Norm Alston: When it Comes to Preservation, Dallas is a Hormonal Adolescent

By Norman Alston, FAIA
Special Contributor

One of the basic tenets in my field of historic preservation is explained by the idea that “a building is a product of its time.” To be more accurate, however, I would expand this idea to say that a building is a creation by people, and the people who cause it to be built are a product of their time. This idea acknowledges that buildings, due to their high utility and very great expense, reflect most clearly our priorities as a society.

While there can be great creativity and personal expression, those elements of our city that are most important to us as a whole are typically reflected clearly through the buildings they create. In other words, these buildings are a clear reflection of our culture.

Just one small example of this is found in so many of the houses across the older areas of Dallas. Our 1928 home in East Dallas has a second outside door that opens directly into one of the bedrooms. Virtually every house in our neighborhood has this, as do those in nearby neighborhoods dating back to the 20th Century. This extra door, a reflection of multiple forces and social norms for housing at the time, is unheard of today. It’s more of a cultural expression rather than a technological one, and the need for it has faded into our history.

This concept drives the current debate about demolitions in our established neighborhoods. I have often said that Dallas seems to me to have been an adolescent city throughout most of my life, perhaps too many hormones and not enough life experience to manage them. The forces and priorities that drive our city are changing rapidly, dramatically, and in some cases, painfully.

The Alternatives to Demolition panel that convened on Tuesday evening at Arts Mission Oak Cliff had a fascinating discussion with a diverse panel of skilled experts. These panelists provided a lot of insight into current development forces in Dallas, as well as the historic forces that shaped our city. There were also descriptions of many tools that are currently available to us as we deal with the needs driving modern development and redevelopment, as well as consideration of tools still needed.

However, what ties this together, and what seems to serve as the source of the pain I referenced, is culture. In historic preservation, we have long advocated for developing a new culture of preservation for our community.

Instead of the default question of “Why preserve?” we should be asking “Why not preserve?”

It has often been expressed that Dallas is too young to have enough history to develop a cultural depth that is uniquely Dallas and worthy of preservation. It is often said that what history we had has already been lost and that all value lies in our future.

Instead, we find ourselves in a new place. Until recently, we have been focused nationally on “new.” I often speak about how our design and construction industry has been geared toward new construction. Only in the past decade have technologies and attitudes begun to realize that we have inherited a great legacy city and that it has qualities and character that continue to be valuable, and people have started to fight to keep them.

In 2016, in response to a series of concerns advanced by the architectural community, the Dallas Chapter of the American Institute of Architects spent months considering these same issues. The result was a policy position known as the Policy Statement on Local Architectural Heritage In it, concern and consideration were extended well beyond the built environment. It recognized that neighborhoods and communities are far more than just the buildings but also include a broad and complex combination of qualities developed over time that give the neighborhood its own identity and that this identity is often valuable and worth keeping. It advocates for recognizing such qualities and their inclusion in redevelopment plans.

It is this crisis of culture that baffles us today. From the demolition of homes in the Park Cities to the loss of Ebby Halliday’s house to the replacement of homes in neighborhoods across our city to the preservation and redevelopment of the Bottoms and Tenth Street, we find ourselves developing a new culture that considers qualities we hoped for, but perhaps didn’t realize that we already had. And we’re doing so on the fly.

The path forward is the responsibility of us all. Let us consider and demand better urban planning from everyone, including ourselves. Let us use the tools available to us from the City of Dallas, and let’s have more of them, but let’s relieve the city from the burden of inspiration and vision for our city. That’s our job.

Let us look to and engage with one another to decide what kind of city we want. Let’s engage in the process, like the ForwardDallas! update and the Atlas Metalworks debate.

Let’s keep talking to our neighbors.