A letter just arrived at our house announcing the Newton Planning and Development Dept’s new Historic Preservation Guidelines. The new guidelines are well written, full of detailed and useful information and beautifully produced … but curiously silent on one issue important to us. How do the Historic Commission’s rules apply to historically mongrel houses?
We, and many others, live in mongrel houses in an official designated historic district. Though our house was built in 1820 or 1840 depending on who you ask, it has been continuously modified, changed and updated for the last 200 years. It’s clearly a historic building worthy of preservation but full of all sorts of more recent details that the historic commission frowns on (e.g. asbestos siding, cinder block retaining wall).
These new guidelines would be very helpful if we had the means and inclination to completely restore the house to its original 1820 state. Like most homeowners though our focus is primarily on normal maintenance rather than historic restoration. I’d love to see more of a focus in the guidelines on the realities of dealing with incremental improvements on our mongrel old houses.
The guidelines do allow you to fix or replace any of these non-historic details. So for example, we can fix or replace our totally non-historic front wall with an identical non-historic wall but once you make a change, the historic restoration guidelines kick in. This tends to lead to a perverse incentive. When you need maintenance work done, its often much easier and simpler to stick with whatever non-historic details your house has (e.g cinderblock wall) than open the job up to a historic review by the commission. It’s a tricky question but I would have liked to see more thought and guidance on how homeowners who can’t afford full blow historic restoration can incrementally improve the historic fidelity of their old mongrels via the regular incremental maintenance and improvements all home owners regularly have to do.
While our historic district neighborhood does have a number of beautifully restored and/or preserved historic houses there are far more of these lovely old/new mutts.
I love history and support historic preservation. But advocates often forget that there is an inherent flaw to preservation philosophy. It assumes the past is better than the future. Why would a progressive community make such a general assumption?
Exactly what we should preserve is so subjective. Here the focus is on homes with very little genuine historic value, yet local government has no qualms about burdening homeowners with excessive regulation. Not only do I not want government intruding in my bedroom, I prefer to keep them entirely out of my house if possible.
While preserving structures of historic significance is worth the money and the effort, the preservation philosophy as practiced today is far overreaching that objective. We’ve given too much power to local lawmakers, and undermined the rights of property owners. Things must be brought back into balance.
Mr. Striar’s comments regarding historic preservation are thought provoking and very much in keeping with the more general debate we are having in our country as to the proper role of government in our lives.
Like Mr. Striar, I appreciate the value of history and support historic preservation. However, I disagree with his view that preservation philosophy contains an inherent flaw; that it assumes “the past is better than the future.” I believe historic preservation makes no such judgment.
To paraphrase current thinking regarding historic preservation, its purpose is not to “arrest time” by standing in the way of progress or development, but rather to inform the present and guide us as we decide our future. Historically, we can be informed in many ways: by the written word, by a picture or re-enactment, and sometimes by a building, a group of buildings, or a neighborhood.
I also do not believe that the value placed on historic preservation is in conflict with progressive values. If that were true would it follow that a “conservative” community would be even more likely to “overreach” in its pursuit of historic preservation? These are unhelpful generalizations.
Do I want government entirely out of my house? No, I do not. It saves lives and benefits us all when housing construction or renovation is inspected to ensure that structural, electrical, insulation and other up-to-date codes are being met. It helps to maintain the value of my house when permits, zoning regulations and public hearings help to maintain the character of my neighborhood.
The question we should be asking, unfortunately often cast as an extreme between government and no government, is whether there is a role for government in whatever concerns us as a community, a state or a nation, and if so, what should that role be so that it may serve the greater good.
Another quirk of the official historic preservation process is that the local historic districts are based on geographical boundaries. The district boundaries were chosen because they include large number of old properties. As I understand the rules though, if you live in a local historic district and your house was built in 1965, you come under that same rules and review that your neighbors 1815 house would – seems a bit bizarre.
Another issue that a neighbor just mentioned – he said that when the Upper Falls Historic District was created it’s statutory authority was limited to the exterior of the house. In the new guidelines, the authority of the historic commission appears to now extend to walls, gates, landscaping, etc. According to my old-timer neighbor there has never been any statutory change to allow this much wider authority on the part of the commission. Does anybody have any information on that point?