Trying to leverage ethnic and social diversity into the
National Historic Landmarks (NHL) program is like trying to get Christianity to
embrace polytheism. Or maybe to get Judaism or Islam to do so, since Christians
do have that weird Trinity thing.
That was the thought that kept coming to me as I rode the
Washington Metro home last Thursday from a meeting that the National Park
Service (NPS) held on the subject – that is, on diversity in the NHL program –
at the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria. I’d taken part at the
request of NPS Associate Director Stephanie Toothman and NHL/National Register
boss Paul Louther, but I’m still trying to figure out why they invited me. Maybe
as a token bow to my non-loyal opposition status, or my faltering work on
National Register Bulletin 38, or something.
Wait a minute, I hear people asking. The National Historic
Landmarks Program?
Yes, there is such a program – established under the 1935
Historic Sites Act and still chugging along, because Washington DC almost never
terminates something once it’s started. And because it justifies the conduct of
“theme studies” upon the basis of which places are nominated as Landmarks; such
studies are nice, generally meaningless bits of vote-candy that members of
congress can dole out to preservation-minded constituents. Never mind that
enactment of the National Historic Preservation act (NHPA) in 1966 made the
program irrelevant by creating the much more inclusive (though still sadly
limited) National Register of Historic Places.
I found myself throughout the day feeling a real sense of
cognitive dissonance. Many of the people participating – mostly academics and representatives
of “diversity” communities ranging from African-American to LGBT – didn’t seem
really to know that there WAS a NHPA, or what the National Register was. It was
like they had somehow discovered the NHL program without learning anything about
what’s happened since 1935. I found myself (to my considerable alarm)
sympathizing with Advisory Council on Historic Preservation Executive Director
John Fowler as he struggled manfully to convey a glimmer of how what they were
talking about did and didn’t relate to NHPA Section 106. Eyes glazed over.
What they were talking about was how to get more
diversity-related places – that is, places associated with ethnic and social
minorities – nominated to the NHL list. Nomination as an NHL involves preparing
documentation that if anything is even more onerous than what has to be
compiled for a National Register nomination, and they then must be processed by
an advisory committee to the Secretary of the Interior before being, maybe,
inscribed by the Secretary in the list. They must be found by the Secretary to
be “nationally significant” in commemorating and illustrating the nation’s
history.
Nationally significant. Think about that for a moment. Suppose you’re, say, a Sikh American living in
Kansas City, and your local house of worship is very, very important in
maintaining your community identity. So you decide to nominate it as an
NHL. How do you show that it’s “nationally
significant” when most Sikh Americans live on the two coasts and in a few
non-coastal cities that aren’t KC? And why should its “national” significance
matter anyway?
And suppose you do somehow get it listed; what good does it
do you? Or do it, or do your community? Well, if a federal agency is going to
muck it up, then the agency has to go through what amounts to NHPA Section 106
review with NPS involvement, but unless you’re a real fan of NPS, that’s a pretty
thin advantage vis-à-vis just getting it included in the National Register –
or, for that matter, when and if the federal threat arises, getting it
recognized as eligible for the Register.
Other than that…
Well, there’s the pride factor; getting it listed is
something the community can point to with pride. That was made much of at the
Alexandria confab. But is going through a laborious nomination process to get
your house of worship listed the most efficient way to generate pride in and
respect for the KC Sikh community? If it were up to me, I think I’d want to
consider options.
Plus there’s this question: who the devil is the Secretary
of the Interior to decide what’s most important in the heritage of American
Sikhs, or anybody else? What kind of democracy are we living in?
The case that kept being brought up as an example of NHLs as
beacons of diversity was that of the World War II Japanese-American internment
camps; it was said that the theme study leading to the listing of many camps,
and their listing, has been very important to the Nisei/Sansei community. That’s
undoubtedly true, but in the one internment camp case with which I’ve been involved
– that of Tule Lake, California – NHL listing has been a somewhat mixed
blessing. Because of the NHL program’s strict nomination procedures, only a
small portion of the camp could be listed, though the whole place is obviously
eligible for the National Register. Now there’s a proposal for an airfield
expansion, requiring FAA assistance and therefore Section 106 review, and the
local powers behind the project get confused (to put it charitably) about why
they need to consider impacts on anything but the officially listed NHL. At
last report, this was causing the camp’s veterans and their families
considerable trouble. Had the focus of attention
from the beginning been Register eligibility rather than on NHL nomination, their
lives would probably be simpler and the camp would get more thoughtful consideration.
My quick spiel to the assembled enthusiasts in Alexandria
(we were limited to 5 minutes) proposed, of course, that the NHL program is a
silly anachronism that’s long outlived its usefulness and ought to be done away
with. Needless to say, this was not well received.
In fact, it pretty clearly wasn’t received at all. Aside
from one academic who scolded from the podium that “in fact, mister King, NHLs
ARE important” (oh; thanks for that), everyone happily went on to talk about
the challenges of nominating places – and, amusingly, non-places like
distinctive cultural practices and beliefs. And of course, to complain about
how the program really, truly, needs more money from congress.
NPS did provide a pretty nice free lunch, though.
2 comments:
There WAS some insightful discussion at the confab about how unreasonably the notion of “integrity” is interpreted when applied to NHLs, but the discussion could just as accurately have focused on National Register properties.
NHLs and their natural counterparts, National Natural Landmarks, are very worthwhile designations, as long as they are not watered down by local listings. They should be extra special places of national significance - the San Fran Cable Cars NHL, the Barringer Meteor Crater NNL - not just another obscure government list, like the NR. Who decides what rises to the level of NHL or NNL ? What's the process ? I guess it's the same thing as deciding what new monument or heritage center will be allowed on the mall, where, and what it will look like. Or what paintings will hang where in the National Gallery, or what the exhibits in any of the mall museums will be about and look like. The process does the best that it can with good intentions, but it is not democratic, because there is no way to please everybody or represent everybody, or satisfy every taste and preference. This is also true of every federal interpretaive facility anywhere in the US. The NPS still instructs the public in the local development and the"Pueblo" ancestry of Chaco, and grants the Pueblo Tribes veto power over what is said and done about Chaco, even though fewer and fewer people still believe the great houses of Chaco had anything to do with the modern Pueblos. The NHL and NNLs are a form of interpreation, more art than science, and there is no way to make them consistent, 100% inclusive, or foolproof. But they are worthwhile because they can at least impress and please most of the people most of the time, and the cachet helps bring in tourist dollars to some areas that need them.
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