Trust Me: Inside the National Trust

By Arnold Berke

(Art by Richard Thompson)

It was a steel-and-glass kind of party. The Oct. 1 reception that opened the National Preservation Conference in Denver filled the sleek atrium that links a 1956 office building designed by I.M. Pei to a 1983 skyscraper by Philip Johnson. Folks feasting on hors d'oeuvres and sweets could gorge on modernism, too. But the name of the venue, the Wells Fargo Center, hinted at a different period and place. The stagecoachy origins of this venerable company (dating to 1852) evoked the plains, the mountains—the West—that awaited partygoers in days to come.

… Denver's a beautiful city, thanks in part to the City Beautiful, the early 20th-century movement that dressed up cities with monumental public buildings, parks, and boulevards. Conference tours took in the C.B. glories of the Denver Civic Center—state capitol, municipal buildings, and museums framing a central park—and the well-planned neighborhoods that extend eastward from it. One lesson from the tours: Cities are never finished. In the civic center, the restorers of buildings and parkland and the builders of new structures have been especially active of late. And just beyond the neighborhoods, a new community is rising on the site of the old Lowry Air Force Base, taking some of its planning cues from the City Beautiful dreamers of old.

… As we could see on our strolls, housing is big news in downtown Denver. Condos and apartments have revived former department stores, office blocks, and warehouses, attracting a slew of shops and entertainment spots. And swaths of once-empty land are sprouting brand-new structures, many of them filled with what are advertised as lofts. But wait a minute … I thought lofts were supposed to be in old buildings.

… Two hundred or so people filled a "town meeting" to talk about how preservation can seed more housing. Baltimore community renewal specialist Paul Brophy embraced the subject by pointing out that answers to the question "vary with market realities" that range from overheated demand in some places to virtually none in others. Look at the big picture, he said, by emphasizing market-rate as well as less pricey housing, infill as well as restoration, and regional as well as neighborhood planning. Affordable housing, said Preserve Rhode Island programs director Cristina Di Chiera, "is the 10-headed monster, the issue that has so many issues to it." Other remarks ran from the general (the complexities of restoration, the lack of skilled labor) to the specific (offering home maintenance courses, reusing schools).

… Lovable landmarks have always starred at these conferences, as places in which to meet, sites to tour in groups, or architecture to behold on walks. Two historic "halls" bracketed the meeting—the Paramount Theatre, where the first plenary session unfolded midst art deco dazzle, and the Red Rocks Amphitheater, where the last one took place open to the sky and framed by ancient jagged stones. A conference staple, the candlelight tour, showcased late Victorian houses in the Curtis Park neighborhood, a near-downtown community on the mend. Up in the Rockies, a kinetic monument—the Georgetown Loop Railroad—transported visitors exploring the old mining town. And the Chautauqua in Boulder offered relief to bus-bound tourists with a century-old campus of genial buildings designed as a warm-weather center for educational and cultural improvement. (Happily, it still serves that function.) Not all of the landmarks were in the pink. Take, for instance, Skyline Park in downtown Denver, a three-block-long "hardscape" hailed as an oasis when it was built in the 1970s but later knocked for luring crime. Not long before the conference—and after much debate—it was reduced to rubble; now it awaits rebirth in a more felicitous form.

… Southeastern Montana "looks like this—it's gorgeous," said Chere Jiusto at a session on the challenges of preserving western landscapes. The Montana Preservation Alliance executive director was showing slides of the remote, beautiful Tongue River Valley, whose natural and historic features are threatened by coal-bed methane development and construction of a railroad. So much to appreciate and so much to defend, both there and in countrysides throughout the West. Jiusto tied this vast region together with a telling comment on its most precious asset. "Life is about water here," she pointed out. "Water is holy. It's a cultural resource."

… Native American landscapes and the sacred sites they cradle were profiled by the screening of the award-winning PBS documentary In the Light of Reverence. Introduced by its producer-director, Christopher McLeod, this radiant film portrays the Hopi in Arizona, the Wintu in California, and the Lakota in South Dakota in their struggles to protect hallowed places from mining, development, tourism—even from rock climbers and New Age rites. The film airs such weighty issues as religious freedom, free speech, and access to public lands, showing how passionate the desire to preserve history and culture can be. And how inclusive the notion of preservation has become.

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