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Restoring Our Heritage: Historic Sites and Structures

In their wonderfully written and lovingly researched 1987 biography of Ybor City (a section of Tampa, Florida) authors Mormino and Pozzetta cite many examples of what they refer to as “the horrors of urban renewal,” illustrated by the above excerpt.

Ybor City was, until World War II, a colorful, cohesive, dynamic, creative, vibrant community; a national model of ethnic diversity, cooperation, and peaceful coexistence. It had once been the economic heart of Florida, enabling Tampa to account for some two-thirds of the entire state’s revenues at the dawn of the twentieth century. Although its cigar factories had mostly closed, robbing it of much economic strength, Ybor was still a 180healthy community until the 1960s, when it was murdered by urban renewal and buried under the concrete of new highway development.

Today, Ybor City is making a strong comeback, albeit with a very different personality. It’s now Tampa’s center of nightlife and weekend public celebrations. Its sexy new image is now attracting many “normal” businesses, as well as high-rent residents, who used to be scared off by the nearby ‘60s-era public housing project (also recently renovated). This renaissance is almost entirely attributable to the restoration and adaptive reuse of its many historic buildings. Old cigar factories now house micro-breweries, shopping malls, offices, and self-serve storage centers.

Ironically, a 3.2 mile section of the interstate highway that destroyed a major part of Ybor City in the early ‘70s is itself about to be restored (via replacement), to the tune of a hundred million dollars. At the same time, a portion of the adjacent Port of Tampa has been cleaned-up and renovated, gaining a cruise ship terminal and beautiful aquarium.

This time around, some lessons have been learned. The Florida Department of Transportation is moving and restoring 32 old buildings that otherwise would have been demolished to make room for the widening of the highway. What’s more, the City of Tampa is moving and restoring several other nearby buildings, and is offering, free of charge, additional old buildings to private citizens, even paying for the cost of relocating them. In just a few decades, we’ve come a long way from the style of urban renewal that tortured José Vega Díaz and killed Blanca.

THE SCOPE OF THE HERITAGE RESTORATION INDUSTRY

Heritage is a very subjective thing: it’s as consciously and subconsciously selective as is our perception of the present. What we choose to restore, 181and to be proud of, says as much about who we are now—and how we choose to see ourselves—as it does about our ancestors.

In the most generic sense, a community’s physical heritage simply comprises those parts of the built environment that lasted long enough for us to get attached to, or where something happened that we consider intrinsic to our sense of identity. Heritage restoration is thus much subtler than, say, infrastructure restoration. One person’s historic building is another person’s obsolete eyesore, and one person’s sacred battlefield is another person’s wasted space. But one person’s broken water main is another person’s broken water main.

Almost anything that is authentically from our past can qualify as heritage. Archaeologists find bliss rooting through ancient trash piles. Go to Scranton, Pennsylvania’s remarkable Steamtown, USA, and you’ll find that heritage can turn formerly ugly, noisy, smelly places—in this case a railroad switching yard—into a must-see spot for family vacations. The transition from utility to heritage (in the absence of some historic event’s happening on the site) is often just a matter of time.

Bottom line: Heritage is what we want it to be, so this restorative industry spills into all of the other restoration industries, both natural and built. In Nantucket, fisheries are heritage. Farms are heritage in the Amish countryside of Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, while in nearby Gettysburg, heritage comprises open fields seeded with lead balls. In Concord, Massachusetts, infrastructure (a small bridge) is heritage. In San Antonio, Texas, war—in the form of a bullet-riddled old convent—is heritage. In Galveston, Texas, a natural disaster is heritage. In Dallas, Texas, a relatively young public building, the Texas School Book Depository, became heritage overnight when Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have shot John F. Kennedy from one of the building’s windows.

There are also intangible heritage assets—skills, languages, crafts, etc.—that have been experiencing opposing dynamics of wholesale destruction and passionate restoration in the past two or three decades. In the United States, the nonprofit Cultural Survival ( www.cs.org) has 182been the leading champion for revitalizing indigenous languages, not to mention restoring the crafts, lands, and human rights of threatened indigenous cultures. For this book, though, we’re going to keep it simple, dividing heritage restoration into natural and built.

NATURAL HERITAGE

Trees for Life was founded by Alan Watson Featherstone, who, in 1985, visited India and was inspired by the long-term ecological and farm restoration project at Auroville, in India’s south. Auroville citizens had planted some 2 million trees in an area that had been an unproductive, near-desert wasteland. It’s now a vast expanse of lush forest and fertile farms.

Trees for Life is doing for Scotland what the Wildlands Project has been trying to do for North America. The organization provides the large-scale vision needed to coordinate the disparate ecological restoration projects being performed by groups and government agencies such as the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Forestry Commission (which, like its counterpart in the States, the U.S. Forest Service, takes an agricultural, nonecological approach to forests), and the Nature Conservancy Council for Scotland.

The goal is to connect both conserved and restored ecosystems and restore the aggregate “Scottish ecosystem” that existed when they were all just components of a higher-level system, rather than isolated biological communities. The initial goal, though, was more modest: Trees for 183Life started with the hope of restoring 1,500 square kilometers in the north-central Highlands.

When the Ghost of “Heritage Lost” Becomes Our Heritage

Just as most Americans admire the green expanses of tree farms we call National Forests, not knowing that we’re gazing at sites of corporate theft and ecological annihilation, so do Scots love their heather, even though most of it is the “scar tissue” formed over the much earlier theft of their forest heritage. Besides their grand shoreline, heather-covered hillsides are just about the only natural heritage modern Scots have known. (On the plus side, heather is a Scottish native… it just wasn’t meant to be the only Scottish native.)

Once up to 80 percent forested, Scotland now has only eight percent tree cover, and just a tiny percentage of that is real forest; most consists of sterile tree farms of foreign species. Gone are the Scots’ pine, birch, rowan, aspen, willow, and alder. In their place: North American sitka spruce, and, well, North American sitka spruce.

This is obviously a loss of ecosystem function and wildlife genetic resources, but it’s a loss of heritage, too. However, the heather-covered Highlands are supremely beautiful, in their own haunting way, so it’s highly unlikely that the Scots would allow the heather to be restored out of existence. Therefore, restorationists should probably ignore those heather expanses that are most visible to tourists, such as Glen Coe (which even I would hate to see restored, so breathtakingly majestic is its blend of biological devastation and geological grandeur). No worries, though: This would still leave centuries of restorative work to be done.

The ecorestoration challenge goes far beyond planting trees, of course. Scotland suffers from a plague of deer, caused by managing protected areas for the benefit of hunters, rather than for nature. The over-populated deer devastate native plants (and the smaller animal species that depend on these plants), just as they do in the United States, and for much the same reason.

The few remnant native forests are mostly in hospice care. All the trees are old: new growth is nowhere to be found on the site of the former Caledonian forest. A student at Edinburgh University inventoried an area that contained 100,000 pines. Because they averaged less than 4 inches tall, he assumed they were seedlings. On closer examination, he discovered that they were all a decade old, but deer browsing kept them to grasslike levels.

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Using a fence, he excluded the deer; the pine, birch, and rowan seedlings within the area are now growing to maturity—the first ones in that part of the country to do so in over a century and a half. In fact, a large part of what Trees for Life does, by way of restoration, is “merely” build fences, allowing Scottish forests to do what they haven’t been able to do for hundreds of years.

The Scots, who recently restored their self-rule, are increasingly looking at their land and culture, and trying to figure out what is truly Scottish, and what has been imposed by centuries of invasion by other cultures. Since it was once between 70 and 80 percent woodland, you would assume that forest restoration is one of Scotland’s top heritage restoration priorities, right? Wrong.

And what about the denizens of those forests—the wolves, brown bears, wild boars, lynx, European beaver, and moose—that have such profound influences on native culture? All are extinct in Scotland now (though not elsewhere): surely the return of those definers of the Scottish soul must be in demand, right? Not necessarily. Restorationists are often confronted by angry landowners, much of whose income has long come from allowing others to hunt deer, with easy shots in wide-open fields of heather. These landowners see the return of the Caledonian forest as a loss of their heritage, not as the return of it.

There probably was never a time when the residents of the Highlands weren’t being invaded by someone. The famous Highland warrior clans encountered by the Romans and English were originally the successful Irish conquerors of the indigenous Picts. But Ireland itself was probably inhabited originally from Scotland and Norway. Given such histories, delaying restoration until “true heritage” has been defined would freeze us into inaction. Heritage restoration often involves a tremendous degree of selecting what we like about our past, to the exclusion of what we are ashamed of, or what we find too painful. Witness how few cities make wartime shrines out of bombed-out building hulks, even when they were the winners.

From Scotland to the World

In 1991, Trees for Life was named the United Kingdom’s “Conservation Project of the Year” in the annual Ford Conservation Awards Competition, which brings a check equalling about $15,000, plus extensive media coverage. The project’s success has inspired others in the U.K., such as the Carrifan Project, designed to restore the native forests of the Southern Uplands, an area that reportedly has lost even more of its forests than the 185 Highlands (if that’s possible). Likewise, the Moor Trees project is attempting to restore native forests to the Dartmoor region in the south of England. Trees for Life has even inspired at least one initiative in the Americas, where the Matatu project is trying to bring back the near-extinct Araucaria trees of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest.

Featherstone has more recently organized an effort to have the United Nations declare the twenty-first century as “The Century of Restoring the Earth.” This designation would coincide nicely with the U.N.-backed effort to establish The Earth Charter, a guideline for sustainable development, which includes such principles as “Protect and restore the integrity of Earth’s ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life,” and “Protect and restore outstanding places of cultural and spiritual significance.”

On May 14, 2002, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan departed from his long-standing calls for sustainable development and joined the Restoration Economy when he declared, “We must rehabilitate our one and only planet… water, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity.” He missed a couple of the eight restorative industries, but who’s counting?

A Heady Pint of Heritage

As long as we’re already in Scotland, let’s not waste any fossil fuels moving elsewhere. Here’s a story that neatly integrates the restoration of cultural heritage, ecological heritage, and a heritage building, and so provides a perfect segue from natural heritage to built heritage. All this is being accomplished by a small, for-profit firm, Historic Ales of Scotland— a true (if unlikely) Restoration Economy company.

In the town of Strathaven in Lanarkshire, close to Glasgow, Bruce Williams has been reviving a delicious realm of Scottish heritage: He brews “extinct” ancient ales based on indigenous botanicals. Scotland once had dozens of homegrown ales that used the leaves, flowers, and fruit of local trees, bushes, and forbs.

On the Isle of Rhum, for instance, archaeologists have discovered the remains of a brewing site dating back over 4,000 years. (Note: Ale is what most Scots drink. Scotch whiskey, better known than Scottish ale outside Scotland, is mostly for export, and “only” dates back about 400 years.) It contained traces of the ingredients for heather ale. Long the national drink of Scotland, the making of heather ale—along with ales made from (or flavored with) gooseberries, elderberries, Scotch Pine needles, and even seaweed—was forbidden by English invaders.

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Scots were instead required by law to make only “industrialized beer,” using standardized ingredients like barley malt and hops. (Of course, even this formula is far superior to the corn-based chemical soup that comes from the major U.S. industrial brewers, many of whom add plastics to form a longer-lasting head.) This was done to raise taxes from sales of malt, as well as to increase sales of hops, because the House of Lords owned all the hop farms. After disappearing for a couple of centuries, these tasty brews have now been brought back to life by Bruce Williams, who, the son of a brewer, has been making beers and ales since he was thirteen.

Originally produced in such small quantities that six local pubs consumed it all, William’s Fraoch Heather Ale (its ingredients also include wild bog myrtle) is now distributed throughout the United States and many other countries. The concoction has won countless awards, including two World Gold Medals in 1996 and 1997. (It was reportedly the only beer that Mel Gibson allowed on the set during the shooting of Braveheart.)

Historic Ales of Scotland (www.heatherale.co.uk) now also produces seasonal supplies of Grozet gooseberry ale, Ebulum elderberry black ale, and Kelpie seaweed ale. The Alba Scots Pine ale is another favorite. Alba’s comeback restores both Scottish and Norwegian heritage, since it was originally brought to Scotland by Viking invaders. It quickly became popular with other sailors, including Captain Cook. He never set sail without Scots Pine ale, prizing its ability to travel well, and its value as a scurvy preventative and tonic for his crews. Now, thanks to Williams, I can easily find it here in Virginia.

What’s more, Historic Ales of Scotland operates out of an early eighteenth-century mill, restored under the supervision of the national nonprofit organization, Scottish Heritage. When Williams first encountered Craigmill—located on the banks of the River Avon (which supplied its power)—the picturesque river was eating the foundation out from under the waterwheel, and the mill was, quite literally, a pigsty. The restoration and adaptive reuse of the old mill began around 1987, with the shoveling out of a few tons of “pig heritage.”

Several years were spent rebuilding the waterwheel, which involved restoring and reforesting the river banks. The owner of the mill, Andrew MacGregor (now a minority stockholder in, as well as the landlord of, Historic Ales of Scotland), then applied to Scottish Heritage for a restoration grant. Grant in hand, work recommenced in 1992, and was completed around the turn of the millennium.

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You’d think that would be about as many different kinds of restorative activities as could be packed into one modest little business, but wait… there’s more. In Maybole, just 18 miles from Strathaven, is a square mile of peat-and-heather-based ecosystem known as the flat moss. This entire area came close to being turned into a monoculture tree farm, thanks to the government incentives being handed out. The tennant, Ian Campbell, would have gone for the conversion, except for one factor: Historic Ales of Scotland harvests heather for its Fraoch ale from the flat moss, and pays him for it.

Although not enough to equal what Campbell would eventually earn from a tree farm, that income is close enough to make it affordable for him to conserve the property. It’s not ecological restoration, granted, but it’s certainly conservation resulting from restoration (of ales). A slightly more restorative effect occurred at the farm where Historic Ales gets gooseberries. The farm was overgrown and not especially productive, because there’s not much of a market for gooseberries (and that’s a real shame: I love ‘em). At the prodding of the Historic Ales folks, the farm was cleaned up (though there’s still lots of room for wildlife) and is now more efficient: a minor form of agricultural restoration.

One last restorative tie-in: A Scottish (and Irish) method of fertilizing fields, which dates back at least 400 years, uses seaweed. But seaweed use was dying out in Scotland, except along the Argyll Coast, where it gives the vegetables and grains a unique (and prized) color and flavor.

Then, Historic Ales began producing Kelpie, which adds bladderwrack seaweed to the mash tun with the barley. The barley itself is organically grown on a farm that has revived the ancient practice of fertilizing with seaweed. This was at Bruce Williams’s request, so that Kelpie would be as authentic as possible. Kelpie (a malevolent water creature of Gaelic myth, such as the Loch Ness Monster) is a delightful black ale (much like a rich, dry porter) and is a World Beer Championships Gold Medal winner.

BUILT HERITAGE

The U.S. Park Service’s restoration of the home of Jack and Rachel Clark strikes many as a strange choice, because nothing happened there. At 188 least, not by the usual standards of historic places. The Clarks weren’t famous, nor were they the parents of anyone famous. The Clarks were the black sharecroppers that former President Jimmy Carter called his “second parents.” “Except in my own room in my own house, this is where I felt most at home,” he wrote.

Embarrassing Heritage

Sometimes, historic buildings convey a heritage that not everyone wants to be reminded of. The motivation behind the Clark house restoration comes from the Park Service’s desire to broaden and deepen its concept (and the public’s perception) of what’s culturally important. It’s quite possible that the Clarks’ influence on young Jimmy contributed to his becoming president. But the Park Service didn’t just restore the house because the Clarks knew an important white man. Rather, it’s part of the Park Service’s agenda to restore our memory of all aspects of our past. Poor sharecroppers are as much a part of who we are as are generals, inventors, and business tycoons.

Some think we should forget this portion of our past, so as to not damage the self-image of young blacks today. Others say that being kidnapped and forced into slavery—and then surviving to help form a powerful new culture—is nothing to be ashamed of: If anyone is going to be discomforted by such a restoration, it should be those whose ancestors perpetrated the crime, and whose current fortunes may have been built on it.

The Manassas Museum in historic Manassas, Virginia, conveys this ugly piece of heritage both powerfully and tastefully. One example is the museum’s reproduction of a “Wanted” poster concerning an escaped slave: the language, which describes the escapee in terms one would normally use for livestock, makes almost every reader cringe and squirm.

A similar dynamic—discomfort with one’s history—is at work in China. Many southern Chinese cities, such as Shanghai, Xiamen, and others have been dramatically revitalized in recent decades. Most observers focus almost exclusively on the economic aspect of this renewal. Shanghai, for instance, was until recently a coastal city on the skids, but is now the most powerful city in China, usurping much of Beijing’s guiding role. It’s not just financial power, either: Shanghai—maybe because it’s so far from the seat of government—is a hotbed of cultural experimentation and business innovation.

The city’s economic and political revitalization is largely due to this freer business environment. Another factor though, is its heritage: Many people enjoy living and working in Shanghai because, despite its 189plethora of recent high-rises (many of which destroyed priceless heritage), the city still boasts many buildings of tremendous historical and architectural value. They are especially rare, due to that mass erasure of China’s past, the Cultural Revolution, and to continued “urban renewal.”

Toxic Heritage

Brownfields can be considered the heritage of our new development-based manufacturing sector. It might be the only form of built heritage that literally nobody wants, and it’s the only restorative industry that is based on eradication. Even the creators of this “heritage” want no part of it, except to cleanse it from the earth and build anew.

The heritage restoration industry frequently (and unfortunately) overlaps with the brownfields restoration industry. Due to the new development realm’s dirty habits, many historic properties are contaminated. Contaminated historic sites often get overlooked for restoration and redevelopment, because adding cleanup to the costs of the building restoration puts it out of reach, budget-wise.

Not all historic buildings can or should be saved. Consider the demolition (by the USEPA) of the Independent Leather Manufacturing Co. in Gloversville, New York, in August 2001. The company was, in the 1800s and early 1900s, one of the region’s biggest employers. The leather glove trade’s collapse in the 1960s left a hugely toxic legacy, now being remedied with $1.3 million from SuperFund. An article from the Environmental News Network on August 14, 2001, stated, “For more than a century, a large number of tanneries in the area discharged their wastewater into creeks and streams. Tannery operations included processes that required the use of solvents, acids, lime, chromium compounds, and dyes and pigments that contaminated soil, sediments, groundwater and surface water on and nearby the facilities.”¹

This demolition decision was easy, because the building was both contaminated and structurally unsound. Once cleared and detoxified, the site will be redeveloped for commercial use, as part of the brownfields program of the state of New York. It’s hoped that the project will help revitalize this economically depressed region of upstate New York. “This site has a lot of potential. It’s in an idyllic location and the contamination at the site is relatively easy to address. Once we remove the contamination, this site could be put to use—so this cleanup is a real boost to both 190the environment and the local economy,” said the EPA’s Paul Kahn in that same article.

But some brownfield sites are designated historic and opened to the public without remediation, such as Gas Works Park in Seattle. This unique recreational area retained the rusting hulks of previous industry as a sort of hybrid between manufacturing heritage and decorative metal sculpture. Although some remediation was attempted, it’s reported that the city dealt with the brownfields issue primarily by posting signs warning of the soil contamination.

While not doing much for the wildlife or the groundwater, the ongoing toxic threat does give the park a sort of perverse integrity, making it truly representative of the new development heritage it commemorates. The warning signs also have educational value, reminding us of the side effects of our shortsightedness (it feels like the set of an apocalyptic Mad Max movie, its ubiquitous radioactive contamination signs). One might consider this a partial restoration: like Amsterdam’s green mountain of garbage, the park restored some value and functionality to an eyesore, but restoration certainly could have gone further.

Adaptive Reuse

Adaptive reuse (often called “adaptive use” in the United States) is hardly new, though its recent surge in popularity may lead some to think so. Adaptively reusing existing structures has been a style of human development ever since the first troglodytes evicted (or ate) the original tenants of a bear cave, and moved their families into the rainproof dwelling. Adaptive reuse wasn’t invented by loft dwellers in SoHo or Georgetown. Now it’s time for the adaptive reuse of buildings (and redevelopment of brownfields) to assume its rightful place as the first choice of developers, with greenfield development being the option of last resort. Americans have been especially slow to see the advantages of adaptivereuse, 191possibly because the United States is the prototypical start-up nation. Our economy began (quite recently) with almost pure new development, since most of the thousand-or-so conquered Native North American nations and cultures—even the nonnomadic ones—created little reusable built environment.

(Exceptions to the lack of Native American built heritage include the Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations. Upon first beholding Tenochtitlan (later Mexico City), Spanish priests wondered if they had stumbled into heaven. The Aztecs had many gorgeous permanent structures, but the Spaniards’ agenda called for erasing existing cultures and religions, so they recycled the stone blocks of buildings and pyramids into cathedrals and forts, rather than adaptively reusing the structures. They didn’t even retain and maintain the infrastructure—the aqueducts and sanitation systems— of the wonderfully clean Aztec cities, coming as they did from cities where human waste was simply dumped out of windows into public streets.)

Adaptive reuse has finally caught on big in the United States and elsewhere. I’m writing these words in the Homewood Suites (owned by Hilton) in San Antonio, Texas. Located on San Antonio’s famous Riverwalk (actually a nicely landscaped storm drain full of filthy water, but that’s another restoration story), the hotel is an adaptive use of the San Antonio Drug Company building, erected in 1919. In the boardroom is a plaque donated by retired drug company employees, thanking Hilton for saving their old workplace, and for being good stewards of their memories.

Restored Heritage as a Revitalizing Force

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Government buildings (courthouses, schools, etc.) have a tendency to become heritage more quickly than residences and commercial structures. In Washington, D.C., the 66-year-old U.S. Supreme Court is due for its first major restoration, which will take five years and $110 million ($60 million less than was asked for). We mentioned the $3 billion Pentagon restoration in the Introduction, and the list goes on: the just-completed $33.5 million restoration of the U.S. Botanic Garden, the new National Archives project, and dozens more D.C. monument/institution restorations.

Since the 1976 U.S. federal program of tax credits for historic restoration was implemented, some 28,000 U.S. historic properties have been rehabilitated and reused, accounting for over $20 billion of private investment as of 2000. The original 25 percent tax credit was reduced to 20 percent in the 1986 tax reform, and many tax shelter programs were discontinued.

This led to a temporary drop in activity, to less than $1 billion in 1988, but historic restoration boomed again when states (45 as of 2002, up from just 16 in 1998) started piling their own incentives on top of the federal ones. Private investment hit $2.3 billion in 1999. The commercial side is larger than the residential, but housing is no slouch: Over 85 percent of the homes sold annually in the United States are existing—not new—and over 550,000 of the existing homes in the United States are considered historic (over 50 years of age).

Heritage restoration is hot, huge, and global. How hot? U.S. contractors reported that restoration and reconstruction projects increased 42 percent in the year 2000 alone. All this talk of how good heritage restoration is for communities shouldn’t lead the reader to forget that this is a very attractive growth business.

Consider this: Heritage is in such demand that we’re starting to build new abandoned factories. In 2002, the largest new multi-housing development in Washington, D.C.’s increasingly chic Bohemian neighborhood of Adams Morgan was designed to resemble a defunct industrial building that had been converted for residential use. In just two decades, some communities seem to have moved from a plague of forsaken factories to a shortage. What’s more, the units—priced from $179,000 to almost $1 million—sold out almost immediately. Is this a good thing? To the 193degree to which it contributes to infill (thus saving greenfields) and enhances the desired feel of the neighborhood, sure. But it can’t really be considered heritage restoration. Some find this approach a bit Disneyesque. Washington Post staff writer Benjamin Forgey, for one, seems to prefer the real thing. In an article entitled “In Adams Morgan, Lofty Ambitions for a Manufactured Factory” (July 6, 2002), he said, “Despite these virtues, the… projects… smack a bit of architectural theming.”

Almost everyone has heritage to restore, even beach resorts that are often considered chintzy. A major part of Miami Beach’s attractiveness comes from the restoration of its distinctive art deco buildings. Meanwhile, Atlantic City is spending $72 million to renovate the classic Atlantic City Convention Hall, where the Miss America Pageant takes place. Local citizens are raising another $3 million to restore the Convention Hall’s 1932 pipe organ, the world’s largest.

The restoration of many cities’ heritage has usually taken place in piecemeal ways such as these, as opposed to grand citywide plans. With formal recognition of restorative development now becoming common, however, this approach is changing.

Many states and cities encourage heritage restoration via tax credits; incentives such as tax forgiveness; transferable development rights; low-interest loans; expedited writing of “smart” (building) codes; elimination of “dumb” codes; and the creation of historic districts that add extra value to the properties within them via higher rents, increased tourist traffic, etc. The value of the last point is underscored by the fact that in many European countries, architectural heritage is the single largest tourism asset.

Worldwide, there are literally tens of thousands of historic buildings and other sites under restoration at this very moment. Each has its own interesting story, but the process of organization and executing the projects is often very similar, as are the effects these projects have on their communities.

• Bologna, Italy (home of the Ducati motorcycle factory, a bit of world heritage cherished by this author), tops public opinion polls as Italians’ favorite city. This is largely traceable to their vigorous restoration of heritage buildings.
• Melbourne, Australia has long suffered by being seen as running a distant second to Sydney, because it lacked the latter’s skyscrapers. But recently, Melbourne leveraged this calmer, more genteel heritage by restoring large numbers of older buildings that had grown shabby. Many now call it “the hippest city in the Southern Hemisphere.”
• 194Copenhagen, Denmark has, for decades, suffered the deterioration that accompanies urban flight to the suburbs. Many neighborhoods, such as Vesterbro, had become crime-filled, drug-infested hellholes. City leaders finally fought back with an enlightened form of urban renewal centered on restoration, targeting Vesterbro in particular for revitalization. To preserve the feel and consciousness of neighborhoods, they even went so far as to rehabilitate old tenement buildings, when tearing them down and building anew would have saved money.
• Glasgow, Scotland long represented the worst of that country’s new development-based economy. Scotland is often considered the home of the industrial revolution, having contributed many of the key technologies and economic concepts that made it possible. Glasgow had a concentration of the dirtiest of those industries, along with eminently Dickensian working conditions. The built environment thus created kept the city dark and depressed long after more enlightened labor practices had evolved, and long after many of the older industries had died. Few new industries took their place, because no one wanted to move to Glasgow. But a concerted, long-term revitalization campaign, centered on restoration of the city’s built (and cultural) environment, led to Glasgow’s being crowned the “European City of Culture” in 1990, and the European “City of Architecture” in 1999.

I could have literally filled this book with such vignettes of village, metropolitan, and even national revitalization via restorative development, but we’re out of room, so let’s look at some of the broader issues.

Lessons Learned from the Urban Renewal Debacle

Anyone with a sense of recent history and culture knows just how far we’ve come, especially if he or she lived in a major Western Hemisphere city during the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of architectural treasures, from courthouses to baseball stadiums, were blithely demolished in a frenzy of “modernization,” and replaced by sterile eyesores that are now themselves being demolished. This architectural holocaust was aided and abetted by “dumb” building codes and even tax incentives. Accompanying the profusion of short-lived, hideous office buildings were the dysfunctional, 195penitentiary-style public housing developments that many blame (at least in part) for the sudden proliferation of gangs, violence, and drugs in formerly peaceful low-income neighborhoods. Many of these housing projects are also being demolished, long before the expiration of their intended life span.

A 1999 trip to Tampa was illustrative. I arrived by Amtrak at Tampa’s Union Station, built in 1912 for $250,000, which was undergoing a $3,000,000 restoration. Sitting on the balcony of my hotel room, I gazed across the Hillsborough River at the recently restored silver minarets of the University of Tampa (UT). This picturesque campus started life in 1891 as the Tampa Bay Hotel, constructed by someone who knew all about the profits to be had from restoration: Henry Plant, who made a fortune rebuilding the South after the Civil War. In 1931, the hotel was restored and adaptively reused as the UT campus.

Such restoration efforts have played a significant part in putting Tampa back on the national economic map. Had the founders of UT chosen to build from scratch, or had they not funded continued restoration work, it’s unlikely that the campus would be what it is today: Tampa’s most treasured and widely recognized feature, the icon of Tampa’s personality (though many locals would put the restored Tampa Theatre at the top of their list of favorite places.).

Tampa’s planners addressed the restoration of Ybor City’s heritage, infrastructure, brownfields, low-income communities, economy, and recreation. Unfortunately, that restoration focused almost exclusively on the built environment, neglecting ecosystems and waterways. Nonetheless, Ybor City demonstrates that we’re beginning to recognize the complex demands of multifaceted, simultaneous, integrated restoration. This approach revitalizes everything that adds (or could add) value to an area, rather than focusing on an isolated outcome at the expense of all else.

Ybor City’s 1960s experience also demonstrates that, without an integrated approach, some forms of renewal can be as disruptive and unhealthy as new development. In fact, they are new development. Even when it’s benign, nonintegrated restoration wastes profits and other value-adds that would have been “free” bonuses with a bit more thought, planning, sensitivity, and/or research.

The Upside of Down Times

Economic distress during the ‘60s and ‘70s turned out to be a blessing for many communities—such as Charleston, South Carolina—that are today experiencing a renaissance. Economic distress meant Charleston couldn’t 196afford urban renewal. As a result, its heritage largely escaped the planners’ bulldozers and has now become the key to the city’s revitalization.

Tampa wasn’t so blessed with poverty in those days. As we’ve seen, they fell victim to the urban renewal craze, when architectural classics were torn down by the thousands nationwide, simply because they were old. Senior residents still mourn the wanton destruction of the distinctive, Moroccan-styled Tampa Courthouse Building. This was probably Tampa’s single most costly and culturally tragic error. The city has been struggling ever since, at a cost of many millions of dollars, to woo people to its downtown, which is mostly deserted on weekends and after six o’clock on weekdays.

Vital, prosperous downtowns always have a physical “heart”: Tampa ripped its out. Fortunately, the three key restorations—the classic Tampa Theatre, the UT campus, and nearby Ybor City—are mitigating that loss to some degree. The less interesting Florida cities—those too young to have “heritage,” or those that took a wrecking ball to their history—are struggling to develop a diversified economic base. Orlando has been trying for decades to convince theme park tourists to drive a few miles to visit its expanse of shopping malls, office buildings, and residential areas, all of recent vintage.

Until you read the opening story, “urban renewal” probably had a positive connotation for you. It certainly sounds like a legitimate, desirable component of restorative development, right? Not without integration with our heritage, it isn’t, as the Ybor City story illustrated. One of the keys to truly holistic urban (or building) renewal is—as Stewart Brand, president of the Long Now Foundation, would say—to view “the whole” as not just whole in space but whole in time as well. Now that we’re learning that urban renewal is supposed to renew and retain, not just replace, metropolitan revitalization plans are proliferating, and heritage restoration is often at their core.

ISSUES AND INSIGHTS

1. Historic restoration can be defined in many ways One such definitional clash concerns whether to restore sites to an arbitrary “original condition,” or to recognize that buildings “live and evolve,” and that this evolution is itself genuine and historic. A good example comes from the Nelson House, a National Park Service (NPS) project. Built in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1735, the Nelson House was named by National Geographic Magazine “Virginia’s Most Famous Revolutionary Home.” Its restoration was a nightmare for the descendants of the original owner.

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Nelson House was purchased and restored in 1914 by George Preston Blow. It remained in the Blow family until 1969, when it was sold to the NPS, which spent $10 million (in 2000 dollars) restoring it to its original condition, which meant removing many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modifications of historic value. In doing so, “they obliterated almost 300 years of history” says John Blow, Captain Blow’s grandson and one of four brothers who sold the house to the NPS. Here’s how Blow describes the project on his website:

Despite this story, please bear in mind that the NPS is one of “the good guys,” a great champion of heritage restoration. The NPS has had little difficulty transitioning from new development to restoration (its only major area of unresolved internal contention being the restorative burning of park lands). The NPS is active in at least four restorative industries: ecosystem, watershed, infrastructure, and heritage. It is actually a leading force in heritage restoration, facilitating the flow of private investments totaling over $2.5 billion annually into the thousand or more restoration projects it has going on at any given moment. Between 1994 and 2000, there was a 47 percent increase in the volume of federal tax credits NPS approved for restoration projects.

Making the decision as to what part of a building’s accumulated renovations and expansions qualify as heritage is a thankless task, guaranteed to anger someone. Witness the hot debate over restoration of James 198Madison’s home, Montpelier. This $40 million project must decide whether to keep the expansions—which also qualify as heritage in the eyes of many people—added by the DuPont family a century after Madison’s death.

2. Few performance specifications exist for historic restorations, so the definition of authenticity varies widely The restoration of the ancient

Cambodian city of Angkor (its regional ecosystem collapses and restorations were described in Chapter 2) provides a perfect example. As soon as Cambodia’s long civil war ended in 1991, many nations rushed in to restore Angkor, as described in a January 15, 1998, Associated Press article. In it, John Sanday, who oversees work at Angkor’s Preah Khan monastic complex for the World Monuments Fund, said:

Later reports claimed that the Japanese take an “aggressive approach” to restoration, stressing beautification and filling-in of missing elements, rather than authenticity. Other major players in what will be at least a 20-year, $100 million effort are Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Italy, Hungary, UNESCO, the European Union, France, and China. “There isn’t one globally accepted way of restoring a monument. It is important that there is debate and that it continues,” said Ang Choulean of APSARA, the Cambodian agency overseeing Angkor’s restoration, in the same article quoted above. “It’s simply a dream to think that we can have one way of restoring Angkor. But we must avoid any damage.”

3. Historic preservationists can sometimes go a bit overboard Local heritage groups sometimes go beyond restoring old buildings to demanding that all new buildings match the style of the period deemed desirable. This can have a stifling effect on architectural creativity and 199innovation. It can also impede other important agendas, such as the use of environmentally efficient designs and technologies. “Green” (planted) roofs are a no-no, for instance, even when they would be invisible from the ground.

Such all-out authenticity agendas are often of value when creating entire historic districts. However, they sometimes can reduce the charm and uniqueness of the older buildings, by surrounding them with too much sameness. Such an approach makes it harder for people to tell real heritage from fake.

4. Context is too often undervalued It’s surprising how often heritage conservation and restoration projects focus on the visual aspects of the project, ignoring all other senses, such as sounds and smells. For instance, at George Washington’s lovingly restored Mt. Vernon property, security personnel patrol the otherwise pastoral scene in a huge, noisy, smelly diesel pickup truck. Why not horses? Or a horse-drawn carriage, to protect guards from the elements?

5. Nonstandardized terminology In Chapter 4, we mentioned the somewhat esoteric problem of terms having mutually exclusive meanings in different restorative industries: Here’s an example of how it affects business. National Public Radio recently told the story of a master roof repairer who was fined $10,000—mercifully reduced from the standard fine of $25,000—by the German Economic Criminal Police. He was restoring a church, and had to replace the rotten, 300-year-old wooden beams. The fact that he replaced the beams, rather than fixing them, officially crossed the line into roof construction, as opposed to restoration. Construction is a different guild, upon whose turf he had unknowingly trespassed. That’s an expensive bit of terminological confusion for an independent craftsperson.

Restoration can legitimately be considered one of the tools of preservation, and using the two terms interchangably wouldn’t be a problem if the world consisted only of inanimate objects. But restorative development addresses more than the built environment: it encompasses the living systems of the natural and the socioeconomic environments, as well. “Preservation” is what one does to dead things. We would greatly serve the cause of integrated restoration if we standardized our language a bit. (Given the evolutionary perspective of buildings offered by Stewart Brand in his landmark book How Buildings Learn, it’s probably quite appropriate to speak of buildings as if they were alive, too.)

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A CLOSING STORY

I wrote much of this chapter in one of my favorite refuges in the world, the lovely Hotel Britânia in Lisbon, Portugal. Lisbon is a city embodying a cornucopia of heritage, even by the very high standards of Europe. Popular legend names Ulysses as the city’s founder, though most historians credit the Phoenecians with the deed some 3,000 years ago. The Greeks took it from the Phoenecians, who were displaced by the Carthaginians. The Romans had their day, of course, from 205 B.C. to the fifth century A.D.

The Hotel Britânia is part of an expanding group of restored hotels owned by a partnership of the Sousa and Fernandes families in Lisbon. The hotels are marketed together as Heritage Hotels Lisboa (Lisboa is the actual name of the city we call Lisbon) at the website www.heritage.pt. This 30-room haven of civilized tranquility is a love affair of the charming gentleman responsible for its revival, Luis Alves de Sousa.

His lovely wife, Ana Maria de Mendonça T. S. Alves de Sousa, authored the romantic short story, “Hotel Britânia: The Magic of Places,” and did the historical research related to the restoration. She also discovered and restored many of the murals that had been painted over. Built in 1944, the Britânia is very young by European standards, but it’s rich with heritage nonetheless. Designed in the art deco style by famed Portuguese modernist architect Cassiano Branco, the Britânia’s history is rife with intrigue. It was constructed during the height of WWII, when Lisbon was known to the world as “the city of spies,” thanks to its international crossroads location and to Portuguese neutrality.

Sousa is a perfect example of a Restoration Economy leader, someone who is earning his living entirely from restoration, and who is expanding those activities as quickly as possible. He is currently bidding on a 1912 building just down the street; his partners recently purchased a small building on the grounds of the castle overlooking Lisbon and created 14 guest rooms within the ancient structure.

Sousa seems to have arrived accidentally at restorative development. He purchased the Britânia in 1976, intending to fix it up a bit and resell it at a profit. But with each improvement, he fell more deeply in love with 201the building. He finally committed to a thorough restoration in the mid-1990s, recreating much of the original charm, while enhancing it with the most uniformly excellent hotel staff I’ve encountered. (Thank you, Pedro, Elisabete, Rui, and Eugénia!) All are multilingual, not to mention phenomenally attentive and caring. In the interests of accurate restoration and guest comfort, Sousa kept the spacious, high-ceilinged room layout, even though he could have had more rooms by shrinking them.

“I’m a happy man,” Sousa told me as we lounged in the bar, with its absolutely stunning parquet floor, in December of 2001. “I love being in this building. I love our employees. … I love our guests: They share my sensibilities. The kinds of people who seek out a place like this are different from the ‘consumers’ who stay in new hotels. Restored hotels have soul… are living structures with a history and personality. Restoration work is too difficult to undertake unless one has a passion for it; unless one derives deep personal rewards from it. But how can one not be enriched, on all levels, by restoring one’s heritage, and having the privilege of earning one’s living doing so?” he said.

What’s truly exciting is that, these days, you’re likely to find someone with a story similar to Luis Alves de Sousa’s in almost every city of significant size worldwide.

You’ve probably found this chapter on heritage restoration “warmer” than the preceding hypertechnical subjects of brownfields and infrastructure. But for sheer depth of emotion, no industry of restorative development can touch the one that ends this survey of the built environment: disaster and war restoration.

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A SMALL SAMPLING OF OPPORTUNITIES

Business and investment

Heritage strikes many as a nontechnological restoration industry, but a wealth of opportunities awaits inventors. The sudden growth of most restoration industries, including heritage, is so new that most of the progress has been in knowledge: technological advances are the next stage. A vast array of older museum, education, residential, office, and government projects awaits.

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NGOs and other nonprofits

As mentioned earlier, heritage tourism has been one of the fastest-growing aspects of the travel industry for over a decade, and shows every sign of continuing its growth. The natural synergy between heritage restoration, community revitalization, travel, and cultural education is spawning many not-for-profit opportunities for new and established organizations.

Community and government

Both metropolitan and national governments are in the unique position of being able to greatly reduce costs and enhance results by integrating the restoration of natural and built heritage with the restoration of brownfields, infrastructure, watersheds, etc. Regions offering tourists nature, picturesque family farms, heritage, efficient infrastructure, good fishing, water sports in clean rivers, etc. will have a powerful advantage over competing areas that rely on just one attraction.

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¹ Environmental News Network, “Officials Demolish Toxic Remains of Gloversville, NY, Glove Industry,”www.enn.com.