There’s Not Much Future in Los Angeles’ Past

We have just gone through another National Historic Preservation Week, and the attendant hoopla bodes ill for the Los Angeles region, for by championing our past, preservationists may be the unwitting enemies of our future.

The well-intentioned movement to “preserve” Los Angeles--to save its historic buildings, its relics, its “important” places--completely misses the essence of the area’s history and what Los Angeles stands for in urban development, which can be summarized in one word: change.

The best way to preserve this tradition of continuous transformation and renewal is to allow it to continue unchecked, unimpeded by misplaced efforts to preserve.

In promoting change--perhaps even championing it to excess--Los Angeles has traditionally viewed its buildings as mere way stations, to be used and abandoned, recycled and replaced, as subsequent technological innovations and life styles called forth new developments.

Preservation of old buildings or places denies that historical pursuit; it fails even to capture a semblance of our region’s historic urge to shed the past by constantly embracing the future.

We can’t save those regional values if we preserve the region’s buildings.

Here, if not elsewhere, the act of preservation is really not that at all. It is a disguised form of destruction, for preservation freezes change; it preempts the future.

There are two parts to this problem. First, preservationists are engaged in an act that, ironically, is itself not a part of our past. The region has little heritage of preservation compared to the older areas of the country. Thus historical preservation creates a discontinuity with our history.

Second, if preservation is now to become a part of our future, what will be the heritage bestowed by present-day preservationists? The very buildings that they seek to preserve today might not have come into existence if we had introduced preservation at an earlier time.

For instance, the present Los Angeles Times building has been an architectural and civic landmark since the ‘20s; why do we not mourn our historical loss of the buildings that it replaced--including the previous Times building, which in turn replaced the city’s first four-story edifice, a hotel, which itself replaced . . . ?

Lest this speculation appear completely fanciful, consider a case from Rome--the Eternal City. As I understand it, between AD 54 and 66, the Emperor Nero built a Circus in the Gardens of Caligula (the work of a previous emperor) thereby destroying valuable urban open space for the sake of promoting urban spectacle. In AD 76, during Nero’s persecution of the Christians, St. Peter suffered a martyr’s death along the spine of the circus’s race-course. Around AD 313 the circus was demolished to make way for the sepulcher of St. Peter, above which was erected a basilica. It stood for 12 centuries, a prototype of primitive church architecture. In the 16th Century it was demolished to make way for the new Basilica of St. Peter--the one we know today.

If preservationists had had their way at the outset, Rome might still have a verdant open space harking to a much more ancient era, rather than the museum of Renaissance and Baroque monuments that is now called Vatican City. Even if preservationists could pick and choose over the centuries, which of the four historically important developments of this acreage should have been preserved?

The heritage of preservation at best may turn out to be a precious urban ossification, and at worst a dreary urban embalmment. We must be more candid about what we may be doing to our future in the name of preserving our past, and we must be more explicit in revealing preservation’s costs as well as its advantages to society.

To remedy this situation we need what I call “sunrise laws” to let a new day dawn on old buildings. As we know, “sunset laws” require legislation to expire after a period of time unless reconsidered and reenacted. Similarly we should establish sunrise laws that allow a historically preserved monument to be considered for destruction or remodeling if a superior use for that site is proposed. This may impose a large burden of proof on the developer, but at least the opportunity would exist not to become enslaved by the past.