New ideas must use old buildings.
Thinking about why "arts districts" become things.
Hey friends, welcome back.
Last week, we explored the fuzzy line between us and our environments. We’d already discussed how our acts of shaping our environment cause them to shape us back, and through last week’s discussion, we’ve learned that, depending on how you think about it, that may be because our bodies are mostly environment, too.
Today, let’s take a step further back and explore a bit more of our environments, the stuff that is clearly not us.
The curious case of the Bleachery
Since we’ve now clearly established a feedback loop between how we shape our environments and how they shape us, a logical next question might be to what to see how this actually works out in the world. By way of example, today, I want us to consider the curious case of the former Southern Bleachery & Piedmont Print Works, which today is a hotbed of development near the core of the unincorporated community Taylors, South Carolina.
I first began working in the area as a volunteer in the summer and fall of 2012 as an outgrowth of some volunteer work we were doing as Taylors First Baptist Church, where I was a member and employee at the time. Due to an interest in community gardening as a way to get to know the neighborhood at the time, a researcher we had engaged made us aware of a large gardening project that was using space at the Mill site that we, working a mere mile down the street, didn’t really know was there.
That was in the summer of 2012. Today, the area is home to a couple of sprawling redevelopment projects and other small businesses. So how did that come about? What effect did how it came about to have on the type of area it became? What lessons can we generalize?
The Death and Life of Great American Mills
As a starting point, I can’t think of a better place than Jane Jacobs. In the 1960s, as freeways were threatening and destroying whole neighborhoods in urban areas of New York, Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a counterargument to the policies that brought about those freeways to begin with.
This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to Sunday supplements and women’s magazines.1
Perhaps Facebook posts are the Sunday supplements of our times? So a question arises, are these arguments still relevant today? Jacobs elaborates a few pages later:
It appears that the rebuilt portions of cities and the endless new developments spreading beyond the cities are reducing city and countryside alike to a monotonous, unnourishing gruel…2
Strong words, but we can relate. How many endless strip malls that are generally identical and tract homes with no character nor concern for their surrounding environs must we endure to feel the truth of her words, in her time and ours.
Alright, so what does this have to do with Mill redevelopment? Jacobs spends the next several chapters laying our principles for good cities, many of which sound old hat to us but were revolutionary at the time:
The uses of sidewalks in promoting safety, providing contact between people, and forming children.
The need for mixed uses so that there isn’t just one type of business in a place providing for a diversity of development.
The need for city blocks to be short enough to provide people with meandering paths to get from one point to the next.
The text is a fascinating read, but the part I want to get to is this, which I will quote at length:
The need for aged buildings
Condition 3: The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones.
Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings, I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation… but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings.
If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction.3
One of the things right off the bat the people tend to notice about the Mill redevelopment area is the eclectic and creative nature of the businesses present. Many of the former textile Mills in the Greenville, SC urbanized area have been re-developed at scale and high cost, limiting the types of tenants that are accessible to them. Jacobs observes:
…enterprises that support the cost of new construction [or high-end redevelopment] must be capable of paying a relatively high overhead–high in comparison to that necessarily required by old buildings. To support such high overheads, the enterprise must be either (a) high profit or (b) well subsidized.4
Option “(b),” being “well subsidized,” is frequently an approach taken with these highly polished redevelopments, but that in and of itself is a limitation. Generally, you will not take a chance on subsidizing something that appears to have a meager chance of working out. Jacobs elaborates:
Chain stores, chain restaurants and banks go into new construction. But neighborhood bars, foreign restaurants and pawn shops go into older buildings. Supermarkets and shoe stores often go into new buildings; good bookstores and antique dealers seldom do. Well-subsided opera and art museums often go into new buildings. But the unformalized feeders of the arts–studios, galleries, stores for musical instruments and art supplies… go into old buildings.5
When we first encountered the “Old Southern Bleachery,” as we called it at the time, the primary tenants were industrial and art studios. A table maker, a pottery school, and a sculptor were the main three, and others soon followed. Over the years, new business ideas of all kinds filtered into the building, but the drive that kicked it all off was the draw of being a part of the eclectic arts community that was there primarily because it was one of the only places it could be.
As Jacobs summarizes:
As for really new ideas of any kind–no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be–there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.6
So as a first examination of how our environments “shape” us, I lift myself as an example. My being present to witness the dramatic rebirth and continual re-invention of this area over the past 10 years has shaped me more than any other series of happenings.
And it’s not just me. I have been a first-hand witness to the transformative power of being involved in this space. The space has transformed a lot over the years, but the way it has transformed the many people who have come and gone through it has been of another magnitude.
We shape our environments, and then they shape us back.
See you next week as we continue our exploration.