(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Dear Somerville Times,

This is a response to Jason Mackey’s letter dated March 23, headed “do not establish a local historic district at 125 Highland Ave.”

I can tell your readers that the Historic Commission did not take Mr. Mackey’s advice. They did, in fact, vote to establish the address as a local historic district. Now the matter goes before the City Council.

Beyond the information just stated, I wish to counter several but not all of Mr. Mackey’s contentions. I take his point that the building has been poorly maintained and needs work. In counterpoint to other points in his letter I offer: a) Somerville needs for more affordable housing than that which is presently conceded by the developer, and b) it is specious logic to tolerate tearing down a 100-year-old building on the National Register of Historic Places because the architect’s expressed racial bias.

Mr. Mackey opens with a claim that affordable housing won’t be built if a local historic district is declared at 125 Highland. I’m sorry: 8 units out of 40 (he admits) would be affordable under the developer’s present proposal. That’s 20%. Our city sorely needs more than 20% of new units built to be affordable. We do not need 80% of said units to be lived in by transient upper-middle class people having their last fling in a gritty urban environment while their real objective is the suburbs once they have kids. All over Massachusetts, affordable housing has been successfully built in historic buildings because such developments qualify for twice the funding under the state’s Community Preservation Act, which Somerville voted to accept. That’s because they qualify under both the historic preservation AND affordable housing categories. Why should Somerville have its landmark buildings replaced with anonymous boxes, when other communities are keeping historic structures AS affordable housing?

On the matter of Ralph Adams Cram’s racial views. It is a complicated task to judge those of the past by today’s standards. However, since the public discourse on this matter has already labeled him a white supremacist, I would like to state that I do not personally believe that the remedy for white supremacy of the present, or the past, is to tear down historic churches. This is not a Confederate monument. This building is a former church building of one of the constituent denominations (the Universalists) of arguably the most liberal Protestant group operating in the U.S. today (the Unitarian Universalists). Would we tear down Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello? Or, closer to home, the Isaac Royall House in Medford, which has the last remaining slave quarters in new England? That building typifies a more helpful approach to buildings with unpleasant histories – a marker and ongoing programming that tells its story to living generations.

Are we really to believe that the Mason’s wouldn’t continue to meet at 125 Highland Avenue if it were not so difficult to maintain? – I ask that because Mackey indicates they don’t do so any longer, and I wonder how many Masons presently reside in Somerville. Lastly, I strongly suspect there were many Masons of the past who held racial views similar to those of architect Cram. Nonetheless, I’m certainly not advocating the abolishment of their group, though it is an historically secret society that to this day only men can join (see https://kingsolomonslodge.com/, the section headed “Become a Mason”).

Sincerely,

Arthur Hock
35-year resident of Somerville