The Recycling Off America

The Recycling Of America

Old buildings make new landmarks

Of all American characteristics, none perhaps has been more enduring than the national preoccupation with newness. This trait nourishes invention, but faddishness as well. Its least attractive symptom may be Americans' rejection of almost anything old that is not a marketable antique. In no aspect of the nation's life has this been more evident than in the reckless, relentless assault on old buildings and neighborhoods. The "pull-down-and-build-over spirit," as Walt Whitman dubbed it, has been incalculably costly in terms of aesthetics, energy and the sense of continuity that binds communities and generations together.

And yet, if the past decade has produced a single cultural bench mark of note, it has been the remarkable turnabout in Americans' estimation of their bricks-and-mortar legacy. In their new appreciation of the old, well-made, neglected structures in their midst, one New Yorker notes wryly, city dwellers resemble the estimable bourgeois gentilhomme of Moliere's play who discovers to his delight that he has unconsciously been speaking prose all his life.

In cities and towns across the country, the great urban renewal juggernaut of the 1950s and early 1960s has ground to a halt in uglification or nullity. The eccentric souls who argued that new is not necessarily better no longer have to prostrate themselves before bulldozers to make their point. They have been joined by civic leaders, foundations, architects and businessmen who can cite scores of projects in which outmoded buildings have been rehabilitated and have in many cases revitalized moribund inner-city districts.

More than 500 U.S. cities now have preservation ordinances aimed specifically at saving honorable structures from the wrecker's ball. A raft of federal, state and local laws provide financial incentives to adapt disused buildings to creative new uses. The U.S. Department of the Interior has boosted its funding of such projects from $300,000 in 1968 to $60 million this year, as much in realization of their economic potential as appreciation of their historic value. Old courthouses, railroad stations, firehouses, police stations, armories, ice houses, hotels, office buildings, factories, warehouses, schools and department stores have found a lively new lease on life. They are what one Interior Department official calls "the last frontier" for urban rediscovery.

From San Francisco's pioneering Ghirardelli Square and Boston's celebrated Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market complex, from Manhattan's reclaimed SoHo district to Sacramento's rehabilitated Skid Row, the emphasis is not so much on reverential restoration of old buildings as on their modernization and re-use without distortion of their original character. While this trend was long resisted by architects who feel that their role is to leave their own creative imprint on the cityscape, many of the nation's top architectural firms have joined the movement to preserve and refit. Three years ago, for the first time, the venerable American Institute of Architects gave official recognition to their work by allotting four of its coveted annual Honor Awards to renovation projects, several of them quite modest. This week at its convention in Kansas City, no fewer than six of the 15 A.I.A. awards will go to recycled buildings.

The broad interest in recycling is illustrated by a traveling exhibition called "Buildings Reborn: New Uses, Old Places." Circulated by the Smithsonian Institution, the recyclorama was originally scheduled for a 22-city tour but is now booked into 67 cities, with 48 more on the waiting list. "Buildings Reborn" was organized by New Yorker Barbaralee Diamonstein, author of a handsome book by the same name (Harper & Row; $10) and herself a pioneer in the movement. Says Diamonstein, a former White House aide and a charter member of the New York Landmarks Conservancy: "Adaptive re-use [of old buildings] is moving from erratic initiative, a loft here, a firehouse there, to become a superb planning tool. It's no longer just a question of restoring a mansard roof or a neoclassic colonnade but of looking at entire neighborhoods and districts. Now I look for us to move from buildings reborn to communities reborn."

The main impetus has come from the environmentalist movement. Conservationists recognized that the preservation of man-made environments and the reuse of finite resources should be as much a matter of concern as the natural ecology. Energy shortages and the faltering economy gave the movement immediacy. Old buildings, one critic has noted, are "a kind of stored-up energy," and they are in place, whereas the steel, glass and aluminum devoured by skyscrapers and shopping centers require huge quantities of energy to produce and assemble. (According to one federal study, an existing building can operate for 16 years on the amount of energy it takes to build the structure from scratch.) Also, in most instances, though by no means all, a staunch old building can be converted for modern usage at less cost than equivalent new construction.

Social critics believe that the Bicentennial kindled a new respect for the nation's physical heritage. More subtly, in the post Viet Nam-Watergate years, many people have become skeptical of massive government programs of any sort. The recycling movement is usually planned and executed locally, on a relatively small scale. Then too there seems to be a growing nostalgia for an earlier age. Notes Sociologist Amitai Etzioni: "The trend to preserve and recycle is not an isolated thing but part of the social fabric. Faced with recession and inflation, Americans are very down on their national future. That is why we have this romanticization of the past. The feeling that 'we are kings of the world, modernity is terrific' is gone. Now glass and streamlining symbolize coldness, impersonality, gas guzzling. Today we find warmth and comfort in more traditional buildings." Adds Hugh Hardy, whose New York architectural firm, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, won an A.I.A. award for its transformation of the St. Louis Art Museum: "Doing alterations used to be like raising pant legs and fixing cats. But the public has forced the architectural profession into reuse. The notion of history has become acceptable; in architecture, people have taken a more humanistic, less mechanistic view."

Indeed, the emphasis of the A.I.A. citations for recycled buildings is as much on their designers' "respect" for the values of the old as on their innovative treatment of the space at hand. In adapting the 123-year-old Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Mass., the Boston firm of Anderson Notter Finegold retained a historical consultant to examine early photographs of the cast-iron facade under a microscope in order to authenticate construction and ornamental details. The hall, which in its heyday was graced by such luminaries as Thoreau, Emerson, Mark Twain, Dickens, Caruso and Teddy Roosevelt, had been used as a shabby roller-skating rink before it was closed down by the fire department in 1973. The restoration, with enthusiastic financial support from the community, has brought back a magnificent 1,500-seat concert hall in its original colors, which had been obscured under 18 layers of paint. The only major exterior change has been the addition of a lobby in the rear to accommodate fire exits; this glass-curtained annex, showing the original masonry, adds excitement to the building. The $2.3 million cost of restoring the hall so far, including extensive mechanical installations, came to around $50 a square foot, much less than a wholly new building would have cost.

On Louisville's historic Main Street, where four decaying blocks have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places, temporarily ensuring their survival, several abandoned hulks have already been recycled. Cited by the A.I.A. is the Louisville Museum of Natural History and Science, which consists of several buildings behind a single cast-iron fac,ade. The interior is in fact almost entirely new construction, highlighted by a soaring five-story atrium and chrome-and-steel display space on 19 levels. The $6 million undertaking, funded by a local bond issue, a federal grant and corporate and private donations, is a key element in state and city plans to revivify the city's crumbling waterfront with a mixture of restorations and ambitious new buildings.

St. Louis, which is also engaged in a major waterfront reclamation project as well as several residential rescues, was cited by the A.I. A. for its imaginative conversion of the St. Louis Art Museum, designed for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair by Cass Gilbert, a leading architect of the Beaux Arts school. The airy building, with a 78-ft.-high vaulted ceiling, had over the years become so cluttered and partitioned that it looked more like a warren than a pleasure dome. Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates gutted the interior to restore the structure's openness--and in the process increased the display space by 10,000 sq. ft. Windows were added, and the walls resurfaced in soft French gray.

Chicago, which has lost a number of classic buildings--notably Louis Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange--managed to save its old public library building after several attempts to replace it with a modernistic structure. The 1897 building had long been inadequate for the central library; it was reincarnated as a branch library and a cultural center, in large part through the efforts of Mrs. Richard Daley, widow of the mayor. Though its vast mosaic-lined entrance halls and twin marble staircases leave little room for a functional library, the interior has been restored in all its original quattrocento palazzo splendor at a cost of $12 million. Architect Gerrard Pook of the 99-year-old firm of Holabird & Root points out that a new central library with the necessary 300,000 sq. ft. could have been built for the same price, but many Chicagoans feel that the A.I.A. award-winning restoration is at least partial atonement for the other great buildings they have lost.

More specialized ventures recognized by the A.I.A. were the conversion of a lecture hall into gallery space and construction of an underground auditorium by Herbert S. Newman Associates at Yale's Center for American Arts, and the creation of a striking office complex within a four-story 1896 bank building in Princeton, N.J. Interestingly, Michael Graves, 44, who was responsible for the design, achieved prominence in the early 1970s as a leader of a highly theoretical group of architects specializing in abstract form. Graves has since redesigned some two dozen old buildings, and is currently converting a 1906 railway station in Millburn, N.J., into an office complex.

New York City is in the forefront of the recycling movement today, after a late start, prior to which it permitted developers to demolish such treasures as the old Metropolitan Opera House, Pennsylvania Station and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The city has now extended historic landmark status to more than 500 individual structures and 37 historic districts encompassing 12,000 buildings.

The SoHo district in lower Manhattan is perhaps the most influential example of recycling in the U.S. Almost entirely through individual effort, SoHo (short for south of Houston Street) has been transformed from a dreary sprawl of outmoded factories and warehouses into a thriving residential district. Fortuitously, the new environmental awareness of the mid-1960s coincided with a shortage of studio and gallery space for artists. Moving clandestinely at first, since the old industrial buildings were not then zoned for residential use, artists found that they could rent loft space at bargain prices; moreover, the high-ceilinged rooms were ideal at a time when the vogue was for monumental canvases. The five-by-six-block district now has some 8,000 residents, 85 art galleries, 30 restaurants, 60 boutiques, two museums and more than a score of centers for the performing arts. The area, once known as Hell's Hundred Acres, has become, in one resident's words, "the Upper East Side of downtown Manhattan."

In terms of property values--and tax revenues--an intelligent renovation program can have a dramatic effect on a city's fortunes. One of the most striking examples is in Sacramento, where a 28-acre swath of slum and Skid Row has been lovingly restored. In 1965 the decrepit area was assessed at $2.8 million, and values were sliding fast. Today "Old Sac," only a few blocks from the state capitol's golden dome, is conservatively assessed at $68 million, while private and government investment in the area has exceeded $100 million. In the process, dozens of buildings have been rehabilitated. Recalls Architect

Robert McCabe: "Ten years ago there were drunks lying in the gutters and $10 girls hanging out the windows. Now parents bring their kids here for the afternoon." More than 160 businesses are flourishing in the area, and at least as many more are waiting for buildings to be converted. During the May jazz festival, 100,000 people jammed into the area, which in the bad old days would have had a weekend population of perhaps 300.

While recycling fervor is a fairly recent national phenomenon, one of the first large-scale, successful urban-rescue efforts was mounted as early as 1955 in Savannah, Ga. This beautiful 18th century port city, still laid out in green squares and broad avenues, boasts more than 1,500 buildings of architectural distinction, with some fine examples of Federal, Regency and Greek Revival from the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet in the early 1950s, Savannahans were abandoning their legacy, leaving buildings to vandalism and fire. Finally, when Isaiah Davenport House, the city's oldest building and by then a sleazy rooming house, was threatened with demolition, a group of civic-minded women banded together to become the Historic Savannah Foundation. They not only saved Davenport House--it is now a museum--but have gone on to restore more than 1,000 other buildings for residential, commercial and office use. In addition, a $7 million federal grant has been used to rehabilitate the waterfront. Other federal funds helped restore two rows of 19th century town houses. All their efforts have changed Savannah into an illustrated walking tour and given the city a $75 million-a-year tourist industry.

Social critics are quick to point out the dangers inherent in overly exuberant recycling. One is what planners call "bouti-quification," in which remodeled quarters tend to be filled with souvenir shops, candlemakers and T shirt dispensers. A more serious problem is what the English referred to as gentrification: the process by which affluent couples take over and rehabilitate rundown districts, leaving no place for their former low-rent occupants to go. This has not been allowed to happen in Savannah and other cities where minority groups, assisted by token loans, have been able to rehabilitate their own neighborhoods with sweat equity. Such programs benefit not only minorities but the cities as well.

To many citizens, city planners and architects, recycled buildings and blocks are no longer a trend but a new and rewarding way of life. Says George M. Notter Jr., chairman of this year's A.I.A. awards program for extended use: "We're a young country and we've been looking for a long time to find ourselves. Now we are just beginning to look at ourselves. When you appreciate where you've been, you have a better chance of deciding where it is you want to go."

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