Historic preservationists
have to have two sets of eyes: One that looks clear-sightedly at the past and
one that sees into the future. It’s a trick, and not all people have, or want
to have, the duel perception. But once you have it, it’s darned hard not to
look at an old structure and begin the imagining – what did that place look
like in its heyday, who frequented it, what went on there, how did that
building influence the people who lived here? You can blur your eyes a little
and help the past come into a vibrant focus. But those people who don’t have
the duel perception look at old buildings and see just that. Old. Time for
something else. It’s a legitimate perspective, it’s just not how we
preservationists perceive.
Thus the conflict arises
that many of us have experienced – one group wants to tear down an old
structure to make room for their new whatever, the other group wants to preserve
and repurpose. The members of Manteo Preservation Trust (MPT) and concerned
townspeople from the small coastal North Carolina area called Roanoke Island
are in this tug of war right now over saving our Works Progress
Administration-era gym. On the other end of the rope is the Board of Education
and other concerned townspeople who see the gym as old and tired and in the way
of their needed school addition. And it is a needed addition, no quarrel over
that. But MPT has come up with a solution that would give the school board more
space than what they would obtain from tearing down the old gym with no
additional cost to them. Still, the tug of war persists. From a
preservationist’s perspective, the intriguing question has to be…why?
When logic, cost-saving
and time-saving don’t sway a decision toward preserving a structure, what’s at
play? We at MPT are asking that question and trying hard to find the answer
because we’re pretty sure preservationists all across the country have their
own version of it. Is it a power struggle? The fuddie-duddies vs. the forward
thinkers? The idea that anything new is better than anything with age? We have
to listen for the answer with unbiased ears; too much is at stake, not only in
this one old gym, not to. One answer we’ve formed revolves around, not
surprisingly, eyes and ears. We often have to be taught what to see.
Since it’s a given that
every single situation can be viewed with many different perspectives, our job
as preservationists has to involve teaching. And that teaching has to be done
well before a tug of war begins. In the heat of the tug, we don’t have time to
tell the story of what that place once was, what it meant to so many people,
why its walls contain more than brick or wood or cement. The reasons why each side
is tugging become secondary to the very act of trying to pull the decision one
way or the other.
So, whether we end up
winning our battle over the WPA gym or not, we have learned a big lesson. You
have to teach people how to see sometimes – how to see past the exterior and
into the heart and soul of a place. And this seeing has to be taught in neutral
times, when the tugging rope has been dropped and both sides have time to unflex their muscles and expand their vision.
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