Ghost Stadium

I was surprised that the city council voted to postpone the demolition of the major part of World War Memorial Stadium. If you're not familiar with what happened at this week's council meeting, Ed Cone has a brief summary with links. If you want the long history, just click the tag for "World War Memorial Stadium" below and you can read all my posts over the past years.

The council is in a quandary about what to do, so while they're waiting for another engineering report, I thought I'd try to organize my scattered thoughts.

The Preservationist Perspective

A good place to start is with the Secretary of the Interior's Standard's for the Treatment of Historic Properties. They guide all federally-funded preservation projects, and they apply to WWMS because it's listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but they are enforceable only if federal money is involved in the renovation.

Here are the standards for preservation:

1. A property will be used as it was historically, or be given a new use that maximizes the retention of distinctive materials, features, spaces, and spatial relationships. Where a treatment and use have not been identified, a property will be protected and, if necessary, stabilized until additional work may be undertaken.
2. The historic character of a property will be retained and preserved. The replacement of intact or repairable historic materials or alteration of features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided.
3.  Each property will be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use. Work needed to stabilize, consolidate, and conserve existing historic materials and features will be physically and visually compatible, identifiable upon close inspection, and properly documented for future research.
4. Changes to a property that have acquired historic significance in their own right will be retained and preserved.
5.  Distinctive materials, features, finishes, and construction techniques or examples of craftsmanship that characterize a property will be preserved.
6. The existing condition of historic features will be evaluated to determine the appropriate level of intervention needed. Where the severity of deterioration requires repair or limited replacement of a distinctive feature, the new material will match the old in composition, design, color, and texture.
7. Chemical or physical treatments, if appropriate, will be undertaken using the gentlest means possible. Treatments that cause damage to historic materials will not be used.
8. Archeological resources will be protected and preserved in place. If such resources must be disturbed, mitigation measures will be undertaken.

The city-proposed plan, euphemistically called "renovation," weakly meets only the first of these criteria: the stadium will still be a war memorial, will still be used for amateur sports as it was intended, and the proposed plaza in front of its impressive triple-arched entry will give it a possible new use, since the area, if carefully and amply designed, may accommodate any number of public, civic, or patriotic activities. But it meets the standard only in an attenuated way, bringing in 30 spectators for college baseball games when once it attracted thousands.

The guidelines call for "identifying, retaining, and preserving character-defining features" of the building. The National Register nomination for the stadium identified not only as its entry arches, but also the inverted "J" shape of the seating, distinctive because it is unique to the stadium. The decorated exterior masonry walls flanking the pylons are also significant, as are the distinctive windows, which still exist but have been blocked up. (You can see them on this old postcard). Finally, the canopy over the seating, though not original, has gained its own significance over time, and certainly makes watching afternoon games more pleasant.

In short, the city's proposal is a preservationist's disaster. Less will be left of the 85-year old stadium than remains of the Roman Colosseum.

At the council meeting, Bill Burckley asserted that most, if not all the significant features can be preserved for the $1.4 million the city has to spend on it, and that is why the council voted to get a second opinion on the state of the stadium's concrete. It would be great if he's right, but I have no idea whether he is.

The Neighborhood Perspective

The Aycock Neighborhood has spent a decade advocating for the preservation of the stadium, and even commissioned its own renovation plans (with a lot of help from friends like Preservation Greensboro). Its concern has been not only with the structure and its use, but its neighborhood setting. Neighborhood representatives served for years on a city-appointed task force that came up with not one, but three different plans for a "park within a park" to include not only the stadium but also the nearby tennis courts, Greensboro Farmers' Market, and the old VFW building across the street. The idea was to increase the public use of the stadium area and to use the stadium for occasional musical entertainment.

Although none of these facilities is in the Aycock Neighborhood per se, they adjoin it, and are identified as vital elements of our neighborhood life in our city-council-adopted Strategic Plan and Summit Avenue Corridor plan. While the neighborhood has been self-funding and carrying out many of the elements of those plans on its own (including streetscape improvements and signage), the city has yet to follow through on any of the promised capital improvements.

My sense is that, while the neighborhood cares very much about the preservation of the stadium, it sees it as only one element of a neighborhood improvement plan, and not the most important one. The Strategic Plan, based on a very open and careful public process, identified the improvement of Summit Avenue as our number one priority. Number 5 on that list was "prepare a plan for War Memorial Stadium and Veterans' Plaza". Veterans' Plaza is the area of public use proposed for the zone between the stadium and the Farmers' Market, and the neighborhood's current interest as a neighborhood in the stadium is mainly in that public space now that minor league baseball is gone.

Make no mistake, though: the stadium was a huge neighborhood asset when neighbors could walk on summer evenings to see the Greensboro Bats play. The city council, the Guilford County commissioners, and various city boosters at that time promised the neighborhood that the old stadium would continue to be a well-maintained and well-used neighborhood asset.

The Parks and Recreation / Greensboro Sports Commission Perspective

The Greensboro Parks and Recreation Department, which operates the stadium, has consistently been adamant (since minor league baseball left) that it wants to use it for one purpose only: amateur baseball. The primary tenants of the stadium have been NCA&T University and Greensboro College, along with some youth leagues (the infield is too big for little league). But Greensboro College has since moved on to greener infields, and the number of youth league games has declined as interest in baseball has waned.

Parks and Rec representatives on the stadium task force opposed using the stadium for other entertainments, citing wear and tear on the playing surface. And any hopes that the old stadium might attract such acts were crushed by Greensboro Coliseum manager Matt Brown, who stole a march on the WWMS renovation proponents by building the White Oak Amphitheatre, much of which he completed even before the city council knew about it.

Members of the Greensboro Sports Commission have said that there is no chance of bringing regional or national tournaments to the stadium, at least as long as Greensboro's new downtown stadium is standing. The old stadium simply cannot provide the amenities that modern athletes and fans expect (although downtown stadium boosters claimed in 2003 that "War Memorial Stadium would be an ideal location to host regional, state, and national baseball tournaments.")

Parks and Recreation and the Greensboro Sports Commission representatives have maintained that there is no need for more than a few hundred seats at WWMS, and their statements have turned out to be true for the stadium's use over the last seven years.

The Political Perspective

The current city council is facing a dilemma left to it by previous councils when they decided to build the downtown stadium and later the White Oak Amphitheatre. Those two votes assured that there wasn't and isn't going to be enough baseball or outdoor musical entertainment to make full use of the old stadium. The newer facilities have sucked the life out of the old one, and there is nothing the present council can do about that.

Even if WWMS received a full-scale preservation and rehabilitation, with all its architectural features returned to their former glory, it would still be a melancholy place -- its empty seats a silent testament to its own diminishment, and to our diminished feelings for the soldiers who died in a war almost 100 years ago that few recall or understand.

So the council will have to decide how to allocate resources to a large and expensive structure for which there is now very little use -- unless they can think of some new use for it, and make sure that it gets used.

Brutal Preservation

Charles Paul Freund writes about the preservation paradoxes swirling around an architecturally-unloved 1970s-era Christian Science church in Washington, DC:

So why has the city's Historic Preservation Review Board unanimously declared the Third Church of Christ, Scientist to be an official D.C. landmark, preventing not only its demolition, but even its unauthorized alteration? Because, it turns out, it is a sterling example of the mid-century school of design known as Brutalism.

... Brutalism's preservers remain vulnerable to the ironists. That's because the church is question is exactly the kind of building that energized the city's grassroots preservation efforts in the first place. Of course, the activist preservationists of decades ago were hardly seeking to save such buildings as this church; many were seeking to prevent them from being built at all (at least in an urban context).

Our fair city has quite a bit of Brutalist architecture, including the Melvin Municipal Office Building, aka City Hall. Sometime in the next generation, people are going to start talking about tearing it down, and we're going to have to decide whether to keep it.

Via Instapundit.

Upheld

The Greensboro Board of Adjustment yesterday upheld a ruling of the Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission about the cutting of a tree in Fisher Park. I wrote about the HPC's vote here, and I should note that I made the motion on the HPC to deny the request to cut the tree. The N&R's Jim Schlosser writes,

The Greensboro Board of Adjustment sided with the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association on Monday by ruling the church must keep a willow oak in a new church parking lot planned along North Elm Street.

I wasn't at the BOA meeting (I was teaching my historical linguistics class), and I believe they made the correct ruling, but I'm going to pick a bone with Jim Schlosser.

The job of the BOA is not to re-hear cases de novo, and the Board does not have to agree with the original ruling in order to uphold it. The Board's job is to determine whether the original ruling of the HPC was made fairly and reasonably.

When the HPC ruled that the tree in question should be preserved, it was not siding with the Fisher Park neighborhood; it was applying what's written in the Historic Preservation Design Guidelines to a specific case. Nor was the BOA siding with anyone in this appeal -- it would be a gross dereliction of their duty for them to do so. The BOA simply found that the HPC had ruled within its authority in a fair hearing.

Portraying a case like this as an amusing feud between a neighborhood and a church, with various boards and commissions taking sides, makes for a lively story.

But it demeans the work of the board and commission volunteers, who take their duties seriously, and it deprives the public of accurate knowledge of how their city government works.

"The most amazing thing is that this started with 10 signs.”

Preservation Nation:

It was the last straw for neighbors like Tad Skelton, who had watched eight houses fall for new ones in one of the town’s two national historic districts. Skelton and others planted red plastic signs in their yards, protesting the teardown trend. Today 550 front yards in the town of 27,000 display the “Protect Historic Kirkwood” signs.

Something for the folks in Greensboro's Kirkwood to think about.

A Green Old Age

Walter Gallas writes about an unusual reason for a tear-down request in New Orleans:

This week I went to the New Orleans City Council to speak against a proposal to demolish an undamaged 1890’s Queen Anne style house on Henry Clay Street in the Audubon Park neighborhood so that the owners could build a new “green” house....

This urge to demolish is especially shocking given that its goal was supposedly sustainability, as it is a complete contradiction of what the green building movement envisions. It would be more responsible to apply green building principles to the current building–exploring ways to conserve energy, preserving its original materials, and ensuring that the building continues to exist for another 100 years. The resources contained in this house will be wasted and lost forever with its demolition.

Mansions vs. McMansions

Greensboro's Treasured Places reports that the Irving Park neighborhood is thinking about adopting an NCO -- not a non-commissioned officer, but a Neighborhood Conservation Overlay. They'd be the first neighborhood to do so since the city council passed the ordinance enabling the overlays.

NCOs allow old neighborhoods to craft their own development guidelines, including street setbacks, building forms, and building materials. The goal in Irving Park would be to stop tear-downs and the building of bulky contemporary houses on small lots.

If that's what Irving Park wants, I'm all for it: that neighborhood is stunningly beautiful and worth protecting. You don't have to live there (and few of us can afford to) in order to enjoy a jog or a bike ride through it and appreciate its many architectural and landscaping wonders. It's kind of like an architectural park for the whole city. (Bless those developers in the 1920s for building sidewalks!)

It will be interesting to see how the neighborhood debate plays out. One assumes that Irving Park, being our most prestigious neighborhood, is probably a stronghold of market-based, laissez-faire, anti-regulatory capitalists. Will those folks oppose regulation when it stands to protect their property values?

We'll see. Just remember Wharton's Land Use Axiom #1: Land use makes hypocrites of us all.

Another Vinyl Hater

Barbara Campagna goes on an anti-vinyl tirade:

“No vinyl” I said. “But vinyl lasts longer and doesn’t need any maintenance,” he responded. Why does this misperception continue in the general public and bleed over into those of us who should know better? As Mike Jackson (Chief Architect of the Illinois SHPO’s office) says, “No Maintenance required” really means “can’t be repaired” - so they end up in the landfill much sooner than say a wood window which can be repaired and repaired and repaired, or recycled. Vinyl can’t be repaired, and it can’t be recycled. So, maybe you don’t need to repaint it every 1o years, but within 20 years you will need to buy new windows yet again, and the heavy imprint on the environment starts all over.

To quote my colleague Patrice’s recent “White Paper on Sustainability”: There is a common perception that windows are a major source of heat loss and gain. Yet retaining historic windows is often more environmentally friendly than replacement with new thermally resistant windows. Government data suggests that windows are responsible for only 10% of air infiltration in the average home. Furthermore, a 1996 study finds that the performance of updated historic windows is in fact comparable to new windows. Window retention also preserves embodied energy, and reduces demand for environmentally costly new windows, typically constructed of vinyl or aluminum… There is the widespread perception that air leakage through windows is responsible for the majority of heat gain or loss in historic buildings. Yet information from the U.S. Department of Energy indicates that windows are responsible for only 10% of air escape in the average American home. Floors, ceiling and walls are responsible for 31% of heat loss and gain, while ducts and fireplaces are each responsible for about 15% of heat loss and gain.

Besides, vinyl windows are just ugly as hell.

Previously.

Mellowing On Mellow Mushroom

I got a couple of responses to what I wrote about the Mellow Mushroom coming to South Elm:

Ed Cone wrote that "Greensboro is not Mayberry." Irrefutable!

I've got no problem with downtown Greensboro growing and changing, though you might not get that message from my post. To clarify: my worry is that South Elm's distinctive, local flavor will be lost to architectural and commercial generica.

So I was really happy to get an e-mail from the Mellow Mushroom's owner, Jim Waters. He wrote,

The store in Greensboro will take into consideration (and respect) the character of the neighborhood and hopefully expand on it. It will have a completely different look than the WS store. When the time comes I'll send you a rendering of the Greensboro store and would welcome your comments. I'll be shocked if we bring a chain feel to the area; that is not why we are heading there.

In the meantime, keep us (and the rest of Downtown Greensboro) on our toes!

...

We have a vision for 609 S. Elm that I hope comes together will blow people away. We are looking for a "bohemian cathedral" feel that will take advantage of all the windows on the south side of the building. We'll see what this all means when we get there.

For what it is worth, we do our fair share to support local art and music and often lay low, take our punches on any dissent and then see if the views change once we deliver our product.

Those are heartening words, because South Elm is already an architectural treasure.

Mr. Waters sent some photos of the Mellow Mushroom in Winston-Salem:


To me, The sleek, almost retro- modernism of the WS store looks appropriate for its context. It will be interesting to see what the Greensboro store will look like.

Wish I'd Said That

Glenn Reynolds writes, "the political rewards for fixing old stuff are far inferior to the political rewards for building new stuff -- even if the old stuff is stuff we need, and the new stuff is showy pork."

So right. His post is about "big" infrastructure like bridges and dams, but the same principle applies to neighborhoods.

Mellow Mushroom Can't Be As Mellow As Two Art Chicks

[Sigh.]

Jogging down South Elm Street the other day, I was thinking how it still has the ambiance of an old-fashioned, small-town downtown, with some distinctive Greensboro touches. Old guys hanging out in front of Coe Grocery. Kindley's used office furniture. Two Art Chicks.

Enter Mellow Mushroom, exit Two Art Chicks.

The chainification of downtown Greensboro has begun. It will be good for property and business owners, bad for downtown Greensboro's being someplace, instead of anyplace or everyplace.

Two Art Chicks has been an ideal downtown citizen, not only providing gallery space for local artists, but also meeting room for neighborhood redevelopment confabs. (It looks like it might now be a victim of its own public-spiritedness.)

But the hard truth is that most people care a lot more about good pizza than they do about picturesque charm or local art.

[Sigh.]

Hope You Enjoyed Your Day

Yesterday was a good day for some people. Mr. Sun spent quality dad time with his boys, took a nap, and made some cute graphics about living in Greensboro. Ed Cone went shopping for consumer goods with his son, and got to make fun of Circuit City afterwards. On Facebook, one of my colleagues updated his status to "having the best day ever!"

Me, I spent the morning alternately feeling like I was going to throw up and shouting obscenities at myself, because we let my daughter run out of gas in our Prius, a block from home.

Did you know that if your Prius runs out of gas, and the big battery gets depleted from driving only on electric power, you have to get a new battery? And the battery costs $4000? And I don't have $4,000? And Sam is going to college next year, and Madeline the year after that?

So I spent the morning getting the car towed to the dealer, hoping against hope that all was well, and shouting the f-word (sometimes vivace, sometimes lento, always fortissimo) at myself all the way home from Rice Toyota.

The afternoon I spent in the 18" spidery crawlspace underneath my kitchen, feeling a lot like Charles Bronson's character in the Great Escape -- you know, the tunneler with claustrophobia.

I had discovered some serious decay caused by our house's previous owner building a deck attached to the rear of the house, which allowed moisture to penetrate and rot the support beams. All this had to be fixed by building a new concrete-block support pier and replacing the rotted beams, in a space accessible only by wiggling 25 feet over and under a century's worth of plumbing, electrical wires, and steel ducts. Lots of those white spider egg sacs this time of year. Thousands of them. They feel kind of tickly on your head and down the back of your neck and under your shirt.

Anyhow, I got the pier built, and took a call (while under the house) from the Toyota technician. All's well with the car (which I still like a lot, so please keep your schadenfreude to yourself, hybridophobes).

And I'm going to enjoy this afternoon by constructing and replacing beams with my new friends the spiders.

Enjoy your nap.

Update (Sunday, 7 pm): I emerge victorious over spiders and rot.

Capitalist Preservationist

Jim Schlosser reports that John Lomax and three partners plan to renovate Greensboro's first Cadillac dealership:

John Lomax, who has rehabbed many downtown buildings, points to the [building's] expensive wainscoting around the showroom walls, white and black diamond floor tiles, skylights and other upscale touches that survive at 304 E. Market St. These features once told car buyers America's most classy automobile was sold here.

According to the article, Lomax has rehabbed 28 downtown buildings in the last 8 years. Two of his partners, Jay Jung and Daniel Craft, also have done adaptive re-use projects. That's an impressive record; Mr. Lomax and his partners are doing good work, and making money at it, which shows me that a lot of people are finding value in preservation these days.

Good News for Friendly Avenue Architecture

From Greensboro's Treasured Places:

On September 10th, the Greensboro Zoning Commission unanimously approved the rezoning of the historic Albright House for office use, paving the way for preservation of the site as the headquarters for the Junior League of Greensboro. Final approval will be requested of City Council ....

The Starmount Company has owned the house for decades, and it has recently developed a plan to donate the house for charitable use. The surrounding wooded land and stream would be dedicated to the city and preserved for use as a passive park memorializing Blanche Sternberger Benjamin.

Although I don't think this part of town really needs another park, it's great news that the Albright house may remain intact and well-used.

Bedroom Renovation Day 8 (Video)

In which I learn the wonders of epoxy.

Bedroom Renovation Day 7 (Video)

Got some window work done. Bob hollers.

Bedroom Renovation Day 6 (Video)

An abbreviated lesson in double-hung window repair. But I didn't acutally get to the "repair" part -- I just took them apart. A later episode will show them put back together (I hope).

Bedroom Renovation Day 5 (Video)

Wallpaper removal, with secret message and dogs.

Bedroom Renovation: Day 4 (Video)

I was delayed from my DIY work for a day because my refrigerator and my car both broke down yesterday.

After dealing with those unpleasant details, I got back to the real fun: caulking a 100-year-old beadboard ceiling. Our house was originally heated with coal-burning stoves and fireplaces, which means that our attic is full of soot.

Having exposed the original wood ceiling (see days one, two, and three), I needed to seal up all the cracks to keep the soot contained. Enjoy Duke Ellington and McKnight's cool fox:

Bedroom Renovation Day 3 (Video)

Another day's work.

Bedroom Renovation Day 2 (Video)

Another day's work.