W(h)ither Away?
The Hall of Fame is in no clear and present danger of being broken up. We have come a long journey in America to a consensus that the safeguarding of our national treasures is one way “to promote the general welfare.” The preservation movement was born — who knows when — possibly when the Egyptians of old tried to extend the life of their kings by embalming them, and doing a good job of it. In the United States it probably began with special care to places related in one way or another to the Pilgrims, Philadelphia, the Potomac, and especially the father of our country: “George Washington Slept Here.”
The tempo preservation was accelerated last century and gathered momentum in the 1900’s with awareness that places cherished and things taken for granted were vanishing. Probably the strongest leap forward was the chartering by Congress after World War II of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private, non profit, educational organization to encourage and assist private endeavor and to take charge of historic properties on behalf of the public. This gave a substantial boost to citizen preservationists, and by the late seventies several thousand private structures were embraced by protective arms and opened to all.
The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 strengthened the movement with matching grants to states and the National Trust, and led to the opening of a National Register of Historic Places. Presumably the Register protects from demolition and “insensitive alteration.” It does so by giving official recognition to objects that are thought to merit preservation. It does not guarantee preservation. A National Trust publication, America’s Forgotten Architecture, says, “It might appear that recognition programs do little but create a lamentation lost that becomes operable each time a building is torn down.”
The National Register contains a multi-thousand of places and things. In the National Trust volume alone we see hundreds of photos of such diversities as sturdy split-rail fences without posts; gracefully sagging shacks; seed elevators; petroleum lines; eye-catching homes, these appealing, those appalling. An entire neighborhood is there; and believe it, a beautiful outhouse with cupola and decorative doorway. Some structures get financial shoring, especially if government takes notice. Some do not, and even outstanding landmarks have been known to disappear.
The Hall of Fame is on the National Resister. It will not disappear this year or next, and will probably celebrate its hundredth anniversary right there on University Heights, where it came into being.
But what kind of shape will it be in for that centennial? Physically fit, we would like to say; but there is not telling what government will do about financing in the face of staggering national debt. The competition for government funds for the remainder of the century and into the next may be a rough game, if played at all. “Preservation starts,” unlike “housing starts,” are not ciphered into public economic reports as items on their own, which show up periodically in the media.
Sooner or later we will have to face squarely those dilemmas already on the global agenda but periodically pushed aside — such as the need to harness and use nature through technology versus the danger of drowning in an environmental mess, the backwash of that technology. to say nothing of the whimper of the population explosion versus the big bang that silences. What, then, if national government will bestow nothing more than blessing on our landmarks by doing nothing more than operate the National Register: an impoverished angel writing in a book of gold.
The Hall lost its fame when it lost its visitors. Fame cannot return unless people return. The words of founding father MacCracken ninety years ago are still relevant: “The Hall of Fame must be visited to by known.”
That simple observation seems so obvious that it hardly bears saying, but the least obvious thing about the obvious is that it has to be repeated once in a whole, lest we forget. Even so clear-eyed a critic as Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, in the troublesome days of closing, that the misguided objective would be to treat the Hall of Fame as a “tourist attraction.” Yet in its best days it had been a regular stop on the New York City tourist circuit. Had there been no tourists, the Colonnade might long since have been wasting in desuetude, with limited regret. One of these days the buses may return, as we hope and the present stewards confidently expect.
But suppose they don.t. Will we once again think of moving the Hall of Fame to save it? American history, we know, is a story of perpetual motion. We have always been adept at clearing out and settling new clearings as others settled into our old.
Modern engineering could move the Hall of Fame with great speed and dispatch stone by stone. Think of London Bridge sold to an American developer for $2 1/2 million, then shipped as blocks down the Thames River, across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, to Long Beach California and trucked through the desert to Havasu City, Arizona, below Parker Dam and there re-assembled over a man-made channel in a man made lake. Havasu is a well advertised city, visited annually by thousands, who find it a pleasant resort complete with drug stores, supermarket, three golf courses — and a community college. The Hall of Fame could likewise be transported almost anywhere. Whatever the site selected, the cost would be enormous, even prohibitive. (To make room for Silliman College of Yale, the Noah Webster House in New Haven was moved by Henry Ford in 1938 to Greenfield, a restored New England setting in Dearborn, Michigan — another American incongruity.)
We can of course turn our backs, let the Hall sit, and take consolation in the knowledge that the most visited places in the world, seen by millions, are ruins: Parthenon, Roman Forum, Stonehenge, Chichen Itza . . . The great Robert Underwood Johnson, whose crystal ball was sometimes cloudy, must have thought of the possibility, for he once assured the world that “were the Colonnades to crumble in an earthquake, the idea of the Hall of Fame would remain as an imperishable monument.” New Yorkers, however, know that when structures are neglected, people move out; and that most buildings don’t crumble in an earthquake but are morel likely to be reduced to rubble by wrecking ball or dynamite; and the “idea” of those buildings sooner or later becomes the reality of new structures. The last consolation of preservationists is a sigh of remembrance over old pictures.
If there is any present comfort, it is to be seen in the small company on University Heights — the Bronx Community College of City University of New York — doing its level best on short rations in the spirit of partnership with the Bronx community to make the Hall of Fame live and thrive.
But the spirited few deserve help. To stay where it is and in good condition the Hall needs the work of many: regular inspection by critical eyes, advisory voices — and action.
To exemplify: as displayed, the bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt is a harsh note in the overall harmony of the Colonnade. Even worse, in 1992, in the name of preservation, “almost all of the 98 busts were stripped of their irregular green finish and given new uniform brown patinas to make them more recognizable and accessible.” But “as works of art they have been severely damaged.” Disapproving conservators say that “less aggressive methods would have kept the green in place and restored the busts to perfectly recognizable appearance. Too late. There are no more options,” and we are stuck with “an unsightly finish.”
It is in the interest of the citizens of the Bronx to band together as guardians of one of their most precious possessions, and of New York City to keep the Hall right where it sits in the Bronx. It is in the interest of New York State to insure that the Hall does not leave New York City. Moving a great landmark seldom advances any reputation but that of the company that engineers the move.
And it is in the interest of the nation that the federal government place the Hall of Fame on the lost of national trusts given a share of perpetual care. In such a spirit we cannot lose. As the letterhead of old told us, “All Americans are shareholders in the Hall of Fame.”
At the least the Hall, after voting in a few more great Americans (from those who reach legal maturity before the year 2000), can be a well kept museum to twentieth century America, what it thought of itself and its past, the greatness of the century — and its folly. For it is in the actions of the devoted twentieth century men and women who built it with their wisdom and all unwittingly neglected it that we trace the rise and fall of fame in one of the nation’s finest monuments.
But as in education, so in preservation: to achieve it we have to want it. Let us, visitors, present owners, government take counsel of ourselves how Fame can return. It will, you know, if we want to to. It will still be alive and looking everywhere. For Fame is older than the House of Fame, older than Noah’s Ark and Webster’s words, older than Pharaoh’s house and more durable. Fame outlasts its definitions and its children.