Post WWII and Urban Renewal
In 1956, President Eisenhower signed into law the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 which established the interstate highway system, which provided an easy and efficient way for troops to depart if under attack. Due to this new construction, many historic properties were destroyed. In the 1960s, the Kennedy administration launched the Urban Renewal Program. Hoping the plan would rejuvenate the cities, it in fact increased the destruction in the downtown areas. The increase in population around this time, as well, and the manufacturing of cars called for a rapid change, therefore hindering our nation and its culture. “With the urbanization, tear downs, and rebuilding America...it is destroying the physical evidence of the past.” During the 1950s and 1960s people saw the negative changes in their city and developed a concern for their “quality of life that reflected their identity.”
As a response to the nationwide destruction brought about by federally initiated programs, a report coordinated by Lady Bird Johnson analyzed the country and the effects of urban renewal. With Heritage So Rich, an accumulation of essays, wrote “an expansive inventory of properties reflecting the nation’s heritage, a mechanism to protect those properties from unnecessary harm caused by federal activities, a program of financial incentives, and an independent federal preservation body to coordinate the actions of federal agencies affecting historic preservation.” The book triggered public awareness of the issue and offered a proposition to handle the situation through the National Historic Preservation Act.
Read more about this topic: National Historic Preservation Act Of 1966
Famous quotes containing the words post, urban and/or renewal:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and and not by a but.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)