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TIME: Almanac 1995
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TIME Almanac 1995.iso
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<text id=90TT2080>
<title>
Aug. 06, 1990: Outracing The Bulldozers
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
Aug. 06, 1990 Just Who Is David Souter?
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
DESIGN, Page 80
Outracing the Bulldozers
</hdr>
<body>
<p>A "guerrilla preservationist" saves historic buildings
</p>
<p>By Daniel S. Levy
</p>
<p> Carolyn Pitts runs her palm over the hand-tooled sandstone
exterior of an old textile mill. "The stonework is marvelous,"
she says. "It was obviously meant to be a real showpiece."
Built in 1849 in Cannelton, Ind., alongside the Ohio River, the
brooding, fortress-like structure with twin turrets and heavily
bracketed cornice was abandoned in the 1950s. Now the roof is
a wreck, and starlings nest inside.
</p>
<p> A recommendation from Pitts could save the mill. As the sole
architectural historian working for the National Park Service's
history division, she decides what structures should be
considered National Historic Landmarks. Pitts walks through the
mill's vast, empty work space and taps a few dusty columns. Her
verdict: "I think I'm playing with fire, but I'm still going
to try to landmark it."
</p>
<p> Pitts outlines the next steps to her guides from Historic
Cannelton, Inc. "It needs a roof, and you'll have to repair and
remove those later excretions," she says, referring to an
unsightly brick addition. "You have to shake the tree a bit.
You just have to get as tenacious as the devil and generate
publicity that this isn't a dead whale, that it's a useful
community building."
</p>
<p> Pitts, 65, is quite a tree shaker herself. Scholar, writer
and bureaucratic infighter, she has done as much as anyone else
to transform the field of historic preservation from a
grass-roots trend to a mainstream movement. During her 16-year
tenure with the Department of the Interior, she has helped
designate more than 200 structures and districts as National
Historic Landmarks. Among her assorted trophies are Frank Lloyd
Wright's Fallingwater house in Bear Run, Pa., and the
elephant-shaped hotel in Margate City, N.J. While there are
55,000 sites, properties and districts on the National Register
of Historic Places, there are only 2,000 National Historic
Landmarks. Being included on that exclusive roll is
preservation's premier distinction.
</p>
<p> A no-nonsense historian, Pitts does not merely scour written
records but gets out and prowls city streets and country lanes
for gems of the nation's "built history." And she is not averse
to a touch of cloak-and-dagger. In 1976 she learned that the
Chrysler Building in New York City was going into receivership
and the owners wanted to raze it. She rushed to the city and
slipped unobserved into the skyscraper. After a top-to-bottom
tour, she saved the art deco masterpiece.
</p>
<p> Pitts' professional fame--and her reputation in some
quarters as a "guerrilla preservationist"--originated with
an audacious maneuver she made 21 years ago in the seaside town
of Cape May, N.J. The community is a melange of Victorian
follies--gingerbread homes with broad, windswept verandas--that had once been a summer playground of the wealthy. But it
fell from favor and became an oceanfront backwater.
</p>
<p> In 1962, after a northeaster devastated the community, local
officials opted to modernize. The Department of Housing and
Urban Development prepared to bulldoze the town for urban
renewal but first hired Pitts to study 600 of its battered
older buildings. What she documented was one of the largest
surviving ensembles of late 19th century frame structures.
Aware that the community looked askance at preservation, she
surreptitiously arranged for the entire town to be placed on
the National Register. Tourists soon began pouring in, and in
1979 the revitalized town requested and received National
Landmarks status.
</p>
<p> At the Park Service, inadequate funding forces Pitts to plot
her sweeps around the country carefully. Piggybacked onto her
recent visit to Cannelton, for example, was an afternoon in
Madison, Ind., a quaint riverside community that stagnated when
railroads supplanted the Ohio River as the transport of choice.
Two of the town's largest 1840s Greek Revival homes were real
finds. At the first, the Shrewsbury house, she noted a
sprightly spiral staircase and a spacious drawing room divided
by paired fluted columns. At the nearby Lanier house--a
cupola-topped temple-form mansion--Pitts was impressed that
the interior had been restored in a later historical style
than the house's. "A building doesn't die at a certain point,"
she says. "I'm not for freezing something in time. Buildings
are, hopefully, around for a long time, and they should reflect
that long life."
</p>
<p> Back in her Washington office, Pitts will put the Cannelton
mill and the two Madison buildings on the agenda of the History
Areas Committee. If approved, they will go before the Secretary
of the Interior's advisory board for its nod and then to the
Secretary for his signature. By the time the owners receive
their complimentary bronze plaque, Pitts will have been back
on the road many times, searching for buildings. After all, it
is often a race between her and the bulldozers. "Tearing down
a building and putting up a parking lot is idiotic," she
insists. "Designation says that there is something important
here, that there are properties that tell us where we've been
and what we are, and we ought to take care of them."
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>