Last summer, YPA was fortunate to host three interns from a variety of backgrounds and grade levels: John Yehambaram, a native of Malaysia, will receive his masters degree in History from St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota; Justin Greenawalt, a native of Connellsville, is a masters candidate in Historic Preservation at Columbia University in New York City; and Michael Bennett, a Pittsburgh native, is a Sophomore at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.
Here are their essays, commentaries on historic preservation in southwestern Pennsylvania, and good advice for us all.
"Look Up"
By Michael Bennett
“Look up!” was perhaps the best advice I was given from a teacher in grade school. We were on a stroll around our school to admire the neighborhood’s buildings, and to get our distracted eyes away from the street windows, he gave us that simple command. I can remember doing as he said, and instantly seeing the intricate and beautiful designs that are hidden in the skylines of the Shadyside buildings. I’m neither architect nor artist, and I can’t recognize patterns or styles, but catching my eye is an accomplishment in itself. Since this quite sudden realization, I’ve used the “look up” tool as a rule of thumb to judge buildings-and furthermore, neighborhoods.
Before the summer, Homestead always had a shaky label in my mind. First, it was the street along the way to Kennywood. Then, it became the neighborhood between the Waterfront and Kennywood. Soon after, it was Charlie Batch’s project between the Waterfront and Kennywood. This summer, Homestead took on a much different label, because I finally took the time to look up. My neck hurts after two months of blinkless admiration.
You don’t have to look for long to find the history that resides in Homestead’s Eighth Avenue. Say you catch the dated brick or the trim patterns, or maybe find delight in the decadent Bank or flourish of old local shop windows. You could find a former steel worker that will reminisce about the bustle of the street, and curse the demolition that has become a pattern along the avenue. Even taking pictures of a building has become a forced assumption that the structure will be torn down in the following weeks.
Could it be that these rotting buildings and vacant lots were once bustling with people and storefronts? That this town was a vibrant center of a thriving steel industry? It’s much easier to believe if you look up-but that’s because it makes it easier to ignore the empty windows and garbage filled lots. Still, the history leaves a yearning to restore, recapture, and preserve what’s left-to make it much easier to believe the local stories.
And things are changing; the people, the buildings, the culture of Homestead will not let their history be ignored or forgotten. It may still be behind the scenes, but buildings are being renovated and store windows are being decorated. A coffee shop is brewing and homes are being restored. Homestead’s Eighth Avenue is slowly moving from the droopy shadow of the waterfront, to the restored neighborhood, rich with the history those waterfront plazas so blatantly lack. If people will only stop and look up, as I did at the start of summer, their appreciation of Homestead’s historic remnants will force them to search for more. Looking up is only the beginning, the catch phrase, the hook of the neighborhood.
But with such a great sight above, the neighborhood’s future, with the help of its people, is looking up too.
The Importance of Saving Our History
By John Yehambaram
I moved to Pittsburgh from St. Cloud Minnesota. I’m originally from Seremban, Malaysia. I lived in Malaysia, for 19 years before embarking on a journey to the United States to pursue my higher education. In Malaysia the word preservation never existed in my mind. I was however always amazed in the mixture of architecture in many cities in Malaysia. There are the structures that were inherited from British colonial times, the intricacies of wood carved village houses that predate British colonialism and the modern and post modern architectures like the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.
When I first arrived in the United States it was on New Year’s eve on a typical Minnesota winter night, - 35F. When I woke up the next morning and opened my window curtain’s all I could see was the color white that glared painfully into my eyes. As the week’s past on and the snow subsided a little, this little town began to reveal its architectural self to me. It like many small towns in the United States had a main street. Most of the buildings had a story to tell of the town’s history, its immigrations, and the transformation of its main street into the center of the town. Winona, Minnesota unlike most cities and towns in Minnesota which were founded by Scandinavian immigrants was established by Polish immigrants. Growth in Winona was built on a railway and steamboat transportation system, wheat milling, and lumber.
In 1856 over 1,300 steamboats stopped at Winona. The railway system grew and the Winona Railway Bridge, built of steel and iron with a steam-powered swingspan over the river, was the second railway bridge to span the Mississippi. The earliest evidence of human habitation in Winona County is based on the discovery of a Woodland period site (circa 800 B.C.-900 A.D.). The present-day city of Winona was founded on the village of Keoxa. As the seat of the Wapasha dynasty, it was home to a Mdewakanton band of the eastern Sioux. Like Malaysia it has its mixture of histories that gives identity to the place. Also similar to Malaysia Winona has its modern identity that it affects it a positive and negative way as well. A Target, Wal-Mart and few other retail outlets that lay on the outskirts of town have affected the growth businesses on the town’s main street and its economic growth. This economic demise in downtown started to take place as I was finishing my undergrad at Winona State University in 2005. What could be done? What has been done? I didn’t know at the time.
After receiving my B.A in journalism, moving to New York to work as a copy editor, going back to school to pursue another B.A in history and a master’s in history back in St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, this was a time where I realized the importance of history and the message it conveys to the societies and societies that precedes it. It’s not only in writing that history is preserved. It’s in everything, music, art, sculptures and building structures.
When I moved to Pittsburgh on December 31st 2008 and got an internship position with the Young Preservationist Association of Pittsburgh. I further realized the potential and importance of history to people. Through its programs of encouraging the younger generation of South Western Pennsylvania to preserve its historic building and monuments and researching on potential structures that could be nominated as a historical landmark it’s helping communities in Pittsburgh have a sense of history. The YPA is trying to help build a newer sense of community in South Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is trying to grow into a greener more environment friendly city.
Historic preservationist groups like the YPA have a role to play reaching this goal. The amount of waste generated through the demolition of buildings is more costly economically and environmentally. YPA is trying to promote the preservation of historical buildings in order to prevent these kinds of waste. We are moving into times where resources for material are becoming scarce but preservation can help in the logistics of limiting the waste of these resources. The life of any city is in its past. YPA is trying to give life back to the history of Pittsburgh for the preservation of its identity and its communities.
There may be a lot of work that need to be done in the preservation of buildings in Pittsburgh. However with organizations like the YPA in Pittsburgh its path to historic preservation is heading towards the right direction. It’s a good example that can be followed in areas in the world where historic preservation of architecture is most needed. Winona, Minnesota needs to revive its main street. Pittsburgh has had some success in reviving main streets in some of its neighborhoods and surrounding areas. Malaysia has had to deal with the call for modernity and to industrialize to catch up with developed nations. But at what cost? Does it have to result in the demolition of buildings of the past to accommodate post modern architecture that creates the illusion of a modern state. Pittsburgh was a city at the heart of industrialization. The steel industry thrived in this city. It also left the city in economic tatters in the late 1980s with the closure of steel mills.
There is still a lot of preservation to be done everywhere. It’s a matter of realizing that in a globalized world everyone can learn from each other especially in the field of preserving historic buildings. Different region, cities and countries may have its own intricacies and politics in preserving potential historic buildings but in the end of the day the whole world is dealing with preserving its natural resources and its environment.
Building preservation has its role to play in this worldly endeavor. I’m glad I’m starting it in Pittsburgh and with the YPA. Pittsburgh has a rich history with the native American tribes of the Allegawis, Adena, Hopewell, Delaware, Jacobi, Seneca, Shawnee, and several settled groups of Iroquois, the creation of Fort Pitt by the British, its involvement in the Independence War and the war of 1812 and the rise of steel mills during the height of the industrial revolution. With this history it has also left monuments, buildings that tell a story of the past. It’s great to be part of a city that has a worldly history and a great starting point to learn about the business of preserving buildings of the past.
For the Love of Old Buildings
By Justing Greenawalt
Truly thought provoking statements are often few and far between. Even less frequent are the comments that really prompt you to look deep into the reasoning behind the choice of a career path or life decision, but it was a comment made at Homestead’s Community Day that managed to make me do exactly that. A local resident, curious about the current projects of the Young Preservationists Association, candidly asked, “How did you get involved with this? You’re not even supposed to know about this stuff.” It was an iteration of a question I had been asked before, but the statement that I should not know about the past, that my affinity for anachronism was somehow odd, was a new addition. My response—typical and reeking of unoriginality--was, “Because I love old buildings.” But this resident’s comment lingered long after she had moved on. What is it to be a young preservationist? To attempt an answer to this question, I provide the reader with my thoughts on the matter through the vehicle of two topics familiar to residents of southwestern Pennsylvania: the Rust Belt and Main Street.
Rust Belt America: a title with unfortunate connotations and one that many residents of southwestern Pennsylvania have either grown-up with or reluctantly settled into. For those unfamiliar with the term, the “Rust Belt” is an area stretching across much of Pennsylvania and into Ohio and even up into Michigan where once prosperous industries have vanished, leaving behind rusting mechanical heaps and expansive brownfields. As a person who grew-up with this title, I did not live at the peak of Pittsburgh’s industrial prowess. Instead, I have grown-up indoctrinated by the stories of the glory days of Pittsburgh and the Monongahela Valley. I have been told of the thick haze that hung over my beloved Pittsburgh and the dreaded experience of atmospheric inversions. I have found myself oddly attracted to the distinct olfactory experience produced by the burning of bituminous coal and reveled in the brute aesthetic force of smokestacks piercing the sky at Braddock and Clairton. But I can never claim this as my own. The legendary Homestead Works closed the year that I was born. As I grew up, the City of Pittsburgh and its once prosperous region, industry fleeing, spiraled downward into what seemed to be a bottomless economic abyss.
As a child, I watched—with little understanding—as my hometown of Connellsville faltered and eventually collapsed; further digging itself into a vicious cycle of disinvestment and self-mutilation. The businesses left Crawford Avenue (our Main Street) for the shopping plaza, the buildings, dilapidated and forgotten, were demolished, and slowly, Connellsville began to lose its essence; the thing that made Connellsville unique from every other small industrial town along the tributaries of the Monongahela. The buildings that remained were reduced to mere curiosities; monuments to a by-gone era surrounded by a sea of vacant lots. This is the stark reality of every young preservationist today. But in being a young preservationist, one generally lacks the one thing that our older colleagues possess: authentic nostalgia.
What do I mean by “authentic nostalgia”? Nostalgia being a feeling of fondness for the irretrievable past, authentic nostalgia, in my definition, is a fondness for places and events that one actually experienced. Most preservationists today wish to see Main Street restored, the businesses brought back, and the title of “Rust Belt” revoked—as do I and the majority of my young colleagues—but whereas older preservationists have their memories to drive their ambitious projects of restoration and preservation, I have only photos, stories, and a sense of the way things “should be”. Granted, we have had people like this forever; we call them “historians”, but historians study the past in an academic and scholarly way; preservationists, although we too are also academic and scholarly, work primarily not in academia, but in the communities with real and tangible buildings.
As a young person, I walk the streets of my city and mourn the loss of a reality I never lived. Those entering the field today, myself included, grew-up in an automotive culture; one in which Main Street and Main Street culture was not dying, but already deceased, one in which the streets and buildings and community were not our classroom, but rather, our living rooms and television sets and computers did the teaching. This, perhaps, is the greatest challenge to young preservationists today, not fighting the good battle to save Main Street, but attempting to convince a generation of people the worth of a concept and a place that both we and they have never known.
The gamut of responses to the mere concept of preservation from members of a community is stunning. My experience alone attests to the apathy on the part of my generation and the great work that we as preservationists have ahead of us. Photographing in Brownsville and Connellsville, PA—both located in Fayette County—the fact that someone, anyone, is interested in these places arouses curiosity and interest in the people who live there. Countless people have approached me on the street to tell me stories of the hey-days of their cities. I was heralded with tales of the movie houses and the soda fountains and the ice cream parlors and the apothecaries and the millineries and the churches, but not one of those stories were told to me by a young person. These were the stories that could only have been spawned by authentic nostalgia. The only response I have ever received from a young person—not directly to me, of course, but to a friend as he passed—was, “They need to tear that down. Who cares, anyway?” I do not claim that this comment is representative of every member of my generation, but it is dangerous thinking nonetheless.
We, as preservationists, are looking at a new breed of historic preservation; one in which the rules are changing and the people involved are characteristically different. In a few, short years, those who proclaim themselves to be preservationists will be attempting to recreate something they have never known. With this, I, as a young preservationist, announce a call to action. The time is now to tell our young people about the past. The time is now to get our young people involved in their communities and in their Main Streets. This is not a job for the History Channel. This is not a job for text books. This is a job for everyone possessing authentic nostalgia. Take a young person aside and tell him or her the stories of yesterday. Bring the old photo albums out of the attic and tell him or her about how things used to be. Take a young person into the community and just look, for there is no greater document to learn from than the living, breathing fabric of our towns and cities. Cultivating an appreciation for the past is something that can never be started too early. I thank those who did these things for me, just as a future young preservationist will thank you.
Justin Greenawalt
Intern, Young Preservationists Association
Historic Preservation Master’s Candidate 2010, Columbia University
