Saying Goodbye to Dick and Sam

I was sorry to learn recently of the passing of Richard (Dick) Jenrette and Alexander (Sam) Aldrich, on April 22, 2018 and July 19, 2017 respectively.

Each man had many accomplishments; you can read Dick’s bio at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/obituaries/richard-jenrette-89-wall-st-power-and-preservationist-dies.html and Sam’s at http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/saratogian/obituary.aspx?n=alexander-aldrich&pid=186166416&fhid=15540. I knew them both as Chairmen of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation during the turbulent 1980s. And yes, both wanted to be called by their first names.

Dick was appointed to the chair by President Jimmy Carter. The rather legendary founder and long-time head of the Wall Street investment firm Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette, Dick was a solid old-school preservationist from the Carolinas. He employed creativity and strategic sensibilities to do well on Wall Street, and he played important roles in the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Dick and the Council’s Executive Director, the late Bob Garvey (also a Carolinian), saw eye-to-eye on most things, and they navigated the Council through the difficult transition into Ronald Reagan’s administration. Specifically, Dick – having been appointed only a short time before Reagan’s election and thus having time on the clock before the new president could replace him, politely declined the White House’s invitation to tender his resignation. He let it be known, though, that he would resign if the new president would appoint a replacement who – unlike Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James G. Watt – was not devoted to unraveling the last (then) twenty years or so of environmental and historic preservation law and regulation. The White House fulminated, but eventually agreed to appoint Sam.

Sam had Rockefeller family connections, and a long history of work in preservation in New York State, particularly in and around Saratoga Springs. He was charming, politically astute, and often a lot of fun to work with.

As head of the Advisory Council’s Section 106 shop, I was somewhat insulated from the Chairmen, but I very much respected both Dick and Sam. Dick oversaw our bruising encounters with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the city governments of New York and Detroit over the Morosco Theater (New York) and Hudson’s Department Store (Detroit). We failed to achieve meaningful preservation of anything in either case – both buildings were demolished – but we tried hard to make sure that local preservation interests had such opportunities as realpolitik allowed to influence government decision-making. In the Morosco Theater case, one of my letters was accurately characterized in the media as “the plaintive wailings of an embattled bureaucrat;” in the Hudson’s case, Detroit mayor Coleman Young let my colleagues and me know in no uncertain terms that no honky bureaucrats were going to stand in the way of his redevelopment schemes. And he was right, but we in the trenches appreciated the support and insulation from the White House that Dick gave us.

Sam was much more part of my life, overseeing the rework of the Section 106 regulations and the complex struggle to keep the Department of the Interior from emasculating the Council, un-funding the State Historic Preservation Officers, and generally wreaking havoc with all aspects of federal historic preservation other than tax credits; those were OK, since they benefitted well-to-do property owners. It was also on Sam’s watch that we began serious interactions with Indian tribes. Highlights I remember are the Council meeting on the Navajo Reservation as guests of the Navajo Nation and our consultations with the National Congress of American Indians, Native American Rights Fund, and American Indian Movement about how tribal historic properties and concerns (notably about ancestral graves) should be addressed in Section 106 review. Though Sam had little personal acquaintance with tribal concerns, he had marched from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King, and was unfailingly considerate and respectful of tribal and minority concerns.

Both Dick and Sam, of course, interacted with the Council staff through our inimitable executive director Bob Garvey, without whose energy, intelligence, and political wile nothing would have been possible.

Sam was eventually succeeded by Cynthia Grassby-Baker, who was very much part of the G.H.W. Bush administration. Though I – like my colleagues – was pretty dubious about Cynthia, it intrigued me that unlike Sam and Dick, she was not part of the traditional eastern preservation establishment. It was on Cynthia’s watch that the Council approved what was (under National Park Service auspices) to become National Register Bulletin 38, addressing the need to respect the significance of traditional cultural places. Bulletin 38 was in many ways a reflection of Reagan-era populism.

But Dick and Sam – with Bob – made it possible for the national historic preservation program to survive and thrive during the difficult years of the Reagan administration, and to maintain and improve a regulatory process built on broadly-defined multi-party consultation. I’ll remember them all with respect and admiration.

The 2018 "To Bridge a Gap" Conference

I’m grateful to the Muscogee Nation and the USDA Forest Service – specifically The Mark Twain National Forest’s Daniel Cain – for making it possible for me to take part in the 17^th(!) annual “To Bridge a Gap” conference, May 21-25, at the Muscogee Nation’s River Spirit Casino Resort on the bank of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

As I understand it, the conference began when a few members of multiple tribes and several Forest Service archaeologists decided there were mutual benefits in collaboration in cultural resource/heritage management and environmental issues, an forthwith began meeting to explore possibilities. The event has grown in all directions; this year it involved close to 400 people from many tribes, several federal agencies besides the Forest Service, and a good many people from consulting firms. Participation by high-level Forest Service management was impressive, with managers in active attendance from multiple Regional Offices and the Washington Office.  The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation was also well represented, as were several State Historic Preservation Officers. Tribal Historic Preservation Officers were everywhere.

Two things stood out for me.

First, although the Forest Service – to say nothing of other agencies – still mostly hires archaeologists to fill its heritage program jobs, it’s clear that those in such jobs recognize that their responsibilities aren’t largely focused on taking care of, or digging, archaeological sites. There seemed to be widespread recognition that “heritage” involves people, communities, and all those aspects of the environment that people and communities value – water, plants, animals, landscapes, viewsheds and smellscapes, among others. My opening-session blather about traditional cultural places (TCPs) seemed positively old-hat, to me at least.

Second, I was impressed by the real sense of collegiality that everyone seemed to exude. I wasn’t in the executive sessions between tribes and regional offices, where perhaps some head-butting occurred, but in the public sessions there seemed to be a high level of mutual understanding and respect. During the magnificent meals that we all dug into three times each day, it looked to me like people from all the tribes, agencies and other entities were cheerfully breaking frybread together.

It rather astounded me that this was the 17^th TBAG conference, and I’d known nothing about it before Dan Cain invited me to take part. It’s remarkable, and rather chastening, to learn that such a collaborative enterprise could have developed in this century, quite under my radar. But it was very, very encouraging, and I hope the participants go on to bigger and even better things next year and beyond.

Crossing the Talbot Avenue Bridge

On April 21, 2018, I visited the Talbot Avenue Bridge in Silver Spring, Maryland. The bridge, which spans the CSX Railroad tracks, has for the last century been the main connection between the largely African-American community of Lyttonsville and the more upscale white neighborhoods across the tracks, as well as the Georgia Avenue corridor into the District of Columbia.

The gathering on the bridge

The occasion for my visit was the installation of a “pop-up park” on the bridge by my colleague and friend, historian David Rotenstein, who has made it his business to remind us here in liberal Montgomery County – and coincidentally in my birthplace, Decatur, Georgia – of our Jim Crow traditions. Perhaps a hundred people attended. David and his colleagues had affixed interpretive placards to the bridge rails, and there was a “conversation corner” where people could share stories about the bridge and their communities. There were speeches, by David and by elders of the African-American community. The elders talked of the role the bridge had played in the life of their community, as essentially their only connection with the outside world and the larger society and economy.

Why was the event staged? Because the century-old bridge will soon be demolished to make way for the “Purple Line,” a largely federally funded rapid transit project. Katherine Shaver’s September 24, 2016 story in the Washington Post tells the tale: see https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/a-bridge-that-linked-black-and-white-neighborhoods-during-segregation-soon-will-be-lost-to-history/2016/09/24/59df40dc-7ab0-11e6-bd86-b7bbd53d2b5d_story.html?utm_term=.f88831912344.

Lyttonsville elder Charlotte Coffield (L) confers with 

David Rotenstein (R). The white taped line symbollically

represented the division between Black (B) and White (W) communities

A couple of the placards recounted the history of the Purple Line’s environmental impact assessment under Section 102(c) of the National Environmental Policy Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. In the course of this assessment, based on a consultant’s report, the bridge was found eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, but only as a work of engineering. Its sociocultural significance seems to have been entirely ignored.

I take it that the existing Talbot Avenue Bridge will be replaced by a modern structure capable of spanning the widened railroad tracks, so the connective tissue it represents will be maintained. And history has moved on; Montgomery County is no longer the segregated set of communities it once was (though in these difficult times, even here segregationist attitudes occasionally resurface). So maybe losing the bridge is no big deal. But damn, people, is it really right for a property like the Talbot Avenue Bridge to be evaluated for the National Register, and hence considered under Section 106, purely as a piece of engineering? Should its traditional cultural value not have been considered, leading in this case – perhaps – to a more respectful outcome?

Among the "popup park's" markers

I know, there’s King flapping his lips again about traditional cultural places. And this time after the fact. No argument; I just think it’s sad that once again Section 106 review – and NEPA review – of impacts on a place of cultural significance to a community has been short-circuited by narrowminded application of the National Register criteria. I guess I should be used to it by now.