When Does Historic Demolition Serve Preservation? Sometimes!

The New York Times recently ran a news article titled, "When Preservation Equals Demolition," which chronicled the battle to save the Century Building in St. Louis and noted that "for the first time anyone involved can remember, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the country's most powerful preservation group, sided with the wreckers. In fact, the redevelopment project that led to the Century's demise was financed with the National Trust's help." Can you put this NYT story into context for our readers? Has the National Trust modified its mission?

Yes, I can. From our perspective, it was an excruciating decision. On the one hand there was the $40 million restoration of the old post office building, which is a National Historic Landmark and one of the most historic and architecturally important buildings in St. Louis, which occupies an entire city block in the heart of downtown St. Louis and is surrounded by buildings. On the other hand, there was the demolition of the Century Building to provide the required parking. The old post office is at the heart visually and geographically of downtown St. Louis, and is central to the revitalization of downtown in the eyes of every city official, developer or business person you talk to in St. Louis. This is a building that dates from 1868 to 1884, was built as a U.S. customs house and post office and for decades and decades was a major federal building.

In the 1950's downtown started to go downhill. At this time the General Services Administration owned the post office building and struggled to keep it occupied. They tried, in the mid 1980's, renovating for about $16 million, adding a food court and retail and so on. That lasted a few years and then failed. So, for the last number of years, the building has sat empty, and finally GSA began the disposal process, to transfer ownership and cut their financial losses. That disposal process started in 1997. So this is not a recent problem. There was as continual effort by the business and political community, and preservationists, to find both a use and the money to do the capital work and ongoing maintenance that would ensure it's future. That came along in the form of Webster University and the appellate courts of Missouri.

One of the special things about the building is that one of its original functions was as a courthouse, so it has magnificent interior courtrooms. One of our concerns, when our staff got involved around 2001, was that there would be compromises made so that those courtrooms would be chopped up and the interior beauty of the building lost. The other possibility was that the building would just sit vacant and continue to slowly deteriorate.

Webster and the Appellate Court insisted that parking had to be directly across the street, and once that was made a requirement for their taking long-term leases and making this whole project viable, we were left with two options. One option was the proposal put forth by the city and the developer to demolish the Century Building, which is right across the street, and the other was what we had proposed at the outset: building a parking structure on an existing open plaza that is just to the north of the old post office, also right across the street. Our Midwest director, who was on the ground there talking with the groups found no support from the city or the county, and even the preservationist said that was impossible and were not willing to take that on as a fight. They thought it was unrealistic. So, the memorandum of agreement that was negotiated and that we finally reluctantly signed, along with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Missouri State Historic Preservation Office, and the city government, acquiesced to the demolition of the Century Building. That was a very painful decision.

We made that programmatic preservation decision in January 2002, at the recommendation of our regional director and with by approval by me and our president Richard Moe. It was nearly a year later that the developer approached us about financial participation in the rehabilitation project. That started negotiations that were focused on a program called the New Market Tax Credit, which you are probably familiar with, and we had a significant allocation of those, and he needed those to make the numbers work to do the old post office rehab. He already had historic preservation tax credits through another bank and another chain of investors, and we are not involved in that.

In the New York Times article, on the Century's demolition, it was said that the National Trust now views revitalization as part of the changing role of preservation, which includes fighting urban sprawl, reviving entire downtown areas, as well as saving historic buildings and sites. Elaborate on the Nat'l Trust's evolving approach to preservation.

I want to stress the evolving aspect of it, because for decades, preservationists have been involved in community revitalization. This started in Savannah, Charleston, San Antonio, and Pittsburgh, where revolving funds and other methods were used to help revitalize residential neighborhoods but went beyond that. Then some 25 years ago, the Main Street program that we began with pilot towns in the Midwest became a national program, and that was community revitalization of downtowns, and later on of urban neighborhood commercial districts. So, there has been a lot of involvement by preservationists, and by the National Trust specifically, in community revitalization, but I think what Richard was saying is that now that you have both renewed interest in downtowns and you have, especially on the East Coast and in the Midwest, a lot of towns with large percentages of vacant buildings. The estimate in Philadelphia is 18,000 vacant buildings; Pittsburgh is 16,000, and I have heard numbers in that range for Baltimore. So, the circumstances have shifted and made the need for revitalization much stronger and in some cases more difficult. At times there are going to have to be compromises. But, there are some neighborhoods where the vacant buildings are too deteriorated to make sense, and there are other neighborhoods where we will fight to the end to save buildings that are currently vacant and hurting but have the potential to be rehabbed.

The president of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis and the director of the graduate program in historic preservation at Cornell University said in that New York Times article that the price (demolition) was too high and that the tradeoff violated the preservation Hippocratic oath; "If you can't be supportive, for gosh sakes, shut up." What is your reaction to this criticism?

One of the hardest parts of this was being in disagreement with the local preservation organization, because 99 percent of the time, we are supporting them. However, in this case, our director knew that doing nothing would mean that the magnificent old post office would miss its opportunity at preservation. This was the chance to find those particular tenants who could stabilize that national historic landmark for generations. To do nothing would have been to make a decision, a decision that ultimately would have been harmful to preservation.

It is important to understand that this was not one building versus another building. The parking structure was being relied upon by the developers of at least five or six historic buildings in the immediate vicinity, and they felt that it was essential in the long run for what they were doing. They went ahead and took down the Century and started construction, and then the lawsuits brought by the Landmarks Association of St. Louis halted the construction of the parking structure,.The developer had enough faith, however, to go ahead because they felt that ultimately the parking would be provided.

We are now seeing revitalization take place in this core area, and I sincerely think it would have been hampered if people knew that the old post office was not going to be rehabbed and that there was not going to be the addition of a thousand parking spaces. It was a tragic cost, though. It just makes me sick when I see a building as handsome as the Century building being demolished, but I keep reminding myself of all of the buildings being saved, including the old post office, because of that happening. Finally, I would say that we felt we were operating in a box. Had there been a willingness by the power structure in St. Louis, including the preservationists, to look at the plaza alternative, we might have given up some green space and saved the Century Building. That was our proposal, and we got nowhere with it.

Let's return to the value and role of the new market tax credits and the National Trust Community Investment Corporation. You have financed about $6 million in New Markets Tax Credits and the Trust has been involved in investing over $100 million of these credits. Can you elaborate on this program?

I'm not necessarily the expert on this at the Trust, but from my understanding, from the program side, this is a federal credit that is designed to attract business activity into low-income census tracts, and in the third round we were very quick to realize that this was a preservation neutral tool that was totally different from the Historic Rehab Tax Credit, where you had to do good rehab to get the credit. Here, you could do anything within the law. You could tear down buildings, put in a Wal-Mart, or whatever else and technically qualify for this 35 to 37 percent credit that is spread over seven years. One of the main reasons for becoming involved with the new market credits was to have them used for preservation.

In the first year, we got the sixth highest award in the country, which surprised everyone, because this is usually a banker's world. We joined with Bank of America to do it, and have done hundreds of millions of dollars of New Markets Tax Credit investment. I was just in San Antonio, where our tax credits made possible the conversion of an old building into a day care center in a low-income neighborhood, and I couldn't have been prouder of our role in that.

Let's focus now on Southern California and Los Angeles. TPR did an interview with you four years ago, during that year's mayoral election campaign. In that interview, you commented that the mayoral candidates appeared to recognize that rehabilitation and preservation are absolutely essential to revitalization, particularly with regard to Downtown Los Angeles. Los Angeles again is in the middle of another mayoral election. What ought the candidates for Mayor in LA be addressing and committing to with regard to preservation?

I think they should be talking about using historic buildings for housing, especially for affordable housing, but also retail and all of the other things, as a way of drawing people to the downtowns and existing neighborhoods, and as a way of fighting sprawl. For us, preservation based revitalization is a highly viable and key strategy for mayors of older cities. At the same time, we know that every building will not be saved. There are going to have to be some tradeoffs, whether it is in certain neighborhoods that have just gone sunk to far into dilapidation, or hard choices like we made with the post office.

This leads us to the battle that the L.A. Conservancy is having with the Los Angeles' school district regarding a major new school site on the 24-acre Ambassador Hotel site. What is the Trust's position?

I am not the point person on this, but I know that Trust staff has had meetings regarding providing tax credits to help save as much of the Ambassador Hotel as possible, while also using it as a school in order to achieve the educational goals. We saw the issue in terms of how much of the building could be responsibly saved, and whether the New Markets Tax Credits help bridge the gap along with historic rehab credits. The last I heard, what will be saved is significantly less than what the Conservancy and we had hoped for.

With regard to schools, we know that the Trust published a report regarding creating small neighborhood schools that students can walk to. Could you comment about this notion of place making and preservation as it relates to the need to create neighborhood schools?

Let me say that this varies from region to region and area to area. When you already have a large suburban area where people are doing everything largely by car, you are going to have a new school to serve them, and that probably makes sense. But we started to hear from communities that they had older school buildings in their neighborhoods that students could walk to. They felt they were part of the character and the anchor of the older neighborhood, and, especially in some states like Ohio and New Jersey there were large amounts of public funding available to upgrade school facilities. The assumption seemed to be on the part of school officials and others, whether state or local, that newer was better, and that they should abandon the older buildings, either moving out to open land where they could build bigger sports fields or bigger schools, or in some cases, tear down the historic building and rebuild on the same site. So, we would still have the neighborhood, but would have lost the qualities of the historic building. We got involved with this issue via two publications we put out. One countered the assumption that newer is always better in schools, the right questions to ask, the right tactics to use locally, and the other was "Why Johnny can't walk to school."

We also reached out to the trade organization, The Center for Education Facilities Planners International, based in Scottsdale, and we found them interested in adjusting some of the standards. We have been just delighted by the new publications they are putting out. One is a primer on the rehabilitation of old historic schools as schools. They are also in the process of field-testing an assessment template for older historic schools. We are in the process of sending out about three hundred letters to governors and state historic preservation offices and the heads of state education departments, and our partners, such as the L.A. Conservancy, with copies of the two initial publications and information on the others that will be coming.

The Trust is based in DC and its history significantly ties it to the East Coast. How does the Trust's California office contribute into the Trust's agenda/priorities?

We have just hired a marvelous director for our West Coast office, who comes from Riverside, has taught at the University of California Riverside, has a PhD in preservation and was a senior planner in for the City of Riverside for a number of years. So, we have selected a third generation Californian and somebody who we think can really bring the Californian and western viewpoint to the Trust.

We also have partners like the LA Conservancy, who we really listen to. We don't try to have a cookie cutter approach to preservation. One of the things that we love about America is the individual sense of place and the regional differences. We want the national things that we can be helpful on, like the rehab tax credits and so on, to be used in a way that is supportive of the uniqueness of the places across our country. So, we seek lot of good advice. In addition to the L.A. Conservancy, we work closely with the California Preservation Foundation and other groups. And then, in addition to the partners in the regional offices around the country, we have two advisors from each state who have a great affect on the work plan of our Western office, and its perspective on what we do as a national organization.