I do have to say that your quip about condos as replica slave cabins is one
of the best bits of drollery I've heard in this whole struggle to get
Virginia's leaders to act like Virginia's leaders. (Well, wait -- on the
fiftieth anniversary of Massive Resistance in the Norfolk schools, brought
on by Virginia's leaders, maybe I should qualify that implied high standard
for Virginia's leaders.) 

A problem is that the overall situation is just plain complex. This not
Fort Drab or Camp Swampy. (And by the way, crummy old barracks, if anyone
imagines them there, have almost nothing to do with it.) Fort Monroe --
there's an aerial photo on the home page at www.CFMNP.org -- is a national
treasure and a gem with multiple facets. It is nothing like a typical Army
post.

I mentioned that everybody agrees on 70% of the solution, and that the
governor's people have now codified that much. That 70% includes the
intentions to 
* reuse the fine old residences and the office-building campus adaptively,
in part to generate revenue, 
* enlarge the marina, again in part for revenue,
* preserve the moated fortress, and adaptively reuse the buildings within
it (yet again, in part for revenue), and
* preserve and enhance the northernmost parts of the post as green space
and beaches. 

As to the other 30%: Still highly influential are a handful of powerful
Hamptonians and their allies who want to profit in the short term -- and
who want Hampton to profit only in the financial sense, rather than
treating Fort Monroe strategically so as not only to profit the region
financially even more for the long term, but to gain cultural and
recreational enrichment as well. 

But even those people don't want to ruin the moated fortress. What they do
want to ruin is the moated fortress's setting. And it is that setting that
relates to the historical significance that I propose needs constructive
revisionism.

On the Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park (CFMNP) home page, I posted
a picture showing multistory upscale condos blanketing the heart of Fort
Monroe -- the "Wherry Quarter" north and northeast of the moated fortress.
It's not our picture. It's from the Florida consultants hired by Hampton
with the support of our governor -- the very governor who, in other
contexts, genuinely cherishes green space.

I asked my son-in-law, an information-technology engineer who works pro
bono for the CFMNP preservation group as our Webmaster, to photoshop that
picture. I asked him to spend 20 minutes making the heart of Fort Monroe
look like part of one of the zillion possible versions of a
revenue-generating, self-sustaining, innovatively structured hybrid
national park akin to San Francisco's Presidio. 

His resulting picture is posted on the home page too. When we posted it,
the entire civic conversation changed, because the people who want to ruin
the setting at Fort Monroe understand the power of an image. They also saw
that the local TV stations were broadcasting the two contrasting images.

Mind you, all of Fort Monroe, not just the moated fortress, is a national
historic landmark. It's Old Point Comfort. 

That ship that brought the first Africans in 1619? It landed at Old Point
Comfort en route to Jamestown. Slaves helped build the moated fortress. And
almost a quarter of a millennium after 1619, Fort Monroe became the place
where slavery began to die.

Now, nobody believes that Fort Monroe overall can be restored to recreate
the locale at the time of the most important historical events in Old Point
Comfort's past, the events of 1861.

(Some people still believe that the imprisonment of Jefferson Davis is just
as important.  But that imprisonment is not an event that confers meaning
on the Civil War or on American history itself. Call me a revisionist. No
doubt I'm also "politically correct.") 

But in my view, it's plenty possible and sensible -- and economically
advantageous -- to respect the natural setting. That'd not be to try to
restore the 1861 sense of place, but to retain a useful sense of it. 

A century from now, when a fourth-grader stands on a rampart overlooking
both Hampton Roads and the Chesapeake Bay, she -- and more importantly, her
moral and historical imagination -- will need to be in a place that
features live oaks and green space, not multistory condos and parking lots.

Please consider: The powers-that-be run a TV commercial about Virginia's
Historic Triangle of Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown. Their
commercial claims that the Historic Triangle tells the story of America's
beginnings. 

But America did not really begin until slavery began to crumble, leading to
the time -- still going on, of course -- when Jim Crow and his residue
began to be opposed and overcome. 

The powers-that-be are impelled mainly, but not entirely, by marketeers,
not historical imagineers. Nevertheless in Virginia's past it's possible to
find examples of the kind of leadership that would help us to craft
something that could really tell the story of America's beginnings: a
Historic Quadrangle, with the newest part anchored at Fort Monroe.

It won't happen unless wiser minds, minds who see the bigger picture,
assert themselves in the public discussion.

Thanks.

Steve Corneliussen
Poquoson, Virginia

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