Q&A: Brian Whetstone, Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation

Architectural historian Brian Whetstone joined Penn as assistant professor of historic preservation this fall. Whetstone’s research explores the intersections between housing and labor equity at museums, historic sites, and preservation organizations in the United States. In an interview, he discusses his forthcoming book from the University of Massachusetts Press, Renting History: Housing, Labor, and America’s Heritage Infrastructure, and the complexities of teaching a survey of American architecture to preservation students.
 

You came to Penn from the National Park Service. What sort of work did you do there?

Whetstone: I worked for the Northeast Regional Office of the National Park Service in Lowell, Massachusetts, at the History, Architecture, Conservation and Engineering Center. HACE serves cultural and historical parks that primarily are dealing with built resources, so buildings, and the museum collections that come along with those buildings. HACE works with parks that are quite small, both geographically – we weren't working with the Grand Canyon, which has thousands of acres of land attached to it – but they are also small parks in terms of staffing. HACE assists these smaller parks with work that they needed done. For example, if they needed a historian to work on a project, we were there to step in and fill that role.

I was hired as an architectural historian for the Center. I did anything and everything under the sun, but my primary work responsibility was to write, and supervise the writing of, historic structure reports. These are fairly standard Park Service documents, which are generated at any moment that a park wants to, say, change the way a building is interpreted. Or, if they're about to do a major renovation campaign on a building, they will first want to make sure they have a fairly comprehensive history of that structure, so that they can be sensitive about the way that they renovate or rehab the building.

I worked with the Salem Maritime National Historic Site to rewrite a historic structure report for a 17th-century timber frame house there known as the Narbonne House. Also, I helped supervise the writing of a historic structure report for the Saugus Iron Works House, which is another early post-medieval timber-frame house.

We did a lot of work with Valley Forge as well, thinking through how to rehabilitate a bunch of buildings that had been sitting empty for some time.

One of the things I will very much miss about that work is getting to work with one project, or one building, and doing a really deep dive into that specific property or structure, spinning out historical research that will feed back into some kind of public interpretation. But this kind of work can also be done here at Penn, particularly with National Park Service.

Our office at HACE had the conservation lab for all of the objects that parks sent to that office for conservation work. It was fun to work where you could go upstairs and see what the paper conservator was doing that day, or the art conservator. There are all these different conservators working there – it is a very interdisciplinary space. And that was one of the reasons I was attracted to Penn as well. The preservation department here is interdisciplinary in that same way.
 

In 2024, you were a research fellow at the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites. What was the focus of your work at CPCRS?

Whetstone: I was in the fairly early stages of a specific chapter for my book project. I was trying to research more about formerly enslaved individuals who stayed on as the first generation of guides or caretakers at plantations on Southern estates, as those places made the transition from a working plantation into a heritage-based site or a tourist site. There are a lot of sites like this outside of Charleston, but I was also looking at Northern sites as well, for example in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where a formerly enslaved woman, who was emancipated in the 19th century, worked at a house as a laundress. In the 1920s, the site transitioned into a house museum, and she stayed on as a rent-paying tenant, living in an outbuilding on the site of the house. She wasn't engaged in any kind of direct interpretive activity, but the administrators of that museum wanted her to stay. They thought the presence of Black labor at the site was a kind of marker of historic authenticity. This was a fairly common theme in the South as well, and is also bound up in these very racist ideas of servitude and labor.

A lot of former plantation managers, or owners, of these estates wanted formerly enslaved people to stay on as caretakers because it made it appear that an antebellum, pre-Civil war, labor context was being preserved on the site. This context was being peddled particularly to Northern audiences who would come vacation in places like Charleston and Natchez, Mississippi, in former Confederate states where, after the Civil War, plantation owners had to decide how these spaces could become profitable again.
 

“The project looks at how house museums across the country are very reliant on people who live in the houses and work as caretakers, or pay rent, and also work by showing the house to visitors.”

Does this book project go into other contexts about labor and historic sites beyond this one?

Whetstone: The project is looking at how the provision of housing has shaped the broader professional field of public history from its modern incarnation in the 19th century to the present. Provision of housing means a lot of different things. It could be a tenant who pays rent and the rent helps subsidize the work that is going on at a museum or historic site or preservation organization. But there are also lots of situations where people trade their labor for housing. The caretaker model is very common where someone is a worker, technically, at a historic site, but their work is what's paying for their housing. It's allowing them to have access to housing in the first place.

There are three main sections to the book, one of which is about historic house museums and other sites that are interpreting domestic space in some way. These are some of the very earliest kinds of public history organizations and they are perhaps the most important because they helped set the standard for a lot of organizations that come after them. The project looks at how house museums across the country are very reliant on people who live in the houses and work as caretakers, or pay rent, and also work by showing the house to visitors.

This used to be the standard practice, but we don't accept this as a common professional practice anymore. Part of the reason why is that during the last half of the 20th century, there were all these tensions embedded in having your workers also be people who live and interact with your institution as their own home. Part of the book argues that professionalization hinged on figuring out the place of tenants and the overall administrative scheme of organizations like historic house museums.

I also look at the National Park Service, which has an employee housing program that provides over 5,000 units of housing to its workers. This is twice the amount of public housing units in a city like Atlanta – it's a very large number of housing units. The Park Service borrowed a lot of this administrative infrastructure from house museums.

The third section looks at post-war preservation nonprofits that emerged after World War II, which are guided by a desire to preserve entire neighborhoods, or take on the preservation of an entire city. A lot of these groups managed to do this by buying up housing and then renting it to people, which subsidizes the work of the organization. The provision of housing is still what's fueling that work in many ways.

The project is trying to answer the question, how and why did all these organizations become landlords? And what does it mean for the current professional landscape that the most successful and profitable way people have found to do public history involves engaging in renting or providing housing of some kind?

Philadelphia is the example par excellence of this. There are so many houses in Philadelphia that continue to use this same model. It's, perhaps, one of the cities with the greatest density of this kind of administrative model across so many different historic sites. When I first started doing this research, Philadelphia was a very generative place to begin looking.
 

“I’m trying to encourage students to adopt a framework that thinks about not just American architecture, but an American built environment.”

You are teaching Historic Preservation’s American Architecture course, which is a core part of the curriculum of the department. Can you talk about the changes that you are bringing to the course?

Whetstone: In the department right now, we are having a lot of deep and sustained conversations about this course and many others. The course helps introduce students to architecture from the beginning of human settlement in America up to the present. It's truly this marathon sprint through American architectural history across time.

The course and others like it have used buildings as the unit of analysis to understand American architectural history, focusing on specific buildings or the work of specific architects. I'm trying to encourage students to adopt a framework that thinks about not just American architecture, but an American built environment, a total and comprehensive landscape that’s been shaped by human interaction and human intervention. I am also asking students to expand beyond questions of style or questions of just architectural history in order to think about topics in architectural history from a variety of other disciplinary lenses. So, we may read a traditional architectural history text alongside an author engaged in ethnography or material culture or social history or cultural history, and try to think, how can you connect a history of a building or a series of buildings into this broader historical context?

In the course, there is still some of the traditional emphasis on being able to visually identify the style, or time period, in which a building was built, in part because that's still the stock and trade that preservation deals in. It’s a kind of visual language that students need to at least be conversant in. What I keep saying in class is, you have to learn the categories before you can start to critique the categories. You have to understand what the basic framework is that exists currently before you can turn around and start tweaking it or dismantling it or adjusting it to be more responsive to contemporary needs. 

It's tricky, because in some parts of the field there has been a major rejection of thinking exclusively about the architecture or style of a building. Perhaps the pendulum will swing back the other way, but there are many corners of the field in which the people who have administrative authority are still wed to this architectural and stylistic model. Sometimes in job interviews, an interviewer will share their screen and ask someone to identify the style of a building. That’s the reality in which we're still living. I can't change that reality for students as they leave Penn and enter the field, but I also want them to be equipped with the critical thinking skills to interpret or to critique and envision something more holistic in place of that.
 

You are new to Philadelphi. Are there places you have discovered that you would like to share with us?

Whetstone: In graduate school, I had an internship with the Northeast Regional Office of the National Park Service here in Philly, at 1234 Market Street, which was a great summer. In that building, SEPTA maintains a transit museum in the basement, which I thought was wonderful. You can get off the Market Frankford Line and enter the building. That summer I lived in West Philly. Now we've settled in West Germantown. I keep half-joking, half-threatening to teach American Architecture next year exclusively from Germantown. It's the perfect cross section of all architecture in Philadelphia, all in one location. We moved from Massachusetts, where we were living in a very rural area. But it's actually quieter and more peaceful living in Germantown than it was in rural New England. We are just so thrilled to be living in Philadelphia.