Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area Created

Thursday, May 8th, the President signed legislation (principally sponsored by Senator John Warner and Representative Frank Wolf) creating the Journey Through Hallowed Ground National Heritage Area. The area’s northern terminus is the Gettysburg battlefield, while its southern end is Monticello. It generally follows Route 15.* It’s 175 miles long, holds some 73 districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and offers different “heritage themes” for exploration.

*Nigh-useless trivia: Much of Route 15 was called “The Carolina Road,” and one small part of this route, a short stretch in the Buckland Historic District, is the first place macadam paving was used in the United States.

G. Earth Explains Rural Preservation to Albemarle County

The six photos above are all taken at, according to Google’s handy altimeter, roughly 27,000 feet (8230 meters) above mean sea level. Thus, each shows approximately the same number of acres or hectares of the planet surface, the differences in land surface elevation being a trivial component of the view. Five of the six photographs show the homes, working places, and treasured historical sites of well over one million people, each. (Keen viewers of the five photos will be able to pick out the walls of the ancient cities at the core of each of these modern metropolises–the Beijing wall-and-moat system is especially prominent.) The other photo shows the same components figuring in the lives of 40, 437 people, plus a few thousand of their neighbors caught unawares.

Do the citizens of Charlottesville want their city to be as densely populated as is Islamic Cairo? Probably not, although the citizens of old Misr-al-Kahira seem to be surviving well enough. Isn’t urban density and community size limited by resources other than land? Yes. Each of these cities, with the possible exception of Cairo, has had to (as did New York City) reach out and seize distant sources of potable water. As Charlottesville and Albemarle County are planning to do, presently. Haven’t these cities shipped many of their social problems to the city perimeter? Well, Cairo and Paris certainly have. Rising literacy rates in developing world have encouraged women in those rural lands to leave the limitations of farming or herding life behind and aim for a richer future in squatter settlements around the Egyptian capital and grim ghettos of (illegal or officially marginalized) immigrants around the French one. In each of the five cities, there are internal “squats” as well, once-vacant buildings now illegally sheltering the formerly homeless.

But, what the photos do is put the lie to the possibility that an increase in population density is entirely undesirable in Charlottesville, and thus that despoiling rural Albemarle to accommodate Central Virginia’s population growth is a necessity. One of the cities pictured is Paris, after all, the most visited municipality in the world and the greatest artistic achievement of the 19th century, during which the town was dramatically reconfigured at enormous expense, and entirely by choice. (It remains the only European, perhaps capital, city rebuilt without having suffered a catastrophe beforehand.) There were those in the French legislature who continually complained, at the time, about the cost. Yet, how many times in the past 130 years has Paris recovered those costs? To make investment in urban infrastructure that permits, and to legislate building regulation that demands, stronger buildings of consistent design (the kind of buildings that are more readily reused) and greater population density in Charlottesville could be the wisest decision that Central Virginians could make.

Mr. G. Earth Tours the UNESCO World Heritage List for You

Above are satellite photographs of six UNESCO World Heritage List properties. Well, technically, five, since Monticello and the University of Virginia form two parts of a combined listing. These two may be joined in that listing by a third site, the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, forming in a kind of World Heritage Archipelago franchising Thomas Jefferson’s most influential and personal architectural works. (Monticello is the only privately-owned WHL property in the United States.) The images are all scaled so that the viewer is about 2000 feet above each site. To note some comparisons:

• The Great Pyramid at Memphis, south of El-Giza, has a base that just barely fits within the square of the Jeffersonian Lawn and Ranges. That is one big geometric construction of stones. Look upon it, ye mighty, and despair.
• Conversely, the Athenian Acropolis seems dwarfed in size by the Lawn, although the Hellenic hill’s influence on world art is so much the greater as to be incalculable.
• Wow. That Île de la Cité (Paris, Banks of the Seine World Heritage Property) is larger than one might have imagined. Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate considered the Gallo-Roman settlement there to be one of the most pleasant places in Europe. The island successfully resisted for several years a Viking invasion in the late 9th century, never surrendering while the Scandinavians laid waste to the Left and Right Banks. The medieval quality of the island, with narrow streets and impoverished residents (and houses that were said to cluster around and reach for the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame de Paris as children circle the skirt of their mother), persisted until it was cleared in the 1860s by the Second Empire’s “urban renewal” and the island was transformed into a national administrative complex, by and large. There are Renaissance and medieval remnants at the west and east ends, respectively, to remind Parisians of what island life used to be like, and some parts of the royal palace (now the Palais de Justice) remain to be toured. Marked on the pavement to the west of the Cathedral are the lines of the medieval streets. Even more careful observation will show foundation lines of the church that preceded the current Cathedral. There is a subterranean museum showing Gallo-Roman ruins discovered while excavating for a car park, including a small part of the island’s rampart, as well.
• Islamic Cairo, a 10th Century creation that reached its artistic zenith in the 14th century, is so much more densely crammed with people and masgeds and bazaars and tea rooms and hammams and madrassas and fountains and the remnants of palaces and with every kind of human construction and clotting than is the sparse Lawn with anything at all that this Egyptian quarter might as well have been imported from another planet, judged by Central Virginia standards.

Indeed, it is not that far from Islamic Cairo to Memphis, which is another patch of relative emptiness. In between the two sites, the El-Giza quarter is no less thick with people, though thin with landmarks. So, the stark contrast is available to Egyptians and Cairo tourists. No need to visit Charlottesville.

Kenridge, Albemarle County, Added to Virginia Landmarks Register

Overshadowed by the Fifeville discussion and vote at the March 20th joint session of the State Review Board and the Virginia Board of Historic Resources, there was another local action: Kenridge (PDF), in Albemarle County, was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register and recommended to the National Register of Historic Places. The house is probably better known to longer-term Charlottesvillians as the Kappa Sigma National Headquarters. Which it was until the Kappa Sigma Foundation secured a Virginia Supreme Court decision that gave the Foundation clear title to the property, which the Foundation sold in 2005. The house made up, along with the adjacent houses White Gables and Boxwood, and a fourth house now demolished, “Rinehart Row,” country houses built by Hollis Rinehart, Sr., for himself and his three children. Rinehart, who made his fortune in servicing the railroads and then in building and industrial construction, had been living in Birdwood until he finished Kenridge in 1922. His architect was William Johnston Marsh of Marsh & Peter Architects, Washington, DC. Marsh had already made a name for himself as a designer of houses in the District, and he and his partner, Walter Gibson Peter, would leave a legacy of District schools and commercial buildings. The firm’s most prominent Charlottesville commission, and the one which brought the architects to together with Hollis Rinehart, was the 1920 Charlottesville National Bank, the town’s first skyscraper, now used as Wachovia Bank’s Regional Headquarters. Rinehart had helped create the Charlottesville Bank and Trust Company in 1914, and was chairman of the board when it came time for the bank to establish itself in a grander fashion on Main Street, and was thus pretty much in charge of picking the tower’s architect. Rinehart would be a member of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, appointed to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, an investor in the Paramount Theater, and one of the founders of Farmington Country Club. While it had its share of larger commissions, including Walter Reed Army Hospital, Marsh & Peter Architects’ most recognizable work today is the gold-domed Farmers & Merchants Bank on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, a building that is currently a branch of Riggs Bank. The Georgetown bank is modeled on the banking hall (the first two stories) of the Charlottesville bank tower, which the firm had designed at least one year before undertaking the Georgetown bank, but the Georgetown version retains its original configuration, windows, and lobby furnishings. The Charlottesville tower was heavily renovated in the 1970s before being returned in 1999 to something much closer to Marsh & Peters’ design, including a faithful restoration of the tower’s 1920 exterior appearance. Both bank buildings may be more the work of Peter, but the firm’s houses, including Kenridge, are generally attributed to Marsh.

Dan Bluestone is (sort of) Wrong About the New Jefferson Scholars Foundation Building!

After making a set of reasonable criticisms of the proposed replacement for the Eugene Bradbury 1913 Compton House in a sharply-worded Letter to the Editor of The Daily Progress, University professor Daniel Bluestone challenges the rainwater harvesting aims of VMDO Architects, the designers of the complex in which Jefferson Scholars Foundation plans to cloister its fellows, writing, “VMDO prides itself on being environmental and green, and using tilted roofs to catch rainwater to flush building toilets. Will there be enough flushes in the lifetime of this mediocre building to make up for resources wasted in, and the environmental irresponsibility represented by, the Compton House demolition?.”

The question is an open one. There is a lot of roof on display in VMDO’s design. If all of it is capturing rainwater for non-potable uses, which may indeed be restricted to supplying water closets, depending on the local building code official’s interpretation of the plumbing code, it will more than fill the annual demand for toilet flushing at the Foundation. The design probably uses dual flush toilets, too, perhaps even of the newest design that calculates exactly how much water the toilet will require to dispose of the type of waste most likely just deposited into the bowl (don’t ask). Such a decision would extend the supply capacity of the project’s cisterns. But, Mr. Bluestone assumes that the Compton House roof was not good, as it stood, for rainwater harvest. In fact, rainwater harvesting features could have easily been incorporated into a redesign of the Compton House roof gutter system. Every drop of water that fell on the existing steeply-sloped red clay tile roof could have been filtered and stored in exactly the same fashion as the water that will fall on VMDO’s new vee-shaped roofs. And, as an extra benefit, according to the USGBC’s LEED 2.2 Reference Guide, a red clay tile roof meets the criteria for LEED credit SSc7.2 Heat Island Effect, Roof. Just like the new roofs that VMDO is apparently planning to specify.

“Sustainable Design” versus Sustaining a Culture: No Excuses.

The catalog of cultural properties eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register includes the category “structures.” It’s a broad one, but boils down to something made by a human being and bent to a human purpose other than providing human shelter. Examples could be: A lighthouse. A bridge. A cable car, or ship, or even airplane (such as Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose–yes, a structure can be a movable beast).

Until coal power and coal-fueled railroads respectively displaced them, water-powered manufacture and livestock-drawn water-borne transportation were the keys to American industrial expansion. River power was a cost-competitive energy source for milling of all types well into the twentieth century. So, old mills, canals, locks, sluices, wharves, and dams figure in the general Eastern American riverscape (as they do specifically along the Rivanna River downstream from Woolen Mills until at least Palmyra) and, thus, in National and State register nominations. To steal a phrase from Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human. Since it’s a human undertaking, it produces evidence of culture, the stuff of cultural resources.

But, bad engineering has toxic effects. No historian argues for the preservation of the heavy-metal tailings trapped in ponds outside the mines of Leadville, Colorado, or wants an unsafe railroad trestle to remain un-shored or un-repaired. River works, especially dams, can make a waterway inviable to aquatic species of all types, and can devastate an ecosystem. Where’s the balance point when ecologically-sensitive design and keeping and holding culturally-sustaining artifacts come into conflict with one another? Doesn’t ripping down that big old 1913 house for a “green” building always make sense? Don’t the benefits of visually-prominent rooftop-mounted solarvoltaic arrays always outweigh the jarring intrusion they’d make when set on buildings in, say, an historic district of Charleston, South Carolina, one that’s dominated by 18th century and early 19th century townhouses?

Finding that point is not a new challenge for historians, archaeologists, or historic preservationists. They locate it all the time. The National Park Service even publishes a National Register Bulletin to help them along. How significant is the cultural property? Is it associated with the life of at least one important person? An event or series of events in American history? Is it a great work of art or craft, or one of the last examples of something of which there used to be a multitude in American life? Does the property conceal knowledge that might be mined by archaeologists or other kinds of historians? And, is there still enough of it left together, what ever it might be, even a historic district, so that it can tell its story? Does it have integrity?

The Woolen Mills Dam was clearly a cultural resource. Had the Mill itself (the red brick building prominent in the postcard-view masthead of this blog, with the Rivanna roaring over the dam visible through the steel truss members of the railroad trestle to the right of the tower) remained, along with the raceway that channeled water to the mill wheels, then the ensemble could have narrated the history of cloth manufacture and commerce in Central Virginia, and made even more clear how mill workers formed a community around the factory. As the dam stood last year, better to remove the stones and the wood cribbing foundation, leave traces of its abutments in place to mark the dam’s former location, and let the shad run miles further upstream and the Rivanna take on the appearance it had in Jefferson’s time, when the end of Market Street formed Secretary’s Ford. Historians and historic preservationists found it easy to accommodate environmental and ecological concerns about the toxic effects of the dam. The result was a pile of old growth wood cribbing ready to be milled into new high-priced flooring and a pile of stone block ready to be dressed into new high-priced stone to veneer a new building (see photos above), all without public controversy or any protest from engineering preservationists or industrial archaeologists.

The most prominent organization in “sustainable design” is the United States Green Building Council, which currently publishes its guidelines for new construction and major renovations under the LEED 2.2 standard. That rating system makes little accommodation for the tangible and reusable energy and material resources embedded in whatever might stand in the way of an entirely new “sustainable” building, and acknowledges the cultural resource value of a building, structure, object, site, or district in only the most oblique fashion. There is no novelty in choosing between environmental benefits and cultural importance, or reconciling conflicts surrounding these matters, and thus not much excuse for the USGBC’s tardiness in addressing the interests of preservationists.

Fifeville Virginia Landmark District Created, National Register of Historic Places Historic District Pending

An excerpt from the draft minutes of the March 20th Joint Meeting of the Virginia State Review Board and the Virginia Board of Historic Resources, with some editing for clarity.

A word on the responsibilities of the two Boards referred to below: The State Review Board [SRB] is an expert advisory board of composition mandated by the Federal government. It reviews nominations to the National Register of Historic Places and advises the State Historic Preservation Officer [in Virginia, Director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources Kathleen Kilpatrick] whether the nomination should be forwarded to the Department of the Interior, where the final determination is made whether the “property” (building, structure, site, object, or district) is entered into the National Register. The Virginia Board of Historic Resources is a gubernatorial commission, and its vote binds properties into the Virginia Landmarks Register. No further official action is required with respect to the VLR.

[Virginia Board of Historic Resources] Chair Patrick Butler opened the floor for public comments about the Fifeville-Castle Hill Historic District. Individuals speaking in opposition to the nomination included: Antoinette Roades, property owner; Kendra Hamilton, former City Council member and Vice-Mayor of Charlottesville; and Stanley D. Sweeney, property owner. Each expressed concern with the nomination’s coverage of historical information, the adoption of “Castle Hill” as name for part of the district, and with the nomination process. Individuals speaking in favor of the nomination included Jane Covington, property owner; and Mary Joy Scala, Charlottesville Preservation and Design Planner. Members of both the [State Review Board] and [Board of Historic Resources] engaged in discussion with staff and members of the public regarding the adoption of the name “Castle Hill”, matters of process, the district’s boundaries, the potential for the inclusion of additional African American history, and the potential for later amendment of the nomination. Mr. Wagner and Director Kilpatrick addressed the Boards’ questions, and Margaret Peters, one of the nomination’s authors, also spoke to the decision of adoption of the “Castle Hill” name. When asked, Ms. Scala confirmed that the City of Charlottesville has no intention of seeking a local conservation district in the area, and that this is on record. Board members asked if a name change required public notification, and Mr. [Marc] Wagner [Virginia Department of Historic Resources Director, Resource Information Division,] answered that it did not, but that the [VDHR] staff would recommend that this be done.

Mr. [Brian] Broadus announced that he would abstain from voting on this nomination, as he was past president of an organization with ties to the area. With a motion from Mr. [Addison] Thompson and a second from Ms. [Helen] Murphy, the [BHR] voted to approve the nomination with the following conditions: that more African-American history is included and that a better name for the district is found in consultation with local residents. With a motion from Mr. [Madison] Spencer and a second from Dr. [Lauranett] Lee, the SRB approved the following motion in relation to the district: “We approve of the district with the proviso that to whatever extent additional research might be made, conducted, or presented that buttresses information regarding African American history as it pertains to slavery, reconstruction, and 20th century history it will be added as addenda or revisions to the document.” Dr. Lee also recommended public involvement in the revisions.

The PAPA Spring Workshop Meeting

The PAPA held its annual Spring Workshop Meeting on March 6th at the offices of the Piedmont Environmental Council. Brian Broadus, an associate with a Charlottesville architecture firm, explained how to register for the joint PAPA blog. David Neuman, PAPA representative from the University of Virginia and the Architect for the University, offered to host the Fall 2008 PAPA meeting at a University venue that he will determine. The tentative meeting date would be Thursday evening, September 18th. Following the PAPA Steering Committee’s recommendation, the University’s organization of the Fall meeting will seconded by another PAPA member, which will in turn organize the following PAPA gathering. The backup for the Fall meeting will be Preservation Piedmont, which will also act as the 501(c)(3) organization with which PAPA organizational dues will be deposited, but sequestered from Preservation Piedmont’s own monies. Preservation Piedmont will organize the March 2009 Spring Workshop Meeting.

The annual dues for each dues-collecting member of the Piedmont Area Preservation Alliance would be $200.00, payable to Preservation Piedmont, and used for the annual gatherings and other Alliance expenses.

The PAPA decided that it would hold a press conference and issue a press release announcing the formation of the organization in May 2008.

The PAPA discussed sponsoring a publicly-directed event during Preservation Month in May 2009, in cooperation with the University of Virginia.

Each delegate to the workshop suggested a topic on which the Alliance might concentrate its attention:

• Hold an energy-conservation workshop directed at historic homes
• Hold a class for homeowners who wanted to research the deed for an historic property
• Give tours of grand homes and African American churches along the Journey Through Hallowed Ground route
• Hold a class that gives an expert’s introduction to the Virginia and Federal Historic Preservation Tax Credit Programs
• Provide hands-on assistance to help maintain rural African-American churches and Rosenwald Schools
• Sponsor building restoration trades workshops
• An Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society exhibit on successful historic preservation and restoration projects
• Print a poster designed for the signature event to help connect public to specific organizations
• Realtor and Real Estate Agent training sessions about register-eligible properties and archaeological digs
• Since buildings with recorded Virginia historic preservation easements are required to be open to the public one day each year, coordinate an open house of such properties, perhaps using a “living history” technique of docents dressed as historical occupants
• Ideas from bottom up – involve neighborhoods in City’s historic preservation deas – they could request info or markers for their neighborhoods
• Hold a “grand homes tour” as a fundraiser. Use the funds for a workshop for the preservation and restoration of rural African-American churches or Rosenwald Schools
• Tour local historic preservation landmarks, including limited-resource preservation success stories such as the Nimmo House
• Sponsor lectures by international preservation specialists, coordinated with the lecture series for the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture
• Lead an “anti-tour of Vinegar Hill” that describes the buildings and community that was lost to “urban renewal” there
• Showcase ways that historic buildings have been incorporated into new developments. Show how the old meets the new and that historic preservation is complementary to modern and “sustainable” design.
• Demonstrate the value of Virginia’s Historic Marker program in calling attention to historic resources and increasing neighborhood pride
• Tour lesser-known African-American buildings, and Odd Fellows Hall, Westhaven, and Vinegar Hill, etc.
• Spotlight demolitions in Fifeville

The Steering Committee will continue to meet monthly. Anyone may join that wish to begin planning for the Preservation Week 2009 event should meet at 8:00am April 18^th at the Blue Moon Diner.

Fifeville-Castle Hill National and Virginia Register Public Meeting

On Thursday, February 7th, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources will host a statutorily-required meeting. The meeting will be held at the Tonsler Park Center and the topic will be the pending nomination of the “Fifeville-Castle Hill” district to the National Register of Historic Places and Virginia Landmarks Register. The time is 6:30pm. The staff of the VDHR will explain the process of property nomination and the advantages of an historic or a landmark district listing, and will take comments from citizens. A report of these comments will made to the State Review Board (the body that recommends National Register listing) and the Board of Historic Resources (which actually lists historic properties on the Virginia register). How a property owner in the proposed district might vote against such listing will explained, too, and a notary public will be on hand to seal official objections to district listing by those property owners wishing to register them during the meeting. The nomination is to be taken up by the two Boards on March 20th. If approved that day by both, the district will immediately become an official landmark in Virginia and,  if confirmed by the Department of Interior later, a nationally-recognized one.

Representatives of the City of Charlottesville, which has sponsored a documentary history of the district and fostered the nomination,  will review the municipal government’s role.