streetsofsalem

I always like to have a preservation post for preservation month so here it is: a little populist spin on Salem’s experience of urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s. This is a long and rather complicated story that I’ve written about here before, several times, and in Salem’s Centuries, so I’m going to streamline it considerably, I promise. I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for a while, because I’m a bit troubled by a trend I see in Salem today, one which has been emerged for several years, maybe even over a decade. It’s the tendency for anyone who is opposed to any policy coming out of City Hall to be denigrated and dismissed, in words spoken at public meetings by officials, and on social media. There’s no question in my mind that the latter is the culprit: social media has enabled us all to be so dismissive, and so unaccountable, I think. Nevertheless, I don’t like the trend, because sometimes you have to fight City Hall, and when City Hall doubled down on a very agressive, one might say radically so, policy of urban renewal in the 1960s, the people of Salem resisted it—and ultimately won a battle (this is a word used by contemporaries again and again) for preservation.

The story you generally hear today in Salem is that Ada Louise Huxtable, the notable architectural critic for the New York Times, set her sights on Salem and transformed the process of renewal through demolition into one of rehabilitation almost single-handedly, or how Samuel Zoll, elected Mayor of Salem in 1969, brought about the same transformation with a resolute will. Huxtable and Zoll were indeed very important players in saving Salem from near-annihilation, and their efforts should not be under-estimated but neither should those of many more anonymous Salem people who really showed up, setting the scene for Zoll’s election and everything that followed. I certainly don’t have all their names but I have some of them, but first let’s look at some headlines from the 1960s.

“Bulldozer job”: this is not an accusation by Salem preservationists but rather the term that the head of the agency charged with implementing urban renewal, the Salem Redevelopment Authory (SRA), used to describe what was coming in 1965! The Executive Director of the SRA, John W. Barrett (who was appointed by Salem’s mayor Francis X. Collins), responded to an “overflow throng” of Salem residents in the summer of 1965 with the admission that in the beginning we did say we would not use the bulldozer approach to Salem in our planning. However, we no longer say that and went on to admit that “from 80% to 90% of structures in the central business district” would be demolished under the present plan. This meeting was sponsored by Historic Salem, Inc., (HSI) which would go on to lead a feisty opposition to the bulldozers over the next eight years. Elizabeth Reardon, President of HSI, moderated regular meetings like this at the same time she was serving on the city’s Historic District committee following the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966. Her successor, Donald Koleman, sued the SRA for not complying with Salem’s original urban renewal plan, which stressed rehabilitation as well as demolition. Prominent architect James Ballou gave an impassioned speech before the Salem Chamber of Commerce urging business leaders to advocate for preservation over demolition. Elizabeth Hunt, Bill Burns, Bob Murray, Deirdre Henderson, and others pressed for preservation consistently in myriad ways, ultimately winning several concessions, first the creation of a consulting blue ribbon panel of professionals chosen by the brand new National Trust for Historic Preservation, and later the formation of the Design Review Board for the SRA, consisting of architectural and preservation professionals appointed by local organizations like Historic Salem, the Peabody Museum and the Essex Institute.

Lynn Daily Item, 4.12.1966

This GREAT poster is among the Salem Redevelopment Authority records at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Rowley, Massachusetts. We used some of these records for our chapter on the 20th century development of Salem, but not all—they could form the foundation of a great thesis, dissertation, or book!

I’d really like to say that all these efforts, including the very personal protest of Bessie Munroe, the elderly resident of an elegant Ash Street home who refused to vacate her home when the bulldozers were really busy in 1969, turned the tide, but the fact is I think it was the destruction itself, especially when no developers popped up to rebuild. Over 60 buildings swept away, but not 147, Barrett’s greatest goal. After Samuel Zoll became mayor in 1970, he made new appointments to the Salem Redevelopment Authority, and new ideas like facade easements for the rehabilitation of buildings rather than their automatic demolition came with these new appointees. The end result was a “workable urban renewal” in Zoll’s words, facilitated in collaboration with Salem’s residences rather than in opposition to them.

“Old Salem” and “restored”:  this phrase and this word were not goals in the 1960s, but a decade later, they were! A big victory for Salem preservationists.

Blog notes: I’m off to Ireland for the rest of May so no blog posts until June. I’m thinking about some changes to the blog after so many (15!) years, some serious Salem fatigue, and several new projects. Would love to hear your thoughts, so please comment below or feel free to email me if you have any about topics and directions at dseger@salemstate.edu. Enjoy the month–it’s my favorite.