The Allentown Preservation League, Inc. (hereafter “Allentown Preservation”) is the sole not-for-profit advocate for preservation and maintenance of Allentown’s historic architecture and neighborhoods, especially those structures within the city’s Historic Demolition zoning overlay. Allentown Preservation was founded in 1991, and awarded a 501(c)3 non-profit designation in 1993, by a group of citizens dedicated to focusing attention on the architectural heritage of the City of Allentown.
Over the past thirty years our organization’s focus narrowed to warehousing and selling architectural salvage at below-market rate, with advocacy and education retreating to the background of our efforts. While we plan to continue that project in the future as well as develop new ways to facilitate the technical conservation of architecture, our newest generation of leadership has felt compelled to bring into the foreground the reasons for preservation and to raise awareness of the advances in preservation thought over the past thirty years.
To that end, we want to clarify that ours is not your grandmother’s preservation movement. We do not stand athwart development and progress for the sake of a quaint or ornamental aesthetic accessible only to the wealthiest twenty-percent of the population in service to their property values, but stand instead in favor of urban development that accounts for the keen advantages of historic planning, construction, and architectural idioms. Ours is a holistic project that ascribes value to more than the superficial color and texture of historic street frontage and façades, but to the systematic and structural benefits that they provide.
We at Allentown Preservation are influenced by the range of ideas and research from the groundswell of grassroots activism of non-profits like Strong Towns; the more granular work of academics like Max Page, University of Massachusetts Professor of Architecture; and the technical education of tradespeople like Scott Sidler of the Craftsman Blog and Austin Historical.
Preservation is no longer merely a matter of architectural beauty, historical significance, or the influence that monumental structures had on society. Preservation is now inseparable from environmental conservation and the economics of justice. We must preserve our historic architecture for reasons of environmental sustainability, to stand against the kind of gentrification that dispossesses and displaces people, and to confront some of the ugliest parts of our history.
In many ways, the modern instinct toward preservation is deeply allied with the humanitarian goals of urban activists like Jane Jacobs and the conservation goals of entities like the Architectural Conservation Laboratory, now Center for Architectural Conservation, at the University of Pennsylvania.
In our post-pandemic efforts to assess and redefine our principles and role, we identified the following as priorities for advocacy and community action:
- Responsible stewardship
- Maintenance as an ethos
- Vernacular architecture
- Small lot, mixed-use planning
- Walkable neighborhoods
- Urban forestry
- Holistic livability
When we speak of responsible stewardship, we are framing this in terms of our individual and collective responsibility for the material and cultural assets which are currently in our possession and the choices we make with respect to them, including the environmental and humanitarian costs of those choices.
We take it for granted because we’re so immersed in our built environments, but buildings are the largest and most financially and ecologically costly objects crafted by human beings. Buildings are also intended to be permanent rather than disposable, they are inserted into places in ways that are difficult to undo, making them naturally transgenerational objects that we all inherit and for which we are communally responsible independent of our own individual wants, as well as contemporary fashions.
Building construction accounts for nearly forty per-cent of all carbon dioxide emissions and in an era when the imperatives to slow the warming of our planet and concomitant increase in severe weather that threatens local ecologies and existing infrastructure, we must learn to be more responsible stewards of what already exists — what has already been extracted from the earth, what was already transported across vast distances, what has already been processed and milled and manufactured using already expended energy.
It takes an enormous amount energy to demolish existing structures, to haul and dispose of the resulting waste, to extract raw natural resources, to manufacture construction-ready building materials, to transport those materials to a construction site, and to then assemble the new physical structure. Old buildings embody all of the spent energy used to originally construct them. The longer a building stands, the greater its offset of those energy expenditures.
As an example, an extensive study by the National Trust for Historic Preservation found that an existing 50,000 square foot structure embodies approximately 80 million BTUs of energy — equivalent to 640,000 gallons of gasoline. Demolition of such a building would result in 4,000 tons of waste. If only 40% of materials are retained, it would take 65 years for a new green, energy-efficient building to offset the embodied energy that was lost. We must conserve the durable goods that are our historic buildings not merely because they make up the unique fabric of our neighborhoods, our commercial and industrial districts, but because they embody the consumption of countless natural resources that we can no longer afford to consume anew.
A neglect of maintenance has quickly become one of our gravest problems as a society, but an ethos of maintenance first, foremost, and forever must be cultivated if we hope to uncouple ourselves from unsustainable models of growth. Smaller, formerly industrial cities like Allentown — long in decline — have many advantages over cities that have undergone continuous cycles of redevelopment. Because the lion’s share of our residential, commercial, and industrial architecture was built with durable methods of construction and materials of greater integrity, we retain strong foundations for a sustainable, maintainable future. Unlike modern stick frame structures clad and outfitted in materials that are typically rated with twenty to fifty year lifespans, European cities have shown us that structural brick and masonry will stand for at least five hundred years if not more and that on average the typical brick wall only needs to be repointed every 120 years. Almost nothing built today is as durable or as worthy of our care as the tens of thousands of brick and masonry structures already built here.
While many might point to the presence of toxic substances like lead and asbestos in older structures and the risks they pose to public health, the truth is that lead and asbestos abatement must be undertaken at cost whether a building is to be demolished, renovated, or restored. Why pay tens of thousands if not millions for the safe removal of these substances only to demolish the abated structure? The past use of materials now considered a threat to public health should not hamper our continual commitment to maintaining and appropriately updating and retrofitting residential and commercial building stock.
Allentown and cities of similar size retain some of the last remnants of vernacular architectures of place. Do they also feature stunning examples of grand academic architectures, which can be found anywhere? Yes. Do many of the more run-of-the-mill buildings share characteristics with other industrial era structures, buildings you might find anywhere from Boston to St. Louis? Certainly. But there is also a local character that is not discoverable elsewhere. Area specific patterns and ornaments, the use of materials that are either locally or regionally abundant, designs that are either unique to us or which are uncommon elsewhere. It is no longer possible to find this kind of location specific architectural language. New construction looks the same in Memphis, Tennessee as it does in Phoenix, Arizona or Portland, Maine. The materials that are used in building either commercial or residential structures cannot be differentiated from one area to another.
The homogenization of architecture was a modernist project of the middle twentieth century, one which sought to supplant the localized wisdom of draftspeople builders who understood the specific needs of their particular place with one-size-fits-all designs that rely exclusively on mechanical air handling and climate control systems to remain habitable. As we find ourselves more and more subject to severe weather, these kinds of hermetically sealed structures and the enormous amount of energy required to keep them livable is an obstacle, when we can avail ourselves of structures that were designed to breathe, to stay dry, to warm and cool people instead of spaces, which won’t suffocate us on stale air or bloom with mold the moment the air handler breaks down. These architectures of place are an asset by which our technological innovations should be informed, being supplemented rather than dependent upon the particular solutions of the postwar era.
We reject the failed patterns of postwar urban renewal zoning and development promoted by the likes of Robert Moses, which have only created less livable, less resilient, and less durable communities. We must actively seek to disrupt these patterns and replace them with the demonstrably more livable, more resilient, and more durable planning of our proven past.
In particular, we resist the allure of lot consolidation and the construction of large block-scaled buildings, which consolidate ownership and community risk. Large block-scaled buildings simultaneously become unmanageable albatrosses that require outsized capital investments frequently enough to become untenable over the longterm. Countless examples of such buildings from the middle 20th century stand as testaments to either deferring maintenance or becoming overleveraged to meet those maintenance needs.
While we do not reject every large development, we think it important that a community actively reduce the proliferation of such buildings, in favor of identifying vacant and underutilized lots and advocating for smaller scale infill development. We also encourage the adaptive reuse and appropriate subdivision of existing large historic structures, especially abandoned industrial buildings for new residential, commercial, or small-scale industrial uses.
Small lots in both residential neighborhoods and commercial districts diversifies ownership, reduces overhead and tax burden, and distributes risk over a much larger pool of people increasing resiliency and the ability to survive economic downturns. Small cities like Allentown have proven remarkably resilient to systemic failures because of this. Recent patterns in development, while boosting the economy now, carry far greater risk and reduce resiliency in the future. Again, this does not mean that we are opposed to all such development on a case-by-case basis, but it does mean that we stand against such development as the default instead of the exception to rehabilitating our neighborhoods and commercial properties as they exist.
We also encourage city government to development reasonable, common sense tax rules and fine schedules to disincentivize mass property acquisitions and improve standards compliance by property investors which reduce rates of owner occupancy and increase blight — downright bog standard bellwethers of community health; thereby creating virtual lot consolidation that similarly reduces resiliency. At least excessively large real estate portfolios are reversible, while demolition of sustainably-sized structures and consolidation of small lots is not.
In addition to preserving the small lots and and high density of our historic planning, we also support the retention and expansion of mixed-use neighborhoods, with corner stores, ground floor retail, at-home businesses, and accessory building businesses. These are the principle means both historically and today that encourage and support sustainable small business and ensure community access to goods and services.
One of the principal reasons for preferring historic mixed-use development patterns is that they encourage walkability and therefore connectivity within communities. Our automobile-centric choices since the second half of the twentieth century have contributed to the dissolution of strong community ties, exacerbated inequities, and made all of us far more subject to the precarity of economic forces outside of our individual control.
Retail moving out of urban cores and mixed-use neighborhoods to suburban commercial plazas and strips has indirectly compelled unnecessary car ownership, placing much greater strain on city infrastructure, increasing traffic congestion and leading to unsafe street conditions for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike; underutilizing land to provide housing to cars instead of people; and generally wasting resources by segregating people from the goods and services that they need to live.
We support a city — as it was historically planned — that supports its inhabitants on foot, on bicycle, on regular and reliable public transit, and only rarely when absolutely necessary by automobile, reducing the city’s dependency on them and freeing up our streets and land to serve people rather than oversized machines.
Built environments are not merely the sum of their architecture, parcel sizes, and uses, however they are also intrinsically connected to the choices that we make with respect to dedicated green space, vegetation, and the maintenance of biodiversity within city limits. This is why we believe that parks, conservation districts, shade trees, and urban forestry more generally are critical components of preservation.
The city of Allentown is fortunate to have a strong foundation here, with a large, deeply integrated, and well-maintained parks system and large tracts of well-forested streets, but we can do more, we can do better, and we can ensure that this foundation is preserved and built upon so that present and future generations can continue to reap the benefits of green streets and spaces.
The urban canopy has nearly immeasurable benefits for the security and well-being of our neighborhoods, but the choices that we make with respect to it have decades-long effects. The loss of a mature shade tree damaged by increases in traffic pollution, by neglected limbing, and a general lack of monitoring and maintenance is a loss that will be felt for twenty to forty years.
An urban canopy is good for people and buildings alike, especially in places where buildings are frequently as tall or taller than the trees, mitigating the risk of damage from falling limbs. Mature shade trees reduce the heat island effect, cooling asphalt and concrete, and reducing cooling costs in buildings by as much as thirty-five per-cent. Trees are an essential component of improving air quality in urban areas, absorbing greenhouse gases and pollutants, capturing airborne pollens, and producing oxygen.
Trees also protect structures from the elements, slowing damage from excessive sun, wind, and rain exposure, while simultaneously sheltering pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers from the same. Furthermore, their extensive root systems reduce surface run-off of water from storms, reduced soil erosion and sedimentation of streams, increase ground water recharge that is significantly reduced by paving, while also helping to disperse surface groundwater above the canopy and reducing street humidity and dampness in building foundations.
We call on city government to better regulate and develop the urban forest in concert with other goals, creating shade tree requirements, systems for inspection and maintenance, as well as penalties and enforcement for injuring, felling, or failing to replace these critical components of the urban landscape.
To summarize these motivating principles, our buildings do not exist separately, discretely in a vacuum. They coexist alongside one another and within a distinct climate, geography, and culture of development. Neighborhoods have a collective character and are knit together by all of the choices that are made by city planners, by civil engineers, and most of all by business and home ‑owners. We are not content to advocate exclusively for the maintenance and preservation of historic structures, but also for the holistic character of our neighborhoods and streetscapes, whether its our public parks and shade trees, our pavement and roadways, our private and public signage, the walkability of our neighborhoods, or the efficacy of our public transit, our approach to preservation is comprehensive and humane, taking into account the whole scope of the commons and seeking to retain or restore the best that we have built and cultivated in this community.