Sticks and Stones of History

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Taking the measure of important structures from the nation's past

In San Antonio, two young architects in shorts and T shirts clamber over the crumbling, eroded walls of Mission Concepcion, a church-cum-fortress built by the Spanish in the early 1700s. "These structures are dissolving," says John Schlinke, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia. "The stone is melting."

In Nicodemus, Kans.--a cluster of trailer homes and collapsing limestone houses, seemingly marooned in the vast rolling prairie--a six-member team of architects and students sits in the township hall, patiently listening to reminiscences by some of the village's 50 remaining residents. The team is trying to fill in a "municipal fingerprint" of Nicodemus during the decades after 1877, when it was founded by a colony of emancipated blacks.

In Lowell, Mass., graduate students bend over drafting tables inside the Boott Cotton Mills, which produced textiles from 1835 until 1955. Working with ink on translucent Mylar, one of them delineates the canals that carried water from the Merrimack River to giant turbines beneath the mills. Says Deborah Hurst, from Washington University in St. Louis: "The technology used when these buildings were built is extraordinary."

These and similar scenes at eight other historic sites this summer have marked the progress of an invaluable federal program called the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Administered by the National Park Service, with technical assistance from the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.), HABS has produced drawings, photos and descriptions of more than 16,000 important structures for its archives in the Library of Congress. They form an irreplaceable historical record of American architecture, ranging from Indian pueblos and pioneer structures to palatial mansions and early skyscrapers. Although more than one-fourth of the structures surveyed by HABS no longer exist, the data on those that still stand can serve as guides to restoration and the formulation of intelligent preservation policies. Only the 41 measured drawings and 57 photos in HABS files, for instance, will make possible an accurate reconstruction of Springwood, the Hyde Park mansion of Franklin D. Roosevelt that suffered severe fire damage last year.

By calling attention to our heritage and by helping to train a cadre of experts, HABS, along with a companion project called the Historic American Engineering Record, begun in 1969, has been instrumental in changing preservation from the concern of the proverbial little old ladies in tennis shoes to a powerful citizens movement. This movement recognizes that there are no more frontiers in America and that people can no longer "Go west" to escape our chaotic urban environment. Rather, we must bring some order, stability and livability to the urban sprawl. We need urban conservation as much as we need to preserve our natural resources.

HABS is the brainchild of Philadelphia Architect Charles E. Peterson, 77. In 1933, Peterson suggested it to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, partly as a way to provide jobs for unemployed architects, draftsmen and photographers. Ickes immediately accepted the proposal, and in two weeks' time 1,200 such professionals were hired for six months under the auspices of the New Deal's Civil Works Administration.

The quality and usefulness of this initial effort led to an agreement between the A.I.A., the Library of Congress and the National Park Service to make HABS a permanent institution, funded by federal, state and private sources. In the years following World War II, architects seemed too busy designing new buildings to spend time on old ones. HABS became essentially a summer program for architecture students, under the supervision of professors and practicing architects. This year some 50 students have been working at the eleven sites on a combined budget of $250,000. Surveys are generally requested by state or municipal agencies or private groups, who also help to pay the tab. Stringent budget cuts have reduced HABS' s once orderly if complicated selection process to pot luck.

Lowell is a landmark of the historical awareness that HABS has fostered, a symbol that we see our past no longer exclusively in powdered wigs and pewter candlesticks but also in the gritty romance of woof, wharf and smokestack. With its coarse but handsome brick structures bordering on a web of canals, Lowell is a kind of industrial Venice without gondolas. But if its partly abandoned textile mills are to survive, they must be occupied and put to new uses. To promote interest in redevelopment, the HABS team is preparing floor plans and renderings of the most dramatic of Lowell's old plants, the Boott Mills complex.

The HABS team at the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, whose ornate bell towers rise like baroque sand castles out of the Texas plain, has been updating and supplementing drawings made in 1935 and 1936. "The purpose of the original survey was to capture the missions as they existed then," says Ken Anderson, HABS' principal architect, who flew from Washington, D.C., to work with Schlinke, Texas Tech Professor John White and William Peoples, a recent graduate of California Polytechnic. "This follow-up survey teaches us how rapidly erosion takes place and how soon something will have to be done."

At Nicodemus--named for a legendary black on the second slave ship from Africa, who later bought his freedom--HABS is less concerned with the buildings than with the homesteaders who built them. Increasingly devoid of people and a reason for being, Nicodemus, the only remaining black settlement in Kansas, is almost literally drying up and blowing away in the dusty prairie winds. Before it does, the HABS team is drawing a reconstructed plan of the town during its heyday and chronicling its social and cultural history. Says Team Member Ruth Pharr, 24, a British archaeologist studying at Kansas State: "This is a fascinating exercise in detective work."

HABS' main focus, however, is and must be on sticks and stones, on the technical resourcefulness that made America what it is. Fewer than 25% of the nation's important structures have been recorded by HABS so far. The program deserves wider support and the recognition that its drawings and photos are more than nostalgic reminders of the past. They are essential documentation for America's identity and its sense of place in the future. --By Wolf Von Eckardt. Reported by Lee Griggs/Nicodemus, with other bureaus

With reporting by Lee Griggs This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.