Book Review

Boston's "Changeful Times": Origins of Preservation & Planning in America. By Michael Holleran. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xii, 337 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-8018-5729-5.)

Much of urban history over the past generation has documented what has been lost. David Hamer and Michael Holleran, in two studies of historic preservation, have examined what has been saved. Historic preservation, each author argues, with the sense of connection to the past that preservation creates, has largely been an urban phenomenon and thus deserves more attention from urban historians than it has received.	1
As tourists, Americans take almost for granted that they will find some sort of historic enclave in any city they visit. Hamer's purpose is to sketch a history of these officially designated "historic districts," to examine what he calls "examples of applied urban history" as "historic phenomena in their own right."	2
The numbers are truly impressive. Historic districts were given legal form as a part of the 1966 federal legislation that created the National Register of Historic Places, and, in the quarter century since, over eight thousand historic districts have been designed. Since there is no national authority to determine what areas should form historic districts, Hamer sees each one as the result of a local, "democratic" process.	3
Historic districts were codified but not invented in 1966, and Hamer points to Williamsburg, Charleston, the Vieux Carré district of New Orleans, and Philadelphia's Society Hill as precursors and models. Hamer argues that, as historic districts proliferated after 1966, they have not been guided by any single theory or impulse but rather have sprung up for myriad reasons and under many different circumstances.	4
By some measure, this is surely an urban success story, a "fall and rise" tale, as Hamer puts it. But dotting the urban landscape with historic districts has raised intriguing questions and dilemmas: What kind of history is to be preserved? and for whom? How can the desire to preserve be balanced against the dynamic change that comes with economic development?	5
Having raised these questions, however, Hamer does not answer them as fully as he might have. His chapter entitled "The History That Is and Is Not Represented in Historic Districts," for example, is by far the shortest of any in the book.	6
Hamer does not take us to visit all eight thousand historic districts, though sometimes the book feels as if he has. The index itself is an extraordinary geography lesson. Yet by introducing us to so many historic districts, he has had to stretch the definition of "urban" quite considerably to include such places as Twin Falls, Idaho, and Bodie, California.	7
Still, Hamer is quite right to suggest that each of these eight thousand districts represents an attempt by local communities to shape their built environment, often in opposition to large "renewal" plans, and to use history as a way of reinvigorating American cities. Hamer is also right that they need to be included in any larger narrative of postwar American urban history.	. . .