Our neighborhoods are going vinyl, and I’m not referring to LP’s.
The architectural heritage of our historic San Diego is under assault! Look around. Vinyl windows with ersatz colonial grids are infecting our pretty, early 1900’s homes everywhere! This home “improvement” trend is rampant and insidious, it’s spreading like a disease, and it’s defiling the beauty of the charming buildings around us.
Classic and uniquely styled wood windows are a signature architectural feature of the Spanish revival and craftsman homes that grace our neighborhoods. Windows are the “eyes” of a home. Deterioration of these windows has led owners to replace them with standard, look-alike, factory-made vinyl substitutes. This is particularly common in apartment buildings where owners have been succumbing to promised “energy efficiency,” “lasting beauty” and cost-effectiveness. These promises are made by profit-conscious salesmen in an industry that has swollen from 10 manufacturers to over 3,000 in 15 years. It’s debatable as to whether they are a cost-effective solution to aging windows, although they certainly do look cheap. They start out a promising lily white and after some years turn yellow, not unlike the shade of underarm stains in your favorite white t-shirt. Nice, huh?
They never look right in our historic buildings. And beyond their negative aesthetics, vinyl windows are unsustainable. They are a petrochemical product. Their much vaunted “insulating core”, between two layers of glass, can fog up and, once this happens, they will have to be replaced again. Claims of these miracle windows “lasting forever” are clearly undocumented, as they have only existed for 20 years. Please read this link: (see: http://www.eastrow.org/articles/vinylwindows.html).
The solution lies not in dumping the old wood windows in a landfill, but in fixing them. Hire a local craftsman. Keep them painted.Take pride in them. They are pretty and deserve it. Wood windows can be restored and, if maintained, can unquestionably last another hundred years, or more. Let’s not violate San Diego’s architecture with vinyl.
—Mark Whitehead, Mission Hills
—Robyn Dunn, Hillcrest
