The constituent landscape: History, race and real estate in Washington, D.C., 1950--1990

This dissertation is concerned with the physical, economic and social transformations that shaped Washington's inner city residential neighborhoods during the second half of the twentieth century. In the postwar period planners, business and citizen groups assumed that much of the inner city would have to be reconstructed if its economic value was to be protected. However, as the nature of architectural taste, the city's workforce, and the economics of its real estate market all changed a strong tendency to preserve and remodel the city's existing housing became evident. This was reinforced by a civil rights-based critique of the displacement caused by federally funded urban renewal and highway building programs. In questioning the wisdom of federal, urban policy African American leaders joined a growing contingent of middle-class and mostly white Washingtonians who championed the cultural value of urban life and the existing architectural fabric of the city. Both groups opposed the virtually unchecked exercise of federal authority in the city and became crucial proponents of the move to establish democratic local government in Washington.; During the same period architects, planners and urban designers began to look for new ways to highlight and protect the constituent elements of the urban fabric in American cities. In doing so they rejected the modernist image of the city as a network in favor of older, organic metaphors that emphasized the cultural patterns and natural interdependencies of their different pans. One of the most significant developments nurtured by this preservation-minded group was an interest in ensembles of buildings, townscape qualities and the visual coherency of places. This led to an increased focus on protecting not just individual landmark buildings but large groups of buildings and entire urban districts. New legislation in the middle of the 1960s institutionalized the idea of historic districts and encouraged their identification and legal protection. Architects and urbanists in Washington, people such as Frederic W. Gutheim and John Carl Warnecke, as well as leaders of the National Trust such as David Finley played a crucial part in promoting the idea that Washington and other cities should not be viewed in narrowly analytical and functional terms. Instead they asserted that the value and pleasures of cities could be more effectively protected by encouraging a stronger sense of place in their inhabitants. This sense of place would be based on preserving existing patterns and physical forms wherever possible.; By the middle of the 1970s neighborhood organizations in Washington joined this effort and promoted the wider use of historic preservation law. Their efforts during the next decade saw the passage of a new local preservation law and the identification and expansion of several significant historic districts. This effort not only reshaped the growth of downtown and contested the legitimacy of the expansion of the U.S. Capitol complex, it also promoted a very specific set of urbanistic values that became widely influential among property owners, real estate agents and planters in Washington. Yet it was an effort whose underlying value was increasingly questioned by the early 1980s. Large real estate developers stepped up their campaign against the identification of historic districts. Organized opposition also arose amongst a number of African American neighborhood groups who had begun to view the historic districting effort as a tool of gentrification. Just as a citywide African American leadership had marshaled its resources to slow urban renewal, neighborhood organizations now used local government to contest the purportedly universal value of historic preservation efforts.; In the period since the late 1980s some of these local organizations have embraced historic preservation as a legal tool that enhances community control of their assets, while others have rejected it as a primarily aesth...