I’ve been meaning to write this piece since I wrote about “ghost buildings” and the preservation of old, iconic signs in redevelopment projects recently. But actually, I’ve been thinking about this idea for my entire run as an urbanist writer.

The very first article I published on any of these urbanist/built-environment/land-use themes was all the way back in September of 2017, a few months after I’d started my first magazine job. I wrote about a lot of different things back then, and I’d just happened upon this topic, which I’ll be fleshing out below.

The subject of that article was this old midcentury motel, complete with a neat custom neon sign, on U.S. 202 in Branchburg, New Jersey. I remember many nights as a kid, on the drive back from a daytrip in Manhattan, seeing that motel and knowing we were close to home. It’s still standing, and I believe it’s still in business.

Looking back, there’s a key point in that 2017 piece that I’ve kept coming back to and refining. It’s to not be blasé about changes to the landscape, and having a sense of how much even very ordinary things can become physical and emotional landmarks. That isn’t an argument against building or redeveloping, it’s just something I think urbanists need to acknowledge.

It seems very natural and human to me to give meaning to stuff like this, and I think that sentiment is distinct from NIMBYism. It isn’t people saying “our totally bland, generic suburban hellscape is actually really unique and no other place is like this!” If that’s all you can hear, you’re missing something. I wrote:

Perhaps such buildings were ugly, and few have aged well. There is something ironic about reading serenity and simplicity into them, when at least some 1950s New Jerseyans surely railed against bulldozing more farmland and covering it over with another gaudy neon-signed motel. Why is the motel more worthy of nostalgia than the farmland?

And yet even artifacts like this, having survived so long, deserve entry into the club. They are not just old buildings; they are little pieces of a way of life that has been superseded, but should not be forgotten. It seems silly, but it might also be valuable, to meditate on how a family of five or six and their dog could fit happily into a motel room smaller than an average New York City apartment. Old buildings can teach us humility.

That final point—a critique of our expectation of ever-increasing material standards of living—is controversial to some people, but I stand by it. When I come across something commonly used a few decades ago, and I wonder how anybody could put up with it, I question whether that’s the right reaction.

But anyway, to the point about appreciating memories and landmarks, see this little snippet from a long personal essay on my hometown that I published at this newsletter:

Writer Rebecca Solnit, in her 2001 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, wrote: “When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back.”

That’s the best way I’ve ever seen this sentiment put. It rings true to me. I’m old enough to feel this myself when I drive around New Jersey with my wife, pointing out the places I used to go as a kid. I remember my father, on visits to Long Island where he grew up, pointing out where the Korvette’s or the A&S department store used to be, or recalling the path via which he and some friends got inside the construction area for the then-new Sunrise Mall.

When people say that development has made a place “unrecognizable to me,” they might be hyperventilating, but they’re also saying something objectively true. I think they should be allowed to mourn their sense of a place, even if I don’t think they should be allowed to encase it in amber.

And on that note, here’s the bit from that 2017 piece from which the headline for this piece comes:

Our society has developed mourning rituals for people—we have not developed them for buildings, or more broadly for fading artifacts of culture. There is something disconcerting about finding our built landscape unceremoniously transformed, often without warning. We are largely past the point where replacing one building with another confers any real benefit but satisfying the fickle interests of developers. The futurist Alvin Toffler wrote—in the 70s!—that only in America could a shopper, upon walking down the wrong street, conclude that the store had simply been torn down overnight.

Perhaps we need a “wake” and a “funeral” when it comes time for demolition. A day or two before the bulldozers come, the old building could be opened up for viewing, and the owner could take a few hours to do a final tour of his business. Pictures could be taken, memories could be shared. Some small consideration for the patrons and the community of which the business was a part could be shown.

There is unquestionably a tension between “progress” and preservation, between cultivating a deep sense of meaning, belonging, and rootedness, and constantly building and replacing things. I don’t think preservation has to come out on top, or that it should, except in rare cases. For me, it’s enough to acknowledge that there is a tension. Some people don’t want to acknowledge that. And others find that acknowledging it isn’t enough.

Have you ever heard of a “funeral” for a building? What do you think of that idea? How can the built heritage of the 20th century be preserved, in some fashion, while allowing land use to evolve along with our country? How can the “invisible crop of memories” attached to our roadside junk be honored in some way?

Leave a comment! This is the meat and potatoes of this newsletter, and I want to hear your thoughts.

Related Reading:

NIMBYism and Existence Value

NIMBYism, Cassette Tapes, Nostalgia, and the Future

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