Concerning Fort Monroe, I had written (in part):
> That's how powerful the development industry is. It's so powerful that it
> has placed both Preservation Virginia and the National Trust for Historic
> Preservation into the pitiful posture of recognizing the true value of
> the asset while at the same time cowering from the duty implied by each
> organization's name: the duty to stand up for protecting, nurturing and
> ultimately enhancing this national treasure.
>
> And if I may add, the same applies to the nation's historians, some of
> whom -- including Ed Ayers and Ira Berlin -- were outright snookered on
> the question at a panel-review symposium in early 2008 by the political
> operatives in charge of the Fort Monroe planning. (Someone please ask me
> to justify that charge; all I need is the slightest nudge.)
Jurretta J. Heckscher replied
> Okay, I'll bite: please tell us more!
> Thanks.
I do want to answer this. Thought you'd never ask. But for the moment,
here's something I'm distributing widely this morning:
To a very large number of friends of Fort Monroe (and also to a large number
of decision makers and journalists):
In presenting the Fort Monroe situation to the world, the New York Times
last night made big progress -- troublingly nonfactual progress concerning
crucial geography, but nevertheless big. You can now help, but it needs to
happen fast, preferably this morning.
In April, Adam Goodheart published the New York Times Magazine article “How
Slavery Really Ended in America,” telling the Fort Monroe Freedom Story but
omitting any mention of what's endangering post-Army Fort Monroe. Last night
he added “The Future of ‘Freedom’s Fortress’”
(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/the-future-of-freedoms-fortress/)
via the “Opinionator,” which the Times calls “exclusive online commentary.”
Apparently comments are delayed; no doubt I wasn't the only reader who
submitted comments last night when the essay appeared. Today I hope others
will comment too. The world is watching.
Goodheart's new online piece is great stuff. Unfortunately, though, he seems
to have accepted the falsehood that in the early years of the struggle to
save Fort Monroe, local and state officials did anything for creating a
national park besides grudgingly accepting the possibility of a minor,
mainly advisory National Park Service presence at most. He also seems to
imagine that the 200 acres of envisioned national park are a single
"enclave," when in fact that enclave would be bifurcated so that -- sorry,
but I have to say it yet again -- financially and culturally
counterproductive overdevelopment on the remaining 365 acres can spread to
create a big, sense-of-place-destroying gap in the national park on Fort
Monroe's bayfront.
That is, Goodheart mentions the idea of "turning 200 of the fort’s 565 acres
over to the Park Service, with the remainder open to development under
strict controls." Question: Would we accept "strict controls" as
justification for, say, a subdivision on a hillside facing Monticello? Sense
of place matters.
And he writes: "Last month, the Park Service held a public comment session
... ; more than a thousand people attended and not one spoke against the
national monument designation. The only dissent, [Hampton Mayor] Ward said,
was over whether the 200-acre enclave would be sufficient."
It's plainly not sufficient, and it's deplorably split. Its envisioned
footprint mocks the importance of this national treasure and, ironically,
would ensure the suboptimizing of its economic potential. That's why about a
hundred people so far -- would the mayor actually call them “dissenters”? --
have e-mailed me copies of their demands to officials for a _real_ national
park.
What America needs at Fort Monroe is a revenue-generating, partly
self-sustaining, taxpayer-minimally-burdening, innovatively structured Grand
Public Place built on a substantial national park -- a _real_ national park
stretching unsplit along the entire bayfront and including the moated
citadel.
Yet Virginia's leaders remain grimly determined to underdevelop Fort
Monroe's potential by overdeveloping its real estate. And America's
historians are not only letting them get away with it without even
commenting, but -- like their colleague Goodheart -- may not even be aware
of the key salient in the actual plan for these many hundreds of acres of
national historic landmark land.
Friends of Fort Monroe, however, can understand the actual picture, and can
speak up. When the Times begins posting comments beneath Goodheart's fine
"Opinionator" piece, I hope many of them do.
Thanks.
Steven T. Corneliussen
[log in to unmask]
Cell 757 813-6739
Please see my recent Fort Monroe op-ed posted online at the Richmond
Times-Dispatch:
http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/oped/2011/aug/11/tdopin02-corneliussen-what-fate-for-this-national--ar-1230828/
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