national register nomination for boulevard park historic

of Disneyland.” 31
This illusion is similar to the active ignorance Paul Groth uses to
describe Progressive opponents of residential hotels, or Fogelson’s description of “blight”
to describe, and thus condemn, neighborhoods that were not actual slums. The desire of
progressive reformers and postwar urban renewal advocates for a suburban paradise and a
non-residential downtown required illusions to promote the changes they sought.
Maintenance of those illusions had real social consequences in the destruction of social
fabric, dispersal of community, and a dire shortage of affordable housing.
In “Myths of Permanence and Transience in the Discourse on Historic
Preservation in the United States,” Mitchell Schwartzer argues that the field of historic
preservation created its own illusions in the form of a pair of guiding myths.
Transience, like Turner’s frontier thesis, discounts many segments of the
American population and denies their role in American history. Permanence
32
The myth
of transience, drawn from Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, is expressed in
American preference for suburban living and residential mobility. The myth of
permanence, originally occurring in early America and returning in post-1960
preservation efforts, promotes resistance to change as a response to the radical changes of
urban renewal. Schwartzer compares these two myths to corresponding schools of
thought in the academic study of history, but considers both confining and incomplete,
limiting the potential development of the field of historic preservation.
monumentalizes buildings and arbitrarily separates them from properties not considered
31 Avila, Popular Culture, p. 145
32 Schwarzer, Mitchell, “Myths of Permanence and Transience in the Discourse on Historic Preservation
in the United States,” Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 48, No. 1 (September 1994), p. 2-11
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