To Preserve and Protect

In the anguished aftermath of the 1992 riots, L.A.’s Central Avenue district set out to salvage its cultural memory. Once the heart of a vital, jazz-inflected African American community, most of the neighborhood’s storefronts had been razed and plowed under long ago, and many of its wooden homes had been stuccoed over by immigrants, erasing the district’s architectural identity. Reginald Chapple, executive director of the nonprofit Dunbar Economic Development Corp., said that although the National Trust for Historic Preservation offered technical assistance for rebuilding the commercial corridor, the program, which was designed to assist small Midwestern towns, “didn’t fit with what was happening in urban communities.” So for the past eight years, the Dunbar agency and its neighborhood allies have been evoking Central Avenue’s historic spirit and sense of place, not with old buildings, but by constructing low-income housing, hanging street banners and staging a popular annual jazz festival at the historic Dunbar Hotel, which the agency owns and operates. Meanwhile, a small but growing number of middle-class blacks have begun moving back after decades of outward migration. “We may not have the built-environment structure,” Chapple said, “but we’ve got the history” to recapture the community’s cohesiveness and spirit.

The Central Avenue experience illustrates how historic preservation in America is adapting to meet a complex new set of challenges that will be high on the agenda when the National Trust for Historic Preservation holds its conference at the Biltmore starting today. Some 2,500 preservationists are expected to attend the annual event of the 61-year-old historic conservation organization, which Los Angeles is hosting for the first time.

Among the more pressing questions: How can preservation take root in areas undergoing constant social upheaval? How can it be used to revitalize older, economically depressed areas? How can historic structures

keep pace with changing technological needs fueled by the new economy? Can cultural festivals, photo archives, oral histories and other “non-built” materials be used to “preserve” communities that have physically diminished? And how do preservationists decide what’s worth keeping from the second half of the 20th century--a period when bowling alleys, cocktail lounges and coffee shops partly usurped churches, libraries and government offices as the neon-lit repositories of American civic life?

The impact of the preservation movement is visible nationwide. In downtown San Jose and other parts of the Silicon Valley, neglected commercial buildings are being retrofitted with T-1 lines for computers and acquiring new lives as Internet dollars chase a dwindling supply of affordable office space. In New York, an influx of urban professionals are colonizing rundown stretches of Harlem, lured by an abundance of spacious and relatively cheap turn-of-the-century brownstones. The startling turnaround of Miami’s booming South Beach, with its rows of glittering Art Deco hotels, shows how buildings once considered worthless kitsch can be resurrected practically overnight as popular tastes change.

In the three-plus decades since the destruction of the Beaux Arts masterpiece Penn Station galvanized New York’s conservation community and led other U.S. municipalities to pass building regulations, preservation-minded groups have expanded their mission beyond protecting individual landmarks.

Among its top priorities, the National Trust lists curbing “sprawl” and promoting “smart growth” in an increasingly suburbanized landscape. Although 40 years ago only two major U.S. cities, Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans, had laws protecting historic properties, today preservationists can claim victories stretching from a restored Frederick Law Olmstead Park in Providence, R.I., to seismic retrofitting of 85 historic Stanford University buildings and the conversion of a restored Japanese coffee farm into Hawaii’s first living history museum.

“The destruction of Penn Station and similar community losses around the country due primarily to urban renewal and the construction of the highway system were huge catalysts for forming preservation groups,” said Richard Moe, the National Trust’s president. “It was an enormously important turning point. But [the movement] has evolved a great deal since then.”

The conference arrives in Los Angeles at a time when the city’s preservation cachet is soaring. At its awards ceremony on Thursday, the trust will be honoring two high-profile L.A. restoration projects: the glamorously retro yet technologically state-of-the-art Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, and the Southwestern University School of Law’s elegant Art Deco home in the former Bullocks Wilshire department store. The trust also will pay tribute for organizational excellence to the 22-year-old nonprofit Los Angeles Conservancy, the nation’s largest local membership-based historic preservation group, with more than 7,000 card-carrying supporters.

The conservancy, a conference co-sponsor, sees the event not only as an occasion to showcase L.A.’s cultural gems, but also to alter traditional views of Los Angeles as a drive-thru, tear-down, disposable metropolis. “I think there’s a perception both inside and outside that people here don’t care about their history,” said Linda Dishman, the conservancy’s executive director. “We need to start breaking apart that myth.”

Today, preservationists aim not only to safeguard individual icons like downtown L.A.’s Central Library, whose threatened destruction in 1978 spurred formation of the L.A. Conservancy, but also entire districts of buildings. The Los Angeles City Council, in concert with grass-roots neighborhood groups and the conservancy, has created several Historic Preservation Overlay Zones, including Highland Park and the Angelino Heights section of Echo Park. After districts are granted recognition by the City Council, residents’ committees review proposed renovations or additions to historic structures. Districts in Wilmington and the West Adams neighborhood are now under consideration.

Preservationists also are canvassing sources of cultural memory that previously may have been overlooked. In the past, public memorials and buildings generally honored businessmen and public officials from the power elite, said Carolyn Kozo Cole, curator of the Los Angeles Public Library’s photo collection. Historians and others are compiling photo archives and oral histories and showcasing them for disenfranchised communities to help them connect with the past, as Cole and co-author Kathy Kobayashi did in their photographic study of local minority communities, “Shades of L.A.: A Search for Visual Ethnic History.” (New Press, 1996).

“Preservation in some way has become more complex and broader as time has gone on, looking at everything from the science of how materials degrade to how people in communities live in and utilize their heritage,” said John Oddy, program officer of the Getty Grant Program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, another conference sponsor.

Yet, as Dishman says, “it all comes down to saving buildings. That is our core mission.”

But whose heritage should be saved? From its inception, the conservancy has lent support to venerable 19th and early 20th century structures such as the Wiltern Theatre, the Ambassador Hotel and St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, as well as beloved period pieces like the Angels Flight railway. Though not all these vintage structures ultimately may be spared, the reflexive destruction of major landmarks is far less likely today than it was a generation ago.

“I remember when [the Central Library] was going to be torn down and a very prominent group of architectural firms were lining up to do” the job, said architect Ronald Altoon, whose firm Altoon + Porter Architects designed the Bullocks Wilshire restoration-renovation. “I won’t mention their names because it would probably embarrass them to do so.”

As national appreciation has grown for Modernist design, the conservancy has sought to stress the importance of L.A.’s postwar architectural environment, including the Cinerama Dome movie theater in Hollywood (1963), the original Bob’s Big Boy Coffee Shop in Toluca Lake (1949) and the prototype McDonald’s restaurant in Downey (1953). This past summer, the conservancy joined forces with a tenants group and City Councilman Mike Feuer to obtain historic cultural monument status for the 53-year-old Chase Knolls apartment complex in Sherman Oaks, which had been slated for demolition. Dishman said that while low-density suburban sprawl is the bane of most East Coast preservationists, in the West, “we have historic sprawl” worthy of study and protection. As an example, on Nov. 18 and 19 the conservancy is sponsoring a tour of postwar architecture in the San Fernando Valley.

Some preservation critics contend that the movement has placed too many restrictions on individual homeowners and turned federal and local governments into powerful de facto landlords. One antagonist, Washington, D.C., land-use lawyer Mel Garbow, has likened preservationists to “butterfly collectors: They don’t have any appreciation for butterflies, they just want to have another one for their collection trophy case.”

Others question whether too much preservation may result in static “museum” cities that stifle striking, new architecture. But architect Altoon, noting the large number of high-profile architectural projects completed or underway in Los Angeles, including the Getty Center, Disney Hall and Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral, asserted that preservation and innovation can be completely compatible: “The new icons are very provocative because they call to attention by their difference the values of the past.”

Los Angeles can claim an exceptionally strong Modern architectural heritage, but it also has a large supply of historic office buildings downtown and in Hollywood that are attracting young 1685025837 and Historic Preservation.”

Abelardo de la Pena Jr. joined the new entrepreneurial subculture recently when he moved his entertainment Web site business, Latinola.com, into a renovated Beaux Arts building on Spring Street downtown. The structure, with its marble floors, old-fangled metal mail chute and rental rates starting at a low $1.25 per square foot, is in the Los Angeles Empowerment Zone and is home to 50 small high-tech companies.

“This is literally the center of the Latino universe, with Broadway, East L.A. within biking distance,” De la Pena said. “Being in downtown L.A. has really identified us, and this building has made it affordable.”