The Public Policy: Don't Touch That Style!
Bovard, James
to Britain's traditional freedoms from the Thatcher regime. Photographers and reporters were stationed outside the Pinter home to harry and snap members of the "June 20" encounter group. Pinter...
...In October 1995 it tossed in $14,000 and became one of the largest donors to the "No on Referendum 48" Coalition working to defeat a private property rights initiative in the state of Washington...
...According to the Trust's 1994 annual report, people prefer places where they "can walk from one destination to another...
...54 April 1997 • The American Spectator advocates...
...JAMES BOVARD is this year's Warren Brookes Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute...
...If this was the case, why did anyone ever leave the east coast...
...I would say that's a bad deal...
...Why should governments have a sacred duty to punish homeowners who deviate from the architectural fashions of earlier decades...
...The church sued and won in federal appeals court...
...77 Delray, Florida, last July, the local preservation board pushed forward with a proposal to designate a number of lakefront homes as historic landmarks despite the opposition of all the home owners...
...The Trust also slapped the "most endangered" label on a huge area in rural Virginia where the Disney Company wanted to build a historic theme park...
...Preservationists portray their controls as minor nuisances...
...The D.C...
...Anne's Roman Catholic Church and parochial school in West Palm Beach is fighting the local government to block the imposition of historic status on two aging, termite-infested, rotting buildings...
...The Trust gave almost as much to that campaign as the Sierra Club...
...They" are right sods...
...Over 300 local landmark laws allow bureaucrats to control the interiors as well as exteriors of designated buildings...
...The Los Angeles Times noted: Supporters of the regulations have cited the church's desire to build a traditional Eastern-style dome atop the roof as an example of a change that would impair the building's historical value...
...the following year, it listed all of Cape Cod, Massachusetts...
...Some old churches have been caught in the crossfire of foolish government policies...
...War on Property Rights The preservation activists would merely seem ridiculous if they didn't pose such a threat to the rights of property owners...
...The Trust—which receives $7 million a year from the federal government—has also helped bankroll political opposition to property rights initiatives...
...This is where worship of state power comes in handy, as preservationists impose their will on property owners and override Fifth Amendment guarantees of "just compensation" for private property "taken for public use...
...The same people who'd scream for the ACLU if the local government dictated that everyone had to dress in fashions popular in the 194o's avidly support government dictates that force everyone to "dress" their houses the same way that they were decked out fifty years ago...
...The Trust's brief to the Supreme Court argued that, even if "the City's action has affected the overall level of religious activity at the Church," it did not infringe on religious freedom, since "no individual member of the Church is being denied the ability to worship...
...Anderson complained that "we couldn't change the mildewed carpets or the broken seats without petitioning them...
...Edward Norton, the Trust's vice president for public policy, justified the contribution at the time by calling Referendum 48 "a stake aimed at the heart of historic-preservation activities...
...In November 1995, one of southern California's largest Armenian congregations—the St...
...The Trust has also filed numerous briefs with the Supreme Court urging that the Court deny property owners any compensation for government actions that nullify or minimize their right to use their property...
...One of their favorites, urban planner James Kunstler, denounced fast-food commercialism last year: "The price we're paying for a Big Mac is a complete degradation of our civilization, the complete degradation of our public life...
...but that's freedom for you...
...The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the federally chartered, Washington-based preservationist organization that's assumed a leadership role for preservationists nationwide, puts out a press-grabbing list each year of the Most Endangered Historic Landmarks...
...The paper concluded that "no one can say for sure whether homeowners would have agreed to the [Historic Register] listing had they known all the facts...
...Some preservationists seem paranoid about any change...
...Whatever is old is holy...
...He would be taken more seriously, however, if he took himself less seriously...
...His heart is often in the right place, even if he wears his spleen on his sleeve...
...Pinter reacted farcically...
...Mary's Apostolic Armenian Church—petitioned the city council to exempt its church from preservation restrictions...
...In 1993, the Trust placed the entire state of Vermont on the list...
...True, the press has mocked him, traduced him, misrepresented him, and misreported him...
...But, according to the Trust, the only way to protect the past achievements of private property is to strip current property owners of almost all control over their land, businesses, and homes...
...Preservation League issued its own "Most Endangered Properties List" last year—and among the group's demands was that Pierre L'Enfant's original 1791 plan for the city of Washington be given historic status—thus locking the nation's capital into a zoo-year old strait-jacket to comply with the Frenchman's fancies...
...But church officials say the dome is a long-term project and that their immediate needs include moving the church altar, building a choir loft and enlarging the sanctuary and Sunday school—all of which require the building to undergo the historical review process under the current law...
...In Annapolis, Maryland, preservation police are fighting a crime wave of hanging flowerpots alleged to be defacing the historic district...
...Craig Anderson, a movie producer and the founder of the Hudson Guild Theater, abandoned efforts to resurrect a run-down concert hall in Manhattan after the Commission slapped a historic designation on the building...
...During the Gulf War he was onthe side of the angels (and Martin Amis) when he campaigned successfully to prevent Abbas Cheblak, a Palestinian enemy of Saddam who had lived in Britain for sixteen years, from being deported as a security risk...
...Even though the church was not listed as a landmark, and even though only the front facade of the churchwas in the local historic district, the local historic board still denied permission...
...The Backlash It's no wonder that historic preservation efforts are beginning to generate a backlash...
...There are vast numbers of ugly, shoddy, shabby buildings in this country—many of them more than a few years old—and it is difficult to understand why government should use its iron fist to force people to continue living in fourth-rate architectural heaps...
...The trouble with Pinter is not that he is entirely wrong but that he is entirely righteous...
...It is almost impossible to exaggerate the overreaching of some preservation Historic preservationists hate the modern church...
...When not paranoid, preservationists can be positively schizophrenic about modernity...
...Most of the buildings that the Trust and its devotees insist are historic treasures were created as the result of decisions by private owners who had control over their own land...
...As the Palm Beach Post noted, "Both buildings have racked up numerous code violations...
...Pinter's friendship with Vaclav Havel speaks well of both men, and his work on behalf of the Kurds and Turkish dissidents is not to be dismissed simply because he overlooked the plight of, for example, contra dissidents under Ortega...
...The Trust is also calling for stricter zoning around the country to restrict development...
...The parish offered to give the supposedly "historic" buildings to the local government, as long as the buildings were moved off church property—but the government preferred to impose historic designation and compel the church and its members to bear the cost of maintaining the property...
...Oil THE PUBLIC POLICY by James Bovard Don't Touch That Style...
...A1994 study in the Journal ofReal Estate Finance and Economics concluded that local historic preservation controls in Philadelphia resulted in a 24 percent reduction in the price of small apartment buildings...
...It has since been replaced by what might be termed hysterical preservationism...
...04 56 April 19 97 The American Spectator...
...One church official complained: "If you designate it, you will have tied our hands as a living, viable presence in the community...
...lt Old churches have been caught in the crossfire of foolish policies...
...The local government first used its eminent domain powers to banish many of the church's worshippers, and then held a gun to the church's head—demanding the church spend whatever is necessary to maintain its buildings to satisfy government officials...
...In recent years historic preservation boards have seized control over places as diverse as pet cemeteries and real-estate advertisement concrete elephants...
...Preservation bureaucrats in Philadelphia control more than 15,000 buildings...
...Preservation advocates endlessly repeat that imposition of government controls over property owners practically guaranThe American Spectator • April 19 9 7 55 tees an increase in property values...
...But even if there was such an effect at one time, the more such designations are slapped over the landscape, the less effect they will have...
...As Chicago alderman Bernard Stone, a member of the City Council committee on historical and architectural landmarks, says, the credo of the preservation movement is, "Anything that doesn't move, landmark it...
...if he were less morally indignant...
...Wally Herger denounced the National Register of Historic Places last year for "acting with dictatorial powers and complete disregard for local communities and local people...
...We will be stuck with buildings we cannot use...
...The parish is struggling to survive in part because of a massive government development project that "saw entire neighborhoods leveled," according to the Post—and was a major failure...
...California Republican Rep...
...Trust President and longtime Democratic Party hack Richard Moe declared in a speech late last year: "Weshould demand land-use planning that exhibits a strong bias in favor of existing communities...
...Anything old is, in many areas across the nation, being treated as sacred...
...restaurant as "an authentic icon of contemporary American life...
...Yet the National Trust in 1994 placed the oldest surviving McDonald's restaurant (in Downey, Califomia) on its "most endangered" list...
...It contends that compelling the church to stay in inadequate quarters is an insignificant burden...
...Since many churches are among the oldest buildings in a community, they are often first on the preservation's target list...
...Preservationists have progressed from targeting specific buildings to targeting neighborhoods, even entire valleys and states, for strict, government-enforced controls...
...Stuck with Old Churches When the Clinton administration sought to whip up national hysteria about the arson of black churches in the South, the National Trust jumped on the bandwagon—announcing that it was putting the black churches allegedly hit by the attacks on its annual list of "most endangered historic places...
...The National Trust was a high-profile opponent of the "takings"/private-propertyrights legislation from the GOP's Contract With America...
...A jogging path received landmark status, as did a ship that sank several years ago...
...The rectory in particular is in poor shape, so much so that diocese officials say they worry about the parish priest's safety...
...The historic preservation movement did much a few decades ago to educate the public about the value of historic buildings...
...The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board even forced a biotech company to spend half a million dollars to add fake smokestacks to an old power plant that it had converted to a research laboratory...
...Meanwhile, there are the plays...
...In Tempe, Arizona, last year, the Planning and Zoning Commission endorsed a new policy that would allow the historic district designation process to formally begin after a petition from a single homeowner...
...Poor Harold: he has spent much of the past twenty years waiting for a squadron of Cossacks to charge him, but no one will even break his windows and drag him out of his house...
...Preservationists were rebuffed last November by overwhelming popular opposition in their attempt to place an entire 75 square-mile section of an Ozarks river valley on the National Register of Historic Places...
...The Supreme Court is currently considering a case involving the Saint Peter's Catholic Church in Boerne, Texas, that sought permission to expand and renovate the side and rear of its building to accommodate its growing number of worshippers (the church has thousands of parishioners but only 220 seats...
...In clashes between preservationists and church congregations, the preservationists often sound far more pious and righteous than the Christians...
...Once the novelty effect of historic preservation wears off, its positive economic impact will evaporate —and all that will be left is the government controls...
...The same bureau-crats imposed landmark status and seized control over the 1958 interior of the Four Seasons restaurant, prohibiting the owner from removing two hanging sculptures, changing the draperies, or modifying the restaurant's bar...
...The ubiquitous "they" willnot jail him, they will riot wiretap him, they will not rape his wife or kidnap his children...
...Leading the charge against property rights is the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has gone from seeking to educate Americans about historic treasures to clamoring for maximum restrictions on private land use...
...Still, no man can be wrong, or absurd, all the time...
...In obstructing the natural flux of change, preservationists are ultimately preventing the creation of new structures that, fifty years from now, might themselves be regarded as national landmarks...
...The New York Landmarks Commission banned residents of Manhattan's Soho neighborhood from planting trees—simply because Soho did not have trees when it was a grimy industrial neighborhood in the late i800's...
...We have a precise agenda," he declared, "and we are going to meet again and again until they break the windows and drag us out...
...In Holden, Massachusetts, advocates of imposing preservation controls on isio homes and businesses used what an editorial last year in the Worcester, Massachusetts Telegram 6 Gazette called a "dubious means: a high-pressure campaign in which many homeowners may have been left in the dark about the impact of historic designation on their property rights...
...The case turns on interpretation of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act—an act the Trust scorns...
...The Trust is on the front-line fighting against proposed "Superstores" in Manhattan — essentially using its muscle and prestige to insure that local residents continue paying far more than citizens in neighboring locales for basic necessities...
...A Trust press release declared that the 1953 restaurant is a cultural landmark that "symbolizes America's love affair with the automobile and the eye-catching vigor of roadside architecture" and labeled the boarded-up, out-of-date (no takeout window...
...What is certain, however, is that the bitterness left by this episode is likely to divide the community and poison civic discourse for years to come...
...The preservationist theology presumes it's heresy to demolish a building of a certain age (25 years old in Seattle, 5o years in parts of California...
...City rules require only that a structure meet certain broad criteria, such as 'prominence of spatial location.' Or it must be 'an easily identifiable visual feature of a neighborhood...
...In 44 The Trust placed the entire state of Vermont on its 'most endangered' list...
...Seattle, the paradise of coffee pretension, is flush with preservation fever...
...Ronald Lee Fleming, president of the Townscape Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, puts it differently: "We seem to be suffering from a new kind of artifact worship—not of the houses of 'great white men' but of the ugly and ordinary at the expense of enhancing the larger environment...
...In some cities, however, government bureaucrats have seized control even over church interiors...
...A1995 Wall Street Journal article noted, "Just about anything more than 25 years old can qualify as an historical landmark here...
...Norton told TAS via speaker phone that the Trust has also aided efforts to block property rights legislation in Florida, Michigan, Colorado, Virginia, and Oregon, but insisted that "no money from the federal appropriation was used directly, indirectly, or in any way for either lobbying or in any activity in any way" related to the Trust's fights against such legislation...
...Government preservation police have seized control over the exteriors—and often the interiors —of perhaps a half million homes and businesses...
...The study, authored by two professors at the Temple School of Business and Management, concluded that "historic control (as practiced in Philadelphia) is confiscatory...
Vol. 30 • April 1997 • No. 4
