An article in the Washington Post yesterday described the economic challenges facing great European landmarks and how many are turning to corporate sponsorships and licensing deals to help defray the costs of maintaining ancient buildings. This practice in turn has caused criticism from those who feel it is wrong to “sell” your collective heritage.
I began this blog a little less than seven years ago and in one of my early posts (prior to the invention of photography, apparently) I confessed my own apostasy in the case of the River Forest Women’s Club, a private club that was sold to a private owner who converted it into an award-winning home protected by preservation easements and powered by green technology. (It is now for sale, if you are interested)
The controversy at that time was that the building was perceived as a public landmark, in part because the local Park District had operated it for paid public programming for three years. But the public entity – the Park District – wanted to demolish the building, and did not have the resources to rehabilitate it following decades of deferred maintenance.
Should landmarks – physical elements of our collective heritage – be privatized? The question is faulty on the face because it panders to the false idea that public and private are separate realms. This ideational construct is not found, to my knowledge, in thousands of years of human history. While some entities and enterprises are construed as public or private, their relationships and interpenetrations in the political economy of the real world are manifold.
There are obvious examples of this public-private symbiosis: bailouts of the banking and auto industries under Bush and Obama; financing of private railroads by 19th century land grants; massive municipal subsidies to private sports teams; the colossal public infrastructural support that made suburbs possible. Yet still we prize this permeable distinction.
Clearly some standards are needed…
To me, the challenge in conserving our heritage, in interpreting it and insuring its value to our own and future generations is the challenge of sustainability: how do you keep something vital, productive and relevant over time.
The answer to this question comes not simply from those with expertise in building materials, technologies, or architecture: nor simply from those who understand economics, planning and programming. Every act of conservation, like every enterprise – succeeds or fails based on its successful balancing of all these factors and more. It takes a village.
The question is not whether you put a billboard up on scaffolding, or allow a watch company to license the image of your landmark, or rent out your house museum to a TV production company for three days, but what the return on those actions is in terms of long-term sustainability of site, message, and ongoing public involvement. If I make a public site inaccessible to the general public by renting it out two days a week to private entities, but the return on those two days ensures the long-term survival of the site – and its continued public access five days a week – I think I have a good deal. This is a TV costume drama being shot in one of the courtyard house museums in East Lotus Village (Dong Lian Hua) in the Weishan Heritage Valley last month:
Our National Trust property in Monterey – Cooper-Molera Adobe – was once a commercial structure appended to a house. It will be again, and the leasing to commercial interests will not only sustain the building – it will ENHANCE its message and interpretation because it will again function as it did originally.
At Mount Vernon they rebuilt and reopened the distillery that George Washington had built there. I suppose Ann Pamela Cunningham, who spearheaded the effort to save Mount Vernon in the 1850s might have objected because her goal was to save Washington’s home from the onset of “manufactories”. In terms of historic context, she was wrong, because in fact George Washington HAD a manufactory at Mount Vernon and was at one time the largest distiller in the United States.
But Ann Pamela promoted an ideological purism that sought to venerate landmarks as holy shrines. Because we value the things we share we tend to make them sacred and want to protect them from the impulsiveness of markets or the vagaries of politics. But any student of history can show how even the most sacred constructions had a vital economic role. Moneychangers have ever been in the temple.
Gothic cathedrals were houses of worship to be sure, but they also had a place in important business transactions and documents BECAUSE they were public, communal places. Khmer kings built temples to Shiva and Vishnu for worship to be sure, but also to shift commercial exchange to the environs of their new temple. Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries of England less for religious belief and more because they had tons of money and commercial agriculture.
Perhaps there is utility in making our communal property a little more sacred than our private property. A landmark is different – it contains stories of a community’s shared past. It IS more important. But importance and significance do not require religious asceticism. A site can be significant AND productive.
That is the basic message of the Global Heritage Fund, since Monday my new employer and one of the few entities that recognizes heritage conservation as a vital community and economic development strategy. Our mission is to use some of the world’s greatest heritage sites as keys to poverty alleviation, education and economic growth in developing countries. Join us.