Marketability of History as the Main Focus of Preservation Efforts - Essay Example

Historic preservation is another method of looking back at our past heritage. With time and with progress of civilisation everything changes its shape. To understand past, present generation looks back at their history. To make history come alive, heritage preservation has become very common. In many countries all over the world, there is a movement towards preserving cultural, ethnic and historical heritage, and United States is no exception. The preservation movement started after the Civil Wars. Curiously enough, it was the Women’s Organizations like Mount Vernon Ladies Association, the Daughters of American Revolution and Daughters of the Confederacy took upon themselves the formidable task of preserving important historic landmarks such as the Congress Hall in Philadelphia, Mount Vernon and the Confederacy White House in Richmond, Virginia. Such efforts were totally based on private philanthropy and preservation was directed to historically significant monuments. In 1966 The National Historic Preservation Act was passed in the United States. Around that time, among the urban planners, there was a concerted effort to preserve some of the characters and specialities of the cities in the U.S. Before that, the American cities, according to some critics, were being systemically destroyed because the planners did not consider the community life indigent to the cities (Jacobs). One of the goals of the Act was to preserve the nation’s historical and cultural heritage as a living part of community life. This led to the development of historic districts in different cities in the United States. Historic districts are groups of building and other properties within an urban area, which are purposefully maintained or re-created to bring back the flavour of a past era. Unlike The Alamo or the Confederacy White House, not all historic districts can lay claim on some momentous happenings in their midst. The focus changed from being historically significant to being aesthetically attractive and economically important. The power that be, which Judy Morley calls a populist coalition (4), wanted to preserve the ‘typical’, and often times it became what people thought was typical and representative for an urban area. Tourism development and economic viability were given more importance than scrupulously following the twists and turns of factual history. The preservation planning for western cities like Denver, Seattle and Albuquerque needed to factor some other considerations in. Initially these cities grew in a rather haphazard fashion, and the modern urban planners sought to consolidate their growth. But the ‘cookie-cutter’ development concept tried to make the western cities replications of their eastern counterparts. This threatened tourism which traditionally was one of the important economic activities of the western cities. To give the tourists a flavour of the ‘wild west’ where the cowboy hero like John Wayne ‘rides into the sunset’ it became important to preserve, not what was factual history for the city, but what popular culture projected as history for the city! The ‘heritage tourism’ generated dollars and everybody from developers to urban planners to city government became convinced that preserving areas in downtown as a designated historical district must be given priority, possibly at the expense of authentic undiluted history. In some cases this newly created historic charm was at variance with what the original residents of the designated historic district wanted. Take for instance the case of Old Town, Albuquerque, New Mexico. The city of Albuquerque came into being in early eighteenth century, almost a century and a half before the United States’ acquisition of New Mexico territory. The Spanish colonial outpost got a federal garrison and a quartermaster depot. But the Santa Fe railroad bypassed the central plaza or the ‘Old Town’ and later form the center of the New Town. The Old Town retained the community character and San Felipe de Neri church was the congregation point of the residents. Many of the old living quarters in old town did not even have internal plumbing and were looked down upon by the Anglo residents of the New Town. Ethnic characters in Old Town and New were totally different. Towards the third quarter of twentieth century Old Town lost its power and could not resist being completely taken into the jurisdiction of the City of Albuquerque, in spite of active protests. The Anglo community of the New Town bemoaned the poverty and the Hispanic life-style of the Old Town residents and converted the Plaza into a tourist place of more than 150 stores, galleries, museums, restaurants and offered tourists from all over the world a stroll into the charming history of Albuquerque, that the tourists can write home about. Instead of the mundane, day-to-day struggle of the original residents of the Old Town, the tourists are overwhelmed with the beautifully recreated ethnic backdrop to enjoy their romantic rendezvous with the Hispanic heritage of the Southwest. Undoubtedly, preserving a city’s past through the old architecture provides identity to a city. Problem is to decide which identity to preserve, the original one or the one the present generation of planners and developers would like to depict. Pioneer Square in Seattle tells another story. This is in existence from the middle of the nineteenth century when the first settlers put up their residences there. Naturally the Indian settlements before that time were not considered in remaking of history. At that time this area was full of parlour houses, crib houses and box houses, some reputable but many are of dubious distinction. In 1889 the Great Seattle Fire completely engulfed the Pioneer Square. As it was reconstructed brick and mortar were used instead of wood. Pioneer Square’s heyday was during the gold rush of Alaska. After this short burst of glory the Square became run-down and gradually turned into a seedy and crime-prone area. In the 1960s and 70s the city government realized the potential of Pioneer Square as a historically significant district and was eager to develop it into an economically viable preservation project. Naturally in doing so the Romanesque buildings housed upscale jewellery shops and tourists enjoyed their java and the gold rush excitement in Starbucks. The history of Denver, Colorado is also entangled with another gold rush era, the Pike’s Peak gold rush. Denver started as a mining town on the frontier and went through all the phases of development, including corruption, high crime, collusion between crime lords and elected officials, depression and resurgence. What is now called the Lower Downtown or LoDo area of Denver was the first white settlement in Denver. However, even before them the Arapaho tribe used the same area as their summer encampment. During the Sand Creek Massacre the severed heads of the tribesmen were paraded in victory at the same place. LoDo was truly a part of Wild West — not in the romantic sense, but in the sense of unabashed savagery. Coming of railroad transformed LoDo into a bustling center of business but by mid-twentieth century it lost most of its significance and regressed back to being more of a skid row. The first plan of urban renewal did not materialize but in 1988 the Lower Downtown Historic District was formed when the town fathers realized this area’s historic, architectural and economic potential. The erstwhile dilapidated area with its history of crime, corruption, savagery, brothels and the like has now been attracting tourists on guided walking tours against payment; thus filling the city’s coffers. The warehouses have transformed into expensive residential estates. The recreated historical buildings house prime accommodations, eateries and upscale shops. Frontier town has been preserved for attracting tourists willing to spend money to enjoy in the Hollywood-like aura of the days gone by. The complex history has been filtered to showcase what one would like to believe, and is therefore eminently marketable. As is evident, marketability of history is the main focus of all the preservation efforts. What people want to see or think may sometimes be completely opposite to what actually was. Interpretation of history is always open to judgement. The same incident would be interpreted differently depending on who is interpreting it: the victorious or the vanquished. The Plaza in Albuquerque may have been taken over from its indigenous community and LoDo from the Arapahos tribes by more powerful Anglo groups. After a few generations the winners feel nostalgic for the past and try to bring back the old days, not as the days truly were, but as the winners would have liked the days to be. Factual history gives way to imagined history. After all time has progressed and past is gone and dead. It may not be possible to go back to the days of brothels, skid rows, corruption and lynching! To maintain the uniqueness of the cities, the city-planners need to glorify the past. That brings them in contact with the developers. The alliance between developers and planners sometimes treads on uneasy ground. What binds the alliance is generation of funds. The historic zones need to be sold, they need to generate money for their own sustainability. This leads to the incorporation of retail shops and fancy eateries in the historic buildings. Perhaps this is the only way in which designated historic zones may survive to give some superficial idea about how the area looked like in the by-gone days gone. References Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1993. Print. Morley, J. M. Historic Preservation and the Imagined West. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Print. Read More