The Planning Report features a candid interview with Ken Bernstein, chief of Los Angeles' newly-created Planning Department's Office of Historic Preservation.
"The Office of Historic Resources was created in part because Los Angeles has never had a full-fledged preservation program. Our Cultural Heritage Ordinance and preservation program dates back to 1962, which surprises many people, as that was actually three years before New York City passed its Landmarks Ordinance in the aftermath of Penn Station’s demolition. But Los Angeles never quite took the next steps necessary to develop a comprehensive preservation program.
...Over the last ten years or so, historic preservation has taken hold in Los Angeles in a way that we hadn’t experienced before, and the level of grassroots preservation activity has become quite remarkable. We now have 22 Historic Preservation Overlay Zones (HPOZs) with the recent approval of the Hancock Park HPOZ. We’ve seen an incredible boom in adaptive reuse projects downtown and in other portions of the city, and the growth of an impressive cadre of new developers and private sector players in historic preservation and adaptive reuse."
Thanks to David Abel
FULL STORY: New L.A. Planning Dept. Unit Champions Historic Preservation
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