PANEL 4
Plan and elevations of South Main and South Water Streets, between James and Crawford Streets, showing rehabilitated structures and new infill, to be constructed in scale with the existing buildings. At the block between Crawford Street and Ward Street, an office tower with parking deck is visible.
Claire Andrade-Watkins
"The selection of panels #4, #6 and #8 for review is based on a conundrum of being both a witness and participant in the ‘lived’ moment of those spaces as the center of the Cape Verdean community, yet invisible in the vision and execution of the College Hill Plan. I see the ‘footprint’ in panel #4 of the house on 26 Planet Street where I was born and raised; the house at 28 Planet next door where I often babysat, the Goff house on the corner of Benefit and Planet where we often visited, and the Burnside Apartments with the wonderful curved iron rail that was the delight of children in the neighborhood.
Reconciling those memories to ‘footprints’ and what the implementation of the plan created in terms of the human consequences to the denizens of those spaces is another perspective: one of existing, but not visible, and voiceless in the determination of ‘significant or insignificant to the historic fabric ’, worthy of preserving or relegated to ‘infill.” The conundrum is not a resolution but a question. What do we remember? Or more importantly, who decides what and how we remember? The challenge is not the regret of the past, but the hope for the future to reconstitute those lost memories and absent voices and integrate them into the new ‘vision’ of significant historic fabric."
DAVID BRUSSAT
"Panel 4 represents, in plan, the blocks between South Water and Benefit streets and between Crawford and James. It made me think of Plantations, east of South Main, a dozen or so stand-alone contemporary versions of colonial houses, circa 1980. Its buildings remain of sterile appearance despite almost 40 years of time and weather. In the image are 49 structures, overwhelmingly new, in line-of-march order. The new ones, as suggested by Panel 2, are of a form alien to their neighborhood, such of it as remains. Today, most of the old commercial buildings survive. A few large new office buildings erode the historic fabric. Still, a bullet has been dodged.
This panel and every panel so far suggest the survey’s inability - or unwillingness - to summon the creativity to imagine patterns of townscape to reflect the natural growth of community. As with the survey’s preferred design palette, so with its preferred organization of infill. The impetus was not to preserve but to contrast with the historic fabric, on as extensive a scale as could be plausibly defended. The survey techniques and scoring criteria for decisions of what individual buildings to demolish and what areas would be subject to clearance and then full-scale renewal made preserving the historic sensibility of the survey district entirely unlikely."