Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 77: Historic Preservation

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

gonna ride historic on the preservation road june's twitter: https://twitter.com/RITTSQU june's web zone: https://june.zone/ june's art studio: https://space1026.com/ 844 North Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19130 Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

I am also now locally recording. So if you can get the second, please got local recording, I am locally recording. How do I do? Do I just do that? Do you not have audacity? Are you smoking? I just record it like separately. I'm smoking inside.

And Justin also told me that I didn't need anything else besides why Justin was lying. I didn't know. I did. I thought I thought you had audacity. I do have audacity. I just didn't have it open. Well, put make it open then. All right, I'm turning it on.

Damn it. You're like an old married thruple. 79 episodes in and with an actual no shit employee and we can't like we can't even wipe our own asses. We're small business now. We're small business tyrants. Great. All right. I think we're all good.

I'm recording locally. To be fair, our actual accountant ghosted us. So that's always a good sign. That's a good sign. Yeah. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. It has slides.

I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. Alice Kodor-Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Liam.

Liam. Yeah, Liam. Hi. I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he, him. We have a guest. We have a guest. Back again.

Hi, everybody. My name is June Armstrong. My pronouns are she and her. And I'm here to help make Justin exceptionally angry. And... Is your last name seriously Armstrong? It is. It's a good name.

It's a good name. It's a good name. Thank you. Which is funny because the Midland Scots family crest, Alice, is three biceps flexing. Hell yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, basically I'm here to complain and show Justin a bunch of slides that will make him increasingly angry.

Right. Perfect. What you see in front of you is Pennsylvania Station being demolished. I was wondering. It shouldn't be like that. They were going to talk about historic preservation and how sometimes it's good, but other times it's bad. It looks like they're selling for a great Fallout game.

It's fulfilling when. You know, the problem is they don't let you just wander around construction sites or demolition sites. You have to like do it at night when nobody's looking or you have to pay somebody off and then it's dangerous. That's because it's an attractive nuisance. Oh. I asked you about my swimming pool, who incidentally not full of dead kids, damn it.

Before we talk about historic preservation, we need to do the goddamn news. Yeah, we're re-arming and re-equipping your sleep paralysis demon because thanks to climate change, 500 millimetres of rain in Henan province, China overnight over one night in the midst of storms that theoretically should be like one in 5,000 years, but aren't for climate change reasons everywhere fucking flooded, car tunnels flooded, subways flooded. The new nightmare, incidentally, is you may have seen videos of this, you may have seen this in the news, people getting stuck in neck deep water in subway cars in the dark for hours.

This is not good. It's not good. I don't like to think about it. I'm going to admit, I looked at that and I was like, that shouldn't happen. That is not something which generally speaking, it doesn't get that bad that quick, but I guess this time it did. Yeah, it's this new recurring nightmare, Roz. One of the subway stations, I guess the roof collapsed, and they designed the subway in

such a way, as Alice explained to me earlier, that between stations, the track goes down and then back up to assist in reducing energy consumption. Yeah, we're saving the planet. That means at the bottom, if you expect there to be massive flooding, you'll need a gigantic sump, which I guess they don't have. No. I do like, I read the Wall Street Journal's article about this. I do like the woman that they interviewed, a woman named Ms. Lee, who was an engineer,

and as more water flowed into the cars, Ms. Lee, who had been communicating with a friend through the messaging app we chatted, typed out a quick text, screwed. Now, she made it out, but I do like to think that's how I would manage in these situations. It's just like text all my shit. Yeah, blanket group text to all my friends. Yeah, fucked up. Yeah, I'd be looking at there and be like, well, this is a pretty shitty way to go. I don't like this.

His final words, a text that just says, womp. Yeah, blub, blub. Oh, my God. So, yeah, we don't in terms of like, like death tone stuff, we don't know yet. Is that it's that bad? But they they evacuated like 800,000 people, which is about how the population of Philly. Yeah, good. We'll take more of the story.

Live on top of a hill. Live on top of a big, big, big hill. Never go underground. Yes, no, never just never go underground at any time. Never go anywhere where water can like collect or get blocked up or where you can live on top of a big cartoon mountain where the water will just wash off the sides. Get some confined space training and then never use it. My favorite confide confined space thing that you ever told me was

when you said one person never dies in a confined space accident, by which you meant like they kill multiple people. But like I tended to believe I tended to read that as there is one guy who is in every confined space accident and is never killed during it. Yeah, yeah, he's the guy who looks at the confined space accident and he says that's a confined space accident. I'm not going in there. Someone hand me some scuba gear, please.

Well, like Alice, and I like that this is about like this specific story about Hanon province, but, you know, over the last fucking week, there's just been videos everywhere of things that are flooded. Cars, yeah, cars that are driving through cities, but not being driven. We had some in London. We had some in Germany. I saw a video of a Porsche dealership and just like all like, obviously, I'm not making light of the human toll.

But just like brand new 9-11's just like undrivably like out. I was like, ah, well, this is the most efficient allocation of resources. Actually, if you want if you want something to laugh at, there was a news anchor in Germany who got cancelled. I think she might have lost her job over this, actually, because she was doing like a piece to camera in a flooded out village. And unbeknownst to her that she was being filmed, she was like, yeah, I don't look like I'm like in the shit enough.

I'm going to smear some mud on my clothes. I'm just going to like walk over to a puddle and like sort of get it on me. So I look more like fucked up and disheveled. Oh, yeah. Every couple of years, there's a news story that comes out where it's like I'm reporting live from the scenes of historic flooding and then there's somebody like just walking through the shot in the background, even though there's like a canoe and there's like, quote unquote, rescue boats that are just clearly set up as props.

But climate change is extremely real. Oh, yeah. And I think that's the important part. Did you guys have a video of the car driving straight into the flooded out underpass in London? Yes. Yeah, that's that's what we're doing right now. It's pretty cool. You could you could tell it was in London because immediately after the back wheel started to float and the car turned sideways, two distinct people went,

what a fucking dickhead. Yeah. Everybody was screaming. No, they're pro tip. Do not try attempt to drive through floodwater. Do not attempt to walk through floodwater. No, floodwater is full of poop. It's full of poop and it's always much deeper than it looks.

Not because you could die, folks, but because it is full of poop. Although you get sepsis or something. Do not touch the poop. Never touch the poop. Speaking of which, our next news item. I still don't understand what this is. Oh, my gosh, Liam. Oh, no, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I have a text that reads specifically. Hang on one second, please. I said, tell me three tips on how to avoid sunburn. I'm literally going to say it on air tonight because I fucking hate podcast redacted. And Anne-Marie, our manager, said, or consider this, don't openly antagonize other podcasts unnecessarily. Who would we be if we didn't open the antagonize other?

The podcast have started telling their fans that sunscreen is a scam and you shouldn't wear sunscreen, which has led to my favorite Reddit post in existence on the subreddit of, hey, I tried this no sunscreen shit. Literally, I think the phrase was I took the no sunscreen pill and I got a horrible sunburn. So I have some actual sun tips. Where's the sun screen?

Where's sunscreen? If I said their name, Roz Blurred out, please. Quote, if you must seek shade, wear protective clothing, hats and sunglasses and avoid the sunniest parts of the day. Otherwise, wear a sunscreen and reapply every two hours, especially if you're spending all day in the sun. But I cannot emphasize enough how much you shouldn't antagonize a podcast student done by two women and their unhinged fam.

So I want to say that I tried to be noble here and Alice dragged me into the shit. Listen, the thing that I put in the slides for this is that you are not Superman. And as such, you do not derive your power from Earth's yellow sun unless your power is having skin cancer. You should put the sunscreen on your body before you go out in the height of summer, otherwise you will get sunburn and also you will increase your risk of getting skin cancers.

And I'm not sure why we have the beach that makes you old tied into this. Yeah, that was what I was wondering when your skin is damaged. It gets in ages. So that is true. When you're not wearing sunblock, you're going to look more old. Yeah. And I mean, separately, there's all these reports about a beach that turns you old. I don't know anything about the beach that makes you old

as an M Night Shyamalan movie, right? Yeah. If I if I wanted to go to a beach that made me feel older, I would go to any beach. Absolutely. If June and I have been interrupted multiple times while biking by M Night Shyamalan filming in Philly, this is true, to my knowledge, does not have a beach that makes you old. No, this is this is M Night Shyamalan's first movie filmed exclusively outside of the Philadelphia area, believe it or not.

Yeah, so I guess it's important in that respect. Maybe worth a check out. In that case, there must be another another movie coming out soon after about like, I don't know, the row house that makes you old or the hoagie that makes you old. There's a great deal of things that could theoretically make you old. So the beach also makes you young or the beach makes you feel good. So and the hoagie makes you feel good. So anyway.

The hoagie of Dorian Gray. What are you talking about again? We're here to talk about old things which have been made old by a beach. Yeah, it's it's the Long Island Railroad terminal that makes you old. Yes, Penn Station does make you old. I think you age about a year every 30 minutes you're in there.

Well, you know how it's like they say that like being on the London Underground for like an hour is like smoking like a full cigarette. It's like this, right? Like it ages you about as much. Yeah, so that's the thing about historic preservation. Here's an urban landscape and usually the show has. I know I know that usually the show has buildings that aren't there anymore. And we saw a preview of what was there before.

But yeah, there's a lot of buildings that have interesting pasts and have shaped historic preservation into the nightmare monster that it is today. And I think we want to I think Justin and I have been yeah, going on bike rides, getting interrupted by M Night Shyamalan and yelling about historic preservation of each other for a long time. So there's a lot that we want to cover. And I'm not going to spend 45 minutes on one slide. Yes, let's not do that again.

So most importantly, I think there's a question that that we need to ask before we start to cancel historic preservation. What is historic preservation? It's when you preserve stuff from history. Yes. Yes. Liam. Liam's gone. We died.

No, I was sure I was also. We're just doing we're doing the like wait stuff thing where we wait until you have the biggest mouthful of food. And then we ask is everything OK for you? Everything is great. Thanks, ma'am. I if you if you have ever worked a waiting job, I need you to confirm for me that this is like an international conspiracy by you and your colleagues that you like wait behind like a water feature

or like a plant or something waiting until I fork the biggest load of food into my mouth and then you spring out an action now. It's when we take down cool buildings and replace them with bad ones. Bingo, Justin, do you have any? You have any thoughts on this? This is such like a university tutorial thing. We shut up. I can't I can't have the worst

that the second worst episode of the podcast two times in a row. Oh, shut the fuck up. You did great. I read it. Yes. It's it's when the building is still there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like historic preservation, as we have, it is all those things, right? It's like a philosophical framework that guides how we preserve buildings

or don't preserve buildings. But I think the other part that's really more maybe subtle, but just as important is like the the commercial and the financial activities and like the kind of cultural or attitude type things, you know, when when I first started asking this question to my friends just to kind of get like a sense for it. They were like, oh, it's when like you have like an old space like the Pennsylvania State Historic like capital.

And it's like, yeah, but there's all different kinds of things that historic preservation means, but it's kind of centered around this this legal framework that guides kind of everything else. And then there's the question of what it's supposed to do. And I think the real thing that we'll get into is like how actually historic preservation gets practiced or what actually historic preservation looks like in the United States or other places and how it's at odds with like things that we think of as kind of maybe

central to what preserving old buildings should be like. Wait a second. Are you suggesting that there's something like political and like ideological about this? No, never, never. Hontology is when you see a scary ghost. Yes. But anyway. Oh, yeah, if you were some block, you preserve yourself like a historic building. Yeah, I mean, not all that well then.

Not all that well. Yeah, I mean, there's still water intrusion, which really just ruins your protective coats. But, you know, I'm just going to say like when I think about historic preservation or like a future for historic preservation, it's like how do we actually preserve cities in the wake of all the things that are changing them? Like climate change and adverse, you know, building codes that kind of

create these adverse outcomes about what we save with embodied carbon and like, you know, how demolition and construction are such active contributors that let alone like the built environment that creates cars and all these other things. But like I said, historic preservation is really like kind of a legal framework more than anything. And I think we're going to start with that and maybe kind of wind our way. I also put something in here. You know, I think, you know, one of the things which is good about it is you

sort of preserve forms of the built environment, which you can't really build anymore. Right. A lot of really uniquely, I think, enjoyable buildings, sort of urban forms, which we've completely outlawed or otherwise discouraged building, you know, not just through like zoning, but, you know, by way of finance, by way of building codes, we're going to talk about that a bit later. Or even just skills, like finding a guy who like thatches a roof now, as opposed to like 200 years ago, very difficult. Yeah. Roof thatcher is like, probably you get paid the big bucks for that now.

Stick to these Rockstar Thatchers. Rockstar Thatchers, you know, you got to get, you got to pay them extra to make sure cats and dogs don't fall out when it rains. That's all about laws. Yeah. You haven't heard of laws? The law. The law. And I have to say the law.

All right, Alice, you're the legal expert. You can probably read this document. This is this is this is like, all right, all right. So it's essentially like we are we are at the the whims at the mercy of a discredited ideology called legal positivism, which suggests that we can make everything make sense by reducing it to like a series of forms that we fill out, and then those forms will be applied in an impartial and rigorous manner.

And like, we subject, you know, our societies to a sort of series of like norms and values that are like impartial, and we can call that pure law. And that doesn't have any that's very nice. That's very handy because we don't have to think about politics or history or ideology or like racism or anything. You don't think about anything except being good at like these sort of like A and B categorizations. So we apply this to it.

Are you allowed to like make changes to a building? Are you allowed to demolish a building? And what we get is historic preservation with like a capital H, capital P. You either have like a building that is like legally decided formally to be historically important, or you have an area that's decided to be like historically important or like naturally important. And there's it's all done on sort of like a very statutory basis, right?

And this question of like whether something is or is not worth preserving can only be answered in this formal way. And if you suggest that this this kind of like formality has any sort of like deficiencies, any things weighing on it, any ideology happening, then you're wrong and also you're a Marxist. And this is like a sort of one facet of the thing that like American law schools spent the entire 1970s fighting about. Well, congratulations Alex, you are a Marxist.

Yes. No, I literally was because I was interested in what was at the time called critical legal studies, which was about. Oh, I know that I don't know how they missed this when they were talking about critical race theory, but it was genuinely a thing was it was critical critical legal studies or critical legal theory was like you analyze how a legal system works, what it's supposed to do by what it actually does, right? What what its material effects are. And it turns out that if you do that, the answer is you're a Marxist.

Yeah, it's weird how that happens. Yeah, so this is on screen as the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places criteria for designation. So to get put on the list, you have to satisfy one of these things, right? And so this kind of guides the way that we think about historic preservation. You know, there's this kind of misconception also that buildings that are on the National Register of Historic Places, they get some kind of, you know, protection because of this designation that, you know,

like captures them as historic places. But, you know, in reality, this is like the the the consequence of the legal framework, which is tax incentives and tax credits, which are only available to large real estate developers explicitly not available to owner occupied homes. And so you can only really afford those things that like give you good historic preservation outcomes if you have the capital to throw around for. That's that's classic. All right, the system works.

It's just a classic legal positivism is the like Chief Wiggum line about like why I thought you said the law was helpless. Yeah, helpless to like help you, not to punish you. There's only like two sets of levers that we're allowed to do. One is like the sort of like discipline and punish thing of like jailing people, fining people, whatever. The other is, you know, tax rebates. And we don't like the effects of those are very disproportionate

because finding a business is very different to finding a person. You can't imprison a business and also like giving a tax rebate to a person makes less of a difference than it does giving it to a business. So. So you mentioned you mentioned that that former kind of vision of historic preservation, where things are done punitively. What we're looking at is where that happens. So as much as I love to save a building, we got to talk about

how historic preservation actually looks when it's applied to people who own buildings, including, you know, owner-occupied homes who've been there for 50 or 60 years or inherited it from their parents or grandparents. Are we doing critical architecture theory right now? God, I hope. Oh, cat. Meow.

It spells cat. Oh, so it's good enough for Rick. Yeah, that's it's cute. And also and also we will be taking your children and sending them to architecture reassignment camps. That's right. It's going to be so much fun. Yeah. Transitioning from Gothic to Romanesque.

Yeah. I like to think of myself as a femboy brutalist. Femboy brutalism, the new hottest accounts of Twitter. Wait until Frank, the Frank Furness banks are introduced later in this presentation. But so basically, my favorite structural elements are arch and rusticated stone. Say no more, daddy.

We love a brick. God, we sure did. That was just for me, wasn't it? Yeah, I thought I thought Justin would get a big laugh out of that. But I guess that is just for you, Alice. Well, I'm wet. So. Yeah, so so the Philadelphia register, like your local

register is your is essentially then your homeowner's association, right? It's the group of people who look at your project or your proposed building modification and they say it's either historic or not historic based on X, Y and Z. And so this adds a whole layer of whatever you want to call it, a whole layer of gum in the works. And it's really, you know, again, it's one of these things where like if we had a functioning system,

you would have a fully, you know, a fully employed historic preservation department in your local city that gives you explicit advice, puts you in touch with contractors who are good, can actually do the work to maintain a historic property, because that's kind of the other consideration through this, what actually gets done in a quote unquote historic way and what that looks like. You know, you can make a lot of things look historic and they don't necessarily make the building look good.

Or they'll destroy the building after a while. So yeah, I mean, it's just this sense of like the guidance on the local level and how that's applied is also really arbitrary specific. And you can always just not tell them and do a repair and hope nobody notices. So, you know, it falls prey to all the all the other classic, you know, property related capital issues where, you know, you have historic properties that are well maintained and very expensive. And they're in historic districts that maintain that kind of wealth.

And then you have places that are dilapidated or they're on the register, but nobody's maintaining them and there's no process for maintaining them. So they fall apart and then you can knock them down and then you can put up a really nice looking new high rise, which will also talk. Sweet. Hi, I'm the University of Pennsylvania. And also I'm Temple University. And you may remember me from such demolition sites as 4054. Chestnut, you sons of bitches.

4052. Oh, didn't they demo 4054? No, they demoed 4050. Oh, thank you. You know, 4048 or next slide, please. Next slide. OK. We've got to go back to where everything started. We must return. We must return to St. Peter's. Everyone's a conservationist until you get the bill.

Yes. All right. I think we've talked about this on a couple of bonus episodes, actually. We talked about it on Cathedral. We've talked about it on Protestantism, I think. Yes. The most important engineering report in history. Leon Batista Alberti was commissioned by, I believe, Pope Julius II in the 15th century to ascertain the condition of old St. Peter's,

which had been somewhat neglected during the Avignon Papacy. And even before the Avignon Papacy was still looking not great, right? So so Leon Batista Alberti took took a look, did some surveys of the interior. And he was like, I have noticed in the Basilica of St. Peter's in Rome, a crass feature, an extremely long and high wall has been constructed over a continuous series of openings with no curves to give it strength and no buttresses to lend it support.

That whole wall has been pierced by too many openings and built too high. As a result, the continual force of the wind has already displaced the wall more than six feet from the vertical. I have no doubt that eventually some slight movement will make it collapse. In other words, the building was fucked. So Julius II wanted to save the building and they got sticker shock when he saw the estimates. And they was like, well,

oh, lesson. Yeah. Now, you know, I had a good run time to build a new one. Yeah, the most important church in Christendom. Yes. So they demolished the most ancient and significant building in Christendom and a new campaign of fundraising through indulgences was undertaken, which, of course, resulted in Protestantism, right? More.

Well, you see, the problem would you like to know more? This is a bit of the notes I didn't finish, but I'm going to give you the gist of what I was about to talk about. One of the one of the issues was getting a good supply of marble for the new church, right? And, you know, early in the church in the construction of St. Peter's, the solution was, all right, we're going to start disassembling the Colosseum, right?

I just take a little off the top. Yeah, a little off the top. Yeah. And we're going to start using, I think I think it was like the big pieces of Tufa for the foundations. Eventually, the support part of any building. Yeah, exactly. You know, they started going after the marble using that. And this, too, represents represents an approach to historic preservation,

which is deliberately not doing it when the thing is like religiously offensive to you, you know, like paganism, whatever, will just demolish the whole thing. Right. Well, the series of pulps, they're at the construction of St. Peter's, I believe, up until what's his face? Sixth is the fifth, I want to say. They were really divided on how to handle the pagan monument question. Well, it's different for Catholics, because not least the Colosseum is a site of martyrdom.

Yes. That's a very good point. Everybody who got killed in there for being a Christian is collectively a martyr. So there's some debate about whether you should like preserve that. Compare and contrast to another great example of like ransacking pagan architecture, the pyramids used to build much of medieval Cairo because, you know, it's it's not coming back. Who gives a shit exactly?

It's a pagan funerary monument to a guy whose type of monarchy is specifically referenced in the Quran as a byword for excess. Nobody's going to give a shit if I take a couple of slabs off of his giant like obelisk thing and use them to build my house. I did see something funny that was a picture of the back of the Sphinx and it said Sphinxster. Very good. That's my contribution to this episode.

See you guys on the other side. Over the next series of popes, there were some popes who, you know, passed edicts for the preservation of ancient Roman monuments, sort of controlling the quarrying of marble from various ones. Was that also done for, like, economic reasons, just to fuck other people over? So the competition. Yeah, I would imagine so. Like, you have to understand from that day to this,

but especially then construction, the biggest series of scams in the world. Like every guy who, like, procures anything is engaged in a Byzantine series of side hustles for every single element of it. Well, I think towards towards the middle to the late sixteenth century, there was a gradual realization, especially what with, you know, the Renaissance really underway or really even starting to Peter out. That Peter out. These ancient Roman monuments are attracting a lot of tourists here.

A lot of posh English people are doing the grand tour. Yeah, we should probably probably keep these around. This is some of the first sort of inadvertently appreciating the aesthetics of a half of a Roman building. We've half disassembled inadvertently creating the theory of ruin value, which is going to lead to the development of fascism. Not great. Yes. Not great.

This is some of the earliest historic preservation, I guess, is preservation of ancient monuments in Rome and, you know, other other especially ancient Roman monuments like that, right? You're you know, I there's there's one saying that people throw around every once in a while, which is, you know, historic preservation is a historic, which I guess is true of anything. The holy nor Roman nor an empire. Yeah, but it really is.

It is certainly congruent with the modern period, I would say. Sure. Yeah. And there's like, yeah, the the the ruin porn thing, like you see the those incredible woodcuts of by Piranesi of the monuments where all the people are rendered really, really tiny so that the monuments look even scarier and more overbearing, but beautiful and like, you know, complex and all those things. And I think it's really interesting to think about the cycle

where the old building gets torn down and then there's this kind of appreciation for the for the historic in some sense of the word that kind of then creates, you know, whatever you want to call it, if it's the Roman monuments, it's the Roman Monument Historic District, right? Yeah. And that's always this kind of like ongoing, ongoing thing. Yeah, there's meanwhile, there's some angry Italian church contractor raising his fist at the Coliseum. What do you mean? I can't use the marble.

Now, some of your more modern theories about historic preservation, I think, are exemplified in the early 1800s and sort of a contrast between Eugene Violette Ladouk versus John Ruskin. Right. Oh, John Ruskin, famously terrified of pubic hair. It's amazing. This is not a true story. It is something that was made up to make fun of him. But I do appreciate it, which is that like John Ruskin spent his entire life looking at like stature in like, you know, sort of Greco-Roman forms,

but like in the belief that like they were as they were preserved in the 1800s, which is to say no color and like no, you know, very austere. And the story is that he on his wedding night was repulsed and terrified to find out that his wife, unlike any depiction of a woman he had ever seen before, had pubic hair. Yeah. I thought it was called public hair. Yeah, he thought there was going to be a leaf down there, too. No, even I believe that's called pulling an ashcroft.

Yeah. Well, I, you know, I studied Greek and Hellenistic sculpture back in Art History College. And it's really weird because the the the sculptures from those times that are passed down, the the men have dicks and pubic hair and the women have nothing resembling actual sex workings. Tiny, tiny, tiny little dicks, though. Infibrillated dicks.

You like tie your dick off to one side with a little cord so it doesn't flop around. That's for that's for that. Athletes. That's that's that's important for, you know. Jesus Christ, just wear a cup. All right. By the early Victorian period, there's a lot of building going on, right? And there's some schools of thought which develop about what to do

with particularly old buildings, right? A lot of people are thinking big things about this. But two of the schools of thought were restoration. Versus conservation, right? And that is Eugene Violette Ladouk and John Ruskin. Respectively, right? So Violette Ladouk was an architect, right? He's most famous for the restoration of Notre Dame

and the restoration of Saint-Chapelle in Paris, right? Which looks fucking great. It looks great. It's so good. It's really good. It's also entirely a Victorian fabrication. Yes, yes. It is. It's fantasy. Yes. It is. It has, I mean, you know, he took some of the original Gothic vaulting.

He covered it in like gold leaf. Yes, this fantastic wallpaper up here. A lot of the stained glass is new. A lot of the gilding is new. Yeah, the thing is the thing is I'm a hypocrite, right? Because I love Saint-Chapelle a lot. But I have contempt for Neuschwanstein, which is the same thing of I'm going to build what I imagine in my sort of romantic flights of fancy

middle ages to have been like, and I'm just going to like live in that. And it's going to be wonderful. And I don't know why I like one and not the other. I I think it's probably because this is better executed. It might be it. Yeah. Yeah, there's there's stuff in the seven lamps that's like John Ruskin kind of like contradicting himself just to justify good looking buildings.

Like like we don't think of marble as a dishonest material, but it's only every use is facing cladding because it's evocative in the right way, you know. The yeah. And the you know, so another one, a Le Duc's restorations was Notre Dame, which had been, you know, busted up the hell in the French Revolution. That's been on store.

Yeah. And that's going to that's going to be important in a second. It's sort of a contrast to Ruskin, right? So, you know, if you're Le Duc style, a restoration is like you look at an old broken up building, you know, that may be hundreds of years old and you say, look, we can rebuild her, we have the technology, right? You know, you're making you're taking an old building

and making it into something that is really new, right? Often in the style of the original, but with very thoroughly modern means and methods, right? Which raises the question of to what extent its builders in the first place anticipated aging and like ruin and patina and stuff like that. If that's if that's important to you, particularly on a religious building, if you can then be like, oh, they made this to,

for instance, glorify Christ, right? And therefore they made it as nice as they could. So I therefore share a sort of religious duty to to restore it to that that sort of like that effect. That's very different from like, are they expected it to get old? They expected it to fall into ruin. And what we should do is like maintain that kind of austerity. Yeah. And, you know, I generally,

I think I agree with the Le Duc methods more than Ruskin. Now, as we found out, Ruskin's a lot of Ruskin stuff is based on misinterpretation. Like, I hate to keep going back to to statuary here. But like fucking true part of the reason why this like Ruskin was really, really taken with like pure white in every sense of that, by the way, but like, especially in like marble in like statuary and as we have now discovered

all of the statues, which he admired so much, were very heavily, luridly even painted. And you go back and look at reconstructions of these based and I mean reconstruction in the like the chemical sense rather than the like fanciful sense of the like we have extracted what pigments remain from this and we've applied them back on to see what it would have looked like. And the answer is that should look like Disneyland.

The Acropolis would have been like this absolute riot of color. But like what survived was was bare marble. And that's what Ruskin was very was very taken with. Yeah. And you can even go to the I think it's the Athens Archaeological Museum and you can see those. You can see original marble sculptures and still have some of that pigment on it. And yeah, it's all it's it's all basic pigment, right?

It's vibrant reds and yellows and blues, not colors that really look kind of necessarily quote unquote true to life. And it's a total misconception that gets carried on. And you know, like all those buildings had graffiti on them, too, from people who are just like I was here. A lot of dick jokes. Yeah. And the like the viewer effect, too, of like Ruskin always working by like by gaslight, right?

And instead and like talking about pieces of statuary who's who's like form should have been understood as being seen in like heavy daylight from overhead or torchlight. And like I really feel like that makes a difference, too. And like having these sort of like these wide expanses of like white space and this sort of like unbroken white space and just like purity of form or whatever is not the way that these things were intended to be to be consumed. But that almost doesn't matter because both like instead of preserving these things

and in creating new art, people like Ruskin and his contemporaries sort of created this new form of art from it anyway. That's also important. Yeah. Did Ruskin ever actually make a building? I don't think so. I think he was an art historian most of all. I don't think so either. Yeah, I think maybe one thing that I can't remember off the top. I think he did architecture criticism, but no, actual architecture.

Every other strike is a critic, but this this goes back to the same thing where it's like the creation of, you know, Ruskin and VLA Laduke, both having these complicated feelings about what to do with old buildings that essentially boiled down to well, it's going to do. I'm going to do the shit that I like really then underscores the way that we think about historic preservation. Right. Ultimately, it just is kind of arbitrary since a set of things it's like, well, we're going to preserve these buildings

because we feel like it and we'll justify the reasons as we go. And I think that there's some really interesting things that end up happening with that. Yeah. Well, one thing you wrote, you know, sort of summarizes opinion in the seven lamps of architecture, neither by the public nor by those who have the care of public monuments is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. Is it means the most total destruction which a building can suffer, destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered,

a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter. It is impossible, as impossible as it is to raise the dead to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. And the thing is, I think he's right. Like you can't jump in the same river twice. Like any time you try and like restore anything, you you are bringing your own your own prejudice as your own point of view,

your own even just like the light which you used to see it, both literally and metaphorically, though those are going to affect what you get out of it. But like the stupid thing here is that he fails. Well, Ruskin fails to consider same thing is true of preservation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you, you know, I feel like his, you know, his idea of conservation is you really have to let the age of the building show

and be honest about his history, whatever that means, and not try and return it to some fanciful idea of its historical appearance. Right. He did not like Laduk's stuff, you know, which. Jesus. I mean, like then this was lessons out. That's right. This comes up time and time again with adaptive reuse, right? Like is is the adaptive reuse of a building good?

If the rent goes from $300 to $500, you know, is it adaptive reuse if the building gets a new roof put on it and all of the historic ornament gets removed? But the congregation of working class people, you know, gets to stay in their building. Are they reusing it or what? It's impossible to say. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one of the things is in our marketplace of ideas. Yes.

Ruskin, I think, won. Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Very, very much one out and a lot of historic preservation, you know, regulations are sort of ordered around Ruskinite practices of conservation, which I think is a big problem considering what kind of buildings we try to preserve. The Victorians and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Amen, sister. Next slide, please.

So the way that the way that this ends up happening in the United States are, yeah, exactly fucking goddamn John Ruskin, who's never seen pubic hair before in his life and got really grossed out by women. It fucking makes all the rules about historic preservation. And this comes out in two main building projects that really become foundational for what like the preservation movement is built on. And it's Mount Vernon, which is the former plantation house of George Washington. In 1858, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association takes it up

and it's started by a South Carolina socialite. Basically, is this way to get, you know, get this pet project done of restoring the grandeur and the beauty of this historic estate where George Washington fucked around or whatever. Well, at one point, America's largest whiskey distiller. Yeah, where where where George Washington's captive like enslaved people. Yes, yes, which, again, speaks to the land of contrasts that is historic preservation. And separately, the other the other one that is going to come up a couple

times is Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia. Carpenter's Hall in 1857 goes from being a auction house, just a place where like they were they were auctioning off what whatever the fuck came in through the door to whoever the fuck was there. They they say, OK, we're done with this activity here. We're going to shut it down and we're going to make a room that honors the First Continental Congress that met here and is a shrine to the National Founding Historic Moment.

It's very interesting you say shrine as this kind of like because you're totally right. It's this this sort of like pre-civil war moments of like very nearly veering into a sort of imperial cult of Washington, which is great, wild stuff. So if you're religion, man, that's those buildings. Yeah, both of these buildings are our shrines, right? Both of these buildings are completely kind of maintained as these

these, you know, jewel box objects, right? There are places where there's a fictive kind of history that's that's built there, right? Mount Vernon didn't used to look like that. It was falling down. Carpenter's Hall has this beautiful interior that has this some, you know, Pennsylvania blue marble fireplace or like four of them, all these tiles. But it's not it's not a 17 hundreds room.

The 17 hundreds room was like this wooden board, just regular ass place where you could have a low key meeting and do some revolutionary organizing. Listen to drinking, too. Yeah, so that's actually. So what's actually there is not what what was there and it doesn't speak to that history of it, but it creates this kind of founding vision or at least this nice story

that we get to tell exactly. And so my my my difficult question here, then is sort of knowing the answer already is if these if these things are a historical, if they have been re rebuilt in this style, why are we talking about John Ruskin? Why does that owe that to him and not Violet Leduc? So what happens in both of these buildings is a creation of that space that is this kind of shining single monument.

What what Violet Leduc would have approached both of these buildings with? And Justin, I'd be interested to hear what your take is because I'm kind of fucking spitballing here. It's like I think the main reason why we went from Ruskin directly to these buildings is because we only finished arranging the slides about five minutes before we record it. No, I I I do have an answer to why do you think, Alice? Yeah, I think the buildings were too new

for anyone to care about preserving the interiors. Yeah, it's it's a combination of that. But it's it's also like I think it's a simple piece of hypocrisy, right? Or I think the point of like Violet Leduc's sort of restoration thing is you fully like commit to this is a flight of fancy. I am like attempting to like reelevate this to the position which I imagine it was like, whereas this is much more much more ideological and I would argue much more Ruskinite

in the sense that it's like, no, this is what it was like. We are retroactively deciding for future generations that this is what it was like. It's not it's not a fantasy. It's just revisionism is my answer. Right. And I think also with that. Yeah, it's not even about construction techniques. It's about that idea of we are going to.

Yeah, we are going to create monuments. We aren't going to reuse these buildings as with with with the modern sense of them in mind. We are using these buildings to preserve the past, you know. And I think that that's a really important shift because then you don't have any room for. Well, we have this row of old buildings with all this embodied carbon in them.

What do we do with them? Yeah, you know, and also crucially, like when we're talking about like embodying history, this isn't like embodying our imagined romantic view of history. This is as a sort of an ideological project to preserve, you know, this idea of like burgeoning American empire and of white supremacy. All of this is right.

Yeah, it's absolutely important that you do you say all of that with your chest and you believe wholeheartedly not that this is like a vision of history. This is history. This is right. This is the only kind that is allowed from now on. And when you read history books that are written around this time, they're exactly that.

There's there's there's all it's all revisionism. It's about telling a story that sounds good. And it really is about positioning these buildings as as the exact same way. And this is this is my Ruskin thing, the exact same way as Ruskin and the the other the Victorians thought of antiquity. It's exactly the thing that gets us decline and fall of Rome. It's exactly the kind of thing that if you think of like a Roman, you are more likely to imagine a guy with an English accent

than an Italian one. It's because you have these these retrospective propaganda projects of various slave empires going back to the past and looking for other slaveholding empires to be like, yeah, we're just like them. And their glory is our glory and their austerity is our austerity. And therefore, we are the natural inheritors of their thing. Yeah. And I think to that point, really, you know, thinking about what these buildings kind of represent

or the kind of future, you know, the preservation projects that kind of follow in the footsteps, right? These these projects then end up kind of in two major buckets. They're either the Mount Vernon Ladies Association that creates the historic house museum to, you know, alter, modify and establish somebody's legacy as maybe something that it isn't or tell a specific story. Or it's the thing where, you know, George Washington fucked around here

and it's it's now the kind of place where we want to preserve it forever. And so and so there's a kind of federal monument making or the, you know, the kind of monument making in the sense of the real shrine. And then there's the monument making in the sense of like this kind of private endeavor by a small group of wealthy people to make themselves feel better about, you know, kind of the state of the world or the built environment that they live in. And I think that that's a really important consideration

because a lot of resources go into the care, maintenance and, you know, ongoing upkeep of these buildings, which, again, is one of these things that has been professionalized to an extremely high degree in historic preservation so that people have to go to school and make, you know, have have marketable skills and then also have to do science and all these other things to correctly identify problems in buildings. But, you know, ultimately, this is about learning

how buildings used to be built and rebuilding them. So, yeah, I think that I think that thinking about historic preservation in these kind of two ways really ends up being, I don't know, maybe. Can we describe it perhaps as a a dialectic? Oh, there's more dialectic. We have like a thesis of preservation, a an antithesis of reconstruction and a synthesis, perhaps,

of some kind of like reconstruction that is less imaginative because it harkens back to a single claimed history. Just a thought. I believe the synthesis is increasing property values, but that's my section. Yeah, I mostly just look at old buildings. That's cool. I mostly just look at things that smart people say

and then go, that's a thing. That's a different thing. That's a third thing. That's a fucking dialectic, baby. That's right. No, next slide. Next slide. Oh, boy, so here's the bad one. Here's the it gets worse.

It only gets worse from here, folks. So Independence Mall is a place where a lot of this plays out in the 1940s. You know, there's this effort underway to totally fuck up this place that is basically just the front yard for one or two or three buildings. Totally clear cutting the land around it to, again,

create this fictive vision of a clear and empty city of Philadelphia, where, you know, independence radiates from all corners. The which at least at least Washington would have loved. Because like all of these guys love that sort of like Masonic allegorical architecture shit. They would have loved this shit. Right. And I mean, Washington, D.C. is based on that.

And, you know, it's it's one of these things where, like, you know, in the mid century, all of this stuff starts to rear its ugly head in a variety of different ways. And yeah, it's really this kind of, again, fictive vision of what what this place looked like, how it functioned, where what kind of buildings were there. And so a whole portion of the city

was just clear cut demolished as the same view up here. You know, Independence Hall and and, you know, it's not like there was ever actually a big green field in front of the in front of Independence Hall. And what still we decided there should be one there. We should have a national mall, too. There's some interesting choices about what buildings got rebuilt and which ones didn't.

But I think we'll get to that later. Yeah. And I think that if you, you know, these these pictures are really like kind of striking just because it shows a before and after. But if you go to the next slide, this is in progress, right? And you just see how there there is a parking lot. They just they turned it into a parking lot.

And you see this whole huge, you know, industrial part of the city and the buildings that are there, these 1860s, either adaptive reuse projects or large banking buildings that are no longer have the same kind of grandeur they may have had in the 1880s and 90s because the central business district moved closer to City Hall. And there's a bunch of other factors, you know,

especially around redlining and racism, but showing just just seeing seeing what this how much damage occurred, you know, seeing seeing the built environment before this where, you know, they talk about these cramped and crowded conditions the way that we always talk about, you know, quote, unquote, urban canyons and then you see places that are like fucking, you know, completely intact 1860s blocks

and they've got narrow, dense streets and they're beautiful. You know, it just depends on where you're at. They look wonderful. I mean, I'm sure they had some, you know, this was this. They started taking these buildings down like what though, forties, right? Yeah, the legislation got passed in the forties. So you probably still had some issues in these buildings, like bad plumbing, maybe no plumbing, plumbing, maybe electricity was spotty or non existent.

I mean, you know, but these are all issues that I think. I mean, we eventually addressed to a large extent unsanitary conditions in cities, you know, not too long afterwards. I mean, for a long time, there were a lot of old buildings that were genuinely just shit, right? And then and then eventually everything got retrofitted with the necessities for life or most of everything, at least. Well, I think even only, I think up until like two or three years ago,

the first bank of the United States didn't have an HVAC system or a fire suppression system. So this is like an ongoing thing, right? Where it's like, what the fuck do we restore? How the fuck do we restore it? And then you see you see places like this that are full of buildings that all have their own stories. And yeah, I'm sure that some of them had maintenance problems,

but those maintenance maintenance problems are inherently fixable. And it's a question of how you do it and why you do it and what you choose to do it on. And if you go, I think so, we're talking. So talking about Carpenter's Hall or just circling back to that, you know, again, there's this misconception that these these fictive environments for, you know, Independence Mall were essentially what it used to look like, you know, these green fields, these open spaces.

In Carpenter's Hall, it actually becomes really curious, right? Because the space that is there is actually within a number of alleyways. And the decision to pick Carpenter's Hall as the place to do some up to no good stuff was intentional based on the fact that you could kind of be discreet about coming in and out. And it was in this denser open environment. When you go to the next slide, you see. Yeah, you see what you see what we have lost in the making of the grass lot

around around Carpenter's Hall that was fictive. You can see it on the left. You can see that the building at the far end of the perspective. You know, they have Carpenter's Hall focused on this otherwise incredible picture of the guarantee, right? I can't read the slide. Guaranteed trust and safe deposit company. Yeah, somebody who gave their their architect one word brief and the brief was pointy.

Yes. Yeah. And Liam, you talk about Femboy brutalism, like here you go. My body is running. These Frank Furness banks are just these incredibly muscular forms with all of these ornamental floral decorations, and they were it's not even that they weren't considered historic at the time or worth saving. You know, one of the main building architects of the main architects of the project, Charles Peterson, kept petitioning people above him to be like,

hey, we really need to save guarantee. We really need to save these Frank Furness banks. They're so beautiful. They're so different. They're so interesting, and they're really, really important buildings. And every time they got the no, because it's not part of the 1970 or the 1776 fictive vision of Independence Mall. But these buildings are incredible, you know, doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter. Get they get swept up by this wave of reaction, whether that's pre civil war. George Washington as like Augustus, whether it's like, in this case, early Cold War, we've got to have an alternative to communism or as as we'll see later on, the sort of 1920s lost cause Confederate thing. Yes. Yeah. And you know, there's a lot of his moralizing that happens here, where like

in the 1950s and 60s, Victorian Gothic buildings become like kind of self evident depictions of like kind of the overbearing and scary cityscape that's that's that's hulking and massing, you know. And that's also, you know, kind of a conversation about how aesthetics change and how that shapes historic preservation. But again, like, you know, it's not that architects didn't know about these buildings, it's not that architects didn't want these buildings to be saved or that there wasn't, you know, kind of internal pressures to do it.

It's that we made a conscious decision to do something. Yes. Speaking of overbearing. Yeah. And so shout out to Professor Mike Lewis, right? This is the Provident Life and Trust, which is the best Frank Furnace bank. It's got this kind of polychrome element, but where it's all still executed in this gray on the right is a color picture of the interior that's all, you know, washed

out, but, you know, you can see the bank vault on the inside. You can see all of the different details and things. You know, this whole building just has so much lush ornament, you know, kind of applied to it and then it has this huge form. And this building that says, do not rob me. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And it's really the thing where it's like, oh, I can put my money in here and

nobody's nobody's fucking getting in, you know. And like you see on the left what it looked like in the center is a picture from the 19 teens of what it looked like at the middle of its life at the at the end of its life by the 1960s. It was on the left. Just this totally not cared for at all, hulking, dark, covered massive ability. I love that game. Power wash simulator looking forward to this deal.

Oh, hell yeah. Justin, you got to model this building so we can put in power wash simulator. I don't think I can do it with that much detail. So yeah, I mean, the Providence is just like an incredible example of like the exact kind of building that we should save, right? It's a historic banking hall. This kind of form no longer exists in the way that we have it. You know, there's so many things about this building that are completely

unique, one off, totally worthy of saving, but it was just in the way of the wrecking ball. Yeah, this is the thing. I don't like it, but I don't like it in ways that interest me, which is a good reason to like, it reminds me of like Hawksmore churches, the sense that they're sort of going to topple over on you. I find that a really like hostile confrontational piece of architecture, which is exactly why I think it's worth documenting.

I think this should be the fucking museum of capitalism, you know? Yes, I like it. Well, anyway, when we run Justin for mayor, the platform is going to be rebuild the profit and rebuild this as a museum. There's a warning from history about capitalism, the capitalists built buildings like this because of how afraid they were that they were going to lose their ill-gotten gains. Exactly.

So we should probably run through the next couple real quick. This is just a couple more fuck ups from Independence Mall and the surrounding environs. Don't don't feel time pressured. People have been in the comments have been like, oh, only a two hour episode. It's kind of short. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, exactly.

So this is my this is the one that I hate the most. This is the Graf House, the the building where Thomas Jefferson wrote the drafts of the Declaration of Independence. My candlelight laid into the evenings on the second floor. I don't know if you can really see it in the photograph on the fire on the image on. Yeah, it's a photograph on the far left, but it's there's that awning over that second floor that says the birthplace of liberty. And that's how the Graf House looked in the time

before they knocked it down because it had been old and dilapidated. And it was the mid 19th century. So it was just an old building. You know, it hadn't retained any of the historic form from when Thomas Jefferson was there. And honestly, you know, what we see on the or what we see on the left is left and right are confused. But what we see on the left is the what it looks like today.

And from the night it was rebuilt in the 1970s. So, you know, this is a building that in really was a real. I really hate this, I'm sorry. This is this is like the worst way to commemorate a historic event. They made a fake 1770s house. They don't have a picture of it that looks like that. If you look at the roof on the left, it doesn't look anything like the prints that we have from Thomas Jefferson's time in the center.

And it doesn't look like anything that it did in the in the middle of the 19th century before it got knocked down, where at least it still has some kind of memorial to it on the outside. So you know where this event happened. It's a little bit off of Independence Mall. It's a different kind of location. And, you know, honestly, it doesn't really fit in with the surrounding environment, because that was the 19th century, you know, fashion

and department store district. It would be very strange to build a gable this tall. Yes, you sort of like lose control of the slider or the protractor. Yes, exactly. And so, yeah, so this is built based on pattern books of maybe what this should have looked like or whatever. And they did a really careful job of refinishing the interior to make it look like something that would have existed in Thomas Jefferson's day.

And it does nothing really to commemorate the actual declaration of independence for whatever the fuck that's worth. You know, you know what it reminds me of country? It reminds me of the expense, the most expensive house, like the one on the hill, the one that you couldn't afford in the Sims. Yeah. So so this is this is this makes me mad because what they here's here's what they did to my boy.

This is the Penn National Bank, which after the graph house was demolished, this was turned into a Frank Furnace bank. That's probably the best one, in my opinion. And definitely the most interesting story about historic preservation. Right. So what what this is, is a city bank that looks like a city building that looks like the mid 19th century architecture that's interesting and diverse and creative and eclectic. And takes all these different forms and has this banking hall

that no longer, you know, is a is a form that we have. And to commemorate this idea of the Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence on the second floor, Frank Furnace incorporates these Palladian windows as the as the giant ones that overlook the banking hall. And so that those are those second floor windows with Thomas Jefferson looks down upon capital and I am waggling my eyebrows in a communist fashion until I am forced to stop.

Right. Until we're forced to cancel Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was very big on Palladio. But but exactly. Thomas Jefferson was really big on Palladio and he designed a Palladian house of Monticello that's Monticello. And this idea that this is a place where, like, you know, kind of independence radiates through these, you know, these these kind of lines in the in the second floor really kind of feels like a more palpable monument.

And then, you know, you look back at the graph house and it's like, oh, after this building got old and got knocked down, we decided not to rebuild this real monument, but we decided and not we didn't decide to take care of it. We decided to just rebuild a house that nobody can live in and create this fake historic site. So I think this this one really feels like instructive about the kind of fervor of of monument myth making in the 17th century in the 1970s

that really mimics, you know, that kind of 1860s stuff that's going on with Carpenter's Hall. And so it really it pisses me off. And then real quickly, there's also Society Hill just more broadly. You know, you think about these things that are historic fictives and and things that aren't really real in the way that you think they are, but they have the Disney effect cobblestones. Are you going to talk about cobblestones, Liam?

If they're Liam, if they're square shaped stones, they are Belgian blocks blocks. I don't give a shit. We have a small number of cobblestone streets and they're all made and they're all fake and they're all an independent small. I fucking hate that. That is my least favorite thing about not literally my least favorite thing about this city, but it turns out like, oh, you know, the cute cobblestone

horses would have gotten their who's caught. Oh, I mean, like we can talk about the benefits of Belgian blocks as a traffic calming measure all we want, but there should be some kind of I don't give a shit with society. I don't give a shit what Society Hill wants. Exactly. Sorry, Society Hill. Not maintained adequately. More like we live in a society.

Hell, thank you. Yes. Wow. Thank you. So, yeah, contribution that I did. So so here's here's how Society Hill got done. And this slide is copied from a presentation by Francesca M. And so I have to give credit or else I'll get expelled. Or that's a bad joke.

Sorry, I'm taking a break from grad school right now. But this is this is a real place in Society Hill that went from being a mixed use, multi-family apartment building in a dense neighborhood of mixed use, multi-family apartment buildings to incentivized by the federal government to become a single family house that looked the way that it did in 1860, not the way that it did when it was standing, you know. And this building here is really good.

This building on the left and the building one in is also really good. And again, look what they did to my boy. Like they just took that whole incredible bay window and that whole mansard roof with that. What is it? Yeah, the whole shirt. They're called jerkin head gables, I think. Great name. Yeah.

Who says architecture can't be fun. Architecture is fun. Jerk, Vander, Clark and Gable. Yeah. So just like this is this is what this is how Society Hill, which is like this quaint neighborhood of 1770s historic architecture that's very quiet at night. It's very weird to walk through. Got built, which was there was a there was a program to de-densify it.

And that's what the Society Hill renovation thing is. And so many buildings didn't look like what they ended up as. And they got turned into these fictions. I like how they couldn't even bother to look back and see where the door originally was on the building. Oh, yeah, it's it's just like it's just like, yeah, you got to make it. You got to make it not a commercial storefront. You got to make it a single family home

and you can use the design guidelines, you know. Right, there's a whole row of windows all along the side there that aren't there in 1860. It's great. We did it, you know. And we and so Society Hill is it goes back and forth with Rittenhouse for the most expensive neighborhood in Philadelphia. And this was all the act of this, you know,

kind of single family de-densification, displacing all of the black and brown people who lived here, you know, totally depopulating the neighborhood and making it attractive for wealthy white suburbanites to move back into the city. And this is the outcome that that that they wanted in Society Hill. And this is the outcome that they have. Unless you got anything, we can go on to the real fuck you.

The big kahuna. Pennsylvania Station in New York City, I think is the root of a lot of the modern preservation movement, because I feel like or what historic preservation is today. I think that Society Hill kind of happens simultaneously, but that sort of tradition or method of implementing historic preservation doesn't become the mainstream, right?

Yeah. It's an exception. Yeah. So what we have here is is sort of so Pennsylvania Station was the main railroad station in New York City. Pennsylvania Railroad built it in the early 1900s, 19. I think they finished it in like 1909, 1910, something like that. You know, so this is 1909, a grand, you know, Bozar public space.

You know, it's built by McKinney and White famous architecture firm. It's beautiful. That does all of the Bozar buildings. You know, and this was, you know, this is this is one of those public spaces that, you know, it was really it was a special place, right? And it was a public space. That is that is an important part of it, right? Yeah.

So in the 1960s, during the really low, low point of the Penn Central Railroad Company, they decided they needed to demolish this in order to in order to maximize the value of the real estate, right? Yeah. And, you know, so this is today where Madison Square Garden is. And of course, they've replaced the terminal with an underground, you know, shitty rail road terminal place on earth.

Yeah, it was a huge, huge. What's the word reduction in the quality of the spaces you pass through on the way to the train, right? It was, you know, and this is this is something that was done with basically no input by the public or anything. And you're you're tearing down, you know, one of the public have to do with public spaces anyway. Well, you know, it's it's one of those privatized public spaces

when you think about it. Well, yeah. And I think what I learned when I was doing more research about it for the podcast or what most struck me was that the people who were building Madison Square Garden posed it as this kind of thing where it's like, look, we're demolishing Penn Station. It's like 50 or 60 years old. It's time to get a new building in here. And in 50 or 60 years when we tear down Madison Square Garden,

there's going to be a beautiful new building. Well, in fact, the way it was brought back is going to be one of their they said there'll be a huge outcry when Madison Square Garden has to come down. I don't I don't really know that that I don't think that would happen, right? Just because you are they were tearing down a public space that, you know, tens of thousands of people used every day so that people could go see next games slightly more conveniently. No, it's it's it's horrible.

And like, you know, you talk about the circulation, right? Like this building has the the patterns of circulation that are laid out based on like, you know, Roman baths where you go through all these different grand, elaborate kinds of classical spaces. You have the same platform circulation problems that the current station has. I will say that. All right. Well, that's for another episode. I love to get in the Coldarium before I get on my train.

Yeah, you got to get hot and then cold and then hot again. And then you get on the train and you sweat it all off. So this station was this this this was demolished, right? And it sort of provoked a reaction which really didn't reach fruition until Penn Central Transportation Company tried to do it again with Grand Central, right? Which led to a sort of landmark Supreme Court case, which was Penn Central Transportation Company versus City of New York.

They wanted to first and foremost, they wanted to build a large office tower above the station, which would have destroyed the interior. And this case, you know, the Penn Central tried to test the city's ability to regulate the appearance of interior spaces. The Supreme Court said the city had the authority to regulate that space because it was if I recall correctly, it did not constitute a taking because they were not interfering with the railroad's ability to use the building for its intended purpose, which was a railroad station.

I love legal positives and I'm so cool. Right. And so famous famous politicians and Nazis like Philip Johnson and Jacqueline Kenney Kenney and Ed Koch and Bess Meyerson got together to protest this building, you know, this this this demolition campaign. And I think this also speaks to the way that the historic preservation movement moved forward, right? Where it goes from being this thing that's just the socialites kind of pet project to a legal framework project where you're trying to save buildings

by making laws against demolishing buildings. And what happens in Penn Station, I think, really on a huge magnitude for the first time is that you they tore down a really, really, really, really good building and they put a shitty building in its place. And so this kind of breaks a compact that happens in cities where, like, you know, you build the woodhouse and then you build the brick house and then you build the stone house and and and it creates a situation where capital really is is running the show.

It is definitely like a situation where, you know, I think there was a paradigm shift where people realized, oh, shit, it's going to get worse and not better. Right. And if you want to keep all of these, like, beautiful Bozar things, then the only way to do it is to, like, physically legally restrain people. Right. Criminalize. Yes. Yeah. And and I think that that really ends up on the local level or whatever the, you know, kind of the city, the city kind of level. That's where historic preservation comes from as a framework.

Yeah, this is where things get wacky. Yeah, this is where things get zony. Yeah. And so. I thought it would be fun to kind of run through a little a real life demonstration of kind of the consequences of what happens to a, you know, historically protected place or like kind of what what the real consequences of historic districts are and kind of the ramifications of that or kind of how it works through.

So this is a block in Philadelphia that many people know as peak urbanism street. Yes, it's a wonderful little block of 26 identical row houses. Everybody loves peak urbanism street. Look at these trees. Look at the narrow street. Look at the lack of cars with trees. I have an organism with trees. Yes, it's urbanism with trees. Everybody loves it.

But when you actually kind of like pull apart, I won't really get too far deep into it. But if you go to the next slide, the historic nomination process that creates the Britton House Fittler Historic District, where peak urbanism street is located, has all of these things that happen alongside of it. Right. You know, there's this intense documentation. This is for a college class at the University of Pennsylvania.

I didn't do this. I didn't I didn't do this drawing. It was somebody in the 80s. But you can see there's this intense accuracy of rendering. And and what you what you kind of pull apart in this is like, all right, so let's let's actually look at the historical nomination inventory form and look at how this house is like kind of put on the map. Right. There's a lot of research that's that was done on this place

as part of a larger thing, and it's on the National Register of Historic Places, which, again, for many reasons could have well have been a tax incentive. Because at one point, all of these homes were owned as a single real estate investment, a single rental investment, which you could argue shaped and maintained its character. Right. If you look at the historic nomination, the inventory says 1900 block of historic urbanism peak urbanism street, AKA Ringgold Place.

Thirteen three story two bay Greek revival brick row houses paired entryways reached by tall transverse marble stoops, raised basements, marble trim circa 1862. Walter Allison Builder, significant. I just get them being Greek revival. I also just read the Greek revival. And so it's it's like this thing where it's like, OK, so there's been a significant amount of research done to get to the point

where they know the builder. There's a significant amount of like description lavished on 26 houses. And also, yeah, there's this this this desire to kind of apply a style to them. It's very formalistic. There's a lot of time, there's a lot of work, there's a lot of money, but it's it's box ticking, right? Yeah, right. And and these are I would I would generally call these federal style. Yes, maybe.

Or you could lump them all into Italian aid, which is what I think all buildings from 1840 to 1920 are. They're all Italian aid, every single one. Talk about an opinion that's going to get us canceled. Oh. Yeah, that's it's going to do it. So yeah, the other important thing to think about is like the total floor area of these houses, it's four single rooms stacked on top of each other, essentially 1200 square feet.

You have to you have to transverse a set of stairs to go anywhere. Your kitchen's in your basement, your bedrooms are on the upper floors. So if you need something, you're going to forget it on the upper floor, etc., etc., etc. It's it's it's historic because it's cute, you know. And yeah, I mean, when you when you look at so here's here's the thing about historic districts, right? There's so much talked about with with this building and just how well it's preserved and all these other things.

But why is it so well preserved? It might be easy to kind of take an understanding of the preservation aspects of it. You go to the next slide, which is the 1934 Brewer real estate appraisal atlas, that's the redlining map for Philadelphia. Oh, the literal red line, too. So yeah, the redlining maps had literal red lines that again, you talk about the ways that that finance plays into the picture. If you were within the red line or you were in a block

or you were, you know, on a commercial street, you could get a loan. If you if the property that you wish to buy resided within the red line, your loan was either of an unbelievably high interest rate or not accessible at all. Because these these property valuation maps are the ones that are used to create create loans, which in America is the way that you get a house. I see here, I am a conspicuous nationality. Exactly. So that's the other thing, right? The red line is the black is for African American neighborhoods,

which in Philadelphia ran tightly along South Street, which you can see as the commercial district at the at the southern end of the picture at the northern end is written House Square, which has always been the center of society in one way, shape or form for all of the wealthiest Philadelphia socialites, railroad industrialists, Pennsylvania Railroad Executives, their families and the you know, the benefactors of all these kinds of Philadelphia institutions. I like the I like the lowest rating here is decadent.

Oh, yeah. And so I think I think what's what's really important to note here is that Peak Urbanism Street resides right on the edge of the red line. This is a map where I've hastily drawn in. Black is the written House Fittler historic district confines. Red is the 1934 Brewer appraisal map red line. And this is then laid on top of each other. There's a couple of things.

And so again, Peak Urbanism Street is almost the carve out on this map. And what you see a block south are a bunch of what were vacant lots, what were 1970s and now like rebuilt in 2018. There's huge McMansion single family homes called the written House Estates. See all of these houses that are just completely stuck out over that didn't get the Society Hill treatment of complete restoration. They got they got nothing.

And so this creates a situation where the properties inside of the black line of the historic district are far more significant in value. And they have so much more lavished on them in terms of the history and stories. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not important. And what's really kind of frustrating to note from my perspective is the way that this historic nomination was, which was written in the 80s, talks about that little area of red that's next to written House Square in in the in the red line here.

There's there's a small court of what are called Trinities, which are the original kind of infill, tiny house, working class development that were really kind of poorly apportioned places for working people to live in between the giant houses. Yes, it is right there. So that is written House Court, which represents some of the earliest extant housing in the entire neighborhood. Those houses are built significantly earlier than Ringold Place, which is 1862.

They're far more significant in the sense that they represent the actual historic growth of the neighborhood from when it was a bunch of brick yards. And these are working class people's houses to a fancy neighborhood where they still had working class black black owned houses or black resided houses. And this story isn't told when you look at the actual inventory, you know, that the amount of care and attention lavished on here is just written House Court. Four, three story, two bay trinity houses, circa 1850s stuccoed. And so there's no there's no style applied to them in that same Greek revival nonsense way.

We don't know who the builder was and whether he was significant. And so none of that work was actually done on these houses from when written House Square was called Goose Town Village because there were a bunch of angry geese by the pond. You know, and it's like this is such this is such this is the way that black culture and black history gets erased in the storytelling of Philadelphia. Right. The historic line follows the red line and the places that are inside the red line or inside the historic district that are still red line

get the bare minimum. So again, so you saying that historic preservation is racist? Well, I think it's at least an engineering disaster. That's what I was asked to be on the show. So just if you look at the if you look at the historic nomination form for for the written House Fittler Historic District, where these properties comprise, you know, what they really talk about is just this idea that, you know, the the consequence is a continuous urban fabric.

So what's historic about it? It looks nice, you know, the buildings of the proposed district possess significance, not just as a grouping of individual landmarks, but rather as a series of streetscapes that give the area a unique sense of time and place. These streetscapes vary from the two story row houses of back streets, such as Addison and Smedley through the four story row houses of Pine and Spruce, blah, blah, blah.

These streetscapes consist of vintage buildings and modern buildings, the modern buildings that blend with the scale, material and details of the particular block contribute to the significant architectural ensemble of the district. So even the houses that are newer historic now, we did it. Congratulations, everybody. They're all in there. I remember going to a meeting about this where they were someone

was petitioning to delist a building from like 1960 from the written House Fittler residential or historic district. I think they did get the delisting, right, because it was just like a brick cube house. We forgot to put we forgot to put Robinson in there, but there's a historic department store on Market Street that the Pennsylvania Real Estate Trust petitioned the historic commission to de-designate because it would just be more expensive

to do stuff to it, like knock it down. No, that was that was that wasn't the historic commission that did that. That was zoning. No, what they did was after it was designated, they positioned they petitioned L and I licenses and inspections to delist it and licenses and inspections delisted it, which they have no authority to do. And yeah, it's just not it's it just has

it they just they just completely delisted it, which is very funny, because I I don't think that will stand up in court, which it will eventually go to. But what's her so? Because again, it's like an incredible piece of architecture and adaptive reuse, that's another story. We don't preserve modernism. Yeah.

You know, there's all there's all kinds of stuff that happens in in in the historic kind of district process. And then, of course, the maintenance of the historic district and the community input meetings and all of that nonsense. You know, historic districts, they all have the same set of rules put on them, especially something here where it's like, oh, yeah, that's that's by design. You know, the new the new buildings have design requirements. There are buildings that are contributing

and buildings that are not contributing that have different levels of kind of care and protection put on them. But ultimately, all these things are really kind of arbitrary because they're overseen by a board of people and you get the you get the input of neighbors in the process. Depending on where you are, it's either administered by professionals or sometimes, and I think this is how it works in New York City, sometimes it's administered by volunteers, which means, you know,

it's it's administered by the type of people who want to volunteer on board. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, adverse adverse outcomes abound. The thing about the thing that makes me the maddest about a place like the Rittenhouse Fittler Historic District and the quaint 19th century streetscape that is contained therein is that, again, is arbitrary. And it's mostly about who lives there and, you know, what their deal is

and whether or not the city wants wants them there. So this is the the the City Planning Commission is part of the Department of Planning and Development, which is also where the Historic Commission is. Right. So these are kind of two heads of the same coin. This is a these are pieces from a Blight certification report about the Tioga neighborhood, which is three miles north of Philadelphia, contains a curious mix of old buildings and new buildings.

And they're all beautiful and they're all from the night, you know, late 19th and early 20th century. And there's some really remarkable architectural forms. But, you know, unfortunately, they've caught they've caught Blight, which means they are going to release Darkspawn. Right. And so this is what, you know, this is what the Blight certification does to a motherfucker, right? So originally, they got a redevelopment plan in 1971

that authorized $19 million to acquire various blighted properties and create community centers and parking lots and marginally de-densify the neighborhood, but they don't have reports on how much housing they removed or anything about that. Um, and it gets recertified for Blight in 2003. That's where the image on the big image on the left is taken, where they identify buildings for, you know, destruction. And you can just see the way that that that the City Planning Commission

talks about this neighborhood. And it's the same kind of place physically or vainly is written out of square, right? Other than Alice to your point, it's caught the Blight, which is a visual condition, right? And Blight is really like Blight is what happens when the city stops doing the trash pickup and the the the streetlight maintenance the way they should.

And it's not like it's it's not something that like just happens or appears. And, you know, there's ways to protect historic buildings and interesting buildings. So on the left, those are two sets of twins. So those are four separate buildings that are each multi unit buildings. And, you know, the way they talk about in the seventies is so like compared to how we think about these places today, it's it's it's almost comical because it's like a residential development in

Tioga consists of two storey row residences, which are dominant and three storey units, which are in a uniquely high proportion. So again, it's a dense urban residential neighborhood. And then overcrowding and subdivided three storey units and a generally scattered distribution of over 300 vacant properties. So what you're saying is effectively, oh, no, my beautiful streetscape got poverty in it. Yeah. And so this is this is particularly like this doesn't make sense to me.

It's like so the three storey units are overcrowded and the single family homes are vacant. And what we're going to do is we're going to knock down the vacant houses. And then we're going to relocate means a low level of demand. Right. Overcrowding means there's a low level of demand, right? So like this is this is like bizarre to me when I when I was reading this, I had to like read it six times and I was just like, oh, yeah, this is this is exactly right. They're just making up soon.

They're just want to knock down black people's houses. This is what everything all all of American Urban Development is doing one thing, which is knocking down black people's houses. Right. And so, you know, like again, 1971, this neighborhood has 300 vacant single family homes, and that's enough to get a blight certification on it. And then in 2003, the city actually does the the John Street demolishing vacant homes program where they recertify it for blight.

And then they actually say, we're going to start demolishing properties. And so you can see these these two sets of twins held out until 2008. And then after that, they they really start to get totally destroyed. And there's some really incredible buildings in this neighborhood, like the Armstrong Conkling Terracotta House, no relation. And like they're just they're just sitting and going to rot, even when they do have historic protection on them, the city can't the city chooses not to compel home the owners to do anything about it.

So, yeah, I mean, again, and so now when you drive past here, there's only these two out of the four. And, you know, they when when you knock down the other unit in a in a twin, the whole thing gets structurally more deficient and requires more upkeep and maintenance that these people, you know, can't people who live here can't afford to do because the city decided that it's going to be deindustrialized, de-commercialized and blighted. I was about to say this one seems to have some kind of unsafe structure

permit on it. Right. But if you look if you look real closely, I think that orange tag is on a different one. And then somebody took the the door the the door blocker off and then was living in it for a little while. You know, it's like it's it's like these buildings are beautiful and like they're so striking and architecturally, you know, just interesting in that same written house, Fittler Historic District way. But they got the blight.

Yeah, unfortunately. Meanwhile, when you don't get the blight, hold on, this is where I pick up. Yeah. But because we're an hour and forty two minutes in, I'm going to use the restroom. I need to get some water. God damn it, dude. Terrible. No, this is actually my favorite part of the show because then you get the the Alice and Liam bit of like the small talk.

It's the Alice and Liam zone. Liam, how you doing? Doing good. Alice kind of depressed now. But, you know, yeah, it turns out this this this urban renewal shit. It's it's quite racist. Yeah, who could have imagined that? I certainly didn't know that before now. It's it's it's a bullshit.

But like that goes into everything that goes into schools that goes into like. You know, people bitch about like. No, it's fine. What if what if what if we simply take the poor people and we build them beautiful, new, brusseless towns outside of the city that they live in out with all of the facilities that they need? And we just move them all out there and then nothing bad happens. The yard was going to try, man.

Oh, my God, it's yeah, no, it's it's it's so fucking infuriating. And it's like, yeah, the whole the whole deal, I suppose, with. I so I went to a museum on Saturday with my parents. And yeah, and it's the Constitution Center in Philly. These museum, if you don't mind the jingoism. And, you know, there's this whole weird, like, invented mythos. According to them, essentially, where everyone in the north was virulently anti-racist and everyone in the north was an abolitionist.

And there was no problem. This is like 2008 kind of like art of manliness. William T. Sherman was a boss kind of thing. Yeah, there's this boy. Like they don't talk about like rap riots or anything. No, of course not. Oh, that was that was something I was going to mention earlier, as you know, the interesting choice of preservation when they did and reconstruction

when they did Independence Mall is, you know, right off that underneath, I believe the U.S. Mint building would have been the location of Pennsylvania Hall, which was, of course, burned down by an angry racist mob because they held a integrated abolitionist meeting. You figure, all right, you know, that's an important historical thing. Maybe you rebuild that. Nah, fuck it. Suppose the lines. Absolutely.

Mole like lines. Definitely don't want a Greek revival building off of Inter Independence Mall. Here we go. Seventh inning stretch complete. Seventh inning stretch complete, yes. So. Good news also, two more hours or less. We talked sort of about Reskin earlier, sort of.

And I think his ideas are really how, you know, your modern historic district functions, right? Very much about conservation, as opposed to conservation and the Reskinite idea, as opposed to any kind of new construction anywhere, right? You have to have a beautiful, perfect ruin forever and never do anything else with it. Exactly, right? Which is interesting because of when a lot of these historic districts were

designated, especially low ground tour does to a mother fucker's brain. You wander around Italy getting heat stroke, jerking yourself off over old temples and shit. And you're like, yeah, no, we have to like, if we don't leave these things that are falling down perfectly alone forever, what else am I going to paint? Yeah, exactly. And I feel like that interpretation has really sort of persevered through the ages to the point now where people argue that the parking lots

in certain historic districts are historic. Did you see the little sign that somebody put up in Seattle with a save parking structure B? My God. We got we got to save it. That's a well, there's your problem, official endorsement. Say, write your congressman, write the mayor of Seattle, write the governor.

You got to save parking structure B. I think every once in a while, there is an architecturally interesting parking structure, but is by far not the rule. Right. The the early the early gas stations are some of the most architecturally interesting and like visually diverse buildings, like their little temples where you got your gas pumped in your window, wiped down and you got more oil in your tank. Back when back when it was like the equivalent of a Tesla charging station.

Oh, excuse me. I was I was completely wrong about both the name and the location, not Seattle, but Santa Monica and its parking structure three. Please sign the petition. W.W.W. Petitions say parking structure three Santa Monica. About to say there is an interesting parking structure in Seattle, but that's more just how the grade comes down.

Yeah, I'm looking at parking structure three and really it's nothing to write home about. That's what I feel, but it is worth writing your congressperson about. So there's there's a lot of historic districts in the United States. Well, OK, let me let me start with going back to Ruskin, right? The Ruskin sort of idea of conservation was really based around buildings that were very, very old and significant, right? Generally speaking, you know, churches,

big old grand mansions, the states, assholes, stuff like that. But otherwise, you know, in terms of new buildings, he is kind of like a neo-gothic, you know, historicist style sort of partially inspires the arts and craft movement, which is also generally historicist. But our historic districts, which are, again, based off of Ruskin's ideas, I mean, there's a lot of ordinary buildings subject to very strict rules, right? You cannot change your light switches.

Well, most interior stuff, you know, whatever. But we have we have, you know, the kinds of buildings which are subject to historic preservation in America. A lot of times post state the ideas of preservation, which are applied to them. So, you know, I think one type of historic district, which is very common, is your Italian eight commercial district, right? Such as this, this is in Cincinnati.

So, you know, and these are buildings that are put up between like 1840 and 1920 something sort of American commercial vernacular architecture. You know, Italian eight is a broad category. You know, you have your cornices, your bay windows. You got some nice stonework or brickwork. Oh, yeah. We have some of these in Glasgow, even. Oh, yeah. They're good buildings. I mean, they're very hard to build in this day and age.

Yeah. And they're usually pretty good size. They got generally fairly flexible floor plans. You got narrow buildings. They're on deep lots. They got narrow street frontage. Do you got lots of stores per? Yeah, we're mostly wasting them as like office buildings. And now the commercial landlords are screaming because of covid.

Yeah. And it's so this is like one one type of building. And what do you wind up in a historic district? Because these are, you know, they're preserved in amber, right? Which I don't know necessarily that it's bad if you have some good, you know, good density and you have some room to expand. But of course, a lot of times the historic district also puts on other overlays like I can't build a new building on a parking lot. You know, I'm still subject to other regulations

which make it difficult that if you need new building stock, it's difficult to build in the historic district, right? You know, and certainly you can't build a building that looks like an Italian eight building that is expressly disallowed usually, because that would be dishonest. You dare try and match the local housing stock buildings that are already there. Oh, no, that that would be entirely like dishonest. It would ruin the historic value of the district.

And there's your John Ruskin. Yes, there is your John Ruskin. Well, there's your John Ruskin podcast. But there's other reasons why it's very difficult to build a building like this today, which are ostensibly about health, safety and accessibility. There's some nuance here. We're going to talk about it in a couple slides. So this is your one type of historic district, which is very common.

Your Italian eight business district, lots of places, have them, you know, cities, small towns, everywhere, because there were so many of these buildings put up because, you know, this was about when, you know, cities were really expanding, right? So almost as if they're not themselves that rare. Not that that makes them unworthy of preservation, but I thought the point of historic preservation was stuff that was significant because it was unusual.

It depends. It depends. Depends. The point of historic preservation is to preserve whatever building you submit a form about. Yeah. And again, the the associated benefits like concentrating wealth or making it, you know, more difficult for. Yeah, that's some catch that catch 22. So there's another type of historic district that's very common.

And that is the single family house historic district. And this is sort of where historic preservation gets weaponized to increase property values. We were just talking about like maybe perhaps you could use this to as a store of wealth, as a way of preserving generational wealth. Yes, exactly. You know, you want to you need to protect our beautiful neighborhood of four square houses ordered from the Sears catalog.

And these are very common, especially in wealthier areas. You will you will have regulations that says we have, you know, we got to preserve, you know, our four square neighborhood, our California craftsman, some other incredibly common building. And ostensibly, it's about history. But a lot of times it's, you know, it's another layer of defense, you know, in order to protect homeowners in the continuous war on apartments, right?

There's also a little a little bonus here, which is that it allows you to become even even more of a homeowner's association tyrant than would otherwise be possible. Yes. Exactly. Yeah. These these places really function when when they're applied like this, they're really function as hate your neighbors, hate everyone else. And also, well, and also the idea that, you know, well, you can either live in our historic district

where we all carefully maintain our our houses with their intricate woodwork and and, you know, balconies and all this decoration, or you can sell it and leave, you know. There's very little flexibility and it really is about protecting the aesthetics of the place to preserve and increase property values. And it works, you know, the historic districts in Philadelphia are where all the high value houses are. Well, it's interesting that the neighborhood I live in, you know,

it's sort of between the Spruce Hill and Cedar Park area. We don't have a historic district, right? And we definitely don't have the highest rents in the city. A lot of buildings are apartments already. So, you know, it's, you know, it's it's it's definitely like once you get the historic district in there, stuff starts to machinate into becoming, you know, a race to the top on property values, as opposed to, you know, anything that's actually about history.

Yeah. And then I don't think we really got into it with the slides, but there's also the conservation overlays that that the city does, which are kind of a weird in between. That's very specific to Philadelphia, though. Yeah. But I mean, like, it's still the same idea of trying to create this place that's all all the same. Oh, pretty easy to get a group of homeowners to say, yes, we want a historic district because, you know, you can sort of explain, yeah, well, a property value is going to go up.

Oh, well, that means my retirement is going to be good. OK. And you really lock in the existing built environment. Right. And, you know, even even if, you know, sometimes you do have neighborhoods that are really worth preserving in some fashion. A lot of times, big old houses, you can convert to apartments. Well, you know, combine historic preservation with zoning. Yeah. Nothing's going to change, right? You know, and this is another one of those things is de facto racist

since the buildings are preserved usually in historically white areas, right? The property values go up there, they go down elsewhere. Sometimes they go down elsewhere. A lot of places they go up everywhere now. And you can't really slip an apartment building in there, you know, at all. Because, you know, you've you've legislated this neighborhood character from a nebulous idea into a cold, hard legal fact. Right. Which is, I guess, where I'm going to sort of jump off and say, OK.

Why don't we build new old buildings? What a good idea. This is this is a question, I think, which is asked a lot, you know, especially I think a lot of people are not super happy with a lot of buildings that are going up these days, right? Five over ones, for instance. Yeah, five over ones, for instance. In historic district, of course, you're not allowed to build a historicist building, but people are not building historicist buildings, not in historic districts, either.

Right. And I think if we had, let's say, a Violette Le Duc, you know, sort of historic district, you would say, yes, let's build new old buildings, right? You would encourage it. You would encourage it as opposed to entirely preventing it, right? Most historic districts right now deliberately require new development to be the most contemporary style possible. Sometimes they say something about, well, I need some kind of context, right? And in architecture, context is a word that doesn't mean anything.

You put, like, a fucking corbel on there or something. Oh, no, it's usually like, well, the architect says context while there's nothing discernibly contextual about the building. I have whispered the word context to myself on a windy Thursday night on site. You know, so this is a building, I think, which I forget where this is going up. I saw it a couple of days ago, South Philly. You can see they sort of tried to do some kind of historicist thing with the cornice here. The cornice line is wrong.

I don't think it's big enough. This bay needs to go all the way up to the top. These bays should be angled and not 90 degrees. This should not be metal panel, which it appears to be. Anyway, it should be red and not gray. Okay, that's all I can say about that. This is a color image of this building, which is just a nightmare. And I think the other thing, the one thing about this is that at the design review meetings

for buildings like this, architects have to come back with revised plans. And so there's this kind of development of stock answers to stock objections where it's like, oh, the building is too big. Well, we've decided to break up the massing of the building by making one bay window different. We've gripled it, yeah. Exactly. And so that's where a lot of these design changes just end up being kind of like tropes and not in good ways, right?

Like all of the windows on the top floor are different. It uses quote-unquote historic materials, but in a very bizarre way. It uses historic finishes, but not really. And this is a multi-unit apartment building that's just a market rate building and is weird. It's kind of weird. I don't completely hate it, but I think it could be better. So yeah, why don't we just build new old buildings? We're going to get into a civic design review a little bit.

But if you're like a trad architecture guy with a white statue head Twitter, you blame socialist architects for the bland buildings. It's they're trying to force their Frankfurt school, which you think is what the Bauhaus was ideology on onto the public, right? Yeah. It creates perverted buildings. Exactly. On the other hand, if you're the publisher of a certain leftist magazine.

Let's call it let's call it Montagnar. You blame capitalism, but don't really dig into it, right? Which gets you most of the way there. It does get you most of the way. I would say that simply being a reductive dipshit and going, well, it's capitalism, isn't it? We'll get you on the right side of most things. This is true.

It was for me. So I thought we'd maybe try and tackle like why is it hard to build a new old building? Now, I wanted to start capitalism, isn't it? Yeah, I wanted to start. Okay, so two reasons. Number one, zoning, which is boring. Number two, parking, which is boring, right? We're going to do this assuming the urbanists got everything they wanted, right?

They completely went out. There's no zoning regulations. There's no parking regulations. It's still hard to build a new old building. Hey, it's Justin in post-production. I'm going to pop in a few times here because I was suffering from some major podcast fatigue. And I don't think I explained a few things in this section coherently. So for the purpose of this section, we're talking in terms of residential construction

because in practice, that's usually what needs to be built in historic districts. I want to clarify, I'm not here to rail against modernism or try and say we can solve social problems by going back to traditional building. I just think this is a fun exercise, right? Anyway, back to the podcast. So let's try and dig into this. I thought we'd sort of start with... So here's a building in Potomac Yards in Northern Virginia.

It's called, I think it's called the station at Potomac Yards. I hate it. So bad. It's an interesting building because it is a three-way mixed-use building. Is it a fire station? There's a fire station in it, yes. Tell me how much I get off my rent for being directly above the fire station door. So there's apartments up here.

I think it's apartments. It might be offices, but I think it's apartments. There's apartments up here. There's a fire station here. On the other side, away from the camera, there's some commercial spaces. And so we can see they clearly gave it the old college try at doing this in a historicist style. But there's some little bits about it, which are just off. It looks like a Scientology compound.

Yes, it's fortified, but not in a good way that these Richard Sonia and Romanesque public buildings should be where you have a bunch of openings and penetrations in the ground level. They really feel like you can get inside them. Yes, it's just scary. I mean, there's a few more openings on the other sides, but there are some issues which you can sort of see. So the ornamentation is very stripped down. These cornices have no brackets on them.

Yes. These bay windows are actually OK, but the whole building is weirdly proportioned. It's much more fat and squat than it should be. You can't really see this because this is too low resolution. These arches above the ground floor windows, the visoires actually intersect with each other in the middle, which would not produce a stable arch. Yes, it's really obvious the brick is applied over some other material. Which I think is one of the interesting things.

Well, number one, it's very difficult to get ornament now compared to what it used to be. Hm, thatches. You don't get thatches anymore. You don't have thatchers. Yes, we also don't have a bunch of guys in a big factory making ornament. That used to be like a big industrial operation, highly unionized, just making ornament for new buildings. June mentioned Armstrong Conklin.

That was our big one in Philadelphia for terracotta ornament. And there's another one in Atlantic terracotta, which sold up and down the East Coast. You used to be able to. Glasgow made so much like wrought iron ornament. If you wanted a fence anywhere in a British colony, it probably came to you from Glasgow on a ship also made in Glasgow. You could order this stuff out of catalogs, right? Or you could have it custom made if you really wanted to.

That sort of economy doesn't really exist anymore. And this is the only time when I, if I were going to say, you know, why did that disappear? I mean, it's capitalism, right? We developed this wonderful thing called modernist architecture, right? Yeah. Originally, it was sort of, you know, we're going to have a guy called Rem Koolhaas invented the Coolhouse, which was cool because it didn't have any stuff on it.

Right. No, and I was earlier than that. Originally, it was going to be, you know, this great cheap to build high quality housing, right? You know, just to house everyone, right? And hey, it's post production, Justin again. So what we would call modernist architecture started as a very socialist project for, among other things, cheap mass housing of workers, right? And one of the ways to bring down a cost of buildings was to simplify construction and reduce the amount of labor required, right?

You could sort of think about it as a style of design, which acts as a labor saving device, right? And under a socialist system, labor saving devices are very good. They save everyone time and effort, give people more leisure time. They can, you know, you're hopefully still paying people the same amount. And, you know, most socialists and social democratic countries and governments build modernist social housing that works very well and is affordable, right? Now, if you wind up stuck with a really rapacious capitalist system, like we have in the United States, though, you wind up with capitalist uses for labor saving

devices and designs, that is to say, increasing profit margins, reducing costs, and de-skilling labor, right? Which reduces the capabilities of workers to organize. And in the case of ornament workers, this was by way of all but eliminating their industry and, of course, by extension their unions, right? And this was, this is not because of the aesthetics of modernism. Exclusively, it was really accelerated by the depression in World War II. A lot of the big terracotta firms like Atlantic, which I just mentioned, or maybe I am about to mention, I forget where this goes in here,

they had shut their doors by 1941, right? And this process was not unique to the transition to ornament-free buildings, right? It repeated itself a few times over the 20th century to the point where now a large apartment building requires the labor of a relatively small number of skilled carpenters and hardly anyone else. And I am sure they are going to try and get this down to one giant 3D printer technician soon. And this is a capitalism problem, not a design problem, right? You're not going to solve this by going back to traditional building. All right, back to the pot. Listen, if you want ornament, you hire one star like public

art guy to design you a big figurative thing that people kill themselves by jumping off of rather than buying a statue out of a catalog. And ironically, the statue guys still happier about this state of affairs than they would be if they just had the statue. I was about to say ornament didn't really disappear, it just took different farms, which are worse. That's a good, yeah, the percent for art program as like kind of a stop gap to replace the ornament on buildings or like nice public spaces. A lot of cities have a thing where you, if you spend 1% of your construction budget on a piece of art, you have to do that if you're building a certain size. But of course, being having capitalism brain, right? To do efficiency.

You want a piece of art that is strictly delineated so that you can say, one art please, I pay one guy 1% of my budget, he shows up in a turtleneck and builds like a square out of a brushed aluminium. And I'm like, thanks very much. Perfect. And then people take selfies behind it and they love it. But yeah, and then we're stuck back in like Piranesi's time, right? Where like a lot of times if you want to get ornament off of a building, you got to get an old building and you got to take the ornament off of it and you got to put it in a new thing. Oh yeah, there's lots of churches do that, especially if you have a new congregation. I mean, we talked about in the Cathedral's bonus episode, Our Lady of Drywall.

That church used recycled stained glass off an old church that was being demolished in Upstate New York. Right. Yeah, if you want to let a roof, you're probably going to go to a church. And I mean, it's not impossible to get ornament today. There are still manufacturers, but it is certainly not the default for any building, right? Especially like there aren't catalogs of stuff. It's like bespoke stuff for rich weirdos building their dream house. I have seen at least one manufacturer that still puts out a catalogue. And it's pretty extensive. It was pressed in. I forget who it was. They operate out of Arizona and they still published a catalogue. It looks like it's from like the 1890s.

That place is good. Yeah, no, because you just get the press, right? If you have the press and you have the molds, it's easy to just put stuff in and get it out. That's bad to say. That stuff lasts forever. There's only three left. Yeah, that's the thing. And I don't think pressed in is good for exterior applications, is it? You have to use a special galvanized thing, which will eventually rust, which is why all the metal bay windows are rusting. And then you put the vinyl siding on them. That'll do it. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a little harder to get ornament. Another problem is that modern materials, construction methods lend themselves to fatter and squatter proportions than let's say load-bearing masonry. So you just naturally

wind up with a building which is sort of slumping down. Right, because the windows, the ceilings are never all that tall. Oh, yeah. And the thing about these, the older buildings is that they had tall ceilings because there was better air circulation in a time when you didn't have HVAC systems. It's crazy if you buy like a, if you rent a 19th century apartment building here, your rooms are twice as tall. Oh, they're massive and they're beautiful and everybody loves them, except they're a pain in the ass to heat and cool. And confirm. And so that's why the windows are sized the way they are is for, you know, our values to keep the HVAC good. Yeah. So you just get, you get buildings that,

you know, you look at it and you're like, okay, this is sort of a vaguely historic style, but you're sort of looking like this is just a little bit off, right? I've occasionally seen it done well, but like not necessarily, not so often, right? We have to, let me slightly modify one Corinthians 1313. Oh boy. Jesus Christ. And now a Biden architects, developers, banks, these three, but the greatest of these is banks. On time. Yes. So it's really true. One of our, what are your problems with buildings is financing them, right? Developers don't really pay for buildings out of pocket. They get loans, right? And the loans, of course, come with strings attached, like maximizing return on investment

and ensuring the bank is making a safe investment, right? This can involve stuff like, let's say, securing a preferential commercial tenant, right? So, you know, in an old building, I might have three small commercial spaces, which are good for like a couple, I don't know, independent restaurants, two of which are going to fail, one of which is going to get on Gordon Ramsay and then fail, right? Worst outcome. Yeah. In a new building, all three of those commercial spaces will be combined into one and they will put a CVS pharmacy in there, right? Or an LA fitness. LA fitness. Sometimes a chipotle. A target, right. Yeah. A single anchor tenant. Yeah. They require bigger retail spaces to operate, right? And it's just easier to

lease one big retail space than a few smaller ones. So, this is one of the aspects of proportion, which is always going to be, you know, different. You might have a bunch of office space left over, in which case you rent that out to WeWork, which is getting leveraged even harder, and you add another like, another story to your house of cards. Yes. Yes. But you don't add another story to your building. No. Yeah. A lot of the design of buildings, you know, it's determined by like real estate market studies, right? You know, it's like, how many units can we sell in this particular neighborhood and people do a whole bunch of analysis about it, which amounts to, you know, the process of putting

up the building is primarily the process of making a loan pencil out, right? And a lot of times, the architect is sort of left with, you know, just fitting the pieces of the puzzle together, right? And this is, you know, kind of despite a lot of stuff like our labor-saving methods and cheap materials, you know, putting up the building is actually very expensive now. If you want an answer to why you see on Twitter, like, oh, how come China can build an apartment building in six hours or whatever? And the answer is like, well, first of all, you know, faking that, and second of all, the economy. You just lie about how fast you build the building. It's very easy to do that. I stole a bunch here out of an article called America's Construction Industry

is Broken by Michael Eliasson. Eliasson, I don't know. He is a mass timber architect, right? Which is, it's like... He speaks for the trees. Yes. The Lorax said yes. Imagine if you use the techniques of five over ones, but for good. That's what mass timber is. One thing which our modern building codes essentially mandate is something called a double-loaded corridor, right? So you can see that here. It's double-loaded because there's apartments on each side, right? You have multiple means of egress. In this case, there's a stairwell over here. There's a stairwell over here, right? The elevators are over here. And this essentially means in order for all apartments to have access, the corridor has to go down the middle, which means most apartments only have one exposure,

right? So you only have windows on one side. But this effectively means as you wind up with a building which is sort of a minimum of around 50 to 60 feet in width, which coincidentally is just big enough to fit on top of one parking lane, right? Which is another thing that really guides the design of buildings. But this means it's very, very difficult to make a narrow building, which a lot of old buildings are, right? So this is some stuff we probably should have gone over in the five over one episode, but that already was too long. We have this department building and your apartment's small and shitty. You can't get a cross breeze through it, right? But your building is very wide and bloated. Yes. The building's very wide and bloated.

It's also short, right? Because the cheapest thing to build is five over one. It's only up six stories, right? You've got to think, okay, what kind of apartments do I build? Right now, it's mostly one in two bedroom apartments, right? I looked through the Civic Design Review Slate in Philadelphia earlier today. They're a grand total of three apartments bigger than two bedrooms in all of the CDR documentation right now. That's so depressing. Yes. So the idea is we're still mostly renting the childless couples and single people. Why is the birthright going down? Oh, well, you need to be able to afford a house in the suburbs to have a family. You could try having an apartment at a two bedroom apartment and a

family in it, but then the city of Philadelphia is going to come along and say that this is a blight. Yes, that sounds right. Don't worry. Yeah, three bedroom apartments are next to, yeah, I mean, those are only first. The big apartment is like the movement that I think we're all pushing for. I am in favor of big apartments, right? And apartments which are just generally better quality than what we're getting. So what does this have to do with like historicist style of building? Well, you get a big bloated bland building. It's got large retail spaces, not the several small ones. And you have apartments which aren't really designed for you to live in for a long time, right? No. A lot of times the phrase transient renters is thrown around.

It's a classist phrase, but the thing is the people who are building financing and putting up these buildings are sort of financing this, are they're building this transient renter paradigm into existence, right? Right. And Justin, like you said earlier, this kind of situation where you have the five over one with the parking, that happens in the situations where the EMBs have everything, right? Yeah. Where you don't have to have parking, but the bank requires it because you're in a neighborhood that quote unquote requires it and a CVS would be great for the neighborhood. Back when I worked at PHA, there was a big controversy. We were designing for the

Sharswood Blumberg project. We were trying to get a grocery store onto the property, right? And no one who was working with us, no one who was willing to work with PHA would go into the project with any other design than a conventional suburban grocery store with a giant parking lot in front, right? Yeah. The grocery store demands the parking lot, which the bank requires as the tenant for the financing to work. Yeah. So you wind up with parking even if there's no parking minimums a lot of the time. Yeah. Sometimes you get some rare situations where you have undesirable interactions with the building code and the zoning code. This was something that happened in Philly a couple of years ago. There was one zoning category. I think it was commercial

mixed use three, I'm not sure, which turned out to actually be impossible to build on. Return to nature. Yes. It was intention for sort of like conventional, your old style shop house. You shop on a ground floor, two apartments above, something like that. Well, it's just not doable. And one of the things which is interesting is this is not sort of the case in Europe, right? I'm talking continental Europe, not Turf Island. Yeah, good Europe. Yeah, right. A lot of these small apartment buildings are easier to build. They require less bloat and they're not any less safe, right? A lot of these regulations are extensively about safety. One of the big ones is means of egress, right? I have become

single means of egress pilled, right? Yes. So one of the things that requires this double loaded corridor is when we have two means of egress. A lot of times in Europe, you're allowed to build much taller with a single means of egress, right? And the single means of egress attaches to fewer apartments. So if you were building a nice big long building like this, what you might have would be several building cores throughout, right? And you'd have firewalls in between, right? This makes the building actually both cheaper to construct. It lets you build more creative apartments. What else? It actually reduces the occupant load on every staircase, right? It's just a superior way of building. It's very difficult to do that here. You can

go up eight, 10 stories in Europe with just one means of egress. Here, you need two once you hit five stories. Okay, it's post-production, Justin, again. So the argument in favor of single means of egress in Europe is as follows. You only need multiple means of egress if you can't reach the top floor with a fire truck ladder, right? This is safe and it works, especially since fire safety is very good these days. Now, here in the USA, we have very large fire trucks with very tall ladders. Furthermore, frequently, street design in cities prioritize emergency vehicles over things like traffic safety or traffic calming or pedestrianization, things like that, right? Yet, we still require multiple means of egress in relatively short buildings,

which restricts building design and results in crappier buildings and apartments, right? Safety is always a trade-off. And this seems like a situation where, especially since we've decided one of the most important aspects of street design is that a fire truck can get anywhere in 30 seconds, it would probably make sense and be very safe to go to a single means of egress requirement for a lot of buildings. All right, back to the pod. I mean, there's an extent to which our safety a lot of our fire safety codes are a little overdone. There's also an episode to be done about the extent to which a fire truck itself has become larger than perhaps it needs to be. And another thing is they just finance buildings differently in Europe a lot of time. There's this

wonderful thing called the Baugruppen in Germany. I don't like that, but only because it's German. Yeah, right. What do you do is rather than have a developer put up a building, you and your friends go to an architect and say, hey, build us a building. And then you just do that. And it's relatively easy to get financing for it. This is sort of a private but collectively owned and financed apartment block designed for odor or occupancy from the beginning, rather than having a developer build and rent apartments. And Baugruppen are not building new old buildings, of course, but they are not building five over ones either. Yeah, and that's the other thing, right, is the housing that's being built for individual

owner occupancies. So limited and it's all greenfield development in the suburbs. Yeah, it's all single family houses. No one's going to think about, we're going to try and build ourselves an apartment. And one of the things is even if you're a non-profit in America, you're trying to build affordable housing, you still go through sort of a developer model rather than a collective ownership model, right? Right. Because everything's top-down charity, there's nothing, there's no collective action. Exactly. Yeah, and another thing I wanted to point out about a lot of these code changes is everything's still accessible, right? We're not like emitting elevators or anything here. There's just different ways to build, which result in

more flexible building designs, which are not necessarily legal or encouraged in America, right? Yeah. As an example, some buildings that would be very difficult to build today. So this, I forget where this building is exactly. It's in Philly somewhere. What do you see here? This is, it's on Sansom, yeah. This is 15 feet wide. And it is one, two, three, four, five, six stories tall, right? Hell yeah. The good kind of five over one. Yeah, I was about to say this. This one does look pretty good. The bay windows look real good. At some angles, you look at this, these bay windows almost form a circle, which is cool. So you would basically not be able to build this building today. If you were trying to build something in this footprint, you would either,

I think you could go up to four stories with one means of egress, right? Have like one or two apartments on each floor, probably one. Or more likely what you would do is you would take the three adjacent buildings and build a conventional five over one to the same height. Yep. So you can't do this anymore. With the single means of egress, you can, right? And then you only have to deal with all the other problems we mentioned, right? Where's the parking structure? Where is the parking structure exactly? It's in the basement. Oh, God. Basement, the sub basement, and the second sub basement. Got to replace the commercial space with a ramp that goes down to some kind of like massive subterranean parking garage. You need to get all of that street

furniture out of there and also widen that street. Yeah. It's a value add. Another example, I think, which is unfortunate. Here's Jeweler's Row. This is also on Sansom Street, not too far away. You see here, we have one, two, three, four buildings. Right. So these were proposed for redevelopment by a company called Toll Brothers several years ago. And they proposed that they were going to build a very, very tall tower at this site, right? It's the worst shit. And they decided to paint all of these retail spaces, which I believe there's either, there are either four or five here and combine them into one, right? Well, and some of them are second floor retail, I think. Yep. This is true. There was some second floor retail on here as well. There was no residential.

It's the America's oldest and diamond district. Yes. There's a lot of small independent jewelers on the street. And they wound up getting the permit to demolish all of these buildings, which they did, for the sake of replacing them with a residential tower. But then COVID hit, so there's just a vacant lot here now. Yep. Yeah. Oh, great. Well, here it is, shitting. And they've promised or they've halted their development plans and decided to take a step back from redevelopment on Jewelers Row. I think they said a couple days ago, or I think they said late last year they were going to try and restart in 2022. I don't believe them. The design is extremely bad and that's another conversation. And again, it's this historicist thing for two

floors and then it's a glass skyscraper above it with luxury. Oh, no, they got rid of the historicist part. Oh, thank God. Yeah. Yeah, just luxury apartments then. Sorry. The other historic thing about Jewelers Row is that it is part of the original row house development in Philadelphia, the row house city. It's part of Car Stairs Row. So it's all actually the same floor plates. Really? The facades are different over time. But I believe that all the floor plates should be identical because they're all of the bones of these buildings, not necessarily the facades of them are from that original row house development. That'll do it. But what are your main historicist styles of development, which I call a small but tall

building? Very difficult to do right now. It's really hard to build sort of like this unless you're at the very top of the market, which I guess is, even when you look at so-called new traditional buildings, you wind up with very modern forms and modern massing. So I'm not sure where this is. You can see this is sort of designed. It is sort of, what would you call it? You got your wrought iron balconies like it's in the French Quarter in New Orleans, but the building is just massive, gigantic, right? Big New Orleans. The bigger, big easy. If Huey Long hadn't been killed, all of you would live in buildings like this. You would all have no-show jobs at like factories owned by various cousins of

Huey Long the 24th. America would be like a hereditary monarchy governed from Shreveport, and it would be a better place for it. Yes. You can't argue with that. Your other options are kind of like, again, if you're building these new traditional architecture, sometimes you do have a small and tall building. This one's in New York City somewhere. You can see this is clearly an ultra-luxury building. There is no way in hell. You can see the Blackwater Sniper Nest on the roof there. It kills you for even looking at it. Yeah, exactly. This is, again, another type of, okay, where you can build sort of decent looking, traditionally proportioned, historicist buildings. It's either ultra-luxury,

higher-up multifamily, or ultra-luxury single family. That's another one. I mean, your ultra-luxury looks quite ordinary, but just because of housing prices. I imagine, I believe this brownstone, it's not a brownstone. It's made out of brick. People still call it a brownstone. A redstone. Yes, exactly. This was built in 2016, I believe. I have no idea what it sold for, but probably a lot. Oh, stupid money. Yes. Stupid money is the correct answer. Mm-hmm. So you don't really have... I'd like to own a house someday. My God. It would be nice. What a beautiful dream. Yeah, exactly, right. Go to our Patreon, you assholes. You're renting till I die. So when you do build

new old buildings, they're either a fat, ultra-luxury, single family, or some combination of the three, right? Or they're for institutional or office use. That's a whole other ball game. Yeah, some bank guy decides, yeah, actually, I want a banking hall again now. Build me one. And this is to say that a huge amount of our historic built environment is just straight up illegal, and it doesn't start or end at zoning. And there's some stuff we didn't talk about, street design, accessibility, stuff like that. I mean, especially in small, multi-family buildings, they're all going to need an elevator now, which is good. Accessibility is good, but it does raise the cost of the building, right? But it's just a lot of stuff is

straight up illegal. That's what we've got to encourage. We've got to encourage wild cat development. We need to have more illegalism in building development. In order to bring back Violette Ladouk's thought, you have to break the law. You have to just start building old and new buildings. Yes. And when the government tries to stop you. You shoot at that with your cannons, yes. Canons, that's what we need. Okay. Yes, I recommend starting your new old building development with large earthen fortifications. What you're going to want to do is pick a highly defensible form of urbanism. Well, that's where some of the really small streets definitely help.

Yeah, you want a bunch of twists and turns. You want overlooks you can throw counter-ups down from. Yes. Yeah. Maybe a murder hole. We've got to unhouseman this shit. You've got to have streets you can barricade again when you get pissed off. We need de-housemanization, yes. De-house. Ironically. All right. So, we couldn't not mention it. What about everyone's favorite form of historic preservation? Confederate monuments. Preservation of what? It's another wave of reaction where they like dynamited stuff that was already there in the 1920s to put a bunch of cheap statues that came again out of catalogs where you could get like the noble sort of Confederate private or whatever

or the general on a horse. You got that out of a catalog. Your local Dorses of the American Revolution or United Dorses of the Confederacy put that up. It's shit. They're shit. They're really cheaply made, which is why it's very easy to pull them over. They just buckle. All those statues are shit. Even if they weren't part of a form of stochastic racial terrorism and white supremacy, they're occupying public space with nothing for no good reason. There's not really anything historically significant about them other than being a sore loser. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's pretty clear cut. The statues are all crap and have no historical value to get rid of them, right? Yeah. But you're a racing culture. If you want a form of like,

oh my god, I mean, if you want a form of like, again, still racist, still racially problematic, you can get your racism fix, actually historically significant contemporary statuary, you fucking go to like, Grant's tomb or any of the shit that we put up after the winning side one, which was a different kind of like American exceptionalism. Just do that. Right. Yeah. No, don't go and soak up all that beautiful culture. Getting rid of these monuments is unquestionably problematic. And there's a whole strain of historic preservation that has the whole what aboutism, right? Like the you are you're actually erasing an important part of our legacy and culture and these monuments are important because they

represent a bad period of time. My answer, my answer to this is simply the newsreel footage of the US Army blowing up swastika monuments. Yeah, or the newsreel footage of Richard Spencer being punched in the face. Yeah, absolutely. These are the deep platforming is good and important. And there's no reason to have any of these monuments when we could have actually accessible public spaces. Yeah, I mean, there's a there's a fence around that one, right, Justin? That's what it looks like. Looks like it looks like there's iron fencing where you should see. There's no form of like interaction planned with these, even if you were like, of the the constituency of white people who are supposed to be like taking heart from this. It

didn't actually mean that much to you until anyone decided maybe we shouldn't have these. It's such white people shit to be like, oh, here's our monument. Do not touch it. Do not interact with those. Reminds me of the World War Two Memorial, actually, which is sort of a similar with that colonized. Yeah. Well, it has this really inviting like waiting pool around its triumphal fountain, right? Which is, you know, tourists like to go in on hot days, yeah, and then the park police come and kick them out. Hell, yeah. America's monuments. God forbid. I'm like, I'm like between two things. I do. I do enjoy tourists being victimized, but I also think the US Park Police are the most

psychotic police agency in Washington, DC, which is saying something. Yeah, cool, cool guys. I mean, Justin, the reason I mean, the reason that it reminds you of the World War Two monument is because it's it's the same copy book, you know, it's the same it's the same classical pattern language that that we've used throughout history to glorify fascism, you know. Pretty cool. Here's my here's the here's the question. The monuments are all bad. What do you do at the buildings? State Historical Museum, same as Auschwitz. Genuinely my answer for every plantation house, I think you the existence of, for instance,

the plantation house wedding is the the biggest like indictment on I hope every single marriage that happens like that is like celebrated at a plantation house ends in a murder suicide. It's genuinely genuinely the most unacceptable thing I can think of in in the year of our Lord 2021. No, if they have to stay up and you can make that argument to me, then it has to be as a as a warning from history, right? Not as this kind of like bucolic thing. And I think we have to like, I think that's very difficult because the architecture is itself inimical to that because it was built in such a way as to suggest this is a beautiful bucolic ideal that we've that we've built for ourselves here. And it's very difficult

to contextualize that. So with that in mind, this is Lee Chapel where Robert E. Lee is buried in where my parents got married. Sorry for saying that your parents are the first Well, it's interesting how Lexington, Virginia has been really aggressively deconfeterizing recently. Well, I just renamed it University Chapel, which apparently was its original name. And they moved the statue of Lee and repose into the basement. I mean, it's sort of complicated by the fact that the Lee family still owns and uses the crypt down there. At least it's an actual church, though, at least it's not just the house which you like interpret as Oh, this is a nice fancy house. Oh, no, the house is where the university president

lives. It's been it's it's been a weird experience watching Lexington, Virginia deconfeterized. They did take all of the statues down, though. That's good. Yeah. I think Arlington house is probably the weirdest just because it's right there prominently in Arlington Cemetery. And it's like this is the National Robert E. Robert E. Lee Memorial. Yeah. Like I appreciate the flex of like just taking the guy's house to use it as a cemetery. But I feel like if you're going to do that, you should have gone the full nine yards and like demolished the house. Yeah, as opposed to putting JFK next to it. I think we should get rid of all the buildings. Yeah, let them do whatever you and people

should they want to on any of the building sites that were occupied by racist bullshit. You know, just do a second Sherman's March through the south. Yeah, this is this is phase two of all new buildings are legalism. Phase one, we build the buildings. Phase two, we take it on the road. I think there's at least one Lee family property that's now occupied and owned by some kind of civil rights group. I forget which that's good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, reparations can take many forms. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, just just replace like I'm willing to tolerate the continued existence of Lee Chapel so long as they put a gigantic bust of Martin Luther King on the front like the Mussolini

building with his giant face on it. Well, they're debating making the greatest sacrifice, which is renaming the university right now. I guess the biggest question is no one knows what to rename Washington and Lee. I mean, Amherst College renamed from their mascot from the Lord Jeffs, the Lord Jeffs of the Mammoths. Jeffrey Amherst was the guy who gave smallpox to indigenous people. Wow, germ warfare. They can they can fix it. Between between that guy and Shiro Ishii, doing bacteriological warfare turns out very rewarding even if you lose the war.

Effective. Well, what did we learn? Just start building buildings. Don't ask permission. Just just build the buildings. Yeah. Just don't get married at a plantation house. Build cornices in your basement. Nothing matters in a random building. Become ungovernable. Yes. Make fire engines smaller. Instead of Maoist furnaces in the backyard, I have a Maoist terracotta kiln. Start grabbing whatever clay dirt you can find. Yes. Single means of interest, ingress and egress. Use sunscreen. Yes. Never go underground.

Safety third. Safety third. That's our next thing. All right. Starting off strong with your NCOV radiation. More blue. There. Well, there's your problem. Thank you for your wonderfully entertaining and informative podcast. I truly cherish it. Below is my true story. Some details are omitted for the sake of anonymity. Okay. I worked with a colleague to develop a highly novel and one-of-a-kind sensor intended for measurements in a spent fuel pool of a nuclear power plant. That pool with the RGB gamma lights in it. Yes. Well, just B.

You pulled the B, gamma lights in it. That pool is where recently used nuclear fuel rods are stored temporarily. It looks a bit like an ordinary swimming pool, except for the ominous blue glow from Cherenkov radiation. Can you swim in it? Can you swim in it? Answer me. Can you swim in the pool? Momentarily, yes. The water X is a radiation shield while also preventing the rods from heating up so much that they destroy themselves. The plan was to use a waterproof container to house the sensor so they could be suspended and transversed or traversed in the pool to various locations while collecting measurement data. Cherenkov radiation pool with a diving board on it.

Yes. We were tight on time and budget, so I repurposed a vacuum chamber for this project. We figured if the seals worked for air, they'd probably be fine for water. It was roughly the size of a two-liter bottle of soda. On the lid, on top, a D-ring was welded to allow suspension of the vessel. We were diligent in making the outside appear sleek and professional, mostly stainless steel, and all materials planned to be in contact with the water were well-documented. The work plan and material list were cleared by the IAEA. I don't know what that is. That is the National What's Hall Mechanic Agency. That sounds about right.

Nobody ever asked about what was inside of the vessel, a battery-powered mess of wires connecting an Arduino, a Raspberry Pi, and other DIY-style solutions. How much shit in your daily life is just like a Raspberry Pi in an Arduino in a fancy container? It's like a video where everything is cake. You cut shit open and it turns out it's all Raspberry Pi. Yeah, Alice, you don't want the answer to that question. No, I really don't. I really don't. God. Am I? Am I on? Yes. On a big day, we brought our equipment to our on-site host, and it passed through various checks and barriers. Meanwhile, we went through the

complicated procedure of entering the containment building, including disrobing and donning site provided garb. The on-site people were supposed to arrange beforehand an apparatus to suspend and traverse the device. They didn't. Improvisation began. It's the team building exercise with the ropes. A comically oversized overhead gantry was enlisted. The hook alone was about the size of a small Volkswagen. To connect the gantry hook to the D-ring of our little vessel, a long piece of very ordinary, an anemic-looking rope was prepared. Some of us were stumped at how exactly to implement the rope solution, but luckily my colleague is an avid climber and could improvise some appropriate knots. I found this all very

silly and amusing, but it's not the point of the story. When things got really interesting, it was about halfway through the measurement campaign. While traversing the device at a depth of several meters, a rather large air bubble suddenly appeared from the submerged vessel and very slowly drifted towards the surface. My colleague and I turned pale and exchanged looks of horror as we both silently recalled the lithium ion batteries inside the vessel powering the sensor. Air exiting the vessel would suggest water entering the vessel. The worst-case scenario would be an explosion which could dislocate or damage nearby spent fuel elements, risking a criticality accident if adequate spacing was not maintained.

After a few minutes, no more bubbles had appeared and nobody saw a reason not to finish out the measurements, so we carried on. As you may have guessed, because this story did not appear on CNN the next day, ultimately everything turned out just fine. No more bubbles appeared. The measurement data were excellent. No water was later found inside the vessel. There was a slightly concave structure on the bottom exterior surface, which we eventually realized probably trapped some air as the vessel was initially submerged, air which was later dislodged, resulting in the aforementioned bubble. Oh, you accidentally made a diving bell. In terms of excitement, I do not expect that day to be topped by any other in my career. Yeah, you're handing back the rubber

suit they make you change into as you're going out of the containment building and they're like, wait, why are the boots full of piss? All the best are. Thank you. Thank you. All right. That was safety third. Our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. That's right. Yeah. Oh, if you have any complaints or problems with the opinions expressed in this episode, you can you can. That's right. You have to mail money directly to me at 844 North Broad Street or June dot zone with your letter of complaint. We also have a P.O. box. We just sent it there. I can meet up with Liam and get a ship from the P.O. box. We are regularly in contact with June. Yes. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah. Thank you so much for having

me. Do you have any other commercials other than people should mail you money? Oh, yeah. You should mail me money at the address of my art studio, which I am a member of Space 1026, which is one of Philadelphia's oldest art collectives and a historic preservation project in and of itself, both philosophically and practically. Yeah. Mail all of us money, but especially June. Mail everybody money. Go to space1026.com or June dot zone. And I'll see you around if you're in Philadelphia. Oh, yeah. Listen to Lions led by Donkeys. Listen to Lions led by Donkeys. Listen to Kill James Bond. Mail the P.O. box. Rare collectible zippo lices. That's my new thing now. I don't know why it's called obsessive compulsive disorder. Yeah. And we will see you on the next

episode. We have business to discuss after we hang up. Yeah. Let's do that quick because we're going on three hours. Sounds even better. All right. Off beaters everyone. Bye everybody. That's