1st Annual Riverside Cultural Heritage Board Practicum

Today I attended a very good practicum session put on by the City of Riverside Cultural Heritage Board at the recently renovated Arlington Branch Library. The event was sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the keynote speaker was Donovan Rypkema on the economics of historic preservation, sustainable development, and white elephant buildings. It was a very dense but stimulating talk and I thought it really added a positive, solutions-based dimension to the Citywide discussion we’re having regarding economic development and historic preservation. If you weren’t one of the seventy-odd people who attended (or gave up on taking notes in the fast-paced discussion) the City taped it and I believe they will have it available for viewing somehow. Also, he has a book called “The Economics of Historic Preservation” published by the National Trust. I was very happy to see Councilman Rusty Bailey there, as well as Planning Director Ken Gutierrez, but I would have liked to have chained the entire staff of our Redevelopment department to chairs in the room. Maybe we can persuade Rypkema to return at some point, perhaps as a consultant to help us craft projects downtown that make economic, preservation, and environmental sense.

The whole session had the air of a revival, with the green glass of the library’s palladian windows providing a glow to the energy in the air. Rypkema is a compelling speaker, and although he goes through the facts and figures of his presentation rather quickly he does not shy away from hammering home the important points that will stick with you long after forgetting specifically how rehabilitation brings a city greater economic growth per dollar in terms of jobs, household income, and property value.

I have one quibble, and it’s that he’s not really sympathetic to our building stock of the recent past. Communities back east that developed a century or two ago often have a built-in stock of taller urban buildings that probably nobody really debates are historically and/or architecturally significant, even if some people contend it is economically infeasible to reuse them. Many of our major western cities saw their major development after the first and second world wars, when automobile-driven patterns gave birth to the sprawl that anyone gaga over smart growth reviles. Yes, we do have millions and millions of postwar resources, and most of them do not fit the sort of profile that fits Rypkema’s model of historic density so perfectly. I would contend that does not necessarily make them any less sustainable or historically important than the buildings that were constructed a century ago. Rypkema related a story in which someone in Phoenix rather ham-handedly explained to him that the sheer numbers of their post-war resources lent weight to their importance in the community, which he took (uncharitably, I think) to mean the person was advocating a “building petting zoo,” a ridiculous concept to everyone outside of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller.

Whether it’s historical chauvinism brought on by unfamiliarity with the developing scholarly perspective on recent past resources or an overly narrow scope focused on a traditional concept of density, I think Rypkema is too dismissive of postwar resources and their potential use in citymaking. I only bring it up because I think this attitude could have disastrous consequences for western cities, particularly my favorite one. Think of the incredible sense of place one gets when shopping in Magnolia Center, the one-story, sprawling retail shops between Jurupa Avenue and Arlington Avenue along Magnolia. The potential for small business incubation cited by Rypkema as a positive potentiality for historic buildings is already alive in these small shops. They are human-scale, centrally located amidst Riverside’s major streetcar and automotive suburbs. Most of them were designed with distinctive architecture representative (though not all exceptional examples) of the Mid-century modern aesthetic, and feature expansive glass and aluminum storefronts that entice both pedestrian, motorist, and cyclist in to view the wares. What is more important to me is that together with the surrounding neighborhoods they form the core of mid-century Riverside, and mid-century Riverside is as important as early Riverside when it comes to defining the city’s historic architectural character. You can’t just plop down a dense mixed-use project on Sunnyside with no regard for the important retail district already there, because it will destroy the intimate sense of place created by the mid-century buildings that are already there. And that is not preserving an architectural petting zoo, rather it is an authentic space based on the continuing realities of the residents of surrounding neighborhoods and the small business owners who have served them.

One more thing, and then I’ll give it a rest: It seems to me that suburban communities designed for automobiles get a bad rap among sustainable development adherents. They’re not walkable, they sprawl, and because of this they are unsustainable. Their sheer ubiquity and unsustainable foundation overshadow any potential historical or architectural importance. So let’s knock down all those 60s and 70s tract homes already and put the mid-rise mixed- use condos we want there, right? Well, wait a minute… are we envisioning a future where we can only walk everywhere, truly? Why can’t we use all that handy road infrastructure for smaller, more sustainable personal vehicles, or -gasp- bicycles? What about working within the established built environment to plant COMPATIBLE retail and commercial within walking/biking distance? How about we start a sensitive infill program focused on obsolete parking lots? It’s clear that Cities with most of their roots in the recent past will have to come up with creative urbanizing solutions that don’t always look like the stuff that has worked in older Cities. And they don’t have to abandon the notion that their history is important to do it.

Well, maybe I’ve picked a straw-man fight, and Rypkema would actually agree with me.  It seems like there is a lot more room to agree than disagree, and after all, the guy’s got to be provocative to get people thinking about his message.