When Disney's main street is the last man standing (without support).

I was hoping at this point to begin a new article on the effect the climate has on the soil here in Afghanistan. Mid-March being the peak of the rainy season here, I figured I’d come up with some demonstrative photos and explore the ramifications that rain has on human habitations here. But so far, Mother Nature has thwarted my efforts: we’ve had nothing but unexpectedly warm, sunny, and dry weather this entire March so far, so I have no photos to offer as proof. I’m not yet concerned. We’re bound to encounter a thunderstorm eventually, here at the northern edge of the Hindu Kush mountain range. The rainy season doesn’t usually end until mid-April. And when we do get that rain, I promise I’ll deliver an article analyzing impacts of precipitation on Afghan soil. Try to contain your excitement.



In the meantime, I return to the States to visit a familiar topic: the “artificial” removal of the vast majority of a structure while preserving the façade. I use the word “artificial” with some hesitation—thus the quotes—because this act, usually (clumsily) called façadectomy, has become so commonplace that it’s almost a natural part of many re-emerging historic urban environments. In most instances, the façade is propped up while the developer builds something else behind it—usually an entirely different building with a floor plan that meets modern demands. Thus, the process is predicated upon the notion that everything about the structure is obsolete except the way the front of it engaged with its surroundings (i.e., the street and adjacent buildings). And in many cases, it is. The entire building would have met the wrecking ball otherwise; keeping the façade allows building and its immediate surroundings to retain a simulacrum of salvaged history. Preservationists usually frown at the façadectomy practice, no doubt because it taints the integrity of this discipline by implying that the veneer is what really matters. A façadectomy implies that the essence of the building—its ability to enclose specific human activities—is expendable, tossing most of the refinement of true preservation out the window and reducing it to a cosmetic exercise. Conversely, anyone preparing a rebuttal to a criticism of façadectomies would argue that the façade really is the most important aspect, while building interiors often undergo far more frequent surgeries over the life cycle of a building. Rare is the National Historic Landmark that enjoys preservation inside and out, so salvaging the just the façade—the one part that the vast majority of people will actually see—frequently succeeds as a cause célèbre in populist preservation. Thus, the “ectomies” continue.

But what happens when the developers salvage the façade, only to replace it with nothing? I first noted this occurrence early on in the life of this blog, when it took me by surprise on Memphis’ Beale Street. For several of the structures along this popular, touristy entertainment hub, the façades are all that survive. If a visitor passes through what used to be an entrance, he or she encounters a courtyard featuring a restaurant and bar.

But from the outside, it doesn't look remotely like a building: the girders supporting the structure make no attempt at subtlety; the masonry where the rest of the building was demolished is still jagged and irregular; the windows are just gaping apertures without glass. It looks like exactly what it is: a brick sheath suspended in an upright position. From a greater distance it's a bit more convincing, and it retains the essence of a contiguous street wall—the classic old-fashioned main street with a storefront at the ground level and apartments or offices on the floors above. As much as I hate sneering Disney analogies, the illusion Beale Street hopes to create is not unlike Disneyland's Main Street, which in itself is a specious paradigm since Disney's corridor owes its vibrancy to a captive audience and its imperviousness to conventional urban blight. Beale Street is vibrant too, no doubt due more to its loose alcohol than because it still harbors a genuine blues community, or many of the Street's actual buildings for that matter. From a distance, Beale Street looks like the real deal. But up close, it's like Pinocchio hoping to become a real boy (alas, another Disney analogy)—the semblance of a building that depends on a human presence to animate and legitimize it.

Keeping this in mind, I was less surprised when I encountered a similar practice in Mobile. Alabama’s southernmost big city, and probably the one with the most distinctive vernacular architecture, has an emergent entertainment corridor in the form of Dauphin Street, a remarkably long main street (over ten blocks) for a not-so-large city.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to determine whether the corridor is enjoying a rebirth or a decline. Vacancy was pretty high on a summer 2010 visit, with some surprising shuttered storefronts:

I know we’re long past the microbrew craze, but at least one should survive on the primary entertainment spine of a metro of over one quarter million. Mobile didn’t appear to have one in business. And the surest sign that Dauphin Street isn’t hot property is the presence of a storefront church:

I've blogged about this a ton in the past. If you see one of these, you can rest assured that the landlord is hard-up for any tenant and rents are low—especially in an area that most likely is trying to attract high-energy, revenue generating debauchery more than piety.


But I don’t want to knock the town when it’s down. Like much of the Gulf Coast, the Mobile area suffered significant losses from Hurricane Katrina, and some of the vacancies might be residual consequences. The fact remains that Dauphin Street almost exclusively features locally owned businesses, and the eyesores alternate in equal measure with streetscapes like this:

Or this:

Or this one:

The establishment in that last photo (probably a restaurant) may be out of business, but the building itself appears well-maintained. None of the grillwork on the balconies is rusted, so it probably hasn’t been shuttered for long. But a trick camera angle is the only thing retaining the duplicity here.
The surgery is much more obvious.

Like the building in Memphis’ Beale Street, it’s an old façade with girders holding it up. But it does show some critical differences. On Beale Street, the girders stood front and center, occupying part of the sidewalk. Here in Mobile, the supports are a bit more subtle because they sit in the back. But this façade also has something else supporting it; unlike Memphis, it’s more than a partition between the street and an open-air courtyard.
The lower level hosts genuine retail space. Whatever the tenant used to be, it was protected from the elements. The alleyway opening to the left of the facade shows how far back the structure extends, seen in the photo angling to the right of the alley:


The scarring of the masonry in both photos suggests that this alleyway underwent some heavy surgery as well in order to achieve its current condition. No doubt at some point in the distant past, this area had a roof. Another significant alteration is right there at the entrance.


Most likely the first floor hosted some large storefront windows flush with the façade, but now they are gated, and the physical entrance to the shelter is offset, allowing a sort of loggia for potential open-air seating—one more reason I think it was intended as a restaurant.

But the most invasive aspect of this façadectomy manifests itself when you crane your neck.

If it weren't for the installation of a new first floor, this building would look just as goofy as the one in Memphis: a decorative brick wall suspended high into the air. But thanks to the restaurant installation at the ground level and the concealment of the girders, it genuinely takes a keen eye to notice the illusion—quite a contrast from the far more obvious, contrived effort in Memphis. Preservationists may groan at the shallowness of either of these initiatives, but they still demonstrate a conscious attempt to retain at least part of the historic commercial character of their respective streets. In both cases, the owner of the property may be waiting until the market is right for a higher and better use. At that point, he or she could fill in the remaining void with a structure that matches the façade.

Filling in the void and completing the façadectomy would be much easier with Memphis. The Mobile example hints at something a bit more problematic and pervasive: many once-struggling commercial corridors are enjoying a revival through renewed populist appreciation in older architecture. But does this revival penetrate the entirety of the building? All to often, the first floor is the only thing capable of landing a tenant: the upper levels remain empty and sometimes quite decrepit. New Orleans' Royal Street in the French Quarter offers a great example, where the first floor is replete with active storefronts hosting often high-end art, antiques, and collectables. Yet even there, where retail space rents at high prices (for New Orleans' standards), the upper levels are frequently shuttered—a problem throughout much of the Quarter. The quaint ideal of retail on bottom and housing above is a concept we idealize but rarely embrace in actuality. Mixed-use seems great when someone else is creating the mixture. But the market demand for it—the best way to find an occupant for those other levels—is often miniscule.

This storefront on Mobile's Dauphin Street looked good enough for a restaurant, and in a better economic climate, it will probably find a new tenant. But the likelihood of demand escalating enough to justify building a structure for those other two floors is slim. In fact, a restaurant on the first floor may actually be a deterrent to transforming those upper levels into residential or office. Food handling is an extremely tough use to mix. Not too many people want the same smells wafting into their home or workspace every day from the restaurant below, no matter how good it may be. And even the best maintained of restaurants have a greater propensity for attracting vermin such as mice or roaches. Ask anyone who's lived next to a grocery store. Ask me.

In light of these undertakings in Memphis and now Mobile, it's hard to take a firm stand on façadectomies. Like it or not, they're part of a sub-practice within historic preservation, and they speak volumes about when the effort to salvage a structure aligns with demand—and when they clearly only generate dischord. We've already lost hundreds of buildings that intended to mix retail and residential throughout this country, and we'll lose many more in the future. Even if Dauphine and Beale Street become trendy entertainment destinations (the latter one already is), nothing suggests that main street architecture has more than a niche appeal—a antique collector's nostalgia. If anything else were the case, the majority of intact American main streets would be flourishing by now, but clearly they aren't. I still hold hope that we will witness the restoration of numerous other aging, pedestrian-scaled buildings in the decades to come, but not all will enjoy preservation from top to bottom, back to front. A flimsy brick wall surviving by braces may look ridiculous, but the care involved in trying to save it earns a distinctiveness all its own. And maybe these shells will find a new hermit crab to re-inhabit them, filling out the remaining three walls, then finding a tenant on those upper-level apartments who never grows tired of the southern barbecue smells simmering below.

Hurdles on the runway.

For the most part, the scale of a city’s major institutions correlates directly to the metropolitan area’s size and economic power. Metros like New York and Chicago win the flagship luxury department stores, they have the highest number of super-tall skyscrapers, the biggest libraries, movie theaters, power plants, and so forth. Obviously Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field prove an exception to this trend, since the humble sizes of these stadia belie the heft of their respective cities. However, both cities claim many more alternate sports venues than much smaller communities such as New Orleans, Indianapolis, or Salt Lake City, so the total square footage of athletic facilities in the major metros roughly parallels the number of people.

One of the few major industries, however, where the importance within a locale routinely defies the city’s relative size is in commercial airports. For example, Ohio’s Port Columbus International (CMH) sits squarely in the center of the country’s seventh most populous state and is within ninety minutes’ flying distance of over half of the nation’s population. It is by far the fastest growing and most economically healthy city in Ohio. Yet the passenger traffic (measured by the FAA) at the airports of Cleveland (CLE) and Cincinnati (CVG) eclipse Port Columbus by far; despite being a relatively slow-growth metro of similar size, Cincinnati’s passenger traffic nearly doubles that of Columbus. Future forecasts suggest this is unlikely to change. Conversely, Salt Lake City’s metropolitan area is only a little over half that of metro Columbus; its vigorous economy suggests that it will grow increasingly prominent over time, but at this point it has a long way to go to equal Columbus’ size. Yet its airport (SLC) receives triple the passenger traffic of its Midwestern counterpart.

These disparities make fundamental sense, and it doesn’t require much scrutiny to see why. The biggest factors influencing the prominence of a city’s airport are 1) its historical size in relation to neighboring cities; and 2) its geographic proximity to other centers of commerce. In terms of both of these factors, the deck is stacked against Columbus. It was historically nowhere near as large of a city as Cincinnati just 110 miles away; the latter community achieved prominence at a much earlier date and therefore justified the aviation infrastructure worthy of its size. Columbus has only risen to the higher echelon of Midwestern cities in recent years. Meanwhile, Cleveland surged in the early 20th century to become Ohio’s largest metro, which it remains to this day (though if growth patterns in Columbus and shrinkage patterns in Cleveland continue, Columbus may eventually dethrone the Forest City). And Salt Lake City’s prevalence has less to do with its current impressive growth—it certainly didn’t demand a major airport forty years ago—than its relative isolation, with no other major city of any reasonable size within a 350 mile radius.



Such aviational curiosities culminate with the unlikely prominence of Memphis International Airport (MEM). The metro area is not growing at anywhere close to the pace of Columbus or Salt Lake City, or, for that matter, the state of Tennessee’s booming capital Nashville, which has surged past metro Memphis in population. But the Memphis airport still averages at least a half million more passengers than Nashville’s in any given year, it remains a hub for Delta (formerly Northwest) and routinely flies to Amsterdam, and, most significantly, its role as the super-hub of FedEx Express has substantiated the airport’s reputation as the number one cargo operator in the world. In spite of these logistical advantages, Memphis was a higher profile city several decades ago, back when the local leadership assembled parcels for this moderately busy airport. Since the mid 19th century, several other urban centers (Nashville and Charlotte in particular come to mind) have shimmied up the ladder at a faster rate, but Memphis Airport still retains its extensive infrastructure—with room to grow—and its unsullied title as the capital of the Mid-South. As the map above indicates, no city of comparable size sits within three hours’ drive; even Nashville rests over 200 miles to the east. But its central location within the South in general makes it a remarkably convenient midpoint; most Southerners have undoubtedly experienced a layover in Memphis when flying Delta.

But is the Memphis Airport Authority thinking in terms of future growth? Some urban prairies to the west of the terminal, where eminent domain allowed the purchase and demolition of private residences, suggest that newer or larger runways form a part of the airport’s future. But the airport’s interior features suggest otherwise.

This photo, taken near the end of one of the sections to Concourse A, while looking back toward the central terminal, reveals an unlikely impediment: a short stairwell. About seven gates operate on the side of the stairwell from which I am taking the above two photos, while the vast majority of the concourse’s gates are on the inner portion of the concourse, closer to the vertex of these lengthy halls. Seen from the other direction, the stairwell and its respective change in elevation offer a distinct visual contrast.

Fortunately, the authorities at Memphis International aren’t dodging the stipulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act; an alternative to the stairwell and escalator is nestled in a corner just to the right of the above photo.

The elevator helps to avert a potentially serious problem for disabled persons with a reasonable solution. But this reasonable solution isn’t exactly modern. The elevator is only conspicuous from the lower level—the most likely destination for those using the stairs—and most people, unaware of its existence, struggle to negotiate their wheeled luggage down the stairs or escalator.

Now I’ll be bold and draw a broad conclusion from this minor obstruction. The leadership at Memphis airport, aware that their city handed the flag to Nashville long ago, has stopped thinking of itself as a critical airport for a prominent city. Its role as a cargo hub remains auspicious, but other cities with lesser airports may soon surpass Memphis’ infrastructure to support commercial flights. The airport’s tidy but faded interior—and its casual negligence of inconveniences such as the one captured in this photo series—collectively diminish the sense that this airport is scrutinizing a future in which it remains a major player in the field of commercial aviation.

Perhaps I’m splitting hairs by pointing this out. But a stairwell in the middle of a concourse is downright weird. I can’t think of where I might have seen it before. While persons in wheelchairs will always have the elevator, what will they do if a sudden evacuation precludes them from using electrically operated conveyances? Why didn’t the authorities at Memphis International install ramps? Ramps would benefit customers with suitcases, strollers, and Segways just as much. The absence of another, better way of managing the grade change here suggests that airport leadership made an effort to fix its problem by installing an elevator with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and then hasn’t thought about this part of Concourse A ever since. And the ADA passed during the George H. W. Bush administration. As is often the case, this nonchalance toward humdrum spaces dampens the overall appeal of this otherwise perfectly decent airport, while capital improvements apply disproportionately to the showy centerpiece of Concourse B. Memphis may not be an Atlanta, but it also pulls a lot more weight within the south than Little Rock these days. One can only hope that the leadership of this Super-Hub for the Mid-South will prioritize universal design as an aesthetic the next time the place is due for a renovation.

Rethinking the Behemoth; Preserving the Banal, Part II: Why downtowns cannot feast on behemoths alone.

In the Part I of this post, I looked at a troubling example of the intersection of economic development, site selection, and historic preservation. The Mayor and City Council of Evansville, Indiana, have decided to demolish a block of century-old commercial buildings to make way from a new sports arena, after negotiations for the previous site, a car dealership, fell through. The Mayor announced that the site where the historic buildings stand (or stood) is ultimately better because the arena will now front Evansville’s Main Street, allowing the activity generated from major sporting events to spill onto the neighboring blocks, thereby helping to revive the long-slumping retail activity on this commercial corridor.

He could be right; I hope he is. But the car dealership site was only a block further from Main Street, and in choosing this location the City is sacrificing some of its oldest surviving structures. Regardless of whether this block of faded two and three-story buildings was architecturally significant, they had the patina that gives a downtown its perceived “character” and could have proven pivotal for a sustainable revitalization of the downtown’s commercial core. Now they are gone. While the arena may nonetheless help bring pedestrian traffic to a part of downtown that has sorely lacked it, the City’s favoritism toward a historic Main Street site instead of a car dealership seems based on two specious assumptions which I previously mentioned: 1) that big-ticket destinations revitalize downtowns because the foot traffic they induce will “spread” to the struggling surrounding area; and 2) that small historic commercial buildings lack merit without some larger attraction upon which they depend, almost parasitically.



Now let’s dissect the first of these two assumptions a bit more.

The Indianapolis blogger, Dig-B raised terrific initial observations when the new site for the arena was announced on the Skyscraper City forum. What’s the biggest problem with an arena as a catalyst for downtown revitalization? As Dig-B recognizes, its usage is sporadic at best. Though it is likely to pack in the crowds for Evansville Purple Aces basketball or the Evansville IceMen hockey, it will remain unused most other days, with the exception of the occasional music concert. If the arena is bustling with activity for 120 days each year—and that’s an ambitious number—that still leaves two-thirds of the year where it will have no activity whatsoever. All too often, downtown revitalization strategies seem (often unconsciously) to import the suburban mall typology where the existing old vacant commercial buildings are perceived as the homes for the small in-line tenants, and what is missing is the giant anchor or department store. If that paradigm were valid, then how would an arena equate to a department store, when a Macy’s or Nordstrom has just as long (if not longer) hours in a mall as the in-line tenants? Many of the arena’s biggest attractions occur at nights and on weekends, whereas these small commercial buildings often attract small businesses that operate during a standard M-F 9-5.

Memphis offers a good example of where a giant sports venue has failed to engage the neighborhood that surrounds it—actually two venues.

Beale Street—at least four blocks of it—remains mostly intact as a testament to the city's blues heritage. (I say "mostly" because it is dotted with none-too-subtle infill and facadectomies, including some where just the facade is standing through careful bracework, while the rest of the building opens to a courtyard or parking lot, as the photo above reveals. I blogged about this peculiar approach to façade preservation in the past.) The map below outlines the heart of Beale Street in red; it is one of the few consistently successful pedestrianized commercial corridors in the country, even if only for three blocks. However, the area that surrounds it demonstrates the potential damage incurred on an urban landscape when a City introduces mega-destinations.
The aerial above makes it clear: all around this nerve center of classic rock ‘n roll are bulky structures—not a home or apartment building to be seen. Within a few blocks on either side sit FedEx Forum and AutoZone Park, circled in purple. No doubt it appeared a wise decision in terms of helping Beale Street to surge with activity after major events, and the street clearly offers a great number of options for a beer and live music after the game. But did the sports venues really need to be located so close to the commercial district?

Beale Street was extraordinarily depressed in the 1970s, despite being declared a National Historic Landmark. Only in the 1980s did entrepreneurial interest take hold and reinvigorate the corridor. Yet the two sports venues listed above were completed in the early 2000s, long after Beale Street had re-established its foothold. My suspicion is that tourists will continue to patronize Beale Street because it boasts a legendary history, and at least some Memphis Grizzlies fans would have trudged over to Beale Street—those who aren’t turned off by the fact that it’s extremely touristy—even if the Grizzlies arena were quite some distance away, because it remains a hub of activity. I’m not sure if the City of Memphis killed a viable neighborhood to the north and south of Beale Street to make room for these stadia, or if the residential community that helped Beale Street to thrive in its blues heyday was eliminated long ago through urban renewal. Regardless, the areas on either side of Beale are pedestrian dead zones today, offering vistas like this one at Fernando Street, looking southward toward Gayoso.

This is what most of the “neighborhood” that birthed Beale Street Blues looks like, sacrificed to make way for enormous structures such as AutoZone Park, FedEx Forum, and the parking garages to serve these two sports pavilions. Could something more compatible have occupied this land, like (wild idea I know) housing? Meanwhile, AutoZone Park also sits just blocks away from the historic Main Street of downtown Memphis (also pedestrianized like Beale Street and Evansville used to be). Main Street Memphis is filled with beautiful commercial buildings that are struggling to find tenants, if this 2007 photo is any evidence.
Beale Street, just south of downtown, feels more like a linear theme park foisted into a no-man's-land—a classic neighborhood corridor in search of its neighborhood.



Compare this to Bourbon Street in New Orleans, perhaps even tawdrier than Beale Street but generally one of the most vibrant Main Streets in America for its surging nightlife—and it’s still open to cars! (At least during the day.)

Granted, it’s much longer than Beale Street, or at least that part of Beale Street that hasn't been ripped apart for urban redevelopment. No major redevelopment has taken place along Bourbon because it serves as the historic commercial artery of the French Quarter, and the neighborhood around it is almost completely intact. See how the street fits in as the spine of the tightly ordered grid that comprises the French Quarter.

And here are some obliquely angled vistas of the streets surrounding Bourbon, elsewhere in the French Quarter neighborhood. One at Burgundy and Bienville Streets shows a number of tightly grouped residences and commercial buildings within the frame of the picture.

Another at Dauphine and Governor Nichols Streets shows some of the classic double shotguns that comprise a preponderance of the housing in this portion of the Vieux Carre.
I could muse endlessly about notions of authenticity and how Bourbon feels a bit more "real" (however commercialized and utterly touristy) because it's still part of a neighborhood, but that is just my own personal taste. The truth is, people go to Bourbon Street regardless of the distance from major event; they'll walk the 4 blocks from the convention center or the 12 blocks from the Superdome. You can see the distance between the two in the photo below, where the Superdome is circled in purple to the lower left.

To the west of the Superdome, just outside of the aerial photo’s left edge, are more big blocky buildings and parking lots—another no man’s land. So is this stadium stimulating economic development? The fact that these “forgotten corners” of downtown Memphis and New Orleans sit so close to the arenas suggests that their impact may be minimal. The crowds that surge around the Louisiana Superdome during major events aren’t enough to spur demand for the real estate that surrounds it. Nothing is pedestrian-oriented nearby; there’s no housing, but no one cares. The crowds cluster for tailgating before the game, then they finish the night off at bars or restaurants in another part of town. (Meanwhile, the Big Easy’s minor league ballpark, Zephyr Field, sits way out in Metairie, the heart of suburbia, in a completely unwalkable area.) Perhaps a century ago, the land around the Superdome comprised a viable neighborhood. But prior to the dome’s construction, the area was little more than a cluster of warehouses, already largely bereft of its traditional mix of commercial and residential architecture, after the mass demolition that was required for the construction of the adjacent interstate highway. No historic artifacts were harmed in the making of this stadium.

I don’t mean to denigrate stadia through this post. Both professional and amateur sports have the capacity to foster collective support of a community like few other major events. But I question whether the decision makers behind site selection for sports venues need to be so choosy. An art gallery or coffee shop often depends tremendously on the viability of its location; a stadium does not. (Just look at the less-than-convenient homes of the Green Bay Packers or New England Patriots, far from the population center of their fan base.) The new Evansville arena will attract its crowds, even if they plopped it across the Ohio River in Kentucky. One can only hope the city’s leadership doesn’t have such a cavalier attitude toward the rest of Main Street—however few blocks remain.

I will conclude this lengthy post with a final look at those demolished buildings on Evansville’s Main Street. What makes them so much more critical to downtown revitalization than an arena, even if they lack any true architectural merit? City leaders were right in thinking that the goal should be to attract pedestrians to the downtown, but perhaps they need to apply the worm’s-eye-view to what’s already on that urban stage, rather than investing everything into how it might play out with a new unfinished script.

When urban revitalization is nothing more than a façade.

Among the more controversial results of arbitration during urban redevelopment is the retention of a building façade, while demolishing everything that comes behind it because, presumably, the layout, traditional use, and possibly even the entire floorplate fail to meet contemporary needs. The growing practice of façadectomy has entered the general development parlance, though the closet etymologist in me hates this; after all, isn’t that word implying that it is the façade that is being removed?

Putting the incorrect suffix aside, historic preservationists have amplified their criticism in recent years of this practice. As Michael Lewis put it in a 2002 New York Times article:

“It is no coincidence that this innovation, which treats a building as graphic art, appeared in the heyday of Pop Art. But in its blithe indifference to the real essence of architecture, which is the poetic shaping of space, such a flaying is scarcely preferable to demolition. It leaves the image of the building, but not the building itself. They are to real buildings as dentures are to teeth.” By the same token, other theorists—generally from a more pro-development vantage point—assert that façadectomies assume no more or less of a cavalier attitude to design than the individuals who originally conceived these structures, since the office buildings of the turn of the 20^th century (which often now face threat of the wrecking ball) were little more than warehouses for commerce with a carefully conceived, meretricious exterior.

Inevitably, this process, which both developers and historians originally may have perceived as a last resort, has become a facile solution and sometimes even a knee-jerk response. It may easily satisfy the grassroots citizenry who want a great old building to survive, so that the only ones left wagging their fingers are professional preservationists—alas, never a group given the respect they often deserve in a nation whose prerogative often leans more toward continued redefinition by building anew. When the neighbors are happy because the essence of the building survives (as embodied by the façade) it gives the developers free reign to take liberties with the remaining 99% of the structure, resulting in some ungainly liberties with massing, scale, building material, and details. This proposed façadectomy of the original St. Vincent’s hospital in Indianapolis was announced just a few days ago and has drawn its fair share of ire on the blogosphere. I withhold further discussion of this proposed façadectomy because it is still just germinating, though I suspect it won’t be the last time this particular blog mentions it.

Instead, I show two particularly idiosyncratic—one might say cynical—examples of what appear to be façadectomies. The one below is at Washington DC’s Penn Quarter, midway in the 8^th Street NW block between E Street and D Street NW. Penn Quarter is a widely publicized revitalization effort at the far east end of downtown Washington that has included offices, theatres, restaurants, nightclubs, and residences, as well as the Verizon Center arena. It is also blocks away from the relatively new Walter E. Washington Convention Center, so many of the uses in this redevelopment cater to tourists and convention-goers seeking evening entertainment. 7^th Street in particular is a major entertainment destination. The example below appeared to be the loading dock for a large office building that fronts 9^th Street NW.

The picture dates from July of 2008. Hopefully a DCist who lived there longer than I did can tell me if this portion of the building has evolved beyond this stage, though it showed no evidence of a stalled project: the entrance on 9^th Street is clearly up and running. This effort looks to me as though, after the initial façade preservation, the builders surrounded the remaining structure with a molding and filled it with plaster of Paris, then used draftsman’s tools to trace the remaining missing features: window treatments, doorways, transoms. And they painted the space above the spartan Romanesque structure a soft blue—the sky, apparently. It almost makes the viewer forget that the only real doors are service gates for unloading merchandise, and the only other real apertures are the vents at the far left and far right of the picture. It looks like a work in progress, and unless the architect or developer was trying to making a witty postmodernist statement on the delicate temporality of urban reinvention, the message connoted here is unclear without being tantalizingly nebulous. Most passersby scarcely notice it; it has the same effect of one of the many street-level blank walls in redeveloped urban environments all across the country.

This façadectomy in the heart of one of Washington’s most emerging districts suggests to me the developer’s contempt for historic preservation as a discipline. No doubt preservationists have often earned a reputation as “no”-men and women, stymieing redevelopment efforts by drawing attention to projects whose demonstrable historic value could only be tucked away in a dusty vertical file. But such an interpretation casts a negative sheen on an artistic and scientific practice that helped salvage New Orleans’ French Quarter from an urban freeway and protected Philadelphia’s City Hall from devolving to a traffic circle. Their continued labors have brought awareness to what Americans have lost—painful victims of the wrecking ball such as New York City’s original Penn Station—and they have consequently helped promulgate an ideological platform under which laypersons can also more effectively organize and advocate to save treasured structures and sites. So it seems all the more tragic that the time spent around the negotiation table for the Penn Quarter redevelopment would lead to this. Is this really the best they could come up with? The most flattering thing that could be said is that it perceives preservation as a continuous streetwall with minor accents. But it’s far more likely to suggest far worse, such as “Here are the remnants of the more interesting buildings that used to stand here before we built a big plaster box.” It effectively relegates this block of 8^th Street to a service road, and that’s the level of ambiance it is likely to convey to pedestrians, who could—and probably will—just as easily opt for the next block down to reach their destination.

Memphis has taken an altogether different approach to façadectomy on what clearly is not intended to be an ancillary or service road. Beale Street is the music and entertainment main street of the city, effectively preserving its blues heritage for general tourist consumption. (My suspicion is that the “real” blues haunts frequented by locals or visitors who are more than dilettantes are scattered elsewhere throughout the city. But my familiarity with Memphis does not extend this far.) At any rate, a handful of buildings haven’t simply undergone a façade preservation treatment within their redevelopment; they received a façade preservation in lieu of a redevelopment.

All that stands are the façades, with girders holding them upright under which the less superstitious pedestrians stroll along. Behind at least one is a patio seating and a small stage for live music.

Stepping back a bit, one can see effectively the result of a more intact main street through the retention of the façade, though the girders are more than a minor distraction:

Lacking the development insight of an insider and unable to find verifiable data on what actually happened (only hearsay), I can only infer (the real point of this blog, actually). Perhaps it was a redevelopment effort that stalled, where the façadectomy was part of the plan but financing fell through. Maybe. But someone had the money to shell out for the interior patio—chump change compared to an actual building, I know, but financing shouldn’t be difficult on the most pedestrian-rich street in Memphis. Most developers would scramble for site control along Beale Street. Maybe internecine squabbling between preservation advocates and developers or landowners led to a stalemate, and this was the result. Something had to be preserved, and the streetwall is more critical from a main street aesthetics point of view. Maybe—and this is my own strongest guess—this area of Memphis, long an African American enclave, suffered greatly after 1967 race riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King , and black flight from the neighborhood as anti-segregation civil rights laws opened their opportunities to move in other areas of the city. Despite being declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966, Beale Street was depressed and largely abandoned until the 1980s, when a music-based revitalization campaign gathered full steam. The discerning eye can easily spot which buildings simply could not survive the disinvestment period—my suspicion was these façades were preserved only because they were the only salvageable element remaining, and landowners realized they could still earn potential preservation tax credits or other financial incentives if they held onto something. Witness this effort elsewhere on Beale Street:

Clearly the building to the right involves some degree of façadectomy: it would be impossible to fit a flight of stairs and a usable space on what survives of the third floor. The landowner retained the façade and took complete artistic license with everything behind it. Perhaps this is a noble effort when placed into the context of the building’s neighbors, which are either infill because the original structures were demolished, or the façades have been altered to such an extent from their 19^th century origins that they no longer bear any passing resemblance to the three-story façade still standing.

To its credit, Beale Street in Memphis manages to achieve the essence of a vintage commercial Main Street, which is less than can be said about the redevelopment of those Penn Quarter structures in Washington DC. The linearity and largely contiguous string of storefronts survive to cultivate a pedestrian oriented entertainment district. The scars of Memphis’ turbulent history remain visible along Beale and are glaringly obvious if one ventures even a block away from it, since shiny new sports arenas (and their requisite parking garages) flank this street—a total rupture from the urban fabric that might have stood at the time when the city genuinely served as the incubator for American musical legends. Beale Street is an artery of life surrounded on either side by what are two dead zones, unless a major sport event takes place.

Several blocks away, a façadectomy stands that may actually achieve a multi-dimensional expressive content that most other attempts lack: the National Civil Rights Museum retains part of the Lorraine Motel façade, including the balcony where Dr. King was assassinated. Lacking any largely agreed upon architectural merit, the motel’s earned its historic import solely as the site of this tragic event.

The majority of the motel was demolished for a total redevelopment into the museum, giving the visitor the chance to see a replica of King’s hotel room, and to view out upon the balcony where the assassination took place. This façadectomy injected literal semantic content for educational purposes—some may argue it sensationalizes or even trivializes the event by integrating it into a museum which ultimately serves as a major tourist attraction, but it shows an understanding of the employment of façadectomy for memorializing purposes, and it avoids merely embalming and petrifying a certain vague character. Although the doors and windows of the museum do not typically align with the original openings in the Lorraine Motel, the communicative intent of this museum/hotel façade combination is precise.

A defense attorney would likely have a field day with this argument I have made, because the evidence I have provided against façadectomies at Penn Quarter and Beale Street are outliers, scarcely representative of the more sincere efforts performed elsewhere. But I conclude with a defense of façadectomy, even if flies against the reasoning employed in the photographs. Rather than looking at the nature of preservation integrity, negotiators should focus on the full implications of a compromise—how do we quantify the sacredness of a building such that it cannot be altered. Many historic structures and sites remain so vigilantly preserved that disabled people cannot access them—preservationists determined that the slightest addition of a wheelchair ramp or lift will damage the integrity of the site in question. This hardly promotes the idea of democratizing truly sacred spaces by making them universally accessible. Many structures undergo ADA compliance with handicapped ramps, installing them as sensitively as possible in order to protect the historic character. Such solicitousness cannot be applied uniformly to all structures—arguments of historic importance are simply more compelling in some cases than others. It remains to be seen if a façadectomy of the St. Vincent’s Hospital (neither a National Historic Landmark nor on the National Register) in Indianapolis—if approved—will at least respect the integrity of the building’s face to the point that the front door provides an entry and windows actually offer a two-way view. But, if a fight begins for this and other structures, one can only anticipate that it will require an extensive documentation of the project’s historic merits before a façadectomy will seem—as it often does—to the slightly more disinterested general public as a perfectly reasonable compromise.

Maybe Memphians are on to something the rest of us don’t know.

Following the post on a parking signage predicament in Indianapolis, I continue with a city that has a bit more sanguine attitude toward the great discipline of finding parking in an urban setting.

This may also rank as my shortest post; I’m at a loss for further words. Parking and fun? Who knew? If it works for that management company, I’m sure it should be having the last laugh.