Downtown: Building the Present and the Future on the Past
How cities can preserve their historic legacy, welcome new investment, and support the people who bring their stories to life.
By David Dixon, FAIA
Adapted from In Walking Distance: How Five-minute Neighborhoods Are Reinventing Downtown (Princeton University Press, May 2027)
How History Helped Bring Downtowns Back
The threats that preservation in downtowns and surrounding traditional urban neighborhoods faces from development today are, at the very least, ironic, and often, unnecessary. After two to three decades of flight to the suburbs, the history embedded in downtown and surrounding traditional neighborhoods brought many of the children of those who fled back.
In turn, federal and state historic tax credits unlocked the ability to bring derelict historic buildings back to life. Built for the economic and social needs of the 18th or 19th centuries and viewed as symbols of urban decline for the first half of the 20th century, these buildings became sought-after places to live and work in the second half of that century.
The turning point? Urban renewal’s destruction of much of urban America in the name of progress, or more literally—a newly auto-centric era—met its Waterloo at a triumphant monument to 19th-century transit: Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station. The shock of this loss energized a nascent preservation movement. Five years after Pennsylvania Station’s demolition was announced in 1961, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, enshrining preservation as a national priority.
Writing a New Chapter Without Erasing the Past
And in an era when roughly 15% to 20% of land in a typical downtown is still tied up in surface parking and still more is occupied by underutilized buildings or obsolete infrastructure with no historic value, even the densest parts of cities have no shortage of sites for ambitious redevelopment. These sites, coupled with a new wave of market demand and financial incentives to retrofit obsolete office and commercial buildings into housing, innovation space, urban university facilities, entertainment venues, and more, give us ample opportunity to write a bold new chapter in our cities’ histories without erasing the chapters that came before.
Looking back today, we can see how history revived the present and inspired a new future. The next question, and one all those engaged in stewarding our cities wrestle with, is: What are historic preservation’s frontiers going forward?
As a planner and urban designer whose work has resulted in roughly $25 billion of new investment in cities that house much of urban America’s historic legacy and who sits today as a member of the Boston Landmarks Commission, I offer these observations: Challenging questions today are rarely about what represents a historic building worth preserving. Or even, when appropriate, how additions or necessary changes should be designed (the accepted norm? using materials and design articulation that clearly distinguish new from historic features). Instead, the most difficult questions often focus on how cities should shape change not just to preserve, but to celebrate their history and the riches it brings us today.
Examples from My Planning and Urban Design Work
Repairing urban renewal’s damage—and adapting Boston’s historic core to 21st century needs and aspirations: A Civic Vision for Turnpike Air Rights in Boston. Following two years of intensive community-based planning, residents of two of Boston’s most historic districts—Back Bay and the South End (widely recognized as the largest intact Victorian row house district in the US) supported twenty- to thirty-story towers as part of air-rights development over the depressed Massachusetts Turnpike, which had cut a destructive swath through the city in the 1960s. The higher values achieved by these towers helped fund decking to reconnect these neighborhoods, heal urban renewal’s damage, and bring new public spaces to the heart of Boston. They also, together with the historic districts to either side, tell the story of Boston’s transition from a growing 19th-century port city to a global center of innovation.
Adapting downtowns to 21st-century economic leadership: Planning for Boston’s Seaport District and Tampa’s Water Street District. Once the heart of one of America’s busiest ports, Boston’s Seaport District today contains roughly eight million square feet of mixed-use development that houses a major center of Boston’s life science economy. The adjacent Boston Wharf district has been carefully preserved and today hosts a lively food, arts, and cultural scene. Again, the immediate juxtaposition of new and old tells Boston’s story. Next to Tampa’s traditional downtown, Water Street is emerging as nine million square feet of new development that provides Tampa with a strong foothold in the global idea economy. The district’s towers add a proud new chapter to downtown largely built up before the Great Depression.
Celebrating buildings that tell our city’s stories. One of the Boston Landmarks Commission’s more controversial decisions (one made before I joined but which I strongly support) was approving landmark status for Boston’s City Hall, whose brutalist architecture by the then-young firm Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles won an international design competition. The building’s monumental and sculptural concrete form stands in sharp contrast to its 18th- through early-20th-century setting. Why is it a landmark today? Because its bold form announced the arrival of the “new Boston,” a city again on the rise after witnessing virtually no new downtown investment since before the Great Depression. City Hall is a monument to living history.
Supporting the People Who Bring Our History Alive
The people who bring our history alive and tell today’s stories are “culture bearers.” I embrace this term for the people I have met who celebrate Memphis’s music story; bring New Orleans’ West African culture into the present, carrying on a legacy passed down by generations of enslaved and freed African-Americans; and tell the stories of America’s quest for human rights along Boston’s Freedom Trail and how others fought to extend those rights along the city’s nearby Black History Trail. In a similar spirit, Los Angeles’s Social District Director Nolan Marshall III points to the performers, artists, makers, chefs, and others who embody downtown Los Angeles’s living culture while Oakland’s Planning Director, Bill Gilchrist, points to the to the social and economic value of creating specialized retail clusters that celebrate the city’s Black or other cultures. One quality shared by these culture bearers across all of these cities, they do not yet receive the recognition that would bring the financial support they need.
A Continuing Dialogue Between Past, Present, and Future
Our cities are at their best when they embody a never-ending dialogue between the past, the present this past has built, and the future we are always building.
