Benefactors Are Now Paying the Price for Historic Preservation

In America, what comes next has always seemed more important than the past, perhaps not surprising in a people who came here to escape their history. But in the last half of the century, the country has come up with a vastly democratic list of physical emblems of American history that it wants to preserve.

The problem, as no less than First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton raised last week, is that somebody has to pay. And though historic preservation is popular--in fact, a grass-roots movement across the nation--the cause still lacks financial wherewithal.

Year after year, Congress pares down the budgets that support historic preservation, even as the list of projects grows exponentially. The National Park Service alone has a list of $1 billion in work it needs to do to preserve or improve the sites it controls. And then there are the 80,000 entries, including 2,025 in California, on the National Register of Historic Places that may have plaques honoring their importance but little financial heft to keep them going.

As a result, preservationists have come to rely on the largess of such corporate benefactors as designer Ralph Lauren ($13 million to repair the Star-Spangled Banner that inspired Francis Scott Key) and discount merchandiser Target ($6 million to refurbish the Washington Monument and historic U.S. sculptures). Thus, foundations and corporations with an impulse to do good and an instinct for good marketing are taking a large role in determining what pieces of American history will remain tangible over time.

But still there is not enough money to go around.

UCLA professor Thomas Hines, an expert on historic preservation, was shocked recently to find a woefully out-of-date orientation film at Jamestown, Va., site of the first permanent colonial settlement in North America. When he stopped a park ranger to complain, she explained that for years park budgeteers have begged unsuccessfully for funds to redo the film.

“I’m not always insistent on political correctness,” Hines said, “but this was so embarrassing. It was racist. It was as if there were no women in Jamestown.”

Hines was so excited when he saw the first lady on television last week discussing the importance of saving American treasures in an effort to drum up private support that he wrote her a note, commending her effort and offering help in California.

“There’s not enough attention to defining history,” Hines said. “Yes, people want to save an old home or church in their neighborhood. Or the flag. . . . But people in general don’t think about it.”

Or they don’t seem to think about paying for it. In fact, it is now all the rage to reclaim everything old, from the silenced stories of early Americans and marginal rural structures to the not-so-old buildings of the 1960s and 1970s such as Los Angeles’ cement Cinerama Dome.

“Often California or Southern California gets overlooked by those who are concerned with preservation nationally because of the way history is defined, usually with a 50-year cutoff,” said Ken Bernstein of the Los Angeles Conservancy.

“But here we’re not talking about Civil War battlegrounds or grand old homes of the 18th century. Here in California, history can be defined by what is unique and important for our architectural and cultural heritage.”

And that can be as new as an original McDonald’s in Downey or a crumbling synagogue in Boyle Heights.

*

Mrs. Clinton decided last year that, as part of the millennium celebrations, she would use her bully pulpit to highlight the need to save an array of remnants of America’s heritage. Last week, she visited several East Coast sites--including Thomas Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey that is filled with rotting papers--where she announced a $5-million restoration grant from the General Electric Co.

She is planning on making at least one similar trip each summer, according to her aides.

To illustrate the range of needs for the White House, this spring the National Trust for Historic Preservation put together a list of 101 places, artifacts and documents at risk unless somebody, somewhere comes up with as much as $408 million to save them from deterioration or destruction.

On that hot list from Los Angeles are St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, the oldest building in the city, and the Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Hollywood Hills, once owned by a prominent arts family and now owned by USC. The trust and the Park Service are planning to narrow the list to 20 or 30 priorities in the next few weeks and then bring them to the attention of potential funders.

“In a perfect world maybe you wouldn’t need private support, but this is not a perfect world,” said Richard Moe, president of the trust. “But our best and maybe our only hope is to get communities and private donors involved.”

President Clinton has announced that he will ask Congress for a “millennium fund” of $50 million in both the 1999 and 2000 fiscal budgets to address these and other Park Service needs. But clearly $100 million, which may or may not be cleared by Congress, is a drop in the proverbial bucket.

“We do not have the preservation ethic in America that older countries have that value their heritage,” said Moe, co-chairman of “Save America’s Treasures” project with Mrs. Clinton.

“But,” he added, “we’re getting a whole lot better.”

Over the last century, France has become the global model of a state committed to saving its treasures and being 100% financially responsible for the effort, said Michael Kammen, a Cornell University professor of American culture and history who is one of Mrs. Clinton’s preservationist advisors. (Early on, the French government was so devoted to preservation that every year it sent emissaries to buy artists’ work--even before the Impressionists were popular--for provincial museums so Paris would not be the country’s only cultural center.)

In England, a national historic trust was created in 1895. It became the prototype for America’s trust, founded in 1949 with the imprimatur of government but little power or money. The limited federal funds that the trust was receiving have been slashed by Congress--in 1995 the trust lost half its roughly $7-million budget--during the recent cultural wars--to the point that Moe negotiated to wean the trust from government funds altogether as of this year.

“Occasionally, the [19th century] ladies mobilized some public support, like the women of South Carolina to save George Washington’s home at Mt. Vernon, but rarely has government given more than rhetorical support” to historical preservation, Kammen said.

The thinking on what should be saved has evolved since the great immigrant influx at the turn of this century, he explained, but the spectrum broadened after World War II when Americans became manic collectors of everything American from piggy banks to beer cans. (Kammen notes that a new “history” museum of some kind opens almost weekly in the United States, bringing such a bonanza of tourist dollars to communities that six cities bid recently for a new tow truck museum. It opened in April 1997 in Chattanooga, Tenn.)

*

The struggle to differentiate between what is simply old or kitsch or historic has become increasingly evident in the 1,500 new entries that every year get the stamp of approval from the National Register. The register has broadened its criteria since it was created as part of the Interior Department by the 1966 Historic Preservation Act.

“We’re just now starting to look at 1950s suburbs to join the register, and that was such a big boom time that the listing is sure to grow from that influence in the coming years,” said Paul Lusignan, a National Register historian.

So between suburbs on the East Coast and rock formations on the Mexican border, mile markers in Pasadena and a strip of 1920s movie houses in downtown Los Angeles--to name a few California examples--there seems to be no end to what Americans value in their history.

If Mrs. Clinton encounters opposition to her campaign to find support for this collection of Americana, it could come from traditional historians, developers or property-rights advocates, according to the experts. But surely she is more likely to find cheerleaders in her American-as-apple-pie quest.

“By starting the ball rolling and finding seed money in corporate entities, Mrs. Clinton is going to run into a whole lot of Americans interested--and thrilled--with her project,” said Lusignan. “At least let’s hope so.”