The Newburyport Blog

Definition of Patina:

“A surface appearance of something grown beautiful especially with age or use.” Merriam-Webster

If you ever watch anything on TV that has to do with old stuff, from the tonier PBS “Antiques Road Show,” to the newer “Pawn Stars” on the History Channel, something old would be brought in, and if it has been refinished, and the original finish has been removed, whether it’s an old gun, a coin or an old piece of furniture, the value of that piece, whatever it might be, would be greatly, greatly diminished.

Same thing with small historic seacoast New England cities, i.e. Newburyport.

When I moved her over 30 years ago, Newburyport had a whole lot of soul and patina. I loved walking down the street and feel the stories behind the homes that I would walk past.

Lately, I’ve heard people use the word “slummy,” even for existing parts of Newburyport.  Yes, really - “slummy.”

Slummy seems to be the new word for anything that hasn’t been torn down, or torn apart and is looking shiny and new.

What I would call “patina” in Newburyport, is now being rebranded as “slummy.”

An historic home, one that is 75 years old, or in Newburyport’s case much, much older, that has been lovingly restored, retains its soul, its patina.  An historic property in Newburyport that has been torn down, or ripped apart so that almost nothing exists, that property, has not only lost its patina, its soul is gone as well, and in my mind, no offense or anything, so has its value, in this particular place, Newburyport, Massachusetts.

A home that has been decimated here and there in Newburyport, Newburyport’s soul and patina still exists.  Keep adding to those homes that have been decimated and the soul of the city gradually disappears, and nope, it cannot be regained.

There are many keepers of the Newburyport’s soul in this city.  And one of those entities that are entrusted with its soul is our Historical Commission (not the Historical Society, two completely different entities).

And back, quite a while ago, when things were really beginning to be decimated, the city, the Historical Commission and the Newburyport City Council, put Newburyport’s Demo Delay in place.  It was a way to get people to stop for a little while, have a discussion about their small piece of the soul of the city.  And the Historical Commission could enact a time period, at the moment it is one year, to delay demolition, and to explore options, and hopefully retain that part of the city’s soul. Or not, the owner or developer could tear down the structure at the end of the demo delay, if they chose to, and at that time the city’s building inspector would issue the appropriate permits.

What is so destructive about the new Demo Delay Ordinance proposed by City Councilor Bob Cronin, and co-sponsored by City Councilor Dick Sullivan, who is also running for mayor, is that the ordinance focuses on structural choices, giving the building inspector say over what gets demolished, and what does not.  The proposed ordinance does not focus on the soul of the city.  And that soul, that patina, is why so many of us come to Newburyport to live, visit, work and play.

Newburyport City Councilor Bob Cronin has submitted a “tweaked” Demo Delay Ordinance to the Newburyport City Council this Tuesday, and for me, it’s a real head-scratcher - and that’s being polite.

While it clarifies the ordinance, it also appears to give the decision making power about whether an historic structure should be demolished, as I read it,  to the building inspector?? rather than the Newburyport City Council appointed Historical Commission, the folks who have and should always make that determination. Yikes!!

Puzzling, weird, what????

It also keeps the Demo Delay at 12 months instead of bumping it up to 18 months, which is what I heard the Newburyport City Council previously agree to (unfortunately the Newburyport City Council could not muster up  enough votes for even a 2 year Demo Delay, which would help this historic city, which is quickly losing its historic character, a lot!!).

I am pretty sure this is not what Councilor Ives had in mind when the discussion took place a few months ago, before she left, which was co-sponsored by Councilor Cronin.

And no one from the Historical Commission was ever consulted?? Weird, odd, puzzling??

“Disappointment” in this odd ordinance tweak, doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Brick and Tree dissects why this proposed ordinance by City Councilor Bob Cronin is so destructive for Newburyport here.

The Bushee estate on Newman Road has been demolished for a subdivision.  That’s a “Yikes.”

“The home that carried her ( Florence E. Bushee) name boasted a twin chimney 2 1/2-story colonial with 13 rooms and eight open fireplaces, ornamental gardens, a carriage house, a post and beam cow barn and multi-stall horse barn.”  Newburyport Daily News, January 25, 2102

The entire article can be read here (it’s worth reading!!).

Carpetbagger

One Newburyport City Councilor got up in the Newburyport City Council chambers and lamented that all these “newcomers” were coming in and telling the folks who were born and raised here what to do.

Another Newburyport City Councilor got up (Thursday night) and said how Newburyport was a working class town, and seemed to intimate that it was still a working class town.  No it’s not. In the year 2012, Newburyport is an upper-middle class city, quickly approaching a upper class enclave - especially when Mr. Karp starts building.

Honey, it ain’t your father’s Newburyport anymore.

If you haven’t noticed the carpetbagger thing has really, really gotten out of hand lately.  You don’t just have the carpetbaggers who came in the first wave, in the mid to late 1970’s and very early 1980’s,  right after Urban Renewal renewed.  There was a wave in the late 1990’s after the MBTA came back to town. Remember that, a big housing spike when a lot of the old timers cashed in.  I remember folks saying  that it was a joke that anyone would want to live in Newburyport’s South End. There was a lot of bitterness about how high the taxes had gotten because of the housing boom, but that money bought more house not so far away, in a place where there weren’t so many doctors, lawyers and financial folks. Where the working class folks felt more comfortable.

And then the super duper influx around 2005, when Mr. Karp bought so much land and real-estate downtown.  Yup, and people have just kept coming, with more and more money, lots more money.  And the old-timers, the natives, they pay attention and they vote, but their numbers just ain’t what they used to be.  It’s not your father’s Newburyport by any stretch of the imagination, no how, no way, any more.

Thanks to the P.Preservationist for the heads-up, as well as Newburyport City Councilor Ed Cameron for the photo (I “borrowed”) and the link to the ZBA meeting.

14 Russia Street, Newburyport, headed for the chopping block by one of our own local developers.

This is why we need a demo delay with teeth, NOT a one year demo delay, good grief!!  Katy Ives is only proposing 2 years. We need more than 2 years (and 2 years is not “a taking,” for goodness sakes!!)

The Newburyport City Council is going to “chat” about Councilor Ives “compromise,” I can see some minor tweaking, but major watering down of even that in a search for some votes.  Hello.

We have a gorgeous, charming place here. The Newburyport City Council has a tremendous and noble opportunity.  Councilor Ives “no demo overlay” for Newburyport’s Historic District - it’s a good idea!!

Councilor Cameron is right, “Newburyport - Death by a thousand paper cuts!!”  Not going to be such a fun place to work, live and play, or eventually make any money off your house when you go to sell it, if the Newburyport City Council doesn’t step up to the plate and do something significant! with a few teeth and a little chutzpah already!! Enough with the caving in to the extreme property rights, minority “wing” of the Newburyport population!!  Man-up!!

14 Russia Street, headed for the chopping block

Link to "A Measure of Change"

This video is worth posting again, and if you haven’t seen it take a look, or if you have seen it, it’s pretty amazing and might be worth a gander again.

It’s about what Newburyport used to look like not so long ago in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It’s not the gorgeous downtown we all know and love now.  And downtown Newburyport no longer has any protection (it ended in 2005).  The Newburyport City Council has a fantastic opportunity now to put protection of downtown Newburyport back in place.  It would be a noble and intelligent thing to do.

The film “A Measure of Change” was made in 1975 by Lawrence Rosenblum on what the city looked like before Urban Renewal.  A link to the video which is now online can be found here.

This sounds like a really good compromise on Newburyport’s Local Historic District (LHD) sponsored on Monday night by Newburyport City Councilors Katy Ives and Bob Cronin. Excellent work!!  I hope it is one that the Newburyport City Councilors see as a “win-win” alternative.

The proposals address what Councilor Ives called the “most egregious” situations affecting our historic assets in the city of Newburyport, i.e. demolition, as well as protecting downtown Newburyport, the restoration of which is responsible for the revitalization of a once dying city.

A very well written article in the Newburyport Daily News about the the proposals sponsored by Councilors Katy Ives and Bob Cronin can be read here.

Newburyport 1967, courtesy of the Archival Center at the Newburyport Public Library (press image to enlarge)

I was telling a business owner this week that Newburyport didn’t always look the way it looks now.  The business owner commutes from just outside Boston, and has had their business in Newburyport for over 10 years.  It was a complete shock to them that this now gorgeous place was literally in “shambles,” a slum in 1967.

The Archival Center at the Newburyport Public Library graciously let me take photos of their archives of Newburyport from 1967-1974, HUD, NRA and Urban Renewal.  A link to the 54 photographs that I took from the Newburyport Archival Center can be found here.

Inn Street, 1974 (press image to enlarge)

Inn Street, downtown Newburyport, 1974 (press image to enlarge)
Courtesy of the Archives at the Newburyport Public Library.

Two views of Newburyport’s Downtown, Pleasant Street from two different time periods.

Unitarian Church, Pleasant Street, 1929, courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print Department (press image to enlarge)

Church of the First Religious Society in Newburyport (Unitarian), Newburyport, MA
Boston Public Library, Print Department, 1929
Leon H. Abdalian, photographer
Glass Negative

Newburyport's Pleasant Street (press image to enlarge)

Newburyport’s Pleasant Street from upper Inn Street, March 1, 1974
Courtesy of the Archives at the Newburyport Public Library.

And this Sunday, October 28, 2012, author and architect Jonathan Hale talks about his 40-year love affair with Newburyport, “Newburyport is a Work of Art: Why its Architecture is Rare and Irreplaceable.” The program is sponsored by the Newburyport Preservation Trust, and it is at 4 p.m. at the Custom House Maritime Museum, Water Street, Newburyport.

I am now going to piss off Newburyport preservationists!  Ooops!

The final report of the Newburyport LHD Study Committee (LHD = Local Historic District) is absurdly fair.  The five members did backflips to accommodate feedback from the community and from the Newburyport City Councilors. Backflips, cartwheels, you name it, right from the get go. And despite all of that, on an up and down vote it’s not going to fly. That’s just the existing political reality.

The leading member of the “Say No to LHD” group, its heart and soul, who got up in the first informational meeting a year a go, disrupting the entire meeting and storming out, vowing to stop the LHD, has done a remarkable job. It’s definitely a “Wow.” It appears that the end most certainly justified the means. Trashing people’s reputations and character, personal attacks, threats of law suits (most recently in a comment in the Daily News), presenting information early last winter (good tactic starting early) that was and is simply not true, has worked. Congratulations.

The final version of the LHD ordinance has finally gone to the Newburyport City Council, a meeting will take place this Thursday, October 25, 2012, Newburyport City Hall at 7PM.

As I see it, the political realities. (The boundaries of the proposed LHD are High Street, the gateway to the city, and downtown Newburyport from Winter Street to Federal Street.)  Lob off the North End of High Street at the Kelly School, and put those folks out of their misery.

There is unanimous support along the South End of the “Ridge” to Willis Lane (which is roughly across the street from Fruit Street).  Shorten High Street from Willis Lane to the Kelly School, maybe include St Paul’s Church on the other side (but, good grief, don’t cross the street!).

And protect downtown Newburyport.  After all that HUD Federal money, please, does anyone dispute that the restoration of downtown Newburyport is the reason that Newburyport has become the thriving place that it is today?  Really, not to protect downtown, good grief.

When Governor Deval Patrick came for a visit at Cafe Di Siena (February 2010), I asked Newburyport City Councilor Tom O’Brien if he would vote for the Newburyport LHD, and his response (this was before all of the hullabaloo), “Of course Mary, there’s been too many tear downs.”  This statement was witnessed by Newburyport City Councilor Barry Connell, who with a wink and a smile by both Newburyport city councilors, pretended to write down this vote for the LHD by Councilor Tom O’Brien on the back of his hand.

So why not have have a “No Demolition” zone/overlay for the entire Newburyport Historic District, that would also include “interior demolition for exploratory purposes,” which, for example, lead to the unfortunate creation by a developer on Pine Street, for which the neighbors are suing the developer and the Newburyport Zoning Board of Appeals.

Can the Newburyport City Council come up with the equivalent of the “Wisdom of Solomon?”  Can they do it in one night?? And what will they say, now that they get the chance have to have a say.  It will be really fascinating to watch.

Newburyport preservation quotes:

“We shape our buildings; thereafter, our buildings shape us.” - Winston Churchill

Newburyport's Market Square and the trolley. Press image to enlarge

Folks who read The Newburyport Blog love old postcards.  Here’s one of Newburyport’s Market Square, with the trolley, the old firehouse that is now the Firehouse Center for the Arts, is in the background (press image to enlarge).

Newburyport postcard, Plum Island Haystack, press image to enlarge.

It’s fall in Newburyport, and there are still farmers who in the marshes around  Newburyport and Newbury will create the iconic haystacks.  I know the readers of the Newburyport Blog enjoy old Newburyport postcards, and this one of the Newburyport marsh scene with the haystacks is so wonderful.

Preservation is in the business of saving communities

Newburyport preservation quotes:

“There may have been a time when preservation was about saving an old building here and there, but those days are gone. Preservation is in the business of saving communities and the values they embody.”

—Richard Moe, National Trust for Historic Preservation

Maybe my hyperventilating over Governor Romney’s running mate (see previous post), Tea Party darling, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh endorsed, Paul Ryan, has something to do with my first-hand local experience with the “slash and burn,” “take no prisoners,” “malign all opposed” politics of the folks who do not want to preserve Newburyport’s historic assets, the proposed Local Historic District (LHD), led by a member of Newburyport’s very own Tea Party, and I gather fan of the John Birch Society.

On my walk around Newburyport this weekend, I ran into a friend who wanted to know what I thought of the article in the Boston Globe about the progress of Newburyport’s Local Historic District’s (LHD), and the LHD’s slow winding path getting to the Newburyport City Council.  And in the course of our conversation, I said something to the effect that, “People wonder why, at this point, I’m not doing more.” The response was, “Well, you got the shit kicked out of your, everyone knows that.”  For which the person got a hug.

Fox News Opinion on the web has a piece called, “America’s coming civil war - makers vs takers,” predictably the wealthy, the makers, pitted against everyone from seniors, to folks who need help with student loans to go to college.

Our local “Say No to LHD” folks definitely feel like that same strident, militant mindset… heck, it is that same militant mindset.  The LHD, in their minds, equals “social engineering,” yes, this is true (I hate to even link to the actual factual proof, because it gives the John Birch Society such pleasure. How do I know that, because that particular post went viral, via the John Birch Society’s Facebook page - I wish I was kidding).

Yes, and anonymous townies, threatened by “newcomers,” joined in the fray (and townies who no longer live here, or live/visit here periodically).  But it is our own John Birch tea party folks who are still willing, if not proud, to give their names to the cause of stridently and militantly destroying Newburyport’s hope of having a Local Historic District.  (They also, as I understand it, complain loudly to their city councilors, the mayor, the press, when a pro-LHD human being loses it, the person in question, I believe, has been identified.)

Do I have first hand experience with the hatred of the ideological Right?  Yes.  Do I know that they will deliver on their promise?  Yes.  Does that make me worry about Governor Romney’s pick for Vice President, that it isn’t all fluffy talk, that delivery of this far right ideology is very real?  Yes, you betcha.

182 High Street, courtesy of the City of Newburyport

The strange story of 182 High Street.

182 High Street has been lovingly restored by its present owner.  The property contains a beautiful 200+ year old carriage barn, which the owner wanted to restore in 2010.  The owner jumped  through many hoops, as anyone who has done such a thing knows - Zoning Board, Planning Board, Historical Commission,  and just a few feet short of the finishline, withdrew the application to continue the project.

Public record shows that the boards and commissions in the city were enthusiastic about the project.  Public records show that the Planning Board thanked the applicant and their team, noted the applicant’s sensitivity toward the historical nature of the property, the reduction of occupancy level and preservation of historical structures. (January 12, 2010).

In July of 2012, however, the owner chose to demolish the beautiful carriage barn at 182 High Street.  A one year demo delay was imposed.  Head scratching all around.

In January 2010 public record shows that the owner wanted to make every attempt to preserve and rehabilitate all the historical aspects of the carriage barn, and to ensure that it would be in keeping with the restoration that was being done on the Federal Period home.

To do what the homeowner desired from a zoning point of view, requires  something called “public benefit.”  The public benefit in 2010 was, without any question on anyone’s part, including the homeowner’s - historic preservation.

If the carriage barn at 182 High is indeed demolished and a new structure built in its place, the owner would still be required to show “public benefit,” as well as go through all the zoning and planning board hoops.  The attorney for the owner was able to say with a straight face, that the public benefit could be affordable housing.

More head scratching all around.  The stated goal in 2010 was to use the structure as a guest house for visiting family members.  Affordable housing would eliminate that possibility, and affordable housing on High Street?? like having affordable housing on Park Avenue. Happy neighbors?? one wonders.

One of the ironies here is that the significantly historical house in Newbury, the Tappan House, bought for 1.6 million dollars, was demolished for a swimming pool, but the barn was kept to be made into, yup, you got it, a guest house.

The historical write-up of the 1792 home at 182 High Street can be found on the city’s website here.

Newburyport preservation quote - Confucius

“The strength of a nation is derived from the integrity of its homes.” - Confucius

(I thought it might be fun to put ups some “preservation quotes” from time to time.)

284 Water Street, Courtesy of the City of Newburyport

“The property, built in 1810, is assessed at $810,700, according to city records. It is a Georgian-style residence with nine rooms (four bedrooms) and two fireplaces. Size of the house is 2,723 square feet, and the structure has unobstructed views of the inlet across Water Street. Several smaller buildings are also on the property…

Abutters at the commission meeting suggested that an owner could get that much or more if owners tore it down, and offered a clear lot to a buyer who might build a larger structure.

The application requests a permit for “demolition of a single-family home, garage, barn and shed…”

“Newburyport’s equivalent of the Tappan House tear-down in Newbury.” - a reference to a significant historic home in Newbury that was bought for 1.6 million dollars and demolished to build a pool (information about the former Tappan House can be read here).

The entire story in the Newburyport Daily News can be read here.

The photo of 284 Water Street is courtesy of the City of Newburyport, and the photo and historic write-up of the home can be read here.

Current photos of the property can be seen here.

And a YouTube video of 284 Water Street can be seen here.

56 High Street, Courtesy of the City of Newburyport

“Sure, we can still have homeowner’s rights and the proposed LHD provides for this. But more than ever before, the City of Newburyport is under pressure to develop real estate for profit, not just for its people and the quality of life. This city has become a destination specifically because of its historical support for preservation, not despite its history.”

Peter Erickson, Newburyport Daily News, Viewpoint can be read here. 

Peter Erickson is a former chair of the Newburyport Historic Commission and has lived on High Street for 24 years. Peter Erickson’s family home on High Street. Photo courtesy of the City of Newburyport which can be seen with the entire write-up about the property here (photo was taken in 1980).