Old Salem College and the town green in Old Salem.
My Old Salem blog on True Green got a lot of coverage, including getting picked up by Kaid Benfield from NRDC on his “Switchboard” blog. The evocative images of Old Salem, North Carolina with snow and the promise of a friendly “hello” seemed to find a wide audience. I took another walk around town later in the week when the snow melted, this time to observe and consider the phenomenon I call “historic urban sprawl”, which is intruding upon more and more of our urban cores and historic sites.
The backyards of Factory Row in Old Salem. My retreat was in the house on the right.
My last couple of days in Old Salem last week on my Best Practices Manual writing-retreat were spent luxuriating on the back porch of the federal house I was staying in. With the snow melted already, and the spring daffodils poking through the grass, I spent the days writing while admiring the expanse of green yard but trying to ignore the rows of condominiums that line the “gateway” to Old Salem, wondering why so many people have such bad taste and lack a sense of place. I thought about these really poor attempts at architectural synchronicity on Friday night when we went to a concert in Winson-Salem to hear a folk singer, Chuck Brodsky, weave his tales of irony.
One song called “Take it Out Back” resonated with me:
Take it out back and dump it in the river
Take it out back and throw it in the woods
Take it out back and chuck it down the hillside
Keep the front yard looking good
Let’s Look At These Poor Attempts at New Urbanism
The condominium "rowhouse" subdvision that marches up to the boundary of the Old Salem historic district and marred my otherwise perfect back porch view.
So, I’m no fan of New Urbanism as I’ve reported in other blogs. But I would sing its praises if New Urbanism could have come to Old Salem rather than the relentlessly banal and poorly done attempts at sympathetic design found in the developments that back up to the historic town, specifically backing up to Factory Row where I was staying on my retreat. Look at the images (above) of two houses on Factory Row which date from the early 1800s. Now look at these images of the attached “rowhouses” behind Factory Row. What’s wrong with this picture? To the new development, the historic houses are what they’re looking at, “keeping their front yard looking good.” While to the historic Factory Row houses, the new development is what was “taken out back.”
Cultural Irony
This development adjacent to Old Salem ignores the traditional neighborhood structure of the town by using attached houses.
So, we have developments that are completely out of scale, show no understanding of why the original place they are mimicking so poorly works so well, and are located next to the original because it increases their property values and desirability. A developer abstracts some details from the original unattached houses and places them all over a few copies, attaches them all and multiplies them by hundredfold. Now, an original street that has five individual houses is backed
Here, on Main Street in Old Salem, the traditional neighborhood structure contains individual one and two story Federal-era buildings.
up to a street of the same length with 50 attached units. It is both scary and sad. The subdivision’s property values are high because they have views of our grand heritage, while the heritage is diminished in almost every way – their views, their context, their authenticity, the massive increase in traffic. I think the urban principle that these types of developments offend the most is being respectful of the “traditional neighborhood structure”. The development ignores the fact that in Old Salem the streetscape is comprised of 2-story individual houses with private yards and low-scale commercial buildings.
Suburban Subdivisions Push the Urban Boundaries
Subdivisions are built right up to the Entrance and Visitor Center at Petroglyph National Monument in Albququerque, NM.
Somewhere in the past fifty years we have gone astray and lost our way. Our rural wide-open spaces have been transformed into Levittown after Levittown. And our small historic urban cores are surrounded by urban sprawl.
And it’s not just in Old Salem; we see it everywhere. Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico is ringed by suburban developments that have virtually destroyed the pristine views that inspired the early petroglyph painters – developments actually called “Petroglyph Park.” At Drayton Hall in Charleston, the National Trust has spent millions of dollars buying land to protect the viewshed and hire lawyers to battle zoning changes that would encourage suburban development along one of the great scenic highways in South Carolina. And the road to James Madison’s Montpelier in Orange, Virginia is lined with suburban developments of builder homes with names like “Poplar Forest”.
The entrance to historic Old Salem.
One of the most important things organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Smart Growth America have done has been to promote smart growth and battle sprawl. Encouraging urban growth and adaptive use is one of the core reasons that preservation equals sustainable development. And at the heart of this are our historic sites – the places that matter to all of us, the reason we travel to places like New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Buffalo, Albuquerque and Old Salem. The unquantifiable “social metrics” that make us feel so good to be there.
