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There are some connections that seem easy to make, but upon examination, the link is tenuous if it exists at all, and that seems to be the case with Historic Preservation and a Sense of Place. The more research I did, the harder it was to tie them together in some sort of cause-and-effect.
That is, it would be wonderful if we could scientifically demonstrate that the preservation and renovation of the historic Ramshackle Building in the Town of Backwater would thereby produce a strong sense of place in the citizens of Backwater, who would then become wise and noble, even to the extent that they quit arguing with each other over zoning, development, subdivision, police budgets, fence-height restrictions, leash laws and all the other important things that small-town residents argue about.
In short, does historic preservation give us a sense of place? And is a sense of place a good thing in and of itself, or is it supposed to produce something good? Are people and societies with a sense of place better than those without?
But I haven't found that connection. If there is a connection, it's a relatively recent contrivance.
Let's start with a look at some undeniably historic structures which certainly provide a sense of place. Nothing symbolizes Egypt so much as the Great Pyramid of Cheops, so ancient that we're not really sure when it was built, or why.
Given that -- both its antiquity and its symbolizing of an entire nation -- you'd expect that nearby residents would automatically esteem and respect the Great Pyramid. But for several millennia, they mainly saw it as an above-ground quarry, a pile of building supplies as it were, a wonderful place to go fetch cut stone.
Over the centuries, most of its polished limestone sheath has been carried off by the neighbors, who also made an industry out of grave-robbing in the Valley of the Kings.
And why should we blame them for destroying part of
the irreplaceable cultural heritage of humankind?
If
you want to mine gold, and for some reason many societies
do, it's a lot easier to go into a tunnel that has already
been dug to fetch gold that has already been refined than
it is to drill and muck, then grind and smelt.
Similar tales could be told of other wonders of the ancient world, which leads me to suspect that there's nothing innately human which makes us respect old things that supposedly give us a sense of place. Most humans would rather have the gold, or a cheap and handy supply of construction materials.
Indigenous people, it appears, don't have the modern sensibility about history and place.
To move to more modern times, consider that marvelous symbol of the City of Lights, the Eiffel Tower. Certainly it must give Parisians a strong sense of place, and if a sense of place is a Good Thing, then the citizens of Paris should have welcomed it, just as they enjoy other Good Things, like wine, women, and song.
But it didn't work that way. The tower was supposed to be a temporary attraction, not a permanent symbol. Go back more than a century, and the French government was organizing a world's fair -- the Centennial Exposition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. And they asked a bridge engineer, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel (the same man who designed the armature of the Statue of Liberty), to design and build a structure to symbolize the occasion.
It would seem to me that a 984-foot-tall guillotine replica might have been a better symbol, but Eiffel came up with a cast-iron tower for the occasion.
That's right -- the occasion. It was just supposed to operate for a year, then get torn down after all the tourists had gone home.
Parisians of today might point with pride to the tower as the symbol of their beloved city, but many Parisians of 1890 wanted the city to keep its promise to tear down this garish, ugly, modern structure. It was grossly out of scale and it wasn't brick or stone -- it stuck out like I would at a country club.
Eiffel had to hustle to save his tower from the enforcers of Parisian esthetics, who saw it as a destroyer of their sense of place, not as the symbol of their place. The engineer installed a meteorological station, thereby giving the tower a commercial and beneficial use so that Parisians would have to put up with this visual blight.
More recently, much the same thing happened in San
Francisco with the construction of the TransAmerica Tower.
Today, it's as much a symbol of the city as the Golden Gate
Bridge; when it was built, it was denounced as an
overbearing out-of-scale blight, a hideous offense to San
Franciscans' sense of place.
We might summarize these developments as: People do not immediately and grateful acknowledge distinctive structures that give them a sense of place. Instead, they usually denounce them and fight them every step of the way.
And as I pointed out earlier, the Indigenous People,
whom we're supposed to respect these days, seldom see the
sense of place
structures of antiquity as anything
other than a source of supplies or wealth.
That's the verdict of rational history. But we all have emotions, and that's put me into the struggle to save a few structures.
Salida, where I've lived for the past 21 years, has the largest historic district in Colorado -- or so says the Chamber of Commerce, and I've never checked that claim by toting up the acreage that other cities devote to historic districts.
How did this come about? And does it create a sense of place? And if there is a sense of place, does it make Salidans better people than those who don't have such a sense of place?
Salida's history is so recent that many travel writers
feel compelled to make it older by claiming, as Snow
Country magazine once did, that it was named by Spanish
missionaries because it serves as a gateway into the
mountains.
There is no record that any Spanish missionary ever
visited Salida. The only documented Spanish visit was in
late August of 1779 when Juan Bautista de Anza, after
crossing Poncha Pass and camping at present-day Poncha
Springs, forded the river where Salida is today. His
sense of place
could be conveyed in less than one
sentence.
Zebulon Pike was a much wordier man than Anza, but even he didn't say much more about the site when he passed through just after Christmas in 1806. The Utes might have had a name for the spot, or something nearby, since they fought a battle in the area against the U.S. Cavalry in 1854.
Salida wasn't founded by Spanish missionaries, Mexican colonists, or Yankee traders. In 1879, two railroads were building west from Cañon City in the hope of ascending the Arkansas and capturing the commerce of the rich silver strikes in Leadville.
The two railroads were the Atchison, Topeka & Santa F, and the Denver & Rio Grande. Those were the days of steam locomotives, of course, and the demands of the locomotive resulted in a great deal of place-creation.
For one thing, the side motion created by the
alternating pistons was hard on track alignment, and the
hot ashes were hard on wooden ties. So the track had to be
maintained constantly, and there wasn't much in the way of
power tools in those days. Six miles was about as much as
a crew could handle then, and if you look closely at a map
from a century ago, every six miles or so, you'll find a
section house
-- generally a railroad siding with a
small depot, a tool shed, and a boarding house.
Steam locomotives required daily service, and trains didn't run very fast then -- 50 or 60 miles was a good day's work. And so every 50 or 60 miles, there was a roundhouse for servicing the locomotives; the economics were better if it sat a junction so it could serve several branches.
And we cannot neglect another economic angle in this process of place-creation. If a railroad arrived in an existing city, property values naturally rose with the improved transportation, but the railroad did not share in those profits. On the other hand, if the railroad created a city more or less from scratch on land it (or a subsidiary) owned, then the railroad got those profits.
This explains why there was once a place known as North Gunnison, and why you've heard of Durango, but not of Animas City, which was there first.
Go back to 1879, when the Santa F and the Rio Grande were both working west from Cañon City. Both companies knew they'd need a service facility at the first wide spot about 50 miles west of the last one in Cañon City. The Santa F's land agent bought options on property around Cleora, a stage station.
The Rio Grande's agent -- a firm whose name I love, the Central Colorado Improvement Company -- went up the river about three miles, optioned a couple of ranches, and started platting streets and lots, just in case.
Neither company committed itself, since they were fighting the Royal Gorge war to see who'd get the route through the narrow defile. The Santa F lost, and so Cleora is known but to history buffs. The Rio Grande won, and went to work selling lots in its new town.
The people who built Salida knew what towns were supposed to look like -- that is, they had an archetype in mind. They didn't look at the regional resources, culture, and climate -- hey, they were less than 100 miles away from Taos, the adobe capital of the observable universe -- and put mud buildings around a central plaza.
Being from Illinois instead of New Mexico, they laid out a typical Midwestern T-town. Think of the railroad tracks as the top crossbar on the T, and of the town's main street as the vertical stroke, and you've got it.
Railroads like this for two reasons. One is that it made the depot the focal point of the community, just in case anyone might forget why the town was there, and the other is that if the depot blocked a street, it provided that much more room for trains to park and switch without blocking an intersection.
So we've got a very generic townsite laid out in conformance with the standards of the time. Most people walked, so sidewalks were wide and streets were narrow. To keep things compact and within walking distance, lots were narrow, and houses tended to be small, especially where working people lived -- close to the railroad yards, since there were no telephones and runners were dispatched to round up train crews.
A generic townsite, laid out for practical and commercial purposes. Hardly the way to develop any real sense of place, and it doesn't get better. The commercial architecture was quite generic, too -- standard brick with a few imported ornaments, some cast-iron store fronts imported from Denver or Pueblo and based on Chicago designs.
It was a standardized industrial and commercial geography. A stranger alighting from a train in Salida in 1920 wouldn't have to know anything special about Salida, or even that he was in Colorado instead of Michigan or Ohio. Along the side tracks would be warehouses and factories. The flophouses and at least one greasy-spoon would be closest to the depot, and within a block of them would be the cribs and whorehouses. The better hotels and restaurants would be farther up the street, but still within sight. Along the way would be a few taverns.
The differences were only in scale -- the next time
you're in Lodo
(a Spanish word for mud,
for
some reason deemed appropriate for an old Denver
neighborhood), start at Union Station, and play
archeologist, looking for the original uses of the
buildings as you move away from the depot. You'll see
precisely the same pattern.
But why did this endure in Salida, giving it a classic Victorian historic district, and not in so many other places?
Just as external economic factors (British investors in a Delaware corporation) created this place, external factors also preserved it. The post World War I depression meant no new construction in Salida. The Great Depression of the 1930s didn't hit Salida that hard, although it did cost a few second-stories, which the owners took off to reduce property taxes. World War II meant all construction material and manpower went to the military.
Then comes the post WWII era of the automobile, of freeways, of shopping centers, of urban renewal laying waste to those dilapidating brick eyesores -- or at least, that's what people called them when I was a kid in Greeley.
That didn't happen in Salida because the place was set up to service steam locomotives, and the steam locomotive was dying then. From 1946 to 1955, railroad employment in Salida dropped from 800 to less than 50. While other places were growing and attracted investment in things like shopping centers on the outskirts or new buildings downtown, Salida's population was shrinking. Capital went elsewhere.
And thus poverty preserved a rather generic small town downtown that had its share of chain stores -- Woolworth's, Monkey Wards, Safeway. In 1920, it was a place like many other places; by 1978, when I moved there, it seemed unique.
My sense of the place was that somehow, in a
psychological sense, I had always known Salida -- it seemed
like the town that the imaginary Sally, Dick and Jane had
lived in. A candidate for city council at the time
described Salida as a Tom Sawyer kind of town,
and
he wanted to keep it that way.
But precisely what in that downtown provides a sense of place?
My first efforts in historic preservation came in about 1980, when I was managing editor of the local daily newspaper, The Mountain Mail. At the time, the First National Bank sat down the street at the corner of Second and F streets (F is our main street), in an old building which had been remodeled about a decade earlier with a bland box International-style facade. It fit in about as well as Hillary Clinton would at a militia meeting.
The bank announced plans for a handsome new building behind that one, which would be torn down -- and no tears were shed over the prospect of losing that big ugly box and replacing it with a parking lot.
But the building next to the box on F Street, the ornate old Wenz Building, would also be torn down for a parking lot. Many local residents -- most of them habitues of the Victoria Tavern and therefore not respectable sorts -- wanted to organize to somehow force the bank to save the Wenz building.
The stuff you hear about journalists being objective is so much crap. I was on their side -- as would anyone, given a choice between supporting a bank's plan or agreeing with one's drinking companions.
The problem was that it was very difficult to sneak any
news about their concerns or activities into the newspaper.
The publisher watched like a hawk for anything about
Save the Wenz Building,
and generally spiked it.
What I later learned was that he had just borrowed a pot of money from the bank for new machinery, and that the note was such that the bank could raise the rate (recall those were the days when the prime rate was at 12 or 15%) pretty much when it felt like.
The publisher didn't want to piss off the bank, but he didn't want to tell me why, either. He did take vacations and go to conferences, and when he was out of town, I hammered the bank about the Wenz building in editorials, and ran lots of coverage of the building's history, of efforts to save it, of how historic designation worked, etc.
None of that did much good for the Wenz Building, which tumbled down when the backhoes attacked it. But I like to think that my journalistic efforts helped encourage people to look into historic preservation and historic districts, so that we didn't lose any more handsome old buildings to progress.
For me, though, the Wenz Building was more for the joy of fighting the biggest bank in town than it was about preserving any sense of place. Salida seemed pretty much the same with a parking lot at that corner and the bank in the background, and maybe it looked better with that damn plain box gone.
The time I felt like we were losing it came a few years later. One bitter cold morning in January of 1985, I walked down to Gambles to get something, and when I looked down F Street, something was amiss -- at first I couldn't figure out what.
Then I saw motion -- backhoes and bulldozers tearing down the railroad depot that stood at the end of F Street. The building itself was no great loss -- it was an art-deco stucco structure put up in the late 1930s to replace the historic Monte Cristo Hotel and a handsome stone depot.
But the only reason there ever was a Salida was for people to get on and off the train. The train hadn't stopped in Salida since passenger service was abandoned in 1966, but as long as the depot stood, you could tell why Salida was there and what it was built to do.
I was so upset that I hastened to the Men's Resource Center -- a place otherwise know as the Victoria Tavern -- and found many of my fellow citizens also commiserating over cold ones. We felt kind of abandoned, as though the community's anchor had been pulled out, and the place was just going to drift away.
When the depot went down, so also did the steel truss bridge across the Arkansas that had once carried trains of Crested Butte coal and millions of tons of limestone from the Monarch Quarry to the steel mills of Pueblo. The whole industrial network was dissolving before our eyes.
As my wife, Martha, put it, Salida was a company town that no longer had a company. And the way it looked on that bitter morning as the demolition crews went about their work, we weren't even going to have anything to remember it by -- it was all going away, and what was to become of us?
But somehow we survived, and Salida remains a place that
I and many others hold a sense of.
The loss of the
industrial economy -- the rustbelt held on in our valley
until the 1980s when it had largely vanished from other
portions of rural Colorado -- meant that a new economy
could take root, one based on recreation in the broadest
sense, from kayaking to summer theater.
In other words, we went from a working town into a town
that catered to people who weren't working. I don't know
that there are any ordinances that demand the preservation
of old commercial buildings, but the standards of the
community
are very opposed to that -- Salidans now take
pride in the structures that were once emblems of poverty,
and restorations are followed quite closely in the local
gossip.
But can I point my figure to any one building and say
this symbolizes Salida in the same way that the pyramids
symbolize Egypt or that the Eiffel Tower symbolizes
Paris?
Can I give you one historic structure that
provides our sense of place
and should therefore be
preserved, as opposed to any other building?
No, I can't. I wouldn't feel good if the Victoria Tavern became a smoke-free tofu restaurant, but on the other hand, that building has catered to the public since 1904, and if the public now wants raw fish in a hygienic atmosphere, why is that any different than selling rotgut and cigars in 1920?
So perhaps we need to look elsewhere, other than at
structures, to see what informs a sense of
place.
One of the oddest places was Kremmling, and it was a
place with a strong sense of itself. We owned the
newspaper there 25 years ago, and on one occasion a woman,
an old-timer, came into the office to berate me about some
editorial, and concluded with You outsider newcomers
just think you know everything.
Instead of trying to demonstrate that I didn't think I knew everything, I instead pointed out that we owned a business and a home in Kremmling, and that indeed both of my children had been born there.
The woman had an answer to that: Just because the cat
had kittens in the oven don't make 'em biscuits.
So I never did quite become a Kremmlingite, but I did make some progress toward that goal as I learned my way around the landscape.
We needed to buy some hay for a burro we owned, and I
got directions to a ranch: Head up the Back Troublesome
till you get to the Old Wheatley Place -- not the Old Old
Wheatley Place that they homesteaded in ought-eight, but
the son's place where they had the big fire in '56, or
maybe '57, along in there somewhere anyway, and you hook a
right there, then go along a couple-three miles till you
can see that slide path way up the canyon -- that's the
slide that kilt ol' George Henricks in '22 -- and there
you'll see a road off to your left. Don't take that one,
take the next one on your left, it's by what's left of a
pickup that the Bartley girl smashed up when she drank a
little too much on her 16th birthday ...
At first, such directions baffled me. Not because I couldn't navigate by them, although that was difficult at first. But because they were so needlessly long and complicated.
Perhaps on account of my journalistic background, I like
brevity and precision in such matters. Why couldn't he
just say Go east on Highway 40 for two miles, then turn
north up County Road 107 for 8.3 miles, then turn right on
County Road 134. You'll know the intersection because
there's a big stone chimney standing there amid burnt ruins
of an old ranch house. After four miles on 134, look to
your left ...
I had a mental map of Grand County that had road numbers and landmarks, and I was dealing with someone whose mental map was laid out quite differently.
His directions, while conveying navigational information, also carried local history. Troublesome Creek got its name for the difficulty of fording it, especially with a herd of cattle. The Front Troublesome road led up the valley from the one-time town of Troublesome, which sat near where the creek joined the Grand River.
Troublesome was never much more than a post office long since closed, but that post office once boasted the first woman postmaster in the history of this nation, and the nearest post office at Parshall had a woman in charge who posted a sign that basically said she'd cut off your mail, or perhaps part of your male anatomy, if you called her a postmistress -- there weren't editresses or publishresses, and so in her eyes there were no postmistresses.
In the spring, the Troublesome Road often flooded as the creek spread across the valley, so a back road was cut to reach the ranches -- thus the Back Troublesome Road.
The Wheatleys had been among the original homesteaders in that valley. George Henricks had homesteaded near the headwaters of Troublesome Creek, and he rode a horse only when necessary -- usually he preferred to walk. On an April day, when he walked down the canyon to check on his cattle at a lower pasture, a snowslide caught him. The Bartley girl's name has been changed in this account, since she's now a respectable citizen of Kremmling even if she did once get drunk as a teenager and roll her dad's old pickup.
These directions weren't just directions, they carried the history of the area with them, and they evolved with time to handle new events, such as the place that Bill Moore lost a load of hay one August afternoon when a sudden downpour made the Front Troublesome road slicker'n snot on a doorknob and that two-ton bobtail he was drivin' started turnin' circles like one of them Olympic figure skaters ...
Directions like these, a mental geography of this sort
-- if they don't constitute the strongest sort of sense
of place,
then the term has no meaning.
Wallace Stegner once observed that we convert
landscape
into place
by telling stories. And
that's exactly what happened to the landscape of that part
of Grand County -- any local description of it, even
something so mundane as directions to buy a load of hay --
was a collection of stories. Get enough directions, and
eventually you'd know the name of every pioneer family,
when they settled, who'd since purchased some ranches, and
what had become of many of these people.
We are, of course, in danger of losing that. It is a cliche that history is written by the victors, but few also observe that the victors also get to draw the maps.
Those pioneer families who arrived in Middle Park in the late 19th century displaced the Utes, who must have had stories about locals there. I suspect that they didn't have a formal name for Grand Lake, but instead called it the Haunted Place Where We Put Our Women and Children On a Raft for Protection While We Fought Those Dog-Eating Scum Arapaho and Their Finger-Chopping Buddies the Cheyenne When They Invaded Our Turf on a Hunting Trip, and While we were Enjoying a Great Battle, the Wind Came up and Sank the Raft.
When they left, so did their geography and history. A
new invasion is underway today, resulting in a new map. If
you drive country roads now, you don't see mailboxes with
addresses like Rt 1 Box 54,
meaningful only to the
Postal Service. Instead, they say things like 054081
Lark Lane,
and there's a big push to get every rural
structure so numbered.
Why is this happening? Why are we replacing
place
-- that is, landscape that has stories -- with
a standardized nomenclature that conveys nothing of the
region or its people or its culture?
The official explanation is that this simplifies matters for emergency personnel. When you dial 911 in Colorado, a computer in Minneapolis reacts between the first and second rings, and when the emergency dispatcher answers the call, the console displays the place you're calling from.
There isn't room on the console for Go up the Back
Troublesome, etc.
, but there is room for 07819
County Road 314.
Such standardization has other
alleged benefits -- the ambulance or firetruck drivers
don't need an intimate personal knowledge of the area, the
kind they'd have to acquire from traditional directions.
They can just consult a computer connected to a Global
Positioning System that in turn communicates with several
satellites in outer space, and the appropriate directions
will pop up.
In other words, anyone from anywhere can now navigate in
the back country, whereas it used to require a sense of
place
to get there.
The new standardization makes life easier for real-estate dealers, subdividers, outside law-enforcement agents and other enemies of the public good, and it destroys any need to develop a sense of place if you do move there.
It is the American way, of course, and for that we can blame Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a rationalist trying to create a new nation along rational principles -- thus our sensible decimal monetary system, as opposed to the bizarre English shillings, guineas, crowns, pence, and the like in common Colonial use.
As Secretary of State, Jefferson was in charge of public lands during George Washington's administration. As a rationalist and a former ambassador to France, Jefferson admired Rene Descartes. For those of you who don't remember everything in your high school geometry textbook, Descartes was the brilliant mathematician who, in essence, invented graphs -- the representation of information on a grid. Any place in space could be defined by coordinates on that grid.
The survey of public lands is the definition of places in space, and since Descartes' grid was so logical and rational and mathematical, why not use that system, rather than the old system of meets and bounds tied to local landmarks which inevitably meant that places were defined by their own culture and history, rather than by abstractions?
One result of Descartes through Jefferson is that we
live in one of those big square states out West,
an
entity whose boundaries are meaningful only to surveyors
and politicians (who in days of yore were often one and the
same: Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln could all set
corners and lay lines).
Another is that today we stand at 10655'31 W
3832'02
N rather than a couple of miles upstream
from where Tomichi Creek flows into the Gunnison
or
on the upper pasture of the old Hartman Ranch,
or
Milepost 290.3, 4 hours, 15 minutes west of Salida on
the Third Division of the Denver & Rio Grande.
And this rationalizing process is reaching is
culmination in the new geography of the Rural West. We are
removing story
from place,
and leaving only
landscape
-- a landscape that can be bought and
sold, often by people whose livelihood is in nowise
connected to that landscape, or indeed to any landscape at
all, but to an electronic network as abstract as those
satellite signals.
So if it were up to me, and I was charged with
developing a sense of place,
I would not be trying
to preserve historic buildings. I would instead be ripping
out modern road signs and house numbers, and thereby
forcing people to learn the stories so that landscape would
necessarily become place. The historic buildings would
live on, at least in community memory, as people learned
their bearings. We might not even have a railroad, but
people would know there was one when they heard about a
mile past that rockslide that caused the derailment which
made 'em lose a load of taconite ...
Or the madame
might have long since have closed, but that new bike
shop is just down the street from Laura Evans's old
whorehouse...
Granted, I'm a writer, a story-teller as it were. So of
course I'm going to think it's the stories that are
important. If I were a carpenter like my friend Greg
Truitt, or a stonemason like my friend Slim Wolfe, then
perhaps I'd change my priorities about how best to preserve
and enhance our heritage, and build and maintain a sense
of place.
Saving our handsome old buildings certainly assists that process, but it's not enough, in and of itself. Let me illustrate.
Our mayor, R.T. Taylor, owns an old two-story brick
building downtown -- a carved stone near the top if it says
Salida Mail, 1880
even though the Mail hasn't been
in that building for years, and the building wasn't
constructed in 1880, but in 1891.
Mayor Taylor is an architect by training, and he takes good care of his building. He lives upstairs, and uses the downstairs for a variety of purposes -- if nothing else is available, he has big anti-nuclear-war displays in the windows.
It struck him that having a tree or two in front of the place would make it more pleasant. He checked with the city attorney -- there wasn't any formal municipal procedure for planting a tree in a chunk of sidewalk, but on the other hand, there wasn't any law against it, either.
Since First Street is also a state highway, he checked with the Colorado Department of Transportation, and discovered that this matter had somehow escaped the notice of its lawyers and engineers -- they flat didn't care whether he planted a tree or not.
So he rented a concrete saw, dug out two chunks of sidewalk, and planted his trees, complete with round metal grates around their trunks. Darlene Louch, down the street at the First Street Caf, saw him at work and insisted he plant a tree for her, too.
So far, so good, right?
Wrong. Certain of our hard-core Historic Preservationists were up in arms. The trees were not historically authentic, they said, since there were no trees along that part of First Street in pictures taken at the turn of the century. Further, as the trees grew and leafed out, they would block the sight lines of the historic buildings and there would be less for tourists to see and appreciate as the perambulated through Historic Downtown Salida.
The mayor told me about this. Look, some shade and
greenery makes downtown a more pleasant place. I live
there. Am I supposed to uproot those trees and pour some
concrete to make the Preservationists happy? Is this a
community where people live and work, or somebody's idea of
a goddamn museum like Colonial Williamsburg?
Since we're at 7,000 feet, our deciduous trees lack leaves for much of the year, and besides, they could be pruned to a decorous height, so the sight-line issue might go away.
As for historical authenticity, the mayor and I dug around the library and found an 1885 picture which showed a line of trees along that part of First Street.
That stalled the Preservationists for a moment, and when
they started rumbling again a couple of weeks later, the
mayor produced some 1890 pictures of one of their buildings
-- no ugly electric panel or phone-system boxes on the
alley side, a privy in back, and a hitching rail and a
watering trough, complete with hand pump, out front. If
you're going to hold me to 1890 standards,
he told
them, then you've got to live by them. So rip out your
phones and electricity, as well as that hideous modern
plumbing. If you need some kind of waiver from the city to
re-install the two-holer out back, I'll do my best to get
it for you. Then come talk to me about ripping out my
trees.
I happened to be privy to this conflict, but they must happen often, and this appears to be the biggest challenge for Preservation.
Phrased differently, the real question is: What is it that we're trying to preserve? The mayor had no intention of tearing down his historic building, or of defacing it with a modern facade. He just wanted a little shade, to make his life more agreeable as he went about living and working in Historic Downtown Salida, as people have done for a century -- certainly something worth preserving if anything is worth preserving.
The Preservationists saw it differently, as though Salida were a delicate museum piece instead of a living community. The interests of residents and property owners, they seemed to say, were subordinate to the interests of maintaining a certain view for tourists -- the view of an insect trapped in amber, rather than of a living creature that changes over time while maintaining the same general form and features.
Another difficulty with Historic Preservation is that just saving the building doesn't save other things we want to save. As our downtown becomes more and more of a tourist destination, it becomes increasingly difficult for residents to buy daily necessities there. We still have commerce in a commercial district, but to be honest, there's a limit on how many hand-dipped beeswax candles I'll ever buy.
Historic preservation should be a tool that enhances the life of a community, and I think that in general, it has been. It helps maintain our pedestrian scale and accessibility, it provides for affordable commercial spaces so that small local enterprises can operate, it gives us a sense of continuity from the past and into the future.
I don't think its energies are always appropriate -- the preservation of the old front of the Denver Public Library was the preservation of an ugly facade of no real historic import or significance -- but by and large, we're better off for it.
And if it fails on some cherished structure, well, even then, history gives us some grounds for optimism. Either the peons will get cheap building supplies, or the new structure that seems so hideous at first will become like the Eiffel Tower or Transamerica Pyramid -- an esteemed symbol that provides a sense of place for future generations.
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