Saving history

Each year, many people wait eagerly for the Academy Award nominations. I wait for something different. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has just announced its annual list of “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places,” which you can see at http://www.preservationnation.org/issues/11-most-endangered/. Not to ruin the suspense, but this year’s list names:

America’s State Parks & State-Owned Historic Sites

Black Mountain, Kentucky

Hinchliffe Stadium, New Jersey

Industrial Arts Building, Nebraska

Juana Briones House, California

Merritt Parkway, Connecticut

Metropolitan AME Church, Washington, DC

Pågat, Guam

Saugatuck Dunes, Michigan

Threefoot Building, Mississippi

Wilderness Battlefield, Virginia

Very different places that tell very different historical stories and are facing very different threats. Washington’s Metropolitan AME Church, for example, is praised as “the national cathedral of African Methodism” but is deteriorating beyond the means of its current members to repair. Closer to my home, the Saugatuck Dunes host “several 19th century summer camps” — one of which I attended as a youth — but they are threatened by a “a proposed 400-acre residential development, including marina, hotel, restaurant and retail complex” that is illegal under current local zoning laws.  That has only prompted the developer to fight an expensive legal campaign against those zoning laws.

I hope the church, the dunes, and the other nine listed historic sites survive. But why? Perhaps the members of the church should move to a more afforable site, collect millions of dollars for selling their land, and allow the course of urban development to continue. And if the Saugatuck Dunes disappear, there are many other attractive dunes all along the western shore of Lake Michigan. (Though I would get really upset if my favorite Saugatuck hot dog stand disappeared). That seems to be the attitude in China, where a veneration for the country’s history is not accompanied by many efforts to preserve historic places. The few historic buildings that tourists visit today are really reconstructions of older buildings. The most poignant Chinese historical site that I have visited is the Old Summer Palace, which was reduced to rubble by European powers in the 1870s and which remains in that condition as a reminder to the Chinese people of the imperial designs of the West. Everywhere else, old structures give way to new ones with an alarming speed as China’s rapid development continues.

We make a different choice here, sometimes protecting buildings and places with only a tangential connection to historical importance. Still, I am glad that we preserve, say, William Howard Taft’s home, for I believe that there is much to learn from our history, and such places make that history come alive. Like the Old and New Testaments, we have a story to tell, and it is nice to have some original illustrations to accopany our many words.