23 6 / 2009
"Within these grids, Euclidian order reigns, but eventually they bump up against each other like tectonic plates, forming an urban planner’s no man’s land just south of the intersection of Market and Gough. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way – there’s an 1852 plan of San Francisco that shows the grids neatly coming together around a boomerang-shaped plaza. However, as is so often the case with grand urban schemes, greed won out over grace, and the plaza never came to pass. Instead, and in an ironic twist of fate, the block that was to be the plaza contains a spec office building that houses the City of San Francisco Planning Department. Today, the messy clot of streets doesn’t even have an agreed upon name. It is, nonetheless, an area of keen interest to me, as it’s the neighborhood that I call home."
PreservationNation » Out Beyond the Castro: Life on Over-the-Top Valencia Street
Today on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s blog, a love letter to San Francisco. I struggle often with “preservation” as a movement or a dogma; so much of it is co-opted by groups with reactionary interest in disallowing natural change and development (“NIMBYs” if you’re sexy), and in doing this, they disavow the natural change inevitable in any urban environment, and the essence of what is worth preserving. Often too, it manifests as exclusionary across racial or economic lines (ie. locking in property values to raise the barriers to entry in a neighborhood) and can create artificial islands of homogeneity. But preservation in its purest form, the loving, flexible and ardent maintenance of the built environment of before, is still vitally important to urban health. The modernist structure of affordable housing and the 20th century forcible reorganization of poverty has shown us this in technicolor. I so love that this is San Francisco’s outpost of the National Trust*; someone so utterly of us, with such a holistic viewpoint. Worth reading the whole, beautifully written thing.
*full disclosure: this is not my first foray into light hero worship of Mr. Veerkamp.
