NEW YORK TIMES, December 22, 1968
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE, Architecture Critic for the New York Times
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Republished
in these later anthologies
Manchester, N.H.:
Lessons in Urbicide
THE
story of the destruction of the
Amoskeag mill complex that has
formed the heart of Manchester,
N.H., for over a hundred years has
a terrible pertinence for the
numberless cities committing blind
mutilation in the name of urban
renewal.
Demolition is under way of one of
the most remarkable manifestations
of our urban and industrial
culture. The historic, but still
functioning, planned mill
community of Manchester, faced
with adjusting to changing
economics, is being
indiscriminately bulldozed for a
researched, consultant-approved
and officially adopted urban
renewal scheme consisting almost
totally of parking lots that mocks
the quality of vision and design
now being ruthlessly effaced.
The Amoskeag plan, conceived and
started in the 1830's by the
Amoskeag Company's
nineteen-year-old engineer,
Ezekial Straw (later governor of
New Hampshire), united factories,
waterways, public buildings and
public commons, housing and
commerce in an integrated design.
The famous mill town's simple,
handsome, vernacular red brick
buildings, constructed for the
textile industry from 1838 to
1915, stretched for more than a
mile along the Merrimac River,
flanking canals and mill yards.
The excellence of the complex has
made it an acknowledged monument
of American industrial history and
urban design.
"Monuments don't pay,"
says Manchester's urban renewal
director, Cary P. Davis, quoted in
Time, as he handed them over to
the bulldozer. Still, the tragedy
of Manchester has not gone
unremarked. Time, Fortune and The
Architectural Forum, representing
the professional press, have added
their voices to the usual ones of
the historians. Maybe that is a
good sign. By slow drops and
trickles in the pool of public
information and opinion, a force
that exerts considerable political
leverage, an awareness of our
losses might hopefully develop
before the country is stripped
bare of its urban art and history.
It is significant in this context
that the term "industrial
archeology," a phrase
employed by historians, is
beginning to break into more
popular usage. Industrial
archeology is the study of the
buildings, plans and structural
and social complexes developed by
the forces of commerce and
industry that have conspicuously
shaped this country in the
nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Manchester is, or was,
a prime example. The term covers a
large, important and varied body
of building that makes special
technological, functional and
esthetic contributions to the
American environment. But its
monuments are largely ignored. We
have a way of sweeping under the
rug art and history that do not
conform to accepted, preconceived
notions of cultural achievement.
We tear down those genuine and
often strikingly handsome
monuments while we build
meaningless reproductions of the
domestic and official eighteenth
century. There is a game, for
example, that could be called
"Who's got the real
Independence Hall" played
cross-country.
Industrial archeology is concerned
with a great deal of the American
scene-significant, strong,
tradition-shattering structures
and plans that tell more about
American civilization than many of
the conventional touchstones.
Randolph Langenbach, a Harvard
graduate who has spent several
years documenting the
Amoskeag-Manchester story for the
Smithsonian archives and on his
own, writes that Manchester's "role
in the growth of American society
is really more important and
symbolic than the role of
Williamsburg. Although much
venerated, Williamsburg was more
English than American in style,
and its significance did not last
through the greatest period of
America's industrial and social
growth, as did Manchester's.
This was written in an article for
the Harvard
Alumni Bulletin. (Harvard
grads, community leaders all,
supporters of culture, read and
remember.) But in the preservation
script as it is written today,
Williamsburg and its imitators get
all the lines. And all the money.
They are rebuilt and refurnished
to expensive, improbable
perfection, while the wrecker's
ball swings freely in the
country's Manchesters. What a
splendid $75 million Rockefeller
restoration and re-use
demonstration project this could
have made. Development problems of
this magnitude and of this
historic importance probably
cannot be solved by any city
without foundation aid.
The tragedy cannot be blamed on
lack of information. John
Coolidge's book on the Utopian
nineteenth-century planning of
Lowell, Mass., Mill and Mansion,
has become a classic in the field.
The Lowell buildings no longer
exist. William Pierson's studies
of New England mill towns are
standard literature. Between this
competent scholarship and the
politically appointed agencies
that run urban renewal there is an
unconscionable communications gap
that could most kindly be called
ignorance. The results of
ignorance are urbicide.
Mr. Langenbach is now documenting
Manchester's self-destruction.
Ninety of the buildings will go
for parking lots and access to
still-functioning factories. The
canals, now polluted, will be
filled in for sewers. What is
being destroyed for some of the
most limited and discredited aims
of urban renewal, he points out,
is the "unity and impact of
one of the most powerful urban
scenes anywhere in the
world."
How did it happen? The same way
that the heart and soul are being
cut out of uncounted American
cities to be replaced by faceless
cliches. First, an outside
research firm is called in to
analyze the community's problems
and make recommendations. The
extremely respected,
internationally known firm of
Arthur D. Little, Inc. produced
such a consultant survey for
Manchester in 1961. While making
numerous economic suggestions, the
report offered the information
that "even with extensive
improvements and upgrading, the
millyard will never be an asset
from the esthetic point of
view."
Well. The blind telling the blind
what to do. Say that to any
architectural historian or urban
designer worthy of the name and
watch the fireworks. The real
catastrophe, however, is that it
is exactly this kind of seriously
inadequate, damaging nonsense that
is being sold successfully to
municipalities countrywide. The
researchers, the planners and the
surveys themselves are close to
identical, ignoring any indigenous
character for formulas of
repetitive, profitable sterility.
The conclusions thus offered and
received as gospel are much like
the grotesque solutions of
incompletely programmed computers.
They are wretchedly wrong. No one
has remembered to put in the
factor of environmental design
sensitivity based on recognition
of its characteristics through
knowledge of its forms and
appreciation of its history. On
those well-known research and
planning teams collecting fat fees
for a depressingly standard
product ground out in town after
town, there is rarely a
contributor of this essential
expertise. The tragically faulty
recommendations that result from
this basic omission are then
translated into action by renewal
agencies, most of whom are
urbanistic amateurs. Surgery is
carried on by plumbers.
What is being produced is a kind
of urban Pablum. We are making a
dull porridge of parking lots and
cheap commercialism, to replace
the forms and evidence of American
civilization. The buildings
despised and sacrificed today are,
or would have been, tomorrow's
heritage. We have forgotten, to
quote Mr. Langenbach again, that "economics
is a social science." We
wonder why the economic formulas
produce inhuman cities.
This is the certain way to the
blight of the future. In
Manchester where the memory of the
mills as a poor and oppressive way
of life is still alive, nobody
really cares. And that is the most
tragic indictment of all.
Twenty-five years later, on January 24, 1993, Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe published an interview with Ada Louise Huxtable. The following is an excerpt from that interview:
Q.
Of all the articles you've
written, the one that had the most
impact in New England and it was
overwhelming ? was the piece on
the need to preserve the historic
mills and ca? of Manchester, N.H.
It had never occurred to anyone in
New England, until you and Ran
Langenbach came on the scene, that
there was anything to preserve in
Manchester Do you remember that?
How do you see the preservation
movement today? You were a very
lonely voice back then in the
'60's
A: We're going back to when all
the destruction was being done.
That was the high bulldozer moment
- the '60's. Langenbach
deserves all the credit for the
Manchester mills; he just showed
me the stuff and what his concerns
were.
I
think I had maybe more impact on
Salem, because Salem had a hideous
urban renewal plan. I remember
going over it with the then-mayor
and planner, and they were going
to eliminate the beautiful
Japanese garden next to the museum
and they were planning roads that
would take away whole blocks. So I
went back to New York and sold it
to the Times as a Page 1 piece ...
and that brought whoever was on
the National Advisory Council on
Historic Preservation in
Washington to Salem. "What
are you doing here?" That
resulted in the change of planners
and the total change in the plan.