Back to the future
A few weeks ago I attended a Newport city council meeting, held for the purposes of reviewing the Historic District Commission’s task force recommendations on how best to improve &/or streamline the city’s historic preservation procedures. During the course of the discussion, several of the participants expressed concern about new preservation guidelines potentially impacting owners of non-historic properties, which as near as I can tell gets defined around here as being anything built after 1940. Why, it was asked, should the owners of undistinguished, dated buildings like 1950’s ranch houses be subjected to the same preservation standards as the owners of important historic Victorian or Colonial homes? Why couldn’t they be exempted? Why did they have to suffer the same amount of fuss and expense and oversight that dogs the owners of more historically prestigious buildings?
A couple of days later, by chance, I had to go see my dentist, whose office is over on Gibbs Ave. He’s a smart man – film buff, Buddhist, Obama fan - and I always enjoy talking to him, even if it is usually just about my teeth. Anyhow, on my way over, I noticed some construction taking place a few doors down from him. For as long as I’ve lived in Newport that particular lot has been occupied by a large, low, clean-lined and expensive looking brick ranch house. Now two new bombastic, view-blocking McMansions were rising up out of the dirt instead. Too bad, I said to him, that they had to tear down that house on the corner. He laughed. Oh, it doesn’t matter, he said, it was just a 50’s ranch.
Does nobody in this town GET that today’s 50’s ranches are tomorrow’s historic properties? Today’s present is tomorrow’s history. We are tearing down the future’s past. Fifty years from now these buildings will no longer be ranch houses, they’ll be Ranch Houses, and people will be snapping up what few are left standing and restoring them to within an inch of their lives. Not to mention selling them for a lot of money. The 50’s ranch speaks to and is expressive of its own historical moment as surely as Colonial houses represent the 1700’s or Victorian houses reveal the 1800’s.
The pattern of architectural destruction is dismally predictable…Throughout the 19th century Colonial buildings beyond number were torn down because they didn’t conform to the new aesthetic standards of the Victorian era. Then the Victorian buildings got torn down because they didn’t conform to the more modernist standards of the 20th century. When I was a child I used to hear otherwise intelligent & sophisticated people speak approvingly about tearing down those “hideous old Victorian piles”. Down with the Victorians! Down with the Colonists! Down with the past! Then when I got to Newport in the late 1970’s, the old workers cottages of the early century were the excrescence requiring immediate removal. Now the mid-20th century buildings are what’s being torn down. Meanwhile, the buildings that have managed to survive this ongoing architectural auto-de-fe are being breathlessly restored and preserved, from whence they will be traded on the real estate market with the kind of fervor inspired in children by Pokémon cards. It makes my head spin just to think about it.
Because the bottom line is this: the vast majority of these “historic houses” – whether Colonial, Victorian, or Early 20th – have no actual intrinsic historic value other than the fact of their survival of the wrecking ball. They are significant only in that they managed to escape the destruction that eliminated so many of their peers. Most are not architectural masterpieces. Washington didn’t sleep there. They were homes built by and for tradespeople, the middle class, the everyday Joe. They were small shops, farms, schoolhouses, vacation places. The vast majority were not designed by architects, but were simply erected by builders and carpenters with absolutely no artistic agenda in mind, just a job to do. A great deal of what we are so frantically trying to preserve is nothing more than the vernacular architecture of previous eras. Indisputably our sense of our own past would be immeasurably poorer without these buildings. So why are we so determined to deprive the future of us?
A couple of days later, by chance, I had to go see my dentist, whose office is over on Gibbs Ave. He’s a smart man – film buff, Buddhist, Obama fan - and I always enjoy talking to him, even if it is usually just about my teeth. Anyhow, on my way over, I noticed some construction taking place a few doors down from him. For as long as I’ve lived in Newport that particular lot has been occupied by a large, low, clean-lined and expensive looking brick ranch house. Now two new bombastic, view-blocking McMansions were rising up out of the dirt instead. Too bad, I said to him, that they had to tear down that house on the corner. He laughed. Oh, it doesn’t matter, he said, it was just a 50’s ranch.
Does nobody in this town GET that today’s 50’s ranches are tomorrow’s historic properties? Today’s present is tomorrow’s history. We are tearing down the future’s past. Fifty years from now these buildings will no longer be ranch houses, they’ll be Ranch Houses, and people will be snapping up what few are left standing and restoring them to within an inch of their lives. Not to mention selling them for a lot of money. The 50’s ranch speaks to and is expressive of its own historical moment as surely as Colonial houses represent the 1700’s or Victorian houses reveal the 1800’s.
The pattern of architectural destruction is dismally predictable…Throughout the 19th century Colonial buildings beyond number were torn down because they didn’t conform to the new aesthetic standards of the Victorian era. Then the Victorian buildings got torn down because they didn’t conform to the more modernist standards of the 20th century. When I was a child I used to hear otherwise intelligent & sophisticated people speak approvingly about tearing down those “hideous old Victorian piles”. Down with the Victorians! Down with the Colonists! Down with the past! Then when I got to Newport in the late 1970’s, the old workers cottages of the early century were the excrescence requiring immediate removal. Now the mid-20th century buildings are what’s being torn down. Meanwhile, the buildings that have managed to survive this ongoing architectural auto-de-fe are being breathlessly restored and preserved, from whence they will be traded on the real estate market with the kind of fervor inspired in children by Pokémon cards. It makes my head spin just to think about it.
Because the bottom line is this: the vast majority of these “historic houses” – whether Colonial, Victorian, or Early 20th – have no actual intrinsic historic value other than the fact of their survival of the wrecking ball. They are significant only in that they managed to escape the destruction that eliminated so many of their peers. Most are not architectural masterpieces. Washington didn’t sleep there. They were homes built by and for tradespeople, the middle class, the everyday Joe. They were small shops, farms, schoolhouses, vacation places. The vast majority were not designed by architects, but were simply erected by builders and carpenters with absolutely no artistic agenda in mind, just a job to do. A great deal of what we are so frantically trying to preserve is nothing more than the vernacular architecture of previous eras. Indisputably our sense of our own past would be immeasurably poorer without these buildings. So why are we so determined to deprive the future of us?
Labels: 1950's architecture, antique shopping in newport, Liz Marchi, Newport preservation, ranch houses
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What keeps us centered in a shifting world? What are our escapes? And can we still go there?Radio and Newspapers are filled with the bad news, but they are also powerfully comforting resources. 
