“For literally nothing down – other than a simple two percent and a promise to pay, and pay, and pay until the end of your life – you too, like a man I'm going to call John Drone, can find a box of your own in one of the fresh air slums we're building around the edges of America's cities. There's room for all in any price range, for even while you read this whole square miles of identical boxes are spreading like gangrene throughout New England, across the Denver prairie, around Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, New York, Miami – everywhere. In any one of these new neighborhoods, be it in Hartford or Philadelphia, you can be certain all other houses will be precisely like yours, inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, possessions and perhaps even blood type are also precisely like yours. In any one of these neighborhoods it is possible to make enemies of the folks next door with unbelievable speed. If you buy a small house, you are assured your children will leave you perhaps even sooner than they should, for at once they will learn never to associate home with pleasure. In short, ladies and gentlemen, we offer here for your inspection facts relative to today's housing developments – developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch. They destroy established cities and trade patterns, pose dangerous problems for the areas they invade, and actually drive mad myriads of housewives shut up in them.”

“The Crack in the Picture Window”, John C. Keats, 1956, Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Add to this the real estate explosion of the past couple of decades, the internet, gigantic and unserviceable mortgage debts, children who no longer know how to play and it seems to me that “place” is a critical agenda item for resilient communities. It is certainly something we've lost in so many parts of our cities and towns, particularly in the US. The Phoenix Metro Region is not exception – in fact it exhibits some of the worst excesses of bizarre zoning and the destruction of place in favor of automobile convenience and thoughput. Ugliness is ever present. While I don't believe we ought to try and “regulate” niceness, I think things have gone so far over the past 50 + years that we need to re-develop some pretty deep and comprehensive understandings of what it is about our human habitats that once worked for us in terms of shelter, culture, community, enterprise, education and family life. From that hopefully growing body of knowledge and understanding, we can do a better job of creating or reviving the idea and the physical reality of place.

Currently in the permitting phase, is an ill-conceived project to “restore” our historic Cobblestone Landing on the Mississippi River. The project, as proposed, will negatively impact the historic boat landing, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and turn the fully functioning boat landing into an empty relic . Info. on the web at http://www.friendsforourriverfront.org/2009/10/…

Wish PPS was in Memphis right now to bring some sanity to the situation!! Thanks for all the good work you do.

Claire L. Turcotte, project administrator, campus heritage initiative, funded by the Getty Foundation.

As a historic preservationist I find that the greatest challenge for myself and my colleagues is educating both the community and our politicians that we have places that they should “treasure.” The combination of too much developer money and political influence in our county creates terrible odds for we, the citizenry, to battle against.

Jerry A. McCoy
President
Silver Spring Historical Society