LETTERS FROM HOME: THE COMMON SENSE OF PRESERVING NEGLECTED BEAUTY

June 22, 2000

Dear Leslie,

The city has started condemnation proceedings that could lead to the razing of a vacant landmark hotel. Whether the City Council is serious about tearing down the hotel is unclear. It may be trying to use condemnation as a stick to hasten the long-delayed sale to a party wanting to renovate the historic building.

In any case, DC has vowed to chain herself to the hotel if the wrecking crew ever moves in. So far she has enlisted at least one professor at the university to join her.

Midwesterners have mixed feelings about protests. We don't like them when millionaire actors get theatrically arrested. But in the early 1980s, one of our farmers named Wayne Cryts took 31,000 bushels of soybeans he had stored at a grain elevator when the owners of the elevator declared bankruptcy and his soybeans were being held as collateral. To us, that made sense.

DC comes from a family that embraces protest, albeit idiosyncratically. Her sister, Danel, started the National Organization for Women chapter at the local university back when the administration building was off-limits to anyone in jeans.

A few years ago when the mayor proposed to give himself the power to pardon municipal offenses, DC went before the City Council to object

For years her father has been boycotting a well-known store because it has always refused his requests for donations to charitable causes.

But what happens if DC ends up in chains? The city might eject her from the Historic Preservation Commission, although it might look bad to punish her for being dedicated to her job.

Or she could be arrested and put in jail.

I would remind her that Henry David Thoreau was jailed for a night for refusing to pay a poll tax. "Under a government which imprisons any man unjustly," he wrote, "the true place for a just man is also prison."

Thoreau inspired Gandhi, who wrote: "The real road to happiness lies in going to jail and undergoing sufferings and privations there in the interest of one's country and religion."

If historic preservation is no religion, its adherents understand that wisdom is the counsel of time.

Transcendentalism and a martyr of nonviolent civil disobedience are heavy hitters to invoke when the stakes are a 70-year-old building vacant so long many residents have never been inside.

But the soul of a city resides in its downtown no matter how many malls and Miracle Miles mushroom at its limits and fill its coffers. In the past we have made the foolish mistake of neglecting our city's beauty. Now part of it is endangered. Short women are contemplating steely acts.

When Emerson went to see Thoreau in jail, he asked "What are you doing in here?"

"More to the point," Thoreau answered, "the question ought to be, What are you doing out there?"

Love, Sam