Letter of support from Carolyn Kent to Carol Shull

Letter of support to Carol Shull from Carolyn Kent, Morningside Heights Historic District Committee

NOTE: Morningside Heights is a New York City neighborhood adjacent to Harlem. In addition to her membership on this committee, Ms. Kent is Co-Chair of New York's Committee on Landmarks and Historic Preservation. Her letter offers valuable insights into the problems often faced by those who want to save landmarks of importance to poor people and minorities.

June 8, 2000

Dear Ms. Shull:

Wariness about deteriorated buildings -- especially when the weakened fabric is additional to the original structure/materials -- should not interfere with efforts to preserve and appropriately list historic sites.

In the case of the eight blocks in Chicago where there is an effort to stabilize, restore, register a site important to the development of 20th century American music, the overriding concern must be to capture and protect from demolition a specific and unique marker for a specific national cultural contribution.

When "integrity" of a structure is questioned, I hear rejection of the history housed within that structure -- for any damaged building can be restored and loss of "integrity" should be seen as a temporary condition. There is hardly a designated landmark across the nation that does not included some replacement materials and the resupply of these according to careful restoration standards is the normal work of historic preservation.

Here in New York City, our corner of town, Morningside Heights and West Harlem, has recently benefitted from this kind of thinking on the part of the Landmarks Preservation Commission where the Hamilton Heights Historic District has recently been expanded to include five blocks of deteriorated commercial fronts along Amsterdam Avenue. More recently, there has been Public Hearing for a new, Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Historic District where townhouses along St. Nicholas Avenue, first
defaced by clumsy commercial conversation and then further disfigured by cheaper and cheaper materials and further deformation, have been included in the district on the basis of hope for their restoration and disinclination to put them at risk of greater damage or demolition.

I admire the Commission for taking a giant step of faith that the community will rally behind appropriate rebuilding of these disfigured sites -- where in some cases, such as historic jazz clubs, some of the changes will be stabilized as significant to the cultural history is the site.

The bottom line is the use of local, state and national listing to sustain the sites that help us study and further record the development of the nation. On every level, privation to excessive show of wealth, we need to keep track of ourselves. The perhaps inevitable drift toward demonstrations of wealth must be resisted while we search out the sites that genuinely define our culture -- here is where "integrity", or "wholeness", really enters in. All of our culture matters and because we cannot safeguard all sites, we must choose those we will maintain and value on the basis of what happened there -- not how much money was spent to mark the spot.

Thank you for allowing me to enter into the dialogue now on-going.

Yours truly,

Carolyn Kent,
Morningside Heights Historic District Committee

(and for identification purposes only, Co-Chair, Committee on Landmarks and Historic Preservation, CB#9 Manhattan, New York City)

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