Preserving Chain Link Fence

In Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, stretching the boundaries of "historic preservation":

Anita Hall grew up in the Buchanan Street rowhouse her parents bought in 1963. It’s in the city’s Parker-Gray neighborhood, hard by the Metro tracks. After her parents’ deaths she bought the house from her siblings and set about sprucing it up. Her nephew, Dallas Hall, runs a contracting business. Three months ago, he pulled out the old chain-link fence and put in a black aluminum fence, its narrow posts topped with arrowhead-shaped details.

“It looks better than a chain-link fence, and the chain-link fence was falling down,” Anita said.

Dallas hadn’t gotten planning permission — “I didn’t even know this section was deemed historic,” he told me — but he did approach the city’s zoning folks with a question about replacing a stockade fence at the back of the property. When they came out to take a look at that, they noticed the chain-link fence was gone.

“They asked me, ‘Where is that fence? Can you recover any of that fence?’ ” Dallas said. They wanted him to reinstall it, which would have been hard. He’d given it to some friends to sell for scrap.

As the historic preservation staff wrote in its recommendation: “While many feel that [chain-link] fences have negative connotations, this material has played an important role in the development of mid-century vernacular housing and their cultural landscape. . . . By eradicating this ‘simple fencing solution,’ the applicant would be removing an important contextual clue to the original occupants of this neighborhood.”

This sort of baloney is in keeping with the mantra of many preservationists these days, that nothing can ever be allowed to change. At least nothing that impacts the "character" of the neighborhood can be allowed to change. Here we also get a dose of left-wing populism, since the "contextual clue" provided by the chain link fence showed that this used to be a working class neighborhood before the yuppies moved in.

What is missing from this story is any notion of beauty, or indeed any idea of why some things should be preserved. To me, old things that are beautiful, or vibrant and full of life, or charged with historical meaning, or otherwise contributory to human happiness, should be preserved, whereas old things that are ugly or empty should be swept away. To remove any notion of beauty or other life-enhancing qualities from preservation makes it the meaningless opponent of all change no matter how good, and what is the point of that?