By David Myers
The critical first step in protecting significant cultural resources is having baseline information on what and where they are, as well as their current status and potential uses. This information is essential for those involved in managing or trying to affect change in legacy cities and for urban revitalization. City and regional agencies play a crucial role in collecting and making available such baseline information through their cultural resource inventories (which are often added to and updated through historic resource surveys).
Inventories are a critical tool for making proactive, timely, and informed decisions, especially when high demolition and/or redevelopment pressures exist. They are most effective when city and regional agencies are able to harness modern information technologies that 1) offer widespread and easy access to key information and 2) allow records to be easily updated to reflect changing conditions. However, developing and maintaining effective digital inventory systems and sustaining related data is a costly and difficult undertaking that can be beyond the reach of many organizations and agencies.
In an environment of diminishing resources for heritage organizations and municipal governments, the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund created the Arches Heritage Inventory and Management System, a modern enterprise-level open source software platform designed for use by heritage institutions around the world. Arches—web-based and geospatially enabled—is purpose-built for managing inventories of all types of heritage places, including buildings, structures, historic districts, archaeological sites, and cultural landscapes. As an open source platform, Arches is available at no cost and is customizable to meet organizations’ particular needs. Organizations may choose to provide unrestricted access to their Arches implementation and data or limit access. Arches is designed to be as intuitive as possible to allow authorized users to enter, edit, and search data with little technical training.
Arches is already being used by a wide range of heritage organizations internationally. Organizations that have deployed Arches in the U.S. include:
- City of Los Angeles: The City of Los Angeles has implemented Arches as HistoricPlacesLA (http://historicplacesla.org), the official Los Angeles Historic Resources Inventory, as a tool to fulfill its obligations under federal, state, and local historic preservation laws; to provide input to its planning processes; and to make information publicly accessible.

Screenshot of HistoricPlacesLA showing clusters representing over 25,000 cultural resources identified to date by the City of Los Angeles. Credit: City of Los Angeles.
- Queen Anne’s County, Maryland: Queen Anne’s County is implementing Arches to present and help preserve more than 300 years of its history of individuals, properties, and events that are significant to the nation, Maryland, and Queen Anne’s County. This Arches deployment is slated to go public later in 2017.
- Cane River National Heritage Area: The Cane River National Heritage Area in Louisiana has implemented Arches as the Cane River Heritage Inventory and Map (http://crhim.canerivernha.org) to manage information on cultural resources and to promote public knowledge, appreciation, and interest in them.

Screenshot of the Cane River Heritage Inventory and Map including integration of historic basemap. Credit: Cane River National Heritage Area.
- Armed Forces Retirement Home: The Armed Forces Retirement Home, a 272-acre historic residential campus in Washington, DC, established in 1851 for military veterans and managed by a federal agency, is using Arches (http://www.afrh-iris.com/) as a tool to inventory and manage its important cultural resources.
Other organizations around the world have implemented Arches, including as national inventories in Asia and the Caribbean. Implementations are now being prepared in the U.S. by the City and County of San Francisco and in the UK by Historic England for Greater London and by the City of Lincoln.
The Arches project is now finalizing development of version 4.0 of the platform, which includes numerous enhancements, such as tools for customization and configuration. Development is also now starting on an Arches online/offline mobile data collection app, which is planned for completion by the end of 2017.
To learn more, visit the Arches project website at http://archesproject.org/.

Using the location filter in Arches, resources that would be impacted by a proposed development project can be quickly identified. Credit: City of Los Angeles.

The Related Resources graph reveals relationships between Arches resources, in this instance between an architect and heritage resources as well as other persons related to those heritage resources (such as owners and occupants). Credit: Arches Project.
David Myers is Senior Project Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute.
About this series
This is the final post in a series that has explored how others are using data to support, improve, and create good preservation practices. The Action Agenda prioritizes data collection and analysis to support key efforts of legacy city preservation:
Action Item 3: Use data to support and improve good practices.
Preservationists need data that goes beyond the facts of buildings, styles, and architects. Good data and layered multidisciplinary analysis can inform strategic decision-making on the ground, prioritize limited funds, support coalition-building with organizations in allied fields, direct preservationists in refining practices and tools in challenging legacy city contexts, and shape effective advocacy efforts. In particular, rigorous analysis should examine how reinvesting in older and historic buildings and neighborhoods compares to demolition with regard to social, economic, and environmental outcomes such as community stability, foreclosures, and property values.
No, Newark is not the next Brooklyn
By webadmin
On June 21, 2017
In Action Agenda, Commentary
By Anne Schaper Englot
In Newark we’re getting tired of hearing hyped-up comparisons to Brooklyn, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone. In 2015 Politico ran a story headlined “Is Newark the next Brooklyn?” The piece was rebutted by Dr. Roland Anglin, a Brooklyn native with 20+ years of work in Newark who formerly helmed Rutgers University – Newark’s Joseph Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies. Anglin published his response—spoiler alert: Newark is not the next Brooklyn, nor do we aspire to be—in The Conversation. That should have put the issue to rest.
But speculation continued, with the question next being picked up by the New York Times in 2016. That time, it was refuted by Newark’s Deputy Mayor Baye Adofo-Wilson: “Newark’s not trying to be the next Brooklyn, or the next Jersey City… We have our own richness and our own culture here that isn’t just an expansion of Wall Street, but really an expansion of Newark and an expansion of New Jersey.”
Things were quiet for a while, but then the New York Post added to fuel to the fire when it quoted New Jersey Performing Arts Center CEO John Schreiber. Schreiber compared the transformation of Fort Greene around the Brooklyn Academy of Music with downtown Newark’s “culturally conscious” development. Yet he also emphatically countered the article’s premise: “Newark is not Brooklyn…Newark is Newark.”
He echoed the refrain we’ve heard again and again from Newark native, Mayor Ras Baraka. “Newark is the next Newark,” Baraka stated and restated to an appreciative audience gathered to hear the Mayor’s State of the City address in May 2017. And yet, on the cover of Radius, a local glossy published by Newark area developer and booster, Paul Profeta, a headline shouts, “Newark Is the New Brooklyn.”
The Hahne’s Building
Cited in almost all these articles as evidence of Newark’s “Brooklynness” is the renovation of the Hahne & Company Department store. Everyone in Newark has a story about the Hahne’s building if they were here prior to the store’s closing in 1987. Whether they shopped there, worked there, or just passed through to stare at luxury goods beyond their reach, Hahne’s played a central role in the life of the city. If you were walking down the street with a Hahne’s shopping bag, you were stylin’.
When my family was first contemplating a move to Newark late in 2013, I drove down Broad Street, Newark’s main thoroughfare. Plywood and chain link surrounded the central park downtown. There was a two-block construction site across the street and the Hahne’s building was all boarded up—a white elephant—at the center of town. Nevertheless, we were assured that Newark was undergoing a renaissance. The first piece of evidence was the opening of Military Park—an expert $3 million reimagining by Dan Biederman Associates, the firm responsible for renovation and programing in Bryant Park.
Photo credit: Anne Schaper Englot
The Prudential Tower was next. Its sleek glass-clad façades and green design brought thousands of employees downtown in one fell swoop. The beautiful new office building was designed by Kohn Pederson Fox and a LEED Gold-accredited, state-of-the-art facility complete with a green wall and green roof. Prudential transferred over 3,000 employees from the suburbs to the building, which looks down on Military Park and mirrors its triumph.
Photo credit: Anne Schaper Englot
The final piece in the set is the Hahne’s building. L+M Development Partners undertook a $174 million redevelopment to transform it into a mixed-use building with retail, commercial, educational, and residential spaces. At its grand opening in January 2017, a record crowd assembled to celebrate the rebirth of a civic treasure. All doubts about Newark’s renaissance—which I learned had been touted in the local and national media periodically since 1987—were put to rest.
Opened in 1901 and designed by Goldwin Starrett (who was soon to be a premiere department store architect), the Hahne & Company store was the gold standard. It had four floors plus a basement of retail around the Grand Court, which was topped by a skylight that sent sun to every level. The store was at the heart of the city.
Photo credit: Anne Schaper Englot
Everyone in the city has a story about Hahne’s. Some stories reflect the institutionalized racial inequality that divided the city in the 1960s. One man told of being an elevator operator who took ladies’ furs to the fur vault after the winter months—yet he was not allowed to set foot on the all-white retail floor. Other memories were more hopeful, such as a professor’s story about winning a drawing contest as a young girl for her drawing of her mom, which was displayed in the store window on Mother’s Day.
When the store was closed in the late 1980s, it was a hole in the heart of Newark. When it became clear that the Hahne’s building would reopen, the city shed a 30-year chip from its shoulder.
Hahne’s Building: A Case Study in Partnerships
L+M are continuing to work to fill all the commercial spaces, but it is only a matter of time. PetCo, CityMD, a Marcus Samuelson restaurant, and a shared-work-hub are all committed future tenants. L+M started the project under former mayor (now U.S. Senator) Cory Booker, who is still a frequent visitor to the building. Booker helped secure the first anchor tenant, Whole Foods, by contacting the company constantly until it finally agreed Newark was “ready” for a store.
Photo credit: Anne Schaper Englot
Rutgers University – Newark was the second anchor tenant to sign on. An amazing synchronicity occurred with the arrival of new RU-N chancellor Nancy Cantor. Cantor is a national expert in creating anchor partnerships between universities and cities, and she saw an opportunity to invest in a linchpin project with other Newark anchors such as Prudential and Goldman Sachs. A RU-N faculty proposal to relocate their engaged scholarship and social art practice to a space in the downtown was quickly approved.
I became involved in the development of this space in the roughly 500,000 square foot Hahne’s building because of my background in architecture, initially serving as a liaison between KSS architects and the faculty, and now serving as the co-director with Newark artist and long-time gallerist, Victor Davson. It is a 50,000 square foot, $25 million project we call Express Newark, as in “Express your amazing soul, Newark.” Express Newark is a university-community collaboratory where printmakers, video artists, a sculptor who has mastered 3-D imaging and printing, graphic designers, painters, photographers, and writers—many of them multimedia artists—work together on myriad projects.
Photo credit: Anthony Alvarez
All told, there are 28 local artists who are recognized community partners, 18 faculty members, and over 1,000 Rutgers students actively engaged in Express Newark. Roughly 150 Newark High School students take college prep and art workshops several Saturdays a month as part of a Kresge-funded program. At first, we worried about not marketing enough to the public, but now we’re trying to stem the tide of organizations and individuals who want to hold conferences, lectures, events, and more in the Express Newark space.
Photo credit: Halkin Mason Photography, courtesy of KSS Architects
Renaissance? Sure, but it’s Newark’s
L+M made so many decisions about the Hahne’s project that were about maintaining the integrity of the architecture and not about the bottom line. The best example is the Grand Court skylight, which had been painted and tarred over during WWII to prevent it from becoming a target for enemy planes. L+M painstakingly disassembled the skylight, sent it to Pennsylvania for sandblasting and restoration, and lovingly reinstalled it over the second story to recreate a modern version of the original Grand Court. The third and fourth floors of the court became a residential court with apartment windows and patios overlooking the skylight. I am such a believer that my husband and I were the first residential tenants: on February 1, we moved into an apartment that overlooks Military Park.
Photo credit: Anne Schaper Englot
Recently, we sat outside with some neighbors at Burg, a burger joint and beer garden in Military Park. The outdoor bar was packed with millennials, there were people jogging and walking dogs, a group was waiting to go on a tour of the city, and others had gathered to paint watercolors and play ping pong. It was a vibrant Newark scene—our own kind of renaissance.
Anne Schaper Englot is a Professor of Practice in Architecture & Humanities in Rutgers University-Newark’s Arts, Culture & Media Department and is the Co-Director of Express Newark: a University – Community Arts Collaboratory.
About this series
This is the first post in a series that will dig into preservation and the arts in legacy cities. The arts have the potential to underpin many of the strategies in the Action Agenda, especially thoughtful, creative community engagement.
Action item 2: Engage and listen to local communities
Preservationists must listen to local needs and priorities and develop new forms of community engagement informed by diverse communities and youth. Creative visualization of preservation’s potential—pop-up shops in vacant storefronts, art installations in empty houses, and collective daydreaming like artist Candy Chang’s “I wish this were” walls—can share important community stories, underscore the importance of place and community, and spur real action to revitalize both vernacular and high-style neighborhoods.
Legacy city preservation practice must hold local heritage and quality of life as significant as architecture. Intangible heritage and culture—the stories that make a community what it is—should be recognized and preserved through oral histories, community storytelling events, and in other ways. is is especially important when demolition is necessary and in neighborhoods that have been shaped by long-term disinvestment and systemic racism.