 So my name is Hilary Bassett. I'm the executive director of Greater Portland Landmarks, and I'm very glad to welcome all of you here today. And I'd also like to say a little extra word of thanks to Max and to all of you for rescheduling with us. It's so great to see you all and to have found another date that so many could attend. A Greater Portland Landmarks mission is to preserve and revitalize Greater Portland's remarkable legacy of historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes, and parks. Before we start, I'd like to just give you a quick preview of landmarks programs coming up. For an education, we have just opened the observatory for the season, just this weekend. And Max and I were just up there, and it is absolutely spectacular. So I encourage you all to put the observatory on your calendar for this summer. And then we'll also be doing tours. And this year we're for the first time going to be offering tours of the India Street area. And you'll have a chance to go in the Abyssinian Meeting House, which is the third oldest African-American meeting house in the country. And it is not normally open to the public, so I encourage you to participate in those. We have been very active in advocacy for historic preservation. And I see many familiar faces who've been coming to City Hall. We have been working with neighborhoods and community groups to encourage historic preservation in those neighborhoods. We have four graduate interns with us. In fact, two are here today, Sam Shoup and Lauren Patterson, who will be working on surveys in neighborhoods all over the city, five neighborhoods this summer. And then, of course, we've been working with citizens and neighborhood groups in the Munjoy Hill area to encourage zoning that will support and protect historic buildings, and will urge your support to attend the city council on June 4. And we hope to achieve some designations in that area as well at a later time. Now, a little bit about logistics for tonight. If you have tickets for the reception, it will be in the parish hall, which is on your right. And you have a ticket, so just show the ticket, and that will admit you to the reception. I'd like to take a minute to thank all our sponsors, collaborators, and staff. First, our staff, Kate Lewis, who's right here, next to me, Alessa Wiley, Julie Larry, Chloe Martin, and Tova Mellon. I'd also like to thank our preservation partners, Architects, Grossmart, Maine, Maine Historical Society, Maine Preservation, and the Portland Society for Architecture. And I'll give a shout out also to the Portland Media Center. You may remember that as CTN, and they are filming this talk for community TV. So a friend, or you'd like to see it again, you can see it on community TV. I'd like to thank also our individual sponsors for making this talk possible. And especially to welcome Vin Verano, who is the president of JB Brown, who's going to be saying a few words today. JB Brown is one of the oldest companies in Portland. You may have noticed the JB Brown building right on Congress Street with the signature right in the middle, right at the center of the building announcing by JB Brown. And so the company is still alive and well and doing development today. And I'd like to welcome Vin to say a few words of welcome to you. And thank you so much. First, I'd like to thank the great important landmarks in Hillary, Kate, and the staff and the board for putting together this presentation. They approached us to see if we would be a sponsor. Giving our history in Portland, we are pleased to do that. So thank you for your interest in coming this evening. I'd like to thank JB Brown, the directors, for giving me a fairly long leash and wide berth to do what we've been doing over the last few years. And especially to Max Page for taking the trip to Portland and sharing with us some of his knowledge and experience. A lot of people know about JB Brown, but I just take a couple of minutes to give some context. The company has been operating in Portland for about 190 years. That's seven generations. It had a strong hand in development on the West End, Gorham's Corner, Free Street, and Congress Street, both buildings and public spaces. And in fact, our oldest property is the former JB Brown Sugar House property on Commercial Street, which we recently built the courtyard hotel. Me personally, I was born in Portland, went away to school in Boston and San Francisco. But essentially, I have lived or worked in many of the areas of Portland. I was born by Evergreen Cemetery, grew up in Back Cove, have worked in the Old Port for 35 years. My children have gone to school in the West End for 20 years. My wife grew up in Deering Highland, so we have touched these neighborhoods. And I have seen an enormous amount of change, especially in the last 10 years, and change is difficult. And so it is important, though, that we provide every generation the opportunity to make its mark on the landscape. That said, respecting the past. And so I'm looking forward to hearing Professor Page and his comments this evening. It's important to have dialogue about these issues rather than getting in silos and becoming echo chambers with one another and everyone agreeing. And so again, I look forward to tonight's presentation. Thank you. Thank you, then. Thank you so much for your great remarks and also for your sponsorship. I'd like to take a minute to introduce our speaker. And I think I'm echoing a little bit of what you just said, Vin, in that with all the change that is taking place in the greater Portland area, we have been working to save and ensure that special places, the buildings, neighborhoods, and green spaces that define our community have a voice to protect them. As an organization, we are also using this time of change as an opportunity to evaluate how historic preservation can be most relevant and most effective in serving the needs of the entire community into the future. To inspire and perhaps provoke our thinking about preservation and its role today, we invited Max Page to Portland. Page is a professor of architecture and director of historic preservation initiatives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and he teaches and writes about the history of cities and architecture. He has written or edited numerous books, including two recent books about historic preservation, Bending the Future, 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Preservation in the United States, and his recent book published in 2016 by Yale University Press, Why Preservation Matters. Please join me in welcoming Professor Max Page to Portland. Thank you, Hillary. Thanks everyone for being here tonight and again, my apologies for having to reschedule. I have never canceled a talk before but I think, I don't know if it was told but my father, 95, died in the middle of that. So that was his funeral, so I could not come and I'm really glad we could reschedule and I could be here today. And actually, pieces of this lecture will be places related to his life. So I had a really lovely tour just now, all too brief, but I think I'll have to come back for a week-long Portland excursion sometime but I got a little bit of a sense of the issues you're dealing with and I hope that what I talk about today are some of the arguments in why preservation matters will be useful and maybe we'll have a conversation after about these issues. I'll start with this and it's, this is a quote by Martin Luther King Jr. This is after they finally completed the march from Selma to Montgomery and he says, and you know these lines, I'm sure. The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Derived from Theodore Parker, abolitionists in Massachusetts, of course Martin Luther King, it's a form of preservation or adaptive reuse. He took a quote that was much more jumbled and made it much more elegant. And there's a lot of danger in when you start by quoting from Martin Luther King Jr. There's delusions of grandeur that could be, one could be accused of. What I'm suggesting is that we bend preservation and continue to bend the preservation movement so that it is tied to the social justice movements of our day. My argument is, and this is developed over years of teaching and thinking about historic preservation, is that this is preservation's moment. We can kind of escape some of the accusations of elitism of this movement and show how preservation is tied to the important quests for social justice in our own time. And I'm gonna try to focus on just three areas in which I think preservation is central to building the kind of world we want to live in. So let me just start though, acknowledging that this writing, both these books that Hillary mentioned, comes out of reflecting on 50 years of the National Historic Preservation Act, 1966. Passed a month and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson a month after I was born. And it was a good moment for reflection and it's also a good moment to note the successes. And this you may recognize, this is Penn Station in New York City, destroyed between 1963 and 1966 and led directly to the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and then the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. And then you can see the glory of that building that took these years to tear down this block long building, one of the great public buildings in the United States. And what I love or what I hate love is if you've been to Penn Station, Amtrak Station in New York City, while you are waiting of course for a delayed train, they provide photographs of the building you don't get to experience anymore because it was torn down. Now I find there's something deeply, there's something deeply cruel about that. That is you're waiting there, you're looking at oh this is what I could have been living in. So the, I don't like to, I have a different book called Giving Preservation to History which talks about how preservation began long, long before the destruction of Penn Station and the creation of the National Preservation Act. That's another story. But it was a signal moment in which we gained this national law that has structured so much of what we do in preservation. And while Penn Station had to die unfortunately and I got interested in architecture because or in part because of one professor I had in college, Vincent Scully and he famously said about this building that we once entered the city like gods and now we scuttle in like rats. But that's very different than if you come on the other train line into New York City into Grand Central Station. And the difference of that experience is profound about how you experience entering a city. And Penn Station died so that Grand Central could live. Grand Central was also threatened with destruction. And as you may know, the Penn Central case in 1978 was sort of the big test of whether preservation laws, local preservation laws were legitimate. And the challenge, what the challenge was, was that preservation laws were taking the property of the property owner, right? You were essentially limiting their use. You couldn't tear this down, we were saying, to build a tower on top. That's essentially a taking of my property. But the Supreme Court ruled a very, very profound, important ruling was that the value to the community of preserving its history and its architecture had to be weighed, could be balanced against the rights of the property owner. Very powerful idea and it gets back to the fundamental reason why preservation is, I would argue, a social justice activity. Because what we do at the starting point, and I will be talking about economic development and the like in a minute, but at the starting point is that we argue that there are values beyond the market, beyond monetary sale that deserve to be honored. That's at the baseline what we do. We say there's something important here. Architectural importance, historical importance, cultural importance, whatever it might be, we are saying that value has to be balanced again. And as maybe even stands equal to or above at times to other kinds of values and values of the market. Very, very important idea that was protected by the Supreme Court decision that protected Grand Central Station. The successes are well beyond just these individual great buildings. I mean, think of how we have broadened the idea of what we consider important. Such as the Stonewall Inn, right? It was now a national historic landmark. This is kind of the key point landmark in the gay rights movement in New York City. That is now a local landmark as well as a national landmark. Also, here in the Bronx, an important cultural center. This store that has been around one of the first Latino music stores that has been anchored there for years. This would not have been considered historical landmark decades ago. So we have broadened. We have these sort of concentric circles as we've expanded what we consider important. And then this Worcester Square in New Haven. Nothing important happened in this particular buildings. The buildings themselves are not extraordinary, but they are part of the fabric of neighborhoods that make up livable cities. So part of what we have done over the past 50 years is also start to preserve the texture of this. I mean, the idea of the sidewalk and the stoop and the three or four story buildings, that line, that is what creates livable cities. I was just talking to Hillary. I'd just come back from a trip and I took my son to Berlin and other cities and he didn't like Berlin much at all. Part of it because there was so much had been destroyed in the war that even though they've tried, they've tried to rebuild those neighborhoods nicely, there's not a lot of historic fabric to give a sense of place. If I just talked about successes of the past 50 years, that would be a very boring talk. What I wanna do is, in this time, issue kind of three challenges. Essentially look at kind of issues that we were not prepared to deal with in 1966 when the National Preservation Act was passed and suggest the ways we need to challenge ourselves. Nothing I'm suggesting here, the areas I'm gonna be talking about are brand new. You're all engaged with each of these areas that I'm gonna talk about. Sustainability, climate change, economic development and dealing with sort of complicated, difficult histories. What I'm suggesting is we need to continue to bend that curve and continue with greater urgency to be involved in these efforts. So let me just start with the question of how preservation plays a role in building a more environmentally sustainable world. So this is, I just, this past weekend, it was celebrating my 30th college reunion. I remember being a bartender at the 25th reunion of those older people and I was like, how could that, that's never gonna be me ever. So now. So this is Crune Hall at Yale and it's a lead platinum building. Many of you know the lead rating system and this is the cutting edge, almost a net zero building. That building will take about 50, 70 different estimates, 50 to 70 years to pay off its carbon debt. And you know what that means, right? To create the materials, to ship them here, to build the building costs an enormous amount of energy, put a lot of carbon in the atmosphere so that even though it's a very, very efficient building, it will take years and years, decades, before this building actually can start to be, to play its role in building a much more environmentally sustainable world, right? So this is one of the misleading ideas of our kind of high tech approach to building sustainably. I would argue that in fact, historic buildings as you well know, is this famous line, is the greenest building is the one that's already built. The buildings have already paid their debt over many, many times. So preservation should be absolutely central to any notion of building sustainable future. I know I'm preaching to the converted but you need to then go preach this beyond this podium out into the wider world because it is starting to change but still far too much. I see this in my classes in the architecture school at UMass Amherst. Still the emphasis is to start if you're thinking about environmental sustainability to start with what's the latest technology? Where do we put the solar panels, the geothermal, et cetera, et cetera? And not to start with how do we reuse buildings? So I'm gonna return to a place, I live in this green valley, they call it the happy valley, Paradise, a little bit Western Massachusetts and people always focus on our sustainable community supported agricultural farms and there you can see a nice farm that has solar panels. It's all great. I have no problem with it all but I would suggest to you that the greenest place near me is actually the dirty industrial city of Holyoke. Have anyone been to Holyoke Mass? Oh, okay, a lot of people have been there, good. So Holyoke, as you can see here, let's see if I can get this little pointer to work. This is just the falls, so at 60 feet at the falls of South Hadley, very fairly steep falls of the Connecticut River and they in the back of the 1850s channeled us into this lovely canal system. And so you had one of the center of the papermaking industry in the nation was there as well as textiles and silk and it's simply by that water flowing downhill being channeled through these raceways from one canal down to another, down to another then back into the Connecticut River that they still to this day power 65% of the electrical needs in the city of Holyoke. Of course, there was no needs for computers, et cetera, back then, so this is a place that is sustainable because of the investments made 150 years ago in the layout of these canals, in these buildings, these very, very strong industrial buildings, some of which I know you have here in Portland. Holyoke should be the place where we invest our energy and our channel development to the city because by its nature, it is much more sustainable even than where I live in the upper valley of the nice green organic farms because of course we drive everywhere and we are generally living in more contemporary homes. So with slight switches in tax incentives, in laws, we could make Holyoke a center for economic development. It is still one of the poorest cities in fact in Massachusetts, but it should not be if you consider the people who live there as doing a community service by living in the city that has a very low carbon footprint. If we start to change our thinking, you'll see how historic places like this actually have enormous value. Now, one of the challenges of having preservation be central to the sustainability movement is that we are gonna also have to look ourselves in the mirror and this is where the provocative part comes in or the tomato throwing may begin. It means that we are gonna have to think about preserving as much as possible. And by preserving, I mean reusing, continuing to use. Not just the ones we think are beautiful, not just the ones we think have historic value, but we should be thinking as preservationists, as conservationists, of reusing existing buildings whenever possible, right? And that means when we may have to get a little less fussy about some of our preservation techniques. Many of the buildings that we want to preserve did not have the intent of the kind of museum care that sometimes we apply to contemporary to our buildings today. This is just one of those examples of battle over windows. Anyone been involved in a battle over windows? Yes, you have preservationists. But this is a case where there was an argument about whether the ones on the right were compatible or not. I would suggest that there are times in which we have become overly concerned about the kind of authenticity. I put that in quotes, a very difficult concept, to the point of not encouraging the adaptive reuse of buildings. Another way, and this is an odd one to show, this is Mong Kok. This is a section of Hong Kong, one of the densest places on planet Earth. I don't think Portland should be that dense, but we need to encourage density. I was on top of the observatory looking out, and I know there's a big debate about building there. We want, preservationists should be leading in the encouragement of more dense walkable and public transportation supported cities. And that means rethinking some of our historic buildings, thinking about additions, encouraging that in a thoughtful manner, but encouraging it nonetheless. That has to be part of our charge, to build those more dense cities that can be more environmentally friendly. And I'd like to also suggest, and I was hearing from some of the staff about how Portland Landmarks is so central to debates about building good architecture. This is a very hard slide to see, I'm sorry. Preservationists have to be advocates of great contemporary architecture. That may be a truism, but I want to encourage, by contemporary, I mean cutting edge, pushing the boundaries. Because of course, we want architecture 50 years from now that we want to preserve, that we will be fighting to preserve because they're such great emblems of this particular moment. And I give you an example of, this is the Castle Vecchio by Carlos Scarpa. I had the great privilege of spending a semester at the American Academy in Rome, which meant I got to travel around the country and see many of Carlos Scarpa's project. Mid 20th century architect, not widely known, not widely, did not do many buildings outside of Italy. But he is an example of an architect who's designed, when you enter, for instance, this museum, you feel like you are grasping, you're experiencing a designer's great work. And yet you are even appreciating the historic building that he's working in even more. So that's a very difficult thing to do. Too often we either, the new design overwhelms the historic or the architect pulls back far too much and actually doesn't do as great individual contemporary work while trying to be overly respectful of the historic fabric. In fact, an example like that or, or I just came from David Chipperfield, the Noyes Museum in Berlin, are examples where you feel like there's a great hand, that could create a hand at work but also respectful of the historic fabric or this, the Mercado Santa Catarina in Barcelona by Enrico Morales, where you have this historic market that then just gets this dramatic rooftop. People, we can obviously, all of these can be argued over whether they are, in fact, a violation of the historic fabric or not. But I'm just suggesting that preservation should lead to an encouraging great architecture that is within or attached to and that refurbishes historic buildings. So just this first part, preservation is and should we need to confidently argue that you cannot build sustainable communities without doing a lot more preservation. And I would suggest we should be reversing the way we do preservation in most places, which is there is the right, usually it's the right of building and then preservationists get to intervene and say, wait, demolition delay, pause. I think it should be reversed. I think the assumption should be that all buildings should be reused and that then there is a justification on the part of developers to say, here's why we have to tear this down. And this is an idea Tom Mays, a friend who I was at the American Academy with, he's with the National Trust, has suggested that communities consider that idea. Again, it's not saying no destruction ever, it's saying the starting point should be we as a community need to save and reuse our buildings, both for cultural reasons, but also for environmental reasons. And then if you need to tear it down, you need to justify why, why it can't be adaptively reused. So consider that one as a local ordinance. Okay, part two. One of the hardest things as preservationists is that as we are accused of economic elitism. The preservationists for rich people, preservationists for those who have time to deal with these aesthetic elite ideas. I think there's nothing further from the truth, but we need to adopt attitudes and policies that make that crystal clear. If we go back to 1966, again, I'm sort of looking at challenges that may not have been on the minds of preservationists at that point. One could argue, I think rightly, that the United States was becoming more economically equal. There were still enormous gulfs, class gulfs, racial gulfs and the like, but there was, through the great society, there was movement towards greater equality and there was a bigger middle class. We have moved quite, quite far away from that. Can preservation, this is the question, can preservation be part of building cities that are more economically equal, egalitarian and just? And I take you to this building right here, which should be historic landmark, because this is, I'll just show you, this is the house, this is about 10 years ago now, sold for three and a half million dollars. Now that'd be a bargain, it's probably five million dollars. This is 555 Hudson Street. Does anyone know perhaps who that lives there? That's this lady, this great writer, one of the great urbanists of our age, Jane Jacobs. You can see just a stack of the first five of her 15 books that she wrote. And she lived there and she developed her attitude towards cities and frankly, also towards preservation and historic buildings by looking out her window. I got to go in there because I was pretending that I was interested in buying that house. See, in this day and age, you can look like me and people are like, maybe he's a dot-commer who has millions and millions of dollars, right? They couldn't tell, so they let me in. So this is her view from her bedroom. And she looked out and she developed an attitude about approach to how you build cities, which is in part to preserve the regular older buildings as well as encouraging new development. She actually wasn't so interested in architectural beauty or even historical importance. This is something that's often missed if you read her and I urge you to read Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was simply interested in having the texture and the economic mix that comes with having older and newer buildings. What she couldn't account for, and it's not her fault, she wrote this in 1961, she was seeing a world where she thought that this neighborhood could remain relatively mixed, economically mixed, but she could not foresee that her house would then sell for three and a half million dollars decades after she left. And if you know the West Village, this is a block away from the High Line, this is a very, very wealthy neighborhood. This is the picture of intense gentrification. And that preservation unfortunately gets linked together with gentrification, right? That's one of the first things out of people's mouth that I say, oh, I'd study preservation. They say, oh, you're encouraging gentrification of our cities. So how do we challenge that? And I go back to my mother's house actually in Camden, New Jersey. This was her house. This was the Kosher Butcher. They lived up above there. And it's a Camden-like holy oak. It's one of the poorest cities, Camden is even in worse shape than holy oak. If we went and looked here and talked about the mansard roofs and how we need to preserve that as an architectural style, that would not resonate with the desperate needs of the community there. So the question is, as preservationists, can we argue for reusing, preserving these buildings in a way that can actually benefit communities there? And I'm gonna suggest that I went to a quick little tour to a couple places that I've studied or visited that offer a way to talk about how we do preservation in a way that can promote real economic development, not just economic development, but equitable economic development. And don't get too upset when I tell you that I'm going to Cuba first. But there are lessons to be learned here. If you've been there, the Old Havana, one of the great collections of buildings of this period, the 17th and 18th century. If you look here, and I've taken this image, I took this photograph particularly looking up. Why is that? In the distance you see the capital, a model after our capital building, and then you see this whole row of buildings that had been preserved. Now down below are tourist stores, right? And they bring in tourists, hard currency, and there's hotels and there's restaurants that cater to the millions of tourists that come in. But if you look up above with a little heart, you can see there's the jeans drying up there. Regular people are still living on the upper floors. And this is not by accident in Havana. Havana is, the Old Havana is owned by the city historian. It's the most powerful historian in the world. They own all of the land of Old Havana, and they are to exploit it, partly to bring in money from outside through tourist dollars, but that means also that they can do a different kind of techniques. And one of them is that they train young people in the arts of preservation. They then give them jobs, and this is key, not just training, but training that is, then leads directly to jobs to renovate the buildings in Old Havana, and then sometimes live in them. Now I am not suggesting some kind of nirvana. The people there were quite open about some of the real problems, some of the corruptions that go on with this, but there's also great pride in having trained eight, 9,000 young people in the arts of preservation and then putting them, providing them with real jobs and doing that work, okay? I will come back to that in a minute. Another place, very quickly, Berlin, where I just was. You may remember from the 1980s, the International Building Exhibition, many of the key post-modern architects of the time got their start in Berlin. Peter Eisenman, one of his very first buildings, at Checkpoint Charlie, John Heduck. Zaha Hadid actually got her first job there, Robert A.M. Stern. That was one side of this big building project in Berlin, bringing in some great new architects, let them go wild. But there was a quieter side to this building project to the 70s and 80s, and that was restoring some of the old industrial and what's called Mietz-Kazerna kind of a part, you know, tenement buildings in the Kreuzberg area and other in Prenzlauerberg, different areas, working class areas of Berlin. Those have proved much more lasting and they were the anchor for creating these vibrant new neighborhoods, because they were not just about preservation, but they were also about providing people with the skills and then the jobs to renovate these empty warehouses and then to live in them. So it was a whole process, not simply preserving and restoring the buildings. We have examples closer to home. This is a land trust in the south part of the Dudley Square neighborhood of Boston. If you look at these buildings, they are not unlike the ones I just saw on Monjoy Hill, there's three decors in this area, but they are, these three as well as 197 more, are in a land trust. In other words, the community was worried about the gentrification, Boston's a very overheated real estate market, and they said we need to preserve this community's mix of incomes and so they set into this land trust a whole series of houses so that they will permanently be middle and lower income even as other areas get developed. So this is not about architectural preservation, it's about community preservation. Theaster Gates in the south side of Chicago has taken along abandoned buildings like this bank building in the Stoney Island Arts Bank and created this incredible library and places for local artists. Thea Rick Lowe, this is the project row houses effort in Houston where a lot of these shotgun shacks have been converted both into housing but also into cultural facilities. So one of the poor neighborhoods of the city is not just treated as kind of a housing for the poor, they should all live there, but rather this should also be a vibrant cultural district. Another project that is in Buffalo is the youth build partnership with what's called Push Buffalo and they've trained young people in how to take regular buildings and make them much more environmentally sustainable, much more environmentally efficient in Buffalo, obviously that matters a whole lot. It could save, could make housing much more affordable if you make the cost of heating that much more affordable. So they're trained and then they're put to work again in making regular buildings more sustainable. So these are just our examples of how preservation becomes a tool for providing real jobs and one of the basic ideas that we think many of you know is that preservation is much more local, long-term labor that rather than bring in a multinational to drop in some prefab houses, when you do preservation work you are building a greater local economy around building and restoring. But let me go push a little further on this issue and have us think even beyond maybe the techniques we've been thinking about. I go back to Holyoke and I think about the 1930s, the Great Depression. And this is a group of young men of part of the Civilian Conservation Corps. So there was enormous, enormous deprivation, unemployment and so we decided as a nation we have to put people back to work and looked around and said well there's work to be done for instance building state parks. So the Mount Tom State Park Reservation which is Mount Tom is right above Holyoke, they built the pathways and the campgrounds and then back in the city they built the World War I Memorial and the post office. So much you all know this, so much of what you walk on when you go to your state parks or when you go to your public buildings were built out of that incredible depression. In other words it was a moment to say let's build our public facilities let's use the moment to put people back to work by building public facilities. And we're talking about that today. We are talking about needing to do public infrastructure projects. The question is will we do a works progress administration? That's what we did in the 1930s, generally new buildings or will we do a works preservation administration? Will we decide that part of the way we put people back to work and fix our infrastructure is actually restoring it and reusing what we have including restoring and reusing what was built back in the 1930s which is still strong and still with us but needs repair. This is an incredible opportunity to hire young people to give them the skills that are long lasting skills and put them to work in doing the vital work of restoring our infrastructure. It has to happen at some point in some way, right? The pipes, the subways, the train lines they're all collapsing and so they need to be restored. The question is how do we do it in a way that actually promotes real jobs for people who don't have them? That's a preservation, that's part of our job as preservationists to advocate for those kinds of policies statewide and national and direct them towards preservation. I want to end this section very briefly by getting back to some of the placards and protesting that I saw at the headquarters this afternoon because we talk about it as a preservation movement. In fact, a friend of mine who will go nameless criticized the book a little bit. It says, you talk about this movement. It's not a movement at all. I said, well, that's the point. I want it to be a movement. And a movement involves sometimes challenging things. And here is a group that does not call itself a preservation organization but I insist that it is. This is Citylife, Vita Urbana in a longstanding 50-year-old, 45-year-old. I just went to its 45th birthday celebration. 45-year-old organization that one of its goals is promotes low-income housing, affordable housing in Boston, but also is willing to press back against evictions. And we've had, of course, different times and most recently big waves of evictions by national banks. And they often will go and they will block, they will form civil disobedience to block the sheriff from coming in and letting Bank of America take back a house to kick the people out. As I said, they don't consider themselves a preservation organization because they said, and I talked to Lisa Owens, who's the director, and she said, well, we're not so interested in the architecture. I said, but you're interested in people living in homes in their community and preserving that mix of who lives in that community. That's a preservationist or that's what we, we should be out there on that line. In the sense that we, that's what we're interested in, ultimately, where we want to preserve beautiful buildings but we also care what goes on inside. If they are hollowed out, like in Jane Jacobs Hudson Street, if we preserve the facades of that neighborhood, that's, it's a fine thing. It's a good thing to do to preserve a walkable neighborhood. But if everything behind it is of one race and one class, then I don't think we've done our duty. And so that is what, that's what they're challenging here. Okay. My third point I'd like to, to look to talk to you about, when you think about 1966, when the National Preservation Act was passed, we had just been through more than a generation where immigration had been very much narrowed in the United States. After 1927, there's a series of laws that really restricted how many people could come into this country. But the 1965 Heart Seller Act had intended to open immigration up and it actually had the intent of widening it dramatically. So the nation that you know today with greater immigrants coming from Central and South America from Asia is the product of that act that took place that was passed right before the National Preservation Act. In other words, when we think about today our work of who we are serving, we are serving an incredibly diverse nation that will only become more diverse just by natural reproduction, whether or not immigration is stopped. This is becoming a far more diverse, I would argue, far more interesting, vibrant nation. But it poses issues of how do you knit together people who are of increasingly diverse origins, religions, and beliefs. And one way I would argue that as preservationists we can do that is not only preserving the sites that represent the best of all these different groups and their histories, but also looking at those places of conflict and violence and challenge. And one of the, I think one of the most vibrant areas of preservation is in the dealing with what we'll just simply call difficult places. This is for whatever we wanna talk about our nation, it is also a nation of enormous amount of bloodshed and violence directed at one another and particular groups. The only way to knit together kind of a national identity with an increasingly diverse nation is to acknowledge those places, to preserve them and then interpret them powerfully. That's what I would challenge you with. I would suggest that this, this is the Robert Lee statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond. This is one way of knitting together. It's essentially by erasing other histories and you declare this is the story of the city of Richmond and the South. And this Monument Avenue if you may know, it's a beautiful, beautiful avenue of historic buildings. And it also has a series of celebrations meant on horses of Confederate generals. And it has been so powerful that narrative that they were able to erase in Richmond with the help of I-95, what I was just writing on, I-95 running through Richmond with federal government money erased the history of slavery in Richmond. This was the second largest slave market in the United States outside of New Orleans. Had anyone heard of Chaco Bottom? Maybe you all have, but very, I studied, I have a PhD in American history. We did not study that site at all. We didn't, I don't remember that word ever coming up in my studies in American history. And partly because it was erased or at least it was covered over. Archeologists friends tell me, it's not erased, it's covered over, there's something underneath. And indeed there is, in fact, there is this, you can see at the bottom here. There is underneath this, they have uncovered. They had to go 10 feet down. The remains of one of the most notorious prisons and selling complexes in Chaco Bottom. So I'm gonna come back to Chaco Bottom towards the very end. But I'm again going around the world in part because I think other countries have more willingly or been forced to more creatively deal with their history in ways that we can learn from and we're starting to learn from. And this as I mentioned, my father who was almost 95 would be 95 next week, grew up in Berlin. And this is in fact his album around the 1936 Olympics. This is the Jesse Owen Olympics. But you see he's taking pictures of all these historic places, but they also have the swastikas covering there, covering everything. But Germany, which I have found in my very complicated engagement over the many years, has done an enormous amount to demand that the issue of what was done in the name of that nation be not forgotten. And this is the, there are new buildings like Vane Liebeskin's Jewish Museum in sort of the southern part of the center of Berlin. There's Peter Eisenman and Richard Sarah's National Holocaust Memorial. This is adjacent to or just across from the parliament building, the Reichstag. That is not analogous exactly, but is if we put a four acre monument to slavery right on the front porch of the Capitol building. I mean, that's the level of kind of a symbolic territory that this is. But they've done other things as well, like uncovered community archeologists. I mean, guerrilla archeologists started just digging in an area where they knew was the sort of the SS headquarters, the Gestapo headquarters and have uncovered the torture chambers and all that went on there. They've been willing to embrace contemporary design in some of the most historic buildings, such as the Reichstag. Norman Foster designed this glowing rooftop to the Reichstag where you can look down into the workings of parliament and to look out over the city. But they've also done something which I think we've only really begun to do, which is engage artists and encourage them to do really boundary pushing memorials, such as these temporary projections of Jewish life onto the buildings of Berlin, decaying buildings of the Kreuzberg neighborhood, where it almost looks for a moment you were brought back in time. Or many of you know of the Stalperstein, the Stumblesteps, it's perhaps the largest memorial in the world because there are now about 100,000 of these in different countries. It started though, one man said, you know, we're simply gonna take out the cobblestone and put in, he did this on his own without permission, put the cobblestone with simply the name of the person who, I mean it was the Jewish person who lived there and then was sent off to Auschwitz or one of the other concentration camps. The idea is that you are to stumble over it and be reawoken and you were brought back to paying attention to that which happened in their name and they're all over Germany and now other countries have adopted it for their own atrocities. And I just visited this memorial and again, a memorial in historic site is the purview of preservationists I would say because this plaza, you would not know what's going on there and there is no plaque exactly to explain what this is but you walk across this Babelplatz and you see suddenly this glass opening and then you get closer, you look down and it's about a 20 foot by 20 foot room underneath the ground level and it's just empty white bookshelves. And then there's a little tiny note that suggests this is a memorial to the books that were burned as part of Hitler's work. And it's a very powerful evocation of the books that were burned and also the books that were never written because the people themselves were burned. Very quickly moving along, different part of the world that I visited and looked at how they have dealt with in Argentina, one of their most painful episodes where 30,000 of their own citizens were murdered by the state in the 1970s and early 1980s. This is one of the prisons where the people who were considered dangerous were held and sometimes tortured. And the building you can see was being torn down but this artist, Seth Wilson, figured out a way to kind of how do you deal with his glass bricks if you can maybe make pixelated images and so he popped out some of the glass, left others so that you could see certain times a day these faces of the prisoners who were there fully knowing, you can see as the building was coming down that this artwork would disappear. Many of this is recognized, many of the artwork of this genre recognizes the impermanence of the city but wants to make a mark that will then live on in people's minds. And we have started in the United States really to do a lot to recognize the difficult places such as Manzanar, Japanese internment camp which is a national historic park. After many years of being, you know, quietly set aside it is now quite an important part of the National Park Service or when I went to visit the city, Money Mississippi which you may know because it was in August of 1955 that Emmett Till, a young boy from Chicago visiting his family was murdered there and it was one of the kind of key catalysts for the modern civil rights movement. When I went to the first time as a photograph I took the store where the incident happened that led to his murder was just falling down, left that way. Well, years later there is a Mississippi Freedom Trail and actually the information on there is pretty good but it's still a plaque and you know, if you've seen our national register plaques most of them say virtually nothing. I noticed the one on the observatory is actually pretty good. It actually gives some information but many of them simply say it's on the national register. Well, we need to do much more to encourage artists to push the boundaries, things that make people uncomfortable at sites of discomfort. I don't know why we should be worried about that, we should encourage that. And we have great examples of mural projects in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles which are using frankly the texture of lots of empty lots to tell stories about city life or Christof Woduszko, an MIT professor who does these massive projections for instance on the Bunker Hill Monument. And many of you may know of the recent opening just a few weeks ago of Brian Stevenson's Memorial to Peace and Justice which captures the history of lynching in the United States. And while this may seem like again, a memorial and not a preservation work, in fact it is very much imagining historic places because it has a column for every single town and all the lynchings that took place in them. And the goal of course in his mind is not just that you come to Montgomery but that the columns will leave Montgomery and go to every single town. So the memorial becomes to be a measure of how well small towns across the South are willing to confront their history because the column is supposed to go back to that place. So there is soil that is brought from each town to the monument and then there's a column that lists the people who were lynched and the community from that town is supposed to say we are ready to install this. So we will see as a measure of how well we are able to confront this and the South is able to confront it. This work has been going on for a while. Again, I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I'm simply kind of blowing on the sails urging that we need to continue this work with greater urgency. This just opened. This is the first monument true museum to lynching. To the thousands of people who were lynched throughout the South. How can it be that 2018 we're only first now actually documenting all the names as many as we have in one place. And I was at the National Trust Conference. This is two years ago, I think. And a filmmaker actually who made, showed this image from Galea, Texas which is called The Hanging Tree. And this is where African Americans were hung but also Mexican Americans. And he has documented, I don't remember now how many of the hundreds and hundreds of Mexican Americans who were lynched as well. It's a part of our history that many of us may not have known although now when we think about it, it makes sense. In other words, there's so much more work to do in confronting our difficult histories. The work goes on in Chaco Bottom. This is a project that I've been involved with now for several years. Ever since I wrote about it for Preservation Magazine, I was so captivated both by the history as well as the community activists who have been pushing on this now for 15 years to make sure that Chaco Bottom, the history is told there and the city and the stories there are uncovered. And one of our goals, it's a little hard to tell here but one of our goals is to have people stop thinking about Monument Avenue when they come to Richmond but think of a new memorial. And we have as part of a memorial park, imagine a grove of lights. And actually we imagine that these grove of lights like the pixelated images from Buenos Aires, you would see from a distance images, not of Confederate war generals but of important African-Americans from Richmond who have long been left out of the history. And what we've done there, or at least proposed and it's moving forward slowly, slowly. The tragedy in Charlottesville has propelled forward the arguments over the history in Richmond. What we've imagined here is to try to do things, try to make proposals that integrate some of the ideas that I've talked about here. We have a memorial park marking the sites for instance of Lumpkin's Jail, this notorious jail as well as other, there was a whole industry of course in the sale and exploitation of African-Americans. In this involved factories, involved counting houses and called places that sold the clothing so you could dress up the slaves so they would look better for sale. I mean a whole integrated world, right? But also we wanna build in one of the train shed, this is the train line, the Amtrak train line, one of the abandoned train warehouse buildings to create that kind of school for high school graduates as well as recently incarcerated individuals to learn some of the skills of preservation, of archeology, of public history, of memorialization and then that they'd be provided jobs that comes from some of the developments that would take place, that the money would be channeled for that particular purpose. Because if Chaco Bottom gets developed in a way that the money goes, profit goes out to other places in the city or far beyond, that would seem like another level, another generation of exploitation. That in fact of all the places in the country, this place where African-Americans were exploited, their bodies were literally bought and sold and their labor was exploited, that the development that takes place, whatever money gets generated, should be put back in to the community. When I first came to Rome, this was in 2014, I saw a photograph, this photograph, by Mimo Yorice, an Italian photographer, and it's, you can see this image, it just struck me so powerfully, it kind of encapsulated my thought about how preservation needs to be involved with, it needs to be sensually involved with confronting difficult places. And here you can see this bust where it is shattered and there has been a repair done, an effort to try to bring it back to where it once was. But you see that it doesn't quite fit, right? And even to stay in it's sort of half fit state, you need a hand to hold it there. And in some ways that really captured for me what our purpose is in this area in dealing with difficult places, is that our job is to bring people to preserve these sites, the difficult sites of violence, of discrimination, of horrors that we don't want to confront, help us confront them, but with a kind of a gentle hand of encouraging dialogue, encouraging conversation about what this means for our communities. Now, just to end here and wrap up, one of the questions you might be thinking is in the back of your mind is I'm with you Max, but what about beauty? Like aren't we all partly preservationists because we love beautiful places, beautiful buildings, landscapes? And yes, yes, I agree. And I can think of when I started to make a list in writing this book of the beautiful places that I come to mind, the list went on for pages. And so I just give you a couple, such as the Taj Mahal, having waking up at four in the morning to be there in pitch black and then slowly see this incredible site emerge and then turn the corner and see a man sweeping up to beautify this building was one of those places. We all mark the years of our lives in many ways by the beautiful places that we've been. So I'm not opposed to beauty whatsoever. And I think of as well one of the last days of my time in Rome was to going to Pentecost mass, which you may find ironic, in the Pantheon. And if you know that what happens at the end of the mass is that thousands of real rose petals are dropped through the oculus onto the congregation. It's an incredible, incredible moment to see this nice Jewish boy felt very moved by this ceremony. I thought it very, very powerful. And so this historic building, this several 2000 year old building gained a new kind of power, a new kind of meaning through this act. So that brings me back to that first image. And you may have, I don't know if you may have found it ironic that a book that is trying to argue that preservation needs to be about social justice struggles has this building, this beautiful building. Many of you may know this. One of my other favorite interior space, the New York Public Library Reading Room. It's not too much of a exaggeration to say I chose my dissertation topic so that I could work in the New York Public Library Reading Room. And I think actually that's as good a reason as any to choose a dissertation topic. It's a glorious, glorious space. And I put it up there partly to be ironic. It is a beautiful space. And you have a career in Hastings City Hall just down the street here. The New York Public Library is one of those great public buildings. It is an architectural masterpiece. You appreciate the power of the architectural gestures and the details when you're in there. But the reason that I love that building is as much, as much the mission, which is this building is one of the great public libraries of the world. It's open to anyone. You walk in, you sit down, you look up a book, you put in your request. It used to be a little vacuum packed little thing that they had and it's still there. They don't really work anymore but you would write down the thing. It would go deep into the bowels of the building. 20 minutes later, you get the book. No questions asked. Anyone. When you sit there at those big oak tables, you could have a Nobel Prize winner to your right. You could have the immigrant studying for the SAT to the left. Someone unsteady, writing an 8,000 page letter to the president. You have anyone who's in there. And to me, this is inseparable. The architecture and the function. So what I think of the beauty equation in our work, which I think is central, what we find beautiful is also the places that we need the most that perhaps as a land of baton, maybe some of you may know of him, a philosopher, says it's we crave in our buildings that which we feel like we lack. So there's many places I could end with but it seems to me at this moment in our history, in our time, that one of the reasons I've drawn to this is that not only a beautiful room, but that's a public room and it's a free room and it's room that's held in common. And that is as much a pursuit. When we pursue the preservation and reuse of beautiful spaces like this, that serve an important function of being free and open to all, we have fulfilled much of our purposes. Thank you. We didn't talk about money. We talked about what maybe we should do. We didn't talk about how to fund those processes, like back to the Depression, we ran up a pretty big national debt to put all those people to work, right? Correct. So maybe we don't want our debt to be too much bigger right now. So how do we do what you're asking without paying for it? Well, so that's a very good question. We have to pay for it if we're gonna do it. So the question is how? So it's interesting what you said, that we did go in, it was the first major, major debt that we entered into to do the New Deal projects and that launched the greatest air of prosperity in American history. So in other words, you pay for it and it comes back to you. One of the things, and this, I was telling Hillary that I'm taking a little side route in my career, is one of the things I've been very involved with is education policy and I'm gonna be the vice president of our statewide teachers union. And one of the things we've pushed for is progressive taxes. And part of our argument is that we've all lived under an austerity mindset. That in fact, there's a lot of money out there. It happens to be in pockets of people that we've not requested that for. In other words, there are ways nationally we would fund it in the way we funded these in the past, either by debt or by new taxes on those, the wealthiest among us. And we do that at the local level and state level as well. In Massachusetts, I don't know the situation in Maine, I suspect it's not that different. We cut three and a half billion dollars in tax cuts out of our budget. Part of that money would go towards these very kinds of work which is self-generates greater economic development, I would suggest. So that's the short answer. I actually think there's far more money than we think. It's just much more less evenly distributed than it once was. And I don't mean to redistribute it to individuals, I mean to take it to the common pot in order to use it for important public buildings, public restoration projects and the like. We used to have many more programs to actually invest in preservation and restoration. And even the recent tax bill cut back on the tax incentives for historic restoration. It doesn't have to be that way at all. It's a choice. I'm talking about some very impressive ideas that have been to provide memorials to tell particular stories out of history. Sometimes very, very important stories. But often requires a huge commitment of resources of government nature. Of course, in Portland, our tradition of historic preservation has been much more to tell the more prosaic stories of the past. How people lived in a prosperous, rural city in the 19th century. And perhaps you can indeed find plaques, for instance, that show where the locations of the underground railway stops were the things of that nature. But as opposed to having individual self-conscious memorials of this kind, how about trying to configure the cityscape a bit so that it does, in fact, evoke the feeling as it was in the 19th century, particularly when we have so many resources that are currently in stand that can remind us that way in terms of neighborhoods and in terms of structures which modest themselves contribute to the story. I think I can only agree with that. I mean, we certainly, I think, I mean, did I miss here? I mean, you're suggesting we should be working hard to preserve rather than simply building memorials to that time, preserve those things that actually lived in the time. Absolutely, these things go hand in hand. I mean, I would suggest that we still have a lot to do in terms of interpreting and telling the stories of the places that even that have been preserved, right? And, you know, we were talking earlier. We often, I showed, I played into this by talking about slavery, for instance, and going to the South. Well, we're all, we live in New England. We were all beneficiaries of, and I mean, even if we were all immigrants long since that time, we benefited from the wealth generated from that, textiles, sugar, rum, everything, divided. And there's an important story to be told there. That started to be told, but every city needs to do that. To say, this house is here, it's a beautiful house. Where did that money come from? Let's not, that doesn't mean to condemn those people forever. It means to understand what went alongside the building of this city. But as I was saying before, there's nothing that makes a sense of place than a continuum of history in a site. And that's what Preservation at Base does. Preservation organizations all over the country and in Portland have built up laws to support preservation. And usually following the Secretary of the Interior standards. So I'm curious if you see movement at places like the government and the National Park Service standards and or the National Trust. Which kind of movement are you looking for? Well, you know, you would really be in Portland, we would be changing our preservation ordinance. Right, right. To achieve what you're talking about. So is that happening? Right, so it's interesting though. It's a very good question because I do think at times, it's interesting, the Secretary of Interior standards in some ways, I think can be far too rigid and inhibit adaptive reuse that we want to encourage. On the other hand, there's also enormous amount of flexibility. That's what's been striking to me is that while I look, if you look at the face of the policies and the rules you could say, this has got to be changed. On the other hand, there's been some impressive wiggle room on issues of integrity and the like that has allowed us to preserve and get landmarked places of cultural importance that might not otherwise by the letter of law fit. That said, I've been struck, I'm gonna, this will come back to haunt me, but I've been struck by the unwillingness of preservation organizations, including our National Trust, which I love dearly, to really be willing to lead a campaign to make some changes that need to happen at that. And I think there's a fear, without getting too political, there's a fear that if we open it up at this particular moment, it will change in ways that we don't like or that many preservationists don't like. I'll just put it that way. But I think that doesn't, that should not preclude us from mapping out what kind of changes we would want. Why do we have we not developed in detail the kind of proposal and this, I'm looking in the mirror as well, the detailed proposal for a works preservation administration. Why don't we lead that debate? There's a lot of just talk about infrastructure, a national infrastructure project. Why don't we think about what that would look like? So that's partly answered to you, is that I don't think we've done, we have yet statewide and national organizations built the common coalition to lead to lead to big changes like that. We're still very much in many ways implementing rules made 50 years ago. And we're not quite willing enough to challenge them and be willing to throw them out and start over in some instances. All right, good. Can you talk about the necessity of making the argument that preservation is really the best path that we have to be environmentally friendly. And I believe that. Do you have any good thoughts about how to win that argument though? Does it feel like, it's a little like being far more and then other sort of like health strategies where there isn't a lot of money to be made. There's so much, there's so much corporate energy and tech energy behind the, you know, the high tech green direction. How do we win that argument? Well, so that's a very good question. I mean, some of the ways we win, I don't know if people have heard that, how do we win the argument for making preservation more central to sustainability when there's a lot of power in other directions and other in focusing on solar panels and geothermal, et cetera. Right, so that's a very good question. One is that we have increasingly good proof and that's been a preservation, I would say in the sustainability aspect of preservation has done some really good research to show the value of reusing historic buildings. There's also, I mean, there's good writings simply on like, you know, David Owen, Green Manhattan just showing that when you live closer together, tends to be in historic places, that people who live there are just simply much more environmentally friendly, just by the very, if you live in downtown Portland, you are a hero, just because you probably walk more, you probably take public transportation more, you live in an older building, that in itself will help enormously. So part of it is making an argument through the research, I think. And I've just forgotten my second point about that. Well, I remember it in five seconds. I'm afraid I lost it. But there's a broader campaign to be led around that and I, yeah, I can't remember. I'll come back to it, but yeah. But it's a very good question because there's a lot arrayed against it and that's a big problem. And it means, I think, well, partly what I wanted to say was it means building coalitions. That means preservationists are sitting there with public transportation folks as allies because if you build more public transportation and you make the city more livable that way, that will help preservation as well. Here's the point I was gonna make. Small changes in our laws, as I was alluding to with Holyoke, can lead to big changes. If Massachusetts has had a law that's out there about carbon taxation, for instance, and it hasn't passed yet, but it's there and it's got supported, it could pass. If it passed and suddenly corporations would find it much, much more to their tax advantage to work in downtown Holyoke because they would have a lower carbon footprint, suddenly you could see, not instantly, but you could see like the whole, the curve would be bent towards that. So there are policy changes that we could make that would value historic places because of their environmental friendliness that would lead, that would start to dominoes falling. So in that way it can be a legislative battle that can precede the transformation. If you win that legislative battle then the economic calculation will be, oh, of course I'm gonna move my business out of Long Meadow and where I'm getting charged this big tax because I have a big office park and I'm gonna move it into 150 year old, beautiful, well-built, historic silk factory building. Anyway. Thank you everyone. Thank you.