Word: historicization
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During the 1980s Spring Street, like so many other neglected, down-and-dirty streets around the country, is shuddering back to life, becoming a gleaming circa-1920s boulevard. Many of its handsomely scaled old masonry buildings were renovated: derelict art moderne office buildings became cool art moderne apartment buildings, and...
But the new urbanity has footholds all over the place, and preservationism has achieved extraordinary momentum. Cincinnati's city council made charming West 4th Street a historic district last year. Among the latest local projects: the conversion of a down-at-the-heels Renaissance Revival textile building into offices. The...
With the proliferation of postwar suburbs, which sucked millions of families out of the cities, downtowns quickly lost their old pizazz. Then the redevelopment binge of the '50s and '60s came disastrously close to indulging the American antiurban instinct to the point of no return. Political pressure to build new...
But urban renewal had its rearguard critics, and vital downtowns had their influential advocates. The right laws were passed. Cases were won. In 1965 New York City passed the Landmarks Preservation Law, setting up a commission that could restrict any changes to designated historic buildings; a year later, Congress enacted...
What has come to be known as gentrification -- the migration of (mainly white) middle-class homesteaders into poor (mainly black and Hispanic) urban neighborhoods -- is neither the cause nor an effect, exactly, of the historic renovation boom. But the two trends have abetted each other. The original '60s militants of...