July 2004
Part 1
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History: It's Not Just For Preservation Any More
it's also for learning from
& improving on the past.

"Planning with History" Working Group:*
Alice Ingerson, Ann O'Halloran, Brian Yates, Claudia Wu, David Olson, Jean Husher,  Jennifer Goldson, John Rodman, John Wyman, Lara Kritzer, Lisle Baker, Peter Kastner

Mayor's Comprehensive Planning Advisory Committee
Newton, Massachusetts


 *Send us questions & comments, or join us in drafting & reviewing this element of Newton's comprehensive plan.   Contact: Alice Ingerson at   appliedhistory@rcn.com   or   617-529-9337.
contents - scroll down or click on the underlined links
planning with history

for making, implementing, & revising plans over time:
  • by choosing from a range of goals: from restoring what we’ve lost; through preserving & reusing what we have; to learning from & improving on the past (click here for an example)
  • on a range of scales: neighborhood, city, region
  • and using a range of tools:  from regulation; through incentives, including grants & loans; to community education & engagement
  • to address a range of issues:  including economic development, housing, transportation, open space, ...
History makes places special.  Help us fill in this map of Newton!
This presentation consists of two separate web files linked together.  To print the entire presentation, hit "print" in your browser for each file.

building a sense of community & sense of place
What makes places special?
What we have learned to see in them.

 
neighborhood history walking tour,
Auburndale, 12 June 2004

Sharing the invisible stories behind the visible city can foster
mutual respect  ...  curiosity  ...   & a sense of humor!

upper left: carpenters working in Newton in the 1890s 
upper right: a school field day in West Newton, 1920s
lower left: Volante Farms off Dedham Street, 1956
lower right: proud innovators & skeptical preservationists in 1902 -
the Newton Police Department's first steam-driven horseless carriage
& horses from the Public Works Department

left photos courtesy of the Newton History Museum / right photos from Thelma Fleishman, Images of America: Newton (1999)

history is everywhere
Every part of Newton has a history ...

Newton's Residential Properties
(as of 2004), by period of original construction
 
map by Lara Kritzer, Newton Planning Department

This map shows that most of Newton's 21,562 existing structures are or soon will be "historic," in the sense of being at least 50 years old, and therefore subject to the city's demolition delay ordinance:

Historic Structures in
Newton, Massachusetts
year
 number of historic structures
percentage of all structures
that are historic
2004
 18,464
 86
2009
 19,854
 92
2014
 20,221
 94

... but not every part of Newton has the same history.
We need to plan for and preserve different places in different ways.
 

Newton's history includes industry, commerce, and housingbuilt for people with a wide range of incomes and occupations.   We may want Newton's future to include all of these things.  But it will take different tools to preserve and renew old mill buildings, neighborhood-based businesses, Victorian mansions, and small-scale or affordable housing.

Making decisions about preservation involves making decisions about redevelopment, and vice versa.  The hard part of preservation & planning is not deciding what is or is not "historic."  In Newton, almost everything is!  The hard part comes next: deciding what to do with all the history we already have, and which new history to make:
  • Which structures are "preferably preserved," and why? How can we make old structures work well for new people, and new activities? 
  • When we redevelop, how can we ensure that new structures are as good or better than the ones they replace?  What do we mean by "good"?  Good for what, for whom, for how long?
Clockwise from upper left: Bemis Mill, Bridge Street, Nonantum (photo by Dan Brody, www.newtonconservators.org/charlesbemisphotos.htm); Lincoln Street, Newton Highlands (photo by Peter Szolovits, http://medg.lcs.mit.edu/people/psz/nhnac/LincolnStreet);  the clock and commercial buildings at the corner of Watertown and Adams Sts., Nonantum; a house in Oak Hill Park

history keeps happening
Newton is already "built out" ...
 
Map from http://commpres.env.state.ma.us/community/cmty_main.asp?communityID=207#Absolute 		The standard "buildout analysis" by the state of Massachusetts focused on the potential for new development in each of the Commonwealth's towns and cities. 

The state map at left, produced in 2000, suggested that Newton's history was almost over.  The map shows only a few areas of "developable land" (in light purple). In Newton, this land is primarily on golf courses, which are officially zoned for "residential" use.


... but Newton is not "finished."  The city is a movie, not a snapshot.
(click on the map below of "Residential Growth in Newton, 1848-2000"
to start the movie if it doesn't start automatically)


animation by Douglas Greenfield, Newton City GIS
Most development in Newton involves redevelopment: recycling "used" buildings or "used" land.  But this is not really anything new:  if we recognize farming as a land use, then development has been happening on "used land" in Newton since at least the 18th century!

We need a different kind of map - a "living map" - to see Newton as a movie, and to see history as we make it.

building a sense of community & sense of place






"A sense of community" doesn't mean everyone will agree with everyone else, all the time.

But understanding the history of our differences might help us
get things done together, even without consensus.

above, left: POW/MIA sign in Coletti / Magni Memorial Park, Nonantum; below, right:
Newton high school students
protest war in Iraq, spring 2003,
photo from www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/05/sprj.irq.rallies

Our neighbor Albert and my mother Lilly didn't like each other much better at the end of the barnraising than at the beginning.

But avoiding people you did not like was not an option. … So they learned, whether they liked it or not, a certain tolerance for another slant on the world, another way of going at things that needed doing.

– Dan Kemmis,
Community and
the Politics of Place (1990)





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choosing from a range of goals

from adapting the past to present needs



above, right: Claflin Elementary School opened in 1953
below, left:  in the 1980s, the building became
the Claflin School Studios, with live/work space for Newton artists

through restoring what we’ve lost



at left: in 1908, a dense network of streetcar lines connected
the northern and southern "Newtons" to each other,
and to surrounding cities where Newton residents worked,
including Waltham and Watertown as well as Boston

at right: in 2002, Newton tried to provide
residents with an alternative to private cars
by creating the Nexus bus service
See whole maps below.

left detail from map courtesy of Newton History Museum, photographed by Peter Kastner, Community Heritage Maps
 right map from www.ci.newton.ma.us/nexus/aug_2002_map.htm

to learning from & improving on the past


at left:  the Newton Alms House in 1900      
at right: Golda Meir House opened in 1979                              

historic maps and photographs courtesy of the Newton History Museum,
photo of Golda Meir House from www.brunercott.com/library/golda/golda.htm


planning on a range of scales
“The Newtons” developed as “beads on strings"
connected to the surrounding region ...
(click on the map below - showing the series of railroads, roads, and streetcar lines
that shaped Newton's land use patterns - to start the movie if it doesn't start automatically)

Yesterday's speculative real estate development is today's historic village:   Speculative development began in Newton along the Boston and Albany line as early as the 1830s (railroad #1 on the map above), and continued through the 20th century.  Newton landowners and developers often lobbied actively for railroads, which increased property values and favored subdivision and new development.  For marketing purposes, rural villages - as well as locations where there had never been a visible "village" - got new names designed to appeal to urban commuters:  Hull's Crossing became Newtonville;  Pigeon Hill became Auburn Dale (originally 2 words);  Baptist Pond became Crystal Lake;  and a farming area outside Newton Upper Falls became Newton Highlands (after all, who'd buy a house in a new development called "Newton Lowlands"?). 

... and Newton in 2004 is still a "network of nodes."

map by Douglas Greenfield, Newton City GIS

"The Newtons" are a microcosm of metropolitan Boston:   The "interpreted land use" map above shows that most of Newton's historical "beads" are still visible, including those that developed around "strings" (like streetcar lines) that have themselves disappeared.  Like most cities and towns in the metropolitan area, Newton is still structured around transportation systems that lead in and out of Boston, "the Hub of the Universe." 

Does Newton need a center of its own to have a sense of community, or a sense of place? Or can it thrive as a "network of nodes"?  Can we create transportation options that don't center on Boston? 


learning from the past:
public transit, mixed uses, density & a sense of place
in Newton
Planning is always a long-term experiment.  But history can
  • help us see the benefits of the plans we DON'T implement, as well as the side-effects of those we do
  • expand our options, by helping us not cross off - as impossible or "untraditional"  - things we have already done
In 1908 (below), Newton was not just a convenient location from which to commute to Boston. It was also a destination for streetcar-riders from around the region who came to Echo Bridge, to Newton's garden cemetery, and to Norumbega Park on the Charles River, at the end of the Commonwealth Avenue streetcar line.  Streetcars tied "the Newtons" together without creating any single downtown.  They stopped every block or two. By linking together neighborhoods that had already been developed, they also encouraged new development between existing neighborhoods.

In contrast, railroad commuters got on and off only at their own stations, and probably knew more about downtown Boston than they did about about "the Newtons" other than their own. The same is true for many of us who commute to Boston today, whether we drive the Massachusetts Turnpike or use public transit.

map courtesy of Newton History Museum, photographed by Peter Kastner, Community Heritage Maps

By 2002 (below), it was hard to design bus routes that would lure us out of our cars for trips other than commuting in and out of Boston. This is partly because we like having the freedom to set our own schedules. But it is partly because neighborhoods developed after 1920 were not laid out around streetcar or rail lines. It is harder to make transportation systems fit development patterns, than vice versa.


a larger version of this map is online at www.ci.newton.ma.us/nexus/aug_2002_map.htm

This change was partly a result of zoning, and partly a result of new transportation options, two things that were closely linked.  Early zoning focused on separating what were seen as "incompatible" uses: for example, on creating residential zones without commercial and industrial land uses. 

Newton's first zoning plan, in 1921, was also driven (pun intended) more by car owners than by streetcar riders.  As shown on the map below, that plan proposed 14 new east-west auto through-routes and 12 new north-south through-routes, to make it easier to get from one activity to another anywhere in Newton. The new roads would have gone through both newly developing neighborhoods, which were designed around cars, and old ones that had grown up along the railroad and streetcar lines.


map courtesy of Newton History Museum, photographed by Peter Kastner, Community Heritage Maps

In the 1970s, a redevelopment project proposed a mix of residential and other land uses for Newton Corner, to be achieved in part through higher density.  Part of the opposition to the project centered on defending Newton's "village tradition" of low-density development.  Yet as the chronological photos below show, Newton Corner - like many of Newton's other "beads on a string" - had actually lost density since the early twentieth century.  And many of Newton's villages had gotten their start as profit-making, mixed-use real estate developments (see above).


images from Thelma Fleishman, Images of America: Newton (1999);
the Seashore Trolley Musuem at http://206.103.49.193/odds/ma/htm/mb04.htm;
Jon Chase, The Fight for Newton Corner  (1987); and Phil Herr.

restoring what we've lost?

In 2004, many of us want the opposite of what we wanted in 1921 or even in 1972. We want to spend less time driving, and more time walking and biking.  We would like reduce the energy we use and the pollution we create by driving private cars. History can help: historic land use patterns that we would now call "transit-based" or "pedestrian-friendly" are still visible, under the surface, in those parts of Newton that developed before cars and zoning.

But it took decades for our individual and community choices to cover up and partly erase those older patterns: as individuals, more and more of us chose to drive cars, and as a community, we rearranged or encouraged new land use patterns through zoning.  Will we have the depth of community memory and the patience to nudge Newton's land uses back, or in some places nudge them for the first time, into patterns that will really let us get out of our cars?
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