Business as usual, or at least what has somehow become usual, was the victor at the July 12 City Council meeting. Mayor David Coss' move to oust several planning and land use commissioners went down in flames and what appeared to be a reasonable argument in yet another appeal on an arbitrary and bizarre Historic Design Review Board decision cratered in the bitter backlash of a meeting that went long past midnight.
Why care, right? It's just the same shit, different day for politics, favoritism and class and race tension in the City-not-so-very-Different, eh? Except that Santa Fe is on an evolutionary cusp right now. As a city, we can have a piece of the spreading media industries
pie, continue to develop science-based entrepreneurial spin-offs, environmental technologies and usher our arts and culture industry into the current century, or we can all start wearing mouse hats and selling disposable cameras from fauxdobe huts. Cultural tourism is a highly competitive industry these days. Santa Fe can play out its tourist-filled glory days until we're a second-tier pit-stop on mid-America's curiosity tour, or we can be a city that is dynamic for its history and beauty, but also for our contemporary culture, quality of life and continuing creative spirit. Ideas around land development, neighbors and neighborhoods and whether our civic policies celebrate or limit our traditions and our vibrancy are fundamental to our community identity. These ideas are central to Santa Fe's future prospects as both a destination and a thriving self-driven economy.
So when planning and land use has become politicized in so confusing and bizarre a way as to ignore the brass tacks of the commission's duties and instead believe that a Super Wal-Mart will be a "pedestrian-friendly" environment or that Jeff Branch's Lowes/chain-restaurant development is about community because it has a "plaza," well, the most compelling interests of the city are far away indeed. And when the H-Board is increasingly protective of a few tiny, historic gems, relying less and less on the letter of its own Historic Districts Ordinance and increasingly often on personal, highly subjective judgments, while mockeries of the very styles the board is meant to protect sprout like tumors on the edge of town-think Camel Rock Suites or the Outlet Mall-it is time to consider how very seriously the intent of the preservation ordinance has failed.
Chris Wilson's impressive history of the ordinance's origin and sober analysis of its effect is efficiently documented in his 1997 book,
The Myth of Santa Fe
, a bit of scholarship that reveals Santa Fe's "historic" styles as the proverbial emperor's new clothes. Wilson's effort is not without appreciation for accepted Santa Fe style, as popularized by John Gaw Meem's Pueblo- and Territorial-Revival idioms, but also points out the strategic calculation with which those styles were glorified and codified.
In the appeal, which the Council denied, the H-Board asserted that the design was not "harmonious." But then the architect is Trey Jordan, who has been a polarizing figure in recent years. Jordan prefers to work in historic districts because of their charm and grace and the challenges of constraint provided by the historic ordinance. But Jordan, while sticking to the letter of the law, has created houses that include a contemporary sensibility. Despite the innocuous nature of his current project, the H-Board decided enough was enough-build it round, brown and stick some vigas out the side or don't build it all. The day after Jordan's appeal bit the dust before a tired and cranky Council, an article detailing the struggle appeared in the New York Times. The article was a bit flaccid on the reporting end of things, taking at face value H-Board member Jane Farrar's assertion that "Santa Fe's architecture evolved from an American Indian Tradition" and that everyone would be happy if Jordan would just go do what he does outside of the historic district.
Aside from the relative ignorance of such a facile remark about tradition, two issues surface here. Historic Districts are not meant to be dead zones-they are meant to be living neighborhoods where preservation is a premium consideration. Santa Fe's historic ordinance quotes this goal: "A general harmony as to style, form, color, height, proportion, texture and material between buildings of historic design and those of more modern design." Whether one accepts the term "modern" to simply mean newer construction (as the H-Board maintains) or to refer more specifically to an architectural style, it would be wrong to believe that Santa Fe's architectural godfather, Meem, would use the word lightly. Chris Wilson, in another book,
Facing Southwest
, points out that Meem moved from Pueblo to Territorial to a third idiom, a merging of modernist sensibilities with his own sense of regional tradition. The only reason Meem didn't create more work along these lines was lack of client base; people instead clamored for his earlier work, the way nobody likes a band's third album-they all want to hear the classics. Now that the client base does exist for exactly the evolution our most revered architect wanted to see-shouldn't we consider honoring that?
Secondly, in a city with as deep a history as Santa Fe, everything outside of historic districts shouldn't be a free-for-all. If historic preservation is so important to us, why have we allowed those god-awful Corozon condominiums to be built? I'm in favor of downtown residential, but there's nothing harmonious about those units. How did we lose the cobblestones on Galisteo Street? Who rubber-stamped the plans to repave our Alameda along the river and cover it in enough generic medians and traffic-directing paint to land a full-sized Boeing?
Why don't we have a body that works with a holistic picture of our community's past and future? Why not one that looks for harmony not just between buildings, but between roads and rivers, rich and poor, culture and commodity? Why not a body that assesses the quality, thought and sensitivity that goes into a project like Jordan's instead of offering willy-nilly approval to shoddy workmanship with no context, but the right look, while dodging the bullet of anything different?
