> [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Maintaining historical sites is not as important as bringing
> in lots of money. Since most of our civic leaders and
> population can't get their history right, why would you
> think that leadership is going to invest in something that
> won't bring them big bucks.

Since I can't discern the tongue-to-cheek relationship in this question, I'll just blunder along earnestly:

Even the most salivating developers agree that the most economically enriching disposition of post-Army Fort Monroe involves a partly-self-sustaining, revenue-generating, taxpayer-minimally-burdening, innovatively structured national park inspired by the example of San Francisco's Presidio.

Moreover, even if President Ayers is only close to right that American history's greatest moment took place at Fort Monroe, this isn't just another case of "maintaining historic sites" the way that the federal base-closure law presumes that it's just another case of closing a nondescript base surrounded by soybean fields.

At http://www.whro.org/home/cfc/productions/monroe.htm you can watch online the Norfolk PBS station's moving, 27-minute documentary about the Fort Monroe question, "Kingdom by the Sea." At one point in that film, an official of the National Trust for Historic Preservation ranks Fort Monroe with Monticello and Mount Vernon.

Fort Monroe is a national treasure with international significance. So the question above, whether it's wryly intended or not, highlights --and maybe implicates -- a mindset that ignores cultural, historical, recreational and environmental enrichment for the sake of the perceived maximizing of financial enrichment.

The deep irony in this six years of struggle has been that Virginia's leaders in both parties, the captives of development-for-development's-sake, fail to act on the obvious economic reality that "swanky condos" will actually cost us money when compared to some fitting disposition for this treasure.

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.) As far as I know, no historian has so much as even questioned the original misframing of Fort Monroe as a project of "redevelopment"-- a key term in the base-closure law -- by one city, Hampton.

Historians appear to believe the smiley-faced press-release music about respecting the history, etc. Even Adam Goodheart, who published the Fort Monroe story "How Slavery Really Ended in America" in the New York Times Sunday magazine in April (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html), appears not to see any need to defend the encroachment of development-for-development's-sake on the sense-of-place-defining bayfront at Fort Monroe.

If Monticello somehow fell into the hands of the commonwealth, would anyone suggest donating it to Charlottesville for "redevelopment"? And if they did, would they persist even though it meant reducing Monticello's economic potential for that part of Virginia?

Steven T. Corneliussen
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