Preservation Month reflections on saving historic buildings

Dr. Betsy Peterson, former Director of the American Folklife Center, once said, “History is much more than facts and dates. It’s people.” All of history is a story of people and their relationships, their trials and everyday lives.

Our buildings are not just old worn-out buildings. They are Grandma’s House, where we spent so much of our childhood, or the old Point Clinic, where so many people were born or treated by Dr. Eshenaur. They’re a testament to the foresight of J.S. Spencer, who financed many commercial buildings in the area solely on faith in his community, and Harry Keib, a skilled carpenter whose works adorn the insides of many old homes in Point Pleasant.

Mollie Beattie, former Director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, wrote, “What a country chooses to save is what a country wishes to say about itself.” She was referring to National Parks and natural areas, but she could just as easily be talking about our community. We are the Historic City of Point Pleasant, are we not?

Can we still welcome visitors to our Historic City, or take pride in our community’s long life and storied heritage, if everything that defines our history is eventually gone? Our City was founded during the Revolution, split down the middle during the Civil War, a powerful voice in the Statehood movement, and an industrial powerhouse for generations, and the proof of that survives in our built environment.

Jane Jacobs, activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, once said, “For really new ideas of any kind — no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be — there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

I generally don’t like long quotes, but I couldn’t put it any better than Jacobs. Newly-built shopping plazas, with their cookie-cutter mentality and rents of $3,000 or more per month, just aren’t suitable for small businesses and, more often than not, aren’t great for chain retail businesses either. Old buildings, on the other hand, are smaller, highly-adaptive, unique homes for creative ideas, and much more affordable since most were paid off long ago.

Carl Elefante, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, coined the oft-quoted phrase, “The greenest building is one that is already built.” Modern construction often considers new energy efficiency standards, and while old buildings often aren’t LEED certified (though they certainly can be, given the proper rehabilitation), the energy cost of constructing the building was absorbed generations ago.

With a new building, you have to consider the energy consumed in making the steel, concrete, drywall, and other components along with the energy involved in the actual construction and use of the building.

At the same time, the destruction of older buildings in the United States results in over 600,000,000 tons of material ending up in landfills each year, material that, aside from its age, is often of a much better quality than modern construction components. Long term, it is more energy efficient to maintain an existing building than to build a new one.

I’ll leave you with a final quote that sums it all up. Richard Moe, former President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, once said, “Preservation is simply the good sense of holding on to things that are well designed, that link us with our past in a meaningful way, and that have plenty of good use left in them.”

I would add “good economic sense…” to Moe’s quote. Historic buildings have weathered fires, floods, wars, and they’re still standing as strong as the day they were built. It would be impossible to build similar buildings today that would last as long, especially within modern development budgets.

These buildings provide our country with an engine for economic expansion by enabling small business experimentation, and more often than not, tourism attractions and cultural anchors find their best home in a historic building.

Why wouldn’t we fight to keep them?