City Council, May 23rd - Eco-Earth and Civic Center Historic Designations

It turns out the big Public Hearing and action on Our Salem will be scheduled for June 13th, so Monday's Council agenda item on Our Salem is just one long throat-clearing in a "first reading."

The preliminaries are broken into four agenda items formally:

• "Updating the Salem Area Comprehensive Plan"
• "Amending the Comprehensive Plan Map and Zoning Map"
• "Amending the Salem Revised Code"
• "Adopting the Salem Housing Needs Analysis"
  

There will be more to say later instead of now. Most of the new things are small, technical amendments. Several parcels have been removed from any new designation because they have current land-use applications in process under current designations and code. The Housing Needs Analysis might be more interesting, as I had not seen that directly addressed before. Additionally, on Friday LCDC temporarily approved a suite of administrative rules (previous note here, OPB's news report from yesterday, and a piece at Sightline from today, which points to a letter signed by several mayors, including Mayor Bennett, asking for delay) slated for final adoption in July, that could impact development code. It will be interesting to see how these might alter Our Salem.

So instead of talking about Our Salem we'll digress a little into a side matter, which is not absolutely all that important, but which is interesting and an ongoing theme here.

Council will consider initiating formal designation of the Eco-Earth Acid Ball as a Local Historic Resource. You might recall when it came to the Historic Landmarks Commission at the request of the Public Art Commission. The HLC endorsed it unanimously. 

The nomination is bifocal, for

its association with the Oregon Pulp and Paper Mill and Boise Cascade as well as for significance as one of Salem’s first community projects that adaptively reused an industrial structure.

This is an interesting and rich web of significance. 

Curiously, there is a pretty robust amount of public process for this designation, with full moments at the HLC and Council.

By contrast, there is no public process for a separate proposal that is proceeding nearly in secret, and which may carry implications much more significant!

An early image of the courtyard at City Hall

The City has submitted a draft Nomination for listing the Civic Center complex on the National Register of Historic Places. This has not gone before the HLC and does not appear headed for any Council agenda. It is a wholly independent process, conducted without any public review at the City. The draft Nomination will be considered instead by the State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation at their June 24th meeting.

Start of Nomination

This seems weird.

The Nomination surfaces tensions that really deserve more public debate and analysis. In its conclusion it cites contemporary assessments and aspirations, highlighting "accessibility and public participation," but also calling a very similar structure "a monstrosity."

Today most of us would probably not say "accessibility" was in fact a feature of the building, site plan, and location. And many agree with criticism of the style as a yielding a "monstrosity." The damn thing is a charmless concrete bunker.

Tensions in the Nomination

But there is also an important counter-theme. Routinely we mourn the demolition of the old, Romanesque City Hall, and wish it were still around. The draft Nomination underscores "the pain" after Eugene's modernist City Hall was demolished just a few years ago. If we consider the likely attitudes of children growing up into maturity 50 or 75 years from now, there's a very good chance they will have come around on the Brutalism and find it quaint, expressive, even valuable. Leaky buildings in an unfashionable mode of a previous generation often in a couple more generations become fascinating and valued.

SF Chronicle: First scorn, now beloved

Earlier this month the San Francisco Chronicle had a story about a particularly accelerated instance of this cycle. The Transamerica tower is also 50 years old this year. It started out scorned, and now along with the Golden Gate Bridge it is an icon of the city. Most cycles of reappraisal seem to take longer, however.

Considering that the proposed bond includes a seismic retrofit and potentially some remodeling of City Hall and Peace Plaza, there should be more public conversation about any changes we might want to make. Listing the complex on the National Register is preemptive and may make some proposed changes more difficult, more costly, or perhaps even impossible.

In the discussion of the Library building, the Nomination takes a lugubrious tone. Two rounds of remodeling "have substantially and irreversibly altered the historic design." It focuses on loss. It's been "remuddled" as the preservationists sometimes say.

Rhetoric of loss in describing the Library

But the building is still living, and many use it. Especially as a whole institution, measured by actual use and by sentiment, it is far more loved than City Hall, Peace Plaza, or Mirror Pond.

Our Historic Preservation framework dismisses the ways people actually use buildings and spaces. Peace Plaza is utterly dead. Few use it. Yet in the discussion immediately preceding the analysis of the Library, Peace Plaza enjoys a higher regard and "retains sufficient integrity from the period of significance with regard to design, materials, and association to be a contributing resource."

We celebrate dead, non-functioning space and denigrate living, fully functional space. Something is very wrong here.

Nominating the Civic Center complex is the right thing, but the process around it is wrong. The timing is clearly being rushed for its 50th anniversary. First we really should have a more public conversation about a site plan and renovations for the next 50 years.

An early model showed an open courtyard

It is interesting, for example, that several models for earlier versions of the Civic Center show an open, uncovered courtyard area. Even if the current translucent panels were no longer amber, the light level in the courtyard would still be low, and opening that up and bringing more light into the interior passageways might be very nice.

There are changes that might alter some "integrity" of the original design, but which would improve accessibility, function, and mood. 

Finally, the Nomination should take a more critical stance on the parking garages. The one at City Hall rates as "contributing," and the one for the Library "non-contributing." Maybe they should be excluded entirely. The conclusion to the Nomination quotes Ada Louise Huxtable on Brutalism and the Boston City Hall in 1969.

Here she is a year later:

Some day, some American city will discover the Malthusian truth that the greater number of automobiles, the less the city can accommodate them without destroying itself. The downtown that turns itself into a parking lot is spreading its own dissolution.

Bullets for the rest:

• Public Hearing for code changes to allow the street painting and intersection mural program. (Previous note here.)
  
• Approvals for 272 apartments and townhouses on Boone Road.
• Remand (by a 6-3 vote, Councilors Andersen, Leung, and Phillips voting against the remand motion) of the Kuebler Village proposal back to the Planning Commission. "City Council found that the testimony and evidence submitted by the applicant was not sufficient to approve the application. The City Council finds that the Transportation Planning Rule Analysis (TPR) provided by the applicant, specifically the proposed mitigation, did not satisfy the approval criteria." There will be more to say later when it returns to the Commission.
• Application for $600,000 for updating the Airport Master Plan. But will we include any assessment of greenhouse gas emissions?
• Application for Oregon Department of Energy Community Renewable Energy grant  to construct a distribution system microgrid at the new Public Works building. "The proposed project would be the first-ever 'community microgrid' in Oregon. This community microgrid creates a network of electricity users that includes the new Public Works Operations Building and nearby residences." Sounds pretty neat, and it will be interesting to learn more about it.
  

Update, November 17th

The HLC did not post the agenda and Staff Reports seven days in advance of today's meeting, only a day or two, so this is just a brief update.

Apparently on November 2nd the National Park Service accepted the Civic Center Nomination, and now the HLC proposes for Council to designate it formally as a local historic resource.

There will be a Public Hearing scheduled later at the HLC.