Early American urban life thrived on lively streetcar corridors, ubiquitous bicycles moving safely on slow, shared streets, and neighborhoods where most daily needs sat within a short walk or ride.
The streetcar era knit cities together in fine-grained patterns of corner groceries, upstairs flats, and neighborhood theaters—places where most needs were within a short walk or ride.
Even before streetcars, the “walking city” and the 1890s bicycle boom made proximity the default. Cars existed only at the margins, so streets functioned as public rooms: shared, social, and slow.
That living heritage—mobility, proximity, and sociable streets—is what made those places humane and connected.
Yet in practice, preservation today often narrows its focus to façades. Landmarks commissions are good at safeguarding terra-cotta, sash windows, and rooflines, but the living urban fabric that made those buildings meaningful—frequent transit, safe cycling, mixed-use proximity—rarely enter the brief.
We end up with postcard streetscapes where it’s hard to catch a bus, risky to ride a bike, and illegal to add the kind of small homes and corner shops those streets were built to serve. That’s not true preservation; it’s aesthetic freeze-drying.
A fuller effort to preserve our towns would widen the lens from ornament to organization—from how buildings look to how people live and move among them. It would treat mobility and proximity as heritage values. The original context of many “historic” districts was a network of transit lines, narrow lanes that tamed speeds, minimal off-street parking, and a jumble of uses that kept daily life close. Preserving that context means reviving it: frequent buses and trains with priority on main streets, protected bike networks, traffic-calmed blocks, and zoning that again welcomes small shops, flats, and missing-middle homes.
Crucially, it would also acknowledge how landmarking is sometimes wielded as a cudgel to block this very heritage. Claims that bike lanes, bus lanes, or modest infill are “out of character” can freeze a district into the least historical version of itself: car-dominated, parking-laden, and functionally exclusive. Midcentury motoring norms—wide lanes, abundant parking, high speeds—are not historic features of 19th- or early 20th-century neighborhoods; they’re intrusions. Elevating them over transit, cycling, and proximity erases the social history that made these places work.
Historian Peter Norton’s work helps explain how we got here. In Fighting Traffic, he shows how “motordom” in the 1920s reframed streets from shared civic spaces into motor corridors, even inventing “jaywalking” to blame pedestrians for car violence. In Autonorama, he chronicles how dazzling promises of car-centered futures kept us doubling down on a system that undermines safety, equity, and the very urbanity preservationists celebrate. Norton’s lesson isn’t anti-progress—it’s about recovering the freedom and dignity people once had to move without a car, and recognizing that our built inheritance is as much about circulation and sociability as it is about style.
A modern and appropriate approach to historic preservation would therefore put good transit, bicycleability, and 15-minute neighborhoods at the center:
- Treat proximity as heritage: legalize the traditional mix—corner stores, upstairs apartments, and small homes—so daily needs are within a short walk or ride.
- Protect historic street functions: prioritize transit on legacy corridors, narrow overly wide lanes, calm traffic, and remove parking mandates that never belonged in pre-automobile places.
- Build complete bike networks: protected lanes that connect homes to schools, shops, and stations, restoring the everyday cycling common before car dominance.
- Make transit frequent and dignified: all-day frequency, reliable operations, and comfortable stops—because a streetcar-era city without good transit is a stage set, not a community.
- Embrace adaptive reuse with access: pair façade conservation with code paths that add homes and active ground floors without sacrificing safety.
- Measure what matters: evaluate preservation impacts on access, safety, emissions, and affordability, not just appearance.
This is not nostalgia; it’s adaptation. In a warming climate, the most resilient “historic district” is one where a family can meet most needs without a car, where buses glide past congestion, where riding a bike is uneventful, and where shorter trips mean lower emissions and cooler streets. These are the conditions that once made American towns hum—and they are far more consequential than whether a replacement window mimics an old muntin pattern.
If you love historic preservation, consider loving what made those places livable in the first place. Save the cornices, yes—but save the corner store, the bus that comes every eight minutes, the safe bike route to school, and the right to live near what you need. That’s how we preserve history we can still inhabit.
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