Framing Howard Hall as Practicality vs Sentimentality Misses Giant Parking Lot

The Hospital is gearing up for another attempt to demolish Howard Hall. But lost in the headline antithesis of practicality vs. sentimentality is the way the whole thing is a giant surface parking lot.

It's all about cars.

Drab and Useless?

Rather than framing it as reason vs emotion, how about we look at carbon footprint.  A more interesting angle might be how profoundly unsustainable and unhealthy is the whole model of car storage and new construction proposed here. In reuse, retaining the embodied carbon in an existing building isn't just sentimentality, and in fact it might be the most prudent, practical option of all.

Lovely and full of Possibility?

It's all about parking
 (Howard Hall in lower left)

Proposed garden and playground concept at Howard Hall site

As we pointed out in July, the Hospital's just going through the motions, and they aren't engaged in a serious attempt to figure out how to use the building now or to bank it for a later use.

If the garden and playground offers such compelling community benefit, there's plenty of surface parking area that could be better used. The garden and playground doesn't need to be in the footprint of Howard Hall on the corner there. The Hospital's policy of subsidizing free parking and employee parking permits deforms the possibilities here. The whole development concept revolves around trading old buildings for surface parking.

But the Hospital's plan is also complicated by the neighborhood's desire for an ornamental emptiness, a green but empty extension of Bush Park.  A streetcar-scaled mixed-use development might have afforded more opportunity for preserving and reusing Howard Hall.

The whole quasi-judicial hearing thing also complicates. That's why the piece in the paper had no comment from Historic Landmarks Commissoners. When the demolition permit application (in the form of removing this historic designation for Howard Hall) finally gets to the Historic Landmarks Commission, because they are making a decision as if they were a judge, they are supposed to avoid ex-parte contact and to make a decision on the merits, assessing only what is presented at the hearing.  One problem with this is that it takes Commissioners out of the larger community-wide debate and informal conversation, and asks them to make a potentially hasty decision at a hearing. On complicated questions like this, ones that require deeper investigation into fact and opinion, it may not be possible to adequately weigh evidence in a single meeting of the Commission. The Hospital will say they can't afford to bank the building, for example, and Commissioners might need to be able take longer to assess that claim.

(For more on Howard Hall and the Blind School Parcel, see notes tagged Blind School Redevelopment.)