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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