Boston celebrates its cultural history and landmarks during National Preservation Month

It's impossible to imagine what Boston would be like without its numerous historical landmarks. From sites on the Freedom Trail to the narrow streets of Beacon Hill, to the Victorian brownstones of Back Bay, parts of the city feel like an open air museum, drawing in millions of visitors every year and making Boston a vibrant place to live. May is National Preservation Month, and cities and parks all across the country are hosting special events, tours and educational activities to promote and protect their historical sites. Nick Armata, senior preservation planner at the Boston Landmarks Commission spoke with GBH's All Things Considered host Arun Rath about what the city of Boston has in store for this month.

Arun Rath: So, give us a quick sketch of the background of Preservation Month and what the city has in store for this year.

Nick Armata: So, Preservation Month was established back in 1973 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Originally, it was designed to be one week of celebrations. And in 2005, the National Trust actually extended that to be the entire month designed to celebrate all of our historic built infrastructure.

Here in Boston, we have a number of different events that are planned to celebrate what makes Boston such a special place in the hearts of both the residents and the folks who visit it. We have a number of events that are both sponsored by the city and from some of our community partners that we work with on a regular basis. So, all month long we'll be offering some events that are just designed to teach folks and allow folks to press pause on their daily lives and essentially to look up and see what makes Boston such a special place and what's so special about the built infrastructure and why it makes Boston so unique.

Rath: Yeah, you know, I think it's something that we take for granted. I live in Lexington and we not so much take it for granted, but take valuing it for granted. So, it's interesting to hear that this goes back about 50 years, are there stories of parts of history that have been saved in that time that otherwise might not have been?

Armata: Yeah, our existence as a department within the city of Boston, the Boston Landmarks Commission, was actually established in 1975, and it was really in response to the rapid demolition of many of the historic resources throughout the city. Primarily, there were a number of properties within the Back Bay, specifically the Hall Street Church that was actually located just off Newbury Street that was demolished, as well as some really important warehouses designed by Charles Finch that were torn down in both downtown as well as East Boston. It really took away from some of the identity of those coastal neighborhoods. Both East Boston and downtown have a legacy of shipping and merchant history that the city was formed around and with that loss, we lost part of the narrative of the city.

So, that's where we come into play. Not only are we preserving buildings from the early Colonial period in the revolutionary time, but we're also expanding that purview into protecting some of the more modern pieces of infrastructure in our city.

A great example of the modern buildings that we're working to preserve are buildings like City Hall. Now, City Hall is somewhat of a controversial building. Many folks will argue that it's one of the most ugly buildings in the country, if not the world. I would beg to differ there, but at the end of the day, it is a unique structure and it tells part of the story of the city of Boston.

Our history is is not always a pretty history. There are a lot of complexities in an urban environment like Boston, and City Hall is kind of representative of that in a physical structure. The neighborhood it sits in was formerly known as Scollay Square, and when that was demolished to make way for Government Center, there was a global competition to come up with some designs — and the winning design is the design that we see today. This building is actually a pending landmark. So, we are recognizing that things that were built mid-century are equally important to the identity of the city of Boston as its revolutionary history.

Rath: It's also fascinating the concept that preservation is not just about what's pretty or agreeable, right?

Armata: Yeah, what we're doing as an agency is we're working with the community to identify things that are important to them. Our staff and our commission does not landmark things because we feel it's something that needs to be protected. It's the community involvement that is really the heart of what we do. Folks identify buildings as being significant to the city of Boston because there's a story there, and folks identify with those stories and we want to continue that legacy by preserving these gems for future generations.

Rath: Of the history out there that's not protected, what most concerns you right now in Boston? What do you want to make sure gets protected?

Armata: So, Boston has a proven track record of preserving revolutionary and early Colonial history, right? Buildings like the Old State House, Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market are all landmarks or pending Boston landmarks, historic neighborhoods like Back Bay, Beacon Hill, the South End are all protected Boston landmarks.

But one of the shortcomings is, if we look at those neighborhoods and we look at the histories of those neighborhoods, there are stories that are absent from those narratives, and those are the stories of folks of color and communities of color. What we've been trying to do as a profession and as a department is really work to preserve all of these different narratives so that we can identify buildings, places and landscapes that are important for everybody in the city of Boston, not just the white population.

A great example of that — and this is one of our biggest success stories to date, in my opinion — is we recently formed our brand new historic district in Roxbury called the Highland Park Architectural Conservation District. And this district is a new kind of historic district. First and foremost, this is a project that the community has fought for for over 40 years. They submitted a petition, I believe, in the 1970s to protect this neighborhood. For one reason or another, it didn't happen. But there has been a movement with a lot of the recent new developments where some of the historic infrastructure was lost in that community. We were able to reactivate that landmark petition and we got this done in 2022. Mayor Wu signed off on the Highland Park Architectural Conservation District in 2022, and it is now an official landmark district of the community.

I say it's a new kind of district for a specific reason. This type of district in Highland Park is not one where it's going to overburden folks in the community with expensive architectural repairs and modifications. The primary focus of this district is to not prevent new construction, but to allow new construction to be complementary of what's there now.

Rath: I love everything about this and everything about what you're celebrating this month. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

Armata: My pleasure.