1960 staged
   a historic sitin. What "The Power of Place" offers is a
   frame for seeing beyond isolated monuments to a broad
   cultural landscape that acknowledges the lives of ordinary
   working people, women and minorities. Understanding
   buildings as common as union halls that once featured
   Latina seamstresses at the podium gives us a new reading of
   our city and our society. "The Power of Place" is a
   well-timed, well-reasoned call for fusing history and the
   environment to create a more democratic and inclusive
   interpretation of the places in which most of us live and
   work. Ms. Hayden greatly strengthens preservation with
   arguments that give the historic environment a critical
   dimension beyond beauty and rarity.

   [End]