Urban Preservation and Renewal

Abstract

This article takes up the creation of Boston’s Beacon Hill historic district during the 1950s as a significant chapter of preservation planning history. Inspired by similar efforts in the South, this campaign succeeded in a decade commonly associated with conformity and consensus, suburbia and urban renewal, obsolescence and progress. Activists on Beacon Hill persuaded their neighbors and city and state officials that the heretofore little-used technique of historic district designation should be employed in a big, northern industrial city. In so doing, they led the way for the more widespread historic preservation movement that followed during the 1960s and 1970s.