Racing the Bulldozers: James C. Massey and the Historic American Buildings Survey

One of the Park Service's "50 Nifty Finds" from the NPS History Collection.

"A complete resume of the builder's art"

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) endorsed recording historic buildings as early as 1918, but it took the New Deal to pay for it. On November 8, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and asked agencies for short-term work projects. Park Service architects Charles E. Peterson and Alston G. Guttersen proposed one: America's old buildings were disappearing to fire, weather, demolition and "improvements," and if most had to go, they argued, they should not pass into "unrecorded oblivion."

Measuring the west elevation of the Jean Baptiste Valle House, Sainte Genevieve, Missouri, April 10, 1934. HABS photo by George Harkness III, Library of Congress

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) was established on December 12, 1933 — the nation's first federal preservation program, and the only New Deal program for historic architecture. Its aim: document everything from outhouses to grand monuments.

Before the CWA money ran out, the Park Service, the Library of Congress and the AIA signed a three-way agreement that still governs HABS: the Park Service runs it and sets standards, the Library preserves the records and makes them public, and the AIA advises. HABS's field methods helped shape the Historic Sites Act of 1935. Then World War II ended most of the funding and labor; Peterson himself served in the Navy (1941–46).

A second start

After the war, Peterson became resident architect at Independence National Historical Park (1950). With architects scarce in the postwar boom, he started a student internship program — and one intern, James C. Massey, would become chief of HABS.

James C. Massey's 1954 drawing for the restoration of Carpenters' Court. NPS

Massey began in 1953, a 21-year-old student architect studying Carpenters' Court at Independence and drawing its reconstruction; he later called working with Peterson the experience that defined his career. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 he worked at the Park Service's new Eastern Office of Design and Construction (EODC) in Philadelphia, then served two years with the Army's Office of Military History in Karlsruhe, Germany.

In 1956 the Park Service launched Mission 66, a ten-year facilities program that also funded historic preservation, and in 1958 HABS became a continuing program under it, with $116,000 that year. Jack E. Boucher became HABS's first full-time professional photographer, setting its standards. Peterson had argued in 1957 that, without enough architects, at least half the money should go to first-class photographs. Massey rejoined the EODC in 1958 and was pulled into HABS work whenever possible. For a time the Cold War shifted priorities toward nationally significant buildings, to be recorded in case they were destroyed in an attack.

A historic structures dinner in Philadelphia, June 24, 1960: James C. Massey, Anne Massey, R.A. Wilhelm and Charles E. Peterson. NPS History Collection, photo by Jack Boucher

Racing the bulldozers

By 1961, the bigger threat was at home: the construction boom, urban renewal, highways, dams and suburbs. Buildings were vanishing faster than anyone could record them, and HABS crews sometimes worked with bulldozers idling nearby. In 1963, Massey, Boucher and student intern John Milner had four hours to document President Ulysses S. Grant's summer cottage in Long Branch before it was razed for a parking lot. Massey later remembered it as a desperate time, with whole blocks and square miles coming down.

The Park Service was demolishing some of its own buildings, too — at Independence, to create the park — so that HABS recorded buildings its own agency then tore down. Frustrated, Peterson retired in October 1962, and Massey became supervisory architect for HABS in the East. In 1964, HABS lowered its age threshold to buildings over 50 years old.

James C. Massey, January 1972. NPS History Collection, photo by Jack Boucher

When the design offices closed in 1965–66, Director George B. Hartzog Jr. picked Massey for the new Washington Service Center. Massey's 1966 article "Preservation Through Documentation" — the first printed use of what became HABS's motto — set out the policy of recording buildings about to be destroyed. He's usually said to have become chief of HABS in 1966, but after a Ford Foundation research leave in Europe (September 1966–February 1967), he likely began serving in March 1967.

A new law, and a badge

A special committee convened by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 reported in With Heritage So Rich that HABS had documented 12,000 places — and that by 1966 half had been destroyed or damaged beyond repair, leaving the collection a kind of death mask of America. The report led to the National Historic Preservation Act (October 15, 1966), which gave the Park Service a lead role in documentation and preservation and created the National Register of Historic Places. In 1967, HABS joined the new Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, with Massey heading its surveys branch.

Massey's badge as chief of HABS, about 1967–1972. NPS History Collection

Massey's gold badge gave him no legal authority — it was for identification — but it probably didn't hurt when he was negotiating to hold off the bulldozers. Curiously, it names the Department of the Interior, not the Park Service.

In 1969 Massey helped create the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), HABS's sister program for industrial and engineering sites, and in 1970 received Interior's Meritorious Service Award. He left in 1972; John Poppeliers led HABS until 1980, followed by Robert J. Kapsch, Kenneth L. Anderson, Paul Dolinsky and Catherine Lavoie. The Historic American Landscape Survey (HALS) joined in 2001.

After HABS

Massey spent nearly ten years as vice president of historic properties at the National Trust for Historic Preservation; in 1980 co-founded the nonprofit National Preservation Institute with Constance Werner Ramirez; in 1983 formed Massey Maxwell Associates with his wife Shirley Maxwell; taught, lectured and wrote widely — including Gothic Revival, Arts and Crafts, House Styles in America and Arts and Crafts Design in America — and was a contributing editor to The Old-House Journal for 20 years. He died on November 10, 2021, near Winchester, Virginia, at 89.

See the NPS Heritage Documentation Programs or search the Library of Congress's HABS database, with drawings and photographs of more than 43,000 structures and sites recorded over HABS's first 100 years.

Sources

Based on "50 Nifty Finds #26: Racing Bulldozers," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article draws on Massey's desk files in the NPS History Collection (HFCA-02025) and published sources including American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-five Years (2008) and Elise Vider's 1991 thesis on HABS in Philadelphia. It places Grant's Long Branch cottage in New York; Long Branch is given here without a state.