THE EXPANDING BOUNDARIES OF HISTORIC PRESERVATION
By Dr. Paul Bentel, FAIA

It is self-evident that the purview of Historic Preservation is expanding. HP has been swept up in the tide of public interest in heritage and place-making. There is a growing awareness that buildings and places singled out for reasons of their significance as cultural landmarks can create social identity. With its arsenal of laws, designation protocols, tax credit programs, registers and its ability to offer legal protection to special parts of the man-madeenvironment, Historic Preservation has also become a valuable medium through which the desire to cement social identity in a “landmark” can be channeled. Historic Preservation has become a popular field in which to argue about what heritage is, how it is reflected in artifacts of the past, in what ways those artifacts manifest heritage, and, finally, how their significance trumps the importance of other things we might put in their place. In short, the boundaries of Historic Preservation have expanded because people recognize its growing utility and relevance as a platform for our collective deliberations about cultural value.

The debate that has unfolded in recent years is lively, contentious and ultimately revealing about the essence of heritage in the pluralistic democracy to which we aspire. But that necessary debate about identity—and the growing belief that we must be open to more cultural diversity—occurs alongside a practical reality. We cannot “save” everything. Anyone with an overstuffed attic or garage can sympathize with the public policy strategists who foresee in the widening domain of Historic Preservation a mind-boggling increase in the things we call “significant heritage.” The prospect of this broadening of the standards of significance, its critics argue, is a loss of meaning in the physical environment in which buildings praised for their immediate relevance threaten to obscure those that possess transcendent and enduring cultural significance.

More tangible than this is the management dilemma that threatens to unfold, producing gridlock in our effort to cultivate and improve the physical environment. Unlike the environmental movement, there is no singular phenomenon of “global warming” by which we can quantify the relative importance of one heritage artifact over another. Personal taste and self-interest matter a great deal in assessments of heritage.

In light of that, consider the monumental task that Long Islanders confront as our physical environment ages and we are forced to judge the historical significance of the buildings around us. Fifty years is the National Register criterion by which buildings become eligible for inclusion as historic properties on the basis of their age. On Long Island, a regional suburban community whose built fabric was dramatically reinvented after WW II, the number of buildings over 50 years old will grow exponentially in a matter of a few years. Are we prepared to handle the difficult deliberations about significance we will confront especially when the terms bywhich we define significance have been so extravagantly broadened by our deliberations on heritage and cultural diversity? Criteria other than age or heritage and social identity such as authenticity and uniqueness will come to play in our decision making about historic buildings. And yet even in these areas, we may continue to agree to disagree. Consider the case of Levittown and its eligibility for inclusion on the National Register. Few places possess more meaning to the historical identity of contemporary Long Island. Yet, because the homes have been substantially altered, they have failed to garner support for nomination to the Register and
will, most likely, never be listed.

This debate is a healthy one, for it requires that we think hard as a community about the values that bind us and guide us in our decisions about the physical environment. Policy makers need to know that their constituencies areawake to the potential of heritage artifacts—especially buildings and environments—to cement political allegiances. Preservationists, for their part, need to be responsible arbiters of “historic” significance, recognizing both the importance and consequence of cultural diversity.