PRESERVING WHOSE HISTORY? WHITENESS AND HISTORIC

PRESERVING WHOSE HISTORY?

Whiteness and Historic Preservation in Cambridge, Massachusetts

DAVI DA SILVA

Davi da Silva completed his graduate studies in Medical Engineering/Medical Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2020. Outside of his research, he was involved in student organizing and activism around affordable housing in Cambridge.

ABSTRACT

Problem, Approach, and Findings

Whose geographies get to be considered “historic?” We attempt to answer this question in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a centuriesold city with a varied history, by comparing the location of National Register of Historic Places and other landmarks to the city’s 20th-century “redlining” maps. From this, we see that the current distribution of protected and visible sites privileges white geographies, despite the clear existence of Black people and landmarks in the city’s history.

Implications

From these results and an examination of the context of a few particular sites, we argue that there are procedural and other structural factors that may privilege white history in the designation of historic protections. Moreover, we argue that given the entrenchment of racism throughout United States history, historic preservation is a project inherently tied to white supremacy. Planners and activists must consider the implications of glorifying a city’s (racist) history in discussions about the future of historic preservation.

During Ayanna Pressley’s 2018 congressional campaign, in which she unseated the longtime incumbent in Massachusetts’s Seventh Congressional District, one word was used frequently: historic. Often, the word was used to describe her campaign, as when she won, she became the first Black woman to represent Massachusetts in Congress. But she also used the word herself to describe the problems facing her district: the historic inequities left by centuries of structural racism in Massachusetts and the nation as a whole. She made this point perhaps most deftly in a 101-second campaign ad, in which she took the MBTA 1 bus from one end of its route to the other (Ayanna Pressley for Congress, 2018). The 1 bus winds through her district from west Cambridge, one of the wealthiest and whitest parts of the Boston area, to Nubian Square in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, one of the region’s Blackest and poorest. In the ad, she ties history and lived experience to geography, noting in a voiceover the drops in income and life expectancy across the bus’s route. Implicit in her message is that only some of this geography and history is represented in government by her (white) opponent, a gap she aspired to fill.

When one thinks of representation in government and public life, one most often thinks of politicians like Pressley—people in public roles, and the power they hold through office and the bully pulpit’s effect on discourse and culture. But just as Pressley’s ad referenced places, so too can representation and its resultant cultural capital be held by geographies. In particular, the notion of which locations are considered officially “historic,” and therefore deserving of state-derived protection, is a form of representation and power. And just like the inequities mentioned in the 1 Bus ad, these privileges of historicity are divided across her district—by geography and race. In this piece, I show the extent of the racialized geospatial disparities in historic preservation and landmarking in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city that is part of Pressley’s district, a former major center of industry and manufacturing, a current biotech hub, and, perhaps most famously, the home of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I also explore several possible reasons for these trends, chiefly that there is inherently an ideology of whiteness within the goal of historic preservation as it exists in Cambridge (and the United States)—an ideology that planners must reckon with.

The project of historic preservation in the United States is enacted through a regionally varying patchwork of protections and designations at the local, state, and national levels, each conferring different protections or restrictions on owners of properties deemed to be historic. In Cambridge in particular, there are two main designations of legal consequence.

The first is the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), a list administered by the federal government in conjunction with local and state historical societies. Being listed on the NRHP does not grant any special protections for a property per se, but it confers certain tax advantages to the owner and has implications for public funding and for state and federal licensing for projects affecting those properties. There are over 200 NRHP sites within the City of Cambridge.

The second important designation is that of a Cambridge Designated Landmark, a more local distinction (Cambridge Historical Commission n.d.). The process for landmark designation requires a landmarking study conducted by the Cambridge Historical Commission, triggered either by a citizen petition or the Commission itself, followed by a vote by the Cambridge City Council. Once designated as a landmark, a property is limited in the ways its publicly visible features may be modified. Over 100 sites in Cambridge have been designated landmarks in this way.

FIGURE 1 – Cambridge, Massachusetts in context. - The northeastern United States, with detail

highlighting the City of Cambridge and its surrounding Massachusetts municipalities.

In addition to these two significant statuses, there are two other semi-official designations that provide a perhaps honorary historic designation status with no concrete legal protections. The first is visible: that of the Cambridge Historical Society’s Blue Oval markers that adorn some Cambridge properties with facts about their history. The other is fairly invisible and less well known: the Cambridge African-American Heritage Trail, which lists locations important to Cambridge’s Black community. These carry no physical marker but can be found in a pamphlet available for purchase from the city and are listed online. As with most things in the geography of American cities, these sites granted official historic designation are not uniformly distributed within Cambridge’s borders. A walk down mansion-lined Brattle Street in west Cambridge finds many—but just a mile or two to the south, near Central Square and the neighborhood of Cambridgeport, they are few. To quantify this discrepancy through a racial lens, these sites can be counted with reference to their location on perhaps the most culturally significant marker of American urban racial geography: redlining maps. These maps arose from the racist New Deal-era practice by the federal government’s Home Owner Loan’s Corporation (HOLC) of carving up cities into different areas for the

purpose of guiding banks’ lending practices in major American cities, including Cambridge. By overlaying the location of historic sites and the redlining maps of Cambridge, a clear pattern emerges that prioritizes white geographies most highly.

The term redlining is a reference to the HOLC’s maps, where so-called “hazardous” neighborhoods—typically Black neighborhoods—were colored in red. However, the HOLC’s maps were more detailed than that—they divided up cities into different distinct districts and assigned each a grade: A for “Best,” B for “Still Desirable,” C for “In Decline,” and D for “Hazardous.” The HOLC also provided detailed information on various facets of each area. This included quantitative data, such as the percent of “Negro infiltration” in that district. It also included qualitative assessments, such as “Apartments on Prescott are fairly high class… A few negro families have moved in on Dame St. and threaten to spread” (Nelson et al. 2021). HOLC maps are most known for their racist economic effects—namely, their role in creating and perpetuating residential racial segregation and creating barriers for Black wealth creation through real estate. But they also serve as a powerful symbol of (white) American society’s official perception of different neighborhoods and their moral value at the time. I use redlining maps here in that sense, not to suggest that redlining was itself the proximal cause of the observed patterns in historic preservation— although the discriminatory lending practices derived from HOLC’s maps may have contributed in various ways.

I examined the relative distribution of all four types of historic designations mentioned above: NRHP, Cambridge Landmarks, Blue Oval markers, and Cambridge’s AfricanAmerican Heritage Trail. I measured the density of sites: the number of sites per square kilometer by HOLC grade (A,

FIGURE 2 – Redlining in Cambridge, a representation of the city’s racial geography. - The

HOLC’s redlining map of Cambridge, Massachusetts, with their defined districts colored by grade. The refers to the HOLC grade assigned that district: A for “Best,” B for “Still Desirable,” C for “In Decline,” and D for “Hazardous.” The city can be roughly divided into the wealthier, whiter west Cambridge, and the less white, more industrial central and eastern portions of the city.

FIGURE 3 – Cambridge, Massachusetts in context. - (Top). HOLC maps of Cambridge, overlaid with the

locations of National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) sites (left) and Cambridge Registered Landmarks (right). (Bottom): total area of historic sites per square kilometer, for National Register of Historic Places sites (left) and Cambridge Designated Landmarks (right), by HOLC grade.

B, C, D, or No Grade), based on the redlining district in which the property’s geometric center falls, using digitized map files from the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project (Nelson et al., 2021).

For the listings that carry legal weight (NRHP and Landmarks) or public visibility (Blue Oval markers), we see the same result: B-graded areas of Cambridge (those designated “Still Desirable” by the HOLC) are disproportionately considered “historic”, compared to C- and D-graded properties (“In Decline” and “Hazardous,” respectively). Oddly, the A-graded properties don’t seem to enjoy the same level of official historicity, but this may be explained by the very small size of the one A-graded region on the HOLC maps, relatively far from either campus or major commercial centers. By contrast, the invisible, legally unprotected landmarks of the African-American Heritage Trail are found mostly in D-graded, “redlined” districts—absolutely none are found in the “Best” or “Still Desirable” districts given an A or B grade. In summary, Cambridge’s white geography, as shown by HOLC maps, aligns neatly with what is officially considered “historic” and worthy of preservation.

This may not be surprising, but why and how did this trend arise? What underlies the racialized geography in Cambridge’s official history?

One possibility is that there are fewer potential sites of historic value in the C- and D-graded districts of Cambridge, due to neglect, demolition, or gentrification. Indeed, this has been the case for many sites of Black history in the United States. For example, the Rosenwald schools were once a project that at its height in the early 20th century consisted of thousands of schools for Black children in the segregated South. In the decades since Brown v. the Board of Education, though, 90% of the schools were demolished or fell into disrepair, leading to challenges for Black historians seeking to preserve them (Cep 2020). And while urban highway construction did not raze Cambridge’s Black communities (although early plans for the Boston area intended to), many other American communities that did suffer such a fate do not exist today to be preserved (Crockett 2013). In a similar vein, one

FIGURE 4 – Cambridge’s unprotected Black landmarks are exclusively found in low-grade districts, while the opposite is true for historic markers for tourists. - (Top): the locations of Cambridge’s Blue Oval

markers and African-American Heritage Trail sites, overlaid on Cambridge’s HOLC redlining map. (Bottom): The density of such sites by HOLC grade. African-American Heritage Trail sites are located exclusively in C-grade and D-grade (redlined) districts. Oval markers are mostly found in upscale B-grade districts, especially along Brattle Street and near Harvard Square.

FIGURE 5 – The Hooper-Lee-Nichols House, the headquarters of the Cambridge Historical Society. Slaveowners were among some of its earliest inhabitants. - The Hooper-Lee-Nichols House,

headquarters of the Cambridge Historical Society, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is located at 159 Brattle St. in a B-graded HOLC district. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

could argue that whatever sites do exist in redlined areas of Cambridge may not satisfy arduous technical requirements of historic preservation ordinances that may demand, for example, architectural significance or connection to famous figures most likely to be connected to the wealthy and white, a concern sometimes raised about 20th century historic preservation in other contexts (Gans 1975).

It is true that Cambridge is subject to some of those forces. Local political forces in Cambridge have a pattern of directing “undesirable” changes away from white neighborhoods in west Cambridge and towards communities of color, such as a recent controversy in which the (white) president of the Harvard Square Neighborhood Association attempted to divert a proposed marijuana dispensary away from prestigious Harvard Square and towards Central Square, long a center of Black Cambridge life. And a Historical Society blue oval marker adorns the former home of T.S. Eliot near Harvard, where Eliot taught very briefly, a clear example of how it may be easier to achieve a standard of historicity simply by proximity to fame and notability when most classically famous figures in the mainstream are white. And because Cambridge’s development policy includes a demolition delay ordinance that applies to any building older than 50 years, old patterns of historicity may indeed become self-reinforcing: only structures that were previously protected from demolition can enjoy continued protection. Cambridge today has a pattern of valuing its white neighborhoods, with its famous and powerful residents, over others.

However, these factors cannot completely account for the disparities seen in Cambridge’s historic protections. First, the African-American Heritage Trail shows that there are sites of interest, particularly notable sites of Black history, in redlined districts. There is no shortage of history there, if one is willing to look.

And to the second point, while other communities may have historic protection standards that on paper favor white historical sites, Cambridge’s are, at least textually, quite broad. This is the definition on the Cambridge Historical Commission’s website of what is considered a designated landmark, for example:

“A landmark is a place, structure, feature, or object that has been designated by the City Council as historically or architecturally significant by itself or because it is associated with events, persons, or trends significant in the history of the City.” The inclusion of architecture, events, and trends in this definition (as opposed to just people) gives a broad, generous interpretation of what could be considered historic. A triple-decker apartment building in midCambridge could be considered historic by virtue of its association with a regional architectural trend, for example. Similarly, a Black church could be landmarked for its association with the local Black population that has long lived in the neighborhood nearby. The standards as written could sustain a more populist approach that broadly values the lived history of residents across the city and does not de jure prioritize whiteness.

Another possibility is that the process required to see a site through to landmarking is biased in favor of whiteness and white participants. There is evidence of this type of effect in other hyperlocal decision-making processes. One recent Boston University study found that participants offering public comment at Massachusetts municipal zoning and

planning meetings were whiter and wealthier than the communities themselves, resulting in a distortion of democratic outcomes (Einstein et al. 2019). The authors speculated on some possible mechanisms: “These forums require significant outlays of time, interest, and expertise. All of these factors will serve to further bias these forums in favor of advantaged voices.” These factors would all certainly be true of Cambridge’s landmarking process, which requires marshalling the support of the public via petition, as well as the backing of the Historical Society and political capital of the City Council to achieve landmarking success.

Some structures go even further to center white voices in historic preservation processes. As became contentious in a recent debate over a proposed East Cambridge Historic District, part of the Historic Commission’s process is to assess the sentiments of local homeowners, but not renters, through postcards mailed to their residences (Levy 2020). A 2015 report of the Boston metropolitan statistical area found that while almost 80% of white people in the Boston area owned their homes, only a third of Black households did (Muñoz et al. 2015). Thus, majority-renter Cambridge’s historic districting process is structurally biased to elevate the voices of whites, who are more likely to own homes. And while not included in the above redlining calculations, the historic district maps of Cambridge are equally stark. If the East Cambridge Neighborhood Conservation District were enacted, almost all of Cambridge would be covered with a historic district, with the notable exceptions of Central Square and Cambridgeport, the Blackest parts of the city, which would be left without a historic district.

Both of those sources of racism in historic preservation concern logistics: details of the sites or the process, and how those may be structurally biased. They also, in some sense, are focused on deficits in the process related to communities of color. That is, why non-white landmarks might be less recognizable, or why those communities have difficulties navigating the process. However, as Goetz et al. (2020) argue, it can be valuable to shift the discourse away from the perceived pathologies or deficits of communities of color and towards an explicit consideration of whiteness and how it shows up in planning. Along these lines, I offer a third, more theoretical criticism: that in a society with a deep history of racism, historic preservation is inherently a project of white supremacy.

The fundamental tenet of historic preservation—that being “historic” makes something inherently worth preserving—stems from the assumption that the past was essentially good. A site is worth preserving solely by virtue of the fact that it is connected in some way to the past, and a politics of nostalgia seeks to promote its continuation into the present. But America’s past was really only good to some, particularly white people, while being a site of intense pain and oppression for others. Using a bare connection to the past as justification for protecting something in the present will necessarily then glorify the connections to violence lurking in even seemingly innocuous pieces of history. This dynamic is not necessarily true for the study of history; one can recall the past without glorifying it, applying a critical lens to both the joys and miseries of what came before in order to understand the present. Historic preservation, however, largely does not seek to analyze, contextualize, or understand. It is a form of hagiography through the built environment, and through its very existence may elevate particular framings of history while masking others.

Cambridge offers several examples of uncritically elevating sites with troubling, racist histories. When I lived in Cambridge, almost every day I would walk past a handsome house with a Historical Society plaque that read: “Home of Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse who was the first Harvard professor of medicine and introducer of the Small Pox vaccine.” It was only years later, when reading Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid (2008), that I would learn another fact about Waterhouse not mentioned on the plaque: that Waterhouse was supported in his work by Thomas Jefferson, who used Waterhouse’s vaccine samples to conduct experiments on some of the people he enslaved. And the Waterhouse House’s ties to slavery pale in comparison to many historic sites in west Cambridge. Indeed, the very headquarters of the Cambridge Historical Society, the Brattle Street mansion known as the HarperLee-Nichols House (Figure 5), was owned by at least two slaveowners, and the Society notes that enslaved people

may have lived in the Harper-Lee-Nichols House itself (Cambridge Historical Society n.d.). Both the Waterhouse House and the Harper-Lee-Nichols House reside in the B-graded districts of west Cambridge and concern centuriesold sins, but the elevation of complementary white narratives and erasure of racist violence in historic preservation also extend to modern landmarks and ones in redlined parts of the city.

As an example of this, consider the recent discourse around one landmark: the EMF Building. The EMF Building is a structure in a D-graded HOLC district, not far from Central Square and south of Massachusetts Avenue and the neighborhood Cambridgeport. Following the 2018 eviction of the artists who had been using the building for studio space, a local group of activists submitted a petition to have the building landmarked. The Cambridge Historical Commission then authored a 24-page landmarking study (Sullivan & Hill 2019) assessing its historical significance and recommending landmarking. The landmark designation was eventually approved (Levy 2019).

The narrative told in the landmarking study is of Cambridge’s nature as a dynamic city of arts and industry, with the building playing a role in both. Built in 1920, the EMF Building served as a factory for many industrial and commercial products, including cameras and radios. As manufacturing waned in Cambridge, a group of artists eventually repurposed the former factory as a set of rehearsal spaces. Since cameras and radios are tools of technology that enable cultural and artistic expression, the building serves as a bridge between these two eras of

FIGURE 6 – Three selected landmarks. - HOLC map of Cambridge, Massachusetts, showing the

location of three landmarks: the EMF Building, the Harper-Lee-Nichols House, and the Waterhouse House.

Cambridge’s history, the story goes. Moreover, with the owner evicting those tenants, the building and its history must be protected from this emerging threat.

This history is factual, but incomplete. It is true that Cambridge has an industrial history, but not all of Cambridge does–you’ll find no remnants of factories in Harvard Square or along stately Brattle Street. The landmarking study (Sullivan & Hill 2019) attempts to draw a universality to the history of Cambridge, rather than situating the building in its more local context. In fact, the only explicit mention of its neighbors is to note their ignorance of the building:

“Tenants said that many nearby residents did not know the space was being used by musicians—they would simply see people coming and going at all hours of the day and night.” Other landmarking studies make explicit reference to, say, architectural features typical of a particular neighborhood, or connection to a particular immigrant group, making ignoring the local neighborhood context notable here. So what is the local neighborhood context of the EMF Building? Cambridge’s HOLC map (Nelson et al. 2021) described the district it occupies:

“70% Negro predominating. Obsolescence. Low class occupants.

Poor housing. Congested area. Home ownership: low.

Occupation: labor – relief.” The presence of a Black community around the EMF Building (or, perhaps, the absence of uniform whiteness) means that the site may also be a potent symbol of another trend in the urban history of the United States: the environmental racism of placing industrial zones and other noxious projects in communities of color, to the detriment of their physical health (Wilson et al. 2008). This trend certainly existed in Boston and Cambridge: early plans would have placed an urban highway directly through the site of the EMF Building, which would have led to the building (and neighborhood’s) destruction absent the activist effort that eventually defeated it (Crockett, 2013). Moreover, given these demographics, the cultural shift brought on by artists to a declining industrial area, celebrated by the landmarking report, could also be seen as an unsavory symbol of gentrification, another widespread source of harm for non-white communities. In these contexts, the EMF Building’s history is less quaint and more troubling.

This is not to say that this latter interpretation of the EMF Building’s status in the area is necessarily more correct, or in and of itself a complete and accurate representation of causality between various neighborhood elements; the relationship between the arts, new residents, gentrification, and industry is complex and contentious. The two narratives may be simultaneously true—it could be that there was an interplay in Cambridge of arts and industry that led to vibrancy for some and suffering for others. What is important is that the landmarking study’s version of the EMF Building’s history serves a political purpose: to situate the artists as sympathetic, and their place in local history as uniquely important, so that their political allies on the City Council and elsewhere can have a basis to come to their aid.

In these ways, the ideological contours of historic preservation of sites like the EMF Building in liberal urban areas have much in common with the debate over the preservation of Confederate monuments, statues of Christopher Columbus, or other violent figures of

FIGURE 7 – The EMF Building, a former factory and recently landmarked property in a redlined district of Cambridge. - A

1994 photo of the EMF Building. (Photo credit: the Cambridge Historical Commission landmarking study) district. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

FIGURE 8 – Current distribution of Cambridge’s Black population, which still roughly resembles HOLC’s maps.

history. Those who support their removal do so because they recognize that official recognition, be it with legal protection or valuable space in the public built environment, ensures not just their continued existence, but their glorification, no matter how much context may be offered in an accompanying plaque. Simply being “historic” is insufficient justification for its continued communal display and preservation. This has largely been argued for sites tied to violent, racist individuals of particular fame (or infamy). But if we extend our understanding of the history of racism to include not just individuals, but social histories involving movements and larger structures, then far more sites of urban geography become ensnared. With this framing follows the recognition that skepticism currently directed towards monuments should be extended to historic preservation as a whole.

To reform some of the current quantitative imbalances in historic preservation, there are a couple different approaches. Some work focuses on centering communities of color in historic preservation efforts. For example, Black preservationists like architectural historian Brett Leggs are involved in efforts to identify landmarks of importance to African-American history and organize financial and logistical support for their preservation (Cep 2020; Leggs et al. 2012; The Widespread Failure to Preserve African American History 2020). Similar efforts exist in other communities, although it should be noted that support some measures, such as historic districts, have been controversial in communities of color due to concerns of gentrification and uneasy political alliances with white preservationists. Cameron Logan’s Historic Capital (2017) gives an accounting of such conflicts in Washington, DC, for instance. But for the urban planning community, particular white people in the profession, the solution cannot just to add a handful of new sites. As shown in Pressley’s campaign ad, “historic” can equally be an inspiring source of celebration or an oppressive weight to be shed. An equitable response to the current state of

the preservation of such history must therefore include a confrontation of the whiteness that underlies the project of historic preservation as a whole, a recognition that you cannot uncritically preserve the history of a white supremacist society without also preserving that white supremacy.

In summary, by mapping the distribution of various Cambridge historic designations, it is apparent that they are disproportionately applied to sites in historically white areas. Some of this disparity can be explained by legal and procedural hurdles that give white people and their properties a systemic advantage in historic preservation process. However, looking at which historical narratives are included in official histories of preserved sites, and which are not, reveals how the act of preservation itself may involve glorifying flattering retellings of history while ignoring uncomfortable truths and context. Given the ubiquity of racism in the fabric of American history, the act of preservation itself requires the protection and elevation of symbols of our violent, painful past—if not indeed celebrating them. As such, the future of historic preservation needs to consider the costs of laundering violence into nostalgia that can accompany landmarking.

REFERENCES

Ayanna Pressley for Congress. 2018. The 1 Bus - Ayanna Pressley for Congress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgF79Shc_YI&ab_ channel=AyannaPressley.

Cambridge Historical Commission. 2021. “Landmarks.” 2021. https:// www.cambridgema.gov/historic/districtsHistoricProperties/Landmarks. Cambridge Historical Society. 2021. “Brief History of the Hooper-LeeNichols House and Enslaved People.” 2021. https://cambridgehistory.org/ research/did-you-know/brief-history-of-the-hooper-lee-nichols-houseand-enslaved-people/.

Cep, Casey. 2020. The Fight to Preserve African-American History. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/thefight-to-preserve-african-american-history.

Crockett, Karilyn Michelle. 2013. “People Before Highways”: Reconsidering Routes to and from the Boston Anti-Highway Movement.

Einstein, Katherine Levine, Maxwell Palmer, and David M. Glick. 2019. “Who Participates in Local Government? Evidence from Meeting Minutes.” Perspectives on Politics 17 (1): 28–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S153759271800213X.

EJI. 2020. “The Widespread Failure to Preserve African American History.” Equal Justice Initiative. January 2020. https://eji.org/news/widespreadfailure-to-preserve-african-american-history/.

Gans, Herbert J. 1975. “Preserving Everyone’s Noo Yawk.” The New York Times, January. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/28/archives/preservingeveryones-noo-yawk.html.

Goetz, Edward G., Rashad A. Williams, and Anthony Damiano. 2020. “Whiteness and Urban Planning.” Journal of the American Planning Association 86 (2): 142–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2019.1693907. Leggs, Brent, Kerri Rubman, and Byrd Wood. 2012. “Preserving African American Historic Places,” 28. Levy, Marc. 2019. EMF Building Wins Landmarking Designation, Not Preventing Its Renovation into Office Space. Cambridge Day. https:// www.cambridgeday.com/2019/12/06/emf-building-wins-landmarkingdesignation-not-preventing-its-renovation-into-office-space/.

———. 2020. Council Affirms Role of East Cambridge Renters in Deciding Neighborhood Conservation District. Cambridge Day. https://www. cambridgeday.com/2020/10/20/council-affirms-role-of-east-cambridgerenters-in-deciding-neighborhood-conservation-district/.

Logan, Cameron. 2017. Historic Capital: Preservation, Race, and Real Estate in Washington, D.C. U of Minnesota Press.

Muñoz, Ana Patricia, Marlene Kim, Mariko Chang, Regine O. Jackson, Darrick Hamilton, and William A. Darity Jr. 2015. The Color of Wealth in Boston. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. https://www.bostonfed.org/ publications/one-time-pubs/color-of-wealth.aspx.

Nelson, Robert, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, and Nathan Connolly. 2021. “Mapping Inequality.” In American Panorama.

Sullivan, Charles, and Hill, Eric. 2019. Preliminary Landmark Designation Report, EMF Building. Cambridge Historical Commission. https:// www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/historicalcommission/pdf/ chcmeetingfiles/L128_prelim_report.pdf.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. Percent Total Population: Black or AfricanAmerican Alone, ACS 2019 (5-Year Estimate). Prepared by Social Explorer.

Washington, Harriet A. 2008. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Illustrated edition. New York: Anchor.

Wilson, Sacoby, Malo Hutson, and Mahasin Mujahid. 2008. “How Planning and Zoning Contribute to Inequitable Development, Neighborhood Health, and Environmental Injustice.” Environmental Justice 1 (4): 211–216. https:// doi.org/10.1089/env.2008.0506.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors attest that they have no financial interest in the materials and subjects discussed in this article.