Anybody who knows me also knows that sooner or later I will start quoting Jane Jacobs, she who took on a goliath named Robert Moses and won; she who saved Greenwich Village from the bulldozer. It’s a story longer than we can retell on an attention deficit website or retrieve from years before most of our readers were born. But then the quote I prefer is simpler than old stories ever are (be they tales told by grandparents or vertical architecture.) It goes like this: “New ideas come out of old buildings.”
That’s more than a quip, it is an essential truth. Those elaborate palaces of glass and steel are contracted by those who have already measured their needs. Those McMansions out west in planned communities are acquired only by those who can acquire a significant bank loan. Whether it’s a garage in Palo Alto where the personal computer was created, a bicycle shop manned by brothers who yearned to fly, or an artist’s loft down where textile workers used to sweat, new stuff emerges from well-used old places. It’s the economy of it all, stupid.
The American Dream comes from re-utilizing a New World’s past that is more compressed that any Old World European or Asian would recognize. Things get ‘old’ here before they are even old. Things become new here before we know they are right in front of us.
And then there are places like Elgin, where homes and businesses were built back when European immigrant artisans were eager to work and style still had some style. A grand, almost improvised Victorian may stand next door to home derived from assembled parts and a Sears catalog. A Georgian mansion sits next to a craftsman bungalow. Each once bare plot of land was morphed into a personal dream.
This brings us to May, 2011 and what we are calling ‘Preservation Month,” to which I wonder in a turbulent town like ours, are we here to preserve or just to persevere? Some of us restore old homes as an investment in our investment, others just because we are stubborn. One fellow I know of spent a couple of years and all the time and money he could spare just to put a porch back on his house exactly the way it was when he was young. Another couple among us is now creating a business downtown dedicated to the proposition that all of us are created creating.
The reconfigured Spacetatste gallery, run by Tim Solarz and Sue Manago will be reopening to the public this Friday, May 6th, starting at 6pm. The first two things they offer us are relatively conventional. One, you can find eclectic and extraordinary things, things that range from beautiful to bizarre to hilarious. Secondly, 10 Douglas Avenue might become something we lack downtown, a real art gallery with an ongoing turnover of work to keep the mind afresh. This we need.
After that it gets more ambitious. They want to build a place that is dedicated to our community’s passion to rebuild, restore and at times create anew this remarkable historic environment we have inherited from our predecessors. Elgin is a lot of work to maintain because is the result of a lot of work that has gone on before we got here. Not only do we have enduring artifacts from the nineteenth century and a once-thriving industrial powerhouse, we even have historic subdivisions. We have ranch houses from a lifetime ago; we have memories of places that no longer are and eagles flying by our (third) library.
So the three other and perhaps harder to describe things they will be pursuing at Spacetaste are these:
1) Preservation in Action Tales, which will be dedicated to the dedication of those restoring their homes and businesses—a graphic documentation of ongoing salvation. One could call it the ‘before and after’ pictures with a timeline, but anyone who has actually engaged in this obsession knows that the real work is never really done. As Winston Churchill said, “first we make our houses and then they make us.”
2) The Neighborhood Preservation Station, which is complicated to explain, for we have acronyms and projects galore in this town—SWAN, GPA, NENA, DNA, ABODE and more. We have contractors who specialize in restoration, we have several historical organizations. We have Mike Alft’s lifetime of work. It could be useful to have a place where some of these things intersected.
3) The Green Thing. How do we restore the old for a ‘sustainable’ future? This is where the new ideas go into the old buildings.
Preservation, perseverance, or inspiration, whatever one wants to call it, it’s Elgin. This city was here long before suburbia or the megalopolis came up to our borders. What we are is what we were.
That’s more than a quip, it is an essential truth. Those elaborate palaces of glass and steel are contracted by those who have already measured their needs. Those McMansions out west in planned communities are acquired only by those who can acquire a significant bank loan. Whether it’s a garage in Palo Alto where the personal computer was created, a bicycle shop manned by brothers who yearned to fly, or an artist’s loft down where textile workers used to sweat, new stuff emerges from well-used old places. It’s the economy of it all, stupid.
The American Dream comes from re-utilizing a New World’s past that is more compressed that any Old World European or Asian would recognize. Things get ‘old’ here before they are even old. Things become new here before we know they are right in front of us.
And then there are places like Elgin, where homes and businesses were built back when European immigrant artisans were eager to work and style still had some style. A grand, almost improvised Victorian may stand next door to home derived from assembled parts and a Sears catalog. A Georgian mansion sits next to a craftsman bungalow. Each once bare plot of land was morphed into a personal dream.
This brings us to May, 2011 and what we are calling ‘Preservation Month,” to which I wonder in a turbulent town like ours, are we here to preserve or just to persevere? Some of us restore old homes as an investment in our investment, others just because we are stubborn. One fellow I know of spent a couple of years and all the time and money he could spare just to put a porch back on his house exactly the way it was when he was young. Another couple among us is now creating a business downtown dedicated to the proposition that all of us are created creating.
The reconfigured Spacetatste gallery, run by Tim Solarz and Sue Manago will be reopening to the public this Friday, May 6th, starting at 6pm. The first two things they offer us are relatively conventional. One, you can find eclectic and extraordinary things, things that range from beautiful to bizarre to hilarious. Secondly, 10 Douglas Avenue might become something we lack downtown, a real art gallery with an ongoing turnover of work to keep the mind afresh. This we need.
After that it gets more ambitious. They want to build a place that is dedicated to our community’s passion to rebuild, restore and at times create anew this remarkable historic environment we have inherited from our predecessors. Elgin is a lot of work to maintain because is the result of a lot of work that has gone on before we got here. Not only do we have enduring artifacts from the nineteenth century and a once-thriving industrial powerhouse, we even have historic subdivisions. We have ranch houses from a lifetime ago; we have memories of places that no longer are and eagles flying by our (third) library.
So the three other and perhaps harder to describe things they will be pursuing at Spacetaste are these:
1) Preservation in Action Tales, which will be dedicated to the dedication of those restoring their homes and businesses—a graphic documentation of ongoing salvation. One could call it the ‘before and after’ pictures with a timeline, but anyone who has actually engaged in this obsession knows that the real work is never really done. As Winston Churchill said, “first we make our houses and then they make us.”
2) The Neighborhood Preservation Station, which is complicated to explain, for we have acronyms and projects galore in this town—SWAN, GPA, NENA, DNA, ABODE and more. We have contractors who specialize in restoration, we have several historical organizations. We have Mike Alft’s lifetime of work. It could be useful to have a place where some of these things intersected.
3) The Green Thing. How do we restore the old for a ‘sustainable’ future? This is where the new ideas go into the old buildings.
Preservation, perseverance, or inspiration, whatever one wants to call it, it’s Elgin. This city was here long before suburbia or the megalopolis came up to our borders. What we are is what we were.
