More snags along the way

Had anyone told me that historic preservation would be so difficult, I might have had second thoughts about enjoining the cause in which I currently find myself engaged, that of struggling to save a historic 1858 Greek Revival House built and lived in by the founding family of our town. The current thinking among some folks here is that it is not historic because, well, it's not historic. What they seem to mean by that is the impression most people have of "historic homes", that being the grandly fancy gingerbread Victorian homes of a later era. People see an austere earlier home style and they deem it "not historic" because maybe it's not a grand mansion or terribly fancy, but that in no way implies that it is not historic. We've also hit a snag regarding where we want to relocate this house in downtown Kent. There is a small vacant patch of land located on one of the main streets downtown, North Water Street, on which we have a purchase agreement from the owner. The trouble is that a non-profit group who occupies the building next door to it uses that small patch of land for a few months out of the year to maintain a garden and to do the occasional poetry reading. The rest of the year, the land is not used much and now they are crying foul and demanding that the city rescind money that they are going to loan us to go ahead and purchase the property. They are demanding that they should have the right to raise the money to purchase the land themselves and that they are being pushed around by our group, who they seem to feel only cares about "rich dead white guy history" that they feel is irrelevant. They claim that we are allowing history to trump what they feel is a social justice cause, which rings hollow to my ears because I chair my church's Social Justice Committee, and it doesn't raise any red flags in my book.

However, I do appreciate their passion and I am sympathetic to their cause. I appreciate that they have an organic garden down there and have done much to improve what was but a weed choked vacant lot for many long years. I do understand and appreciate their viewpoint and I approve of the work they do to promote cultural arts in our city, but to poo-poo our cause as merely promoting "rich white guy history" is disingenuous when they stand to benefit from our being their next door neighbor. They will be able to use what will be a clean, well lit and beautifully restored space for programming as opposed to their dilapidated space that they are using now, that is often freezing and unheated in the wintertime. I would hope that the property owner of their building will be motivated to invest in his building and restore it as well, or at least fix it up to where it is more attractive and inviting to potential visitors. As it stands now, I wonder that anybody even knows that it is a gallery at all. The building is sorely in need of a great deal of money for renovation and I am assuming that the owner isn't making enough money off of it to do that. The non-profit group that is using this old dilapidated wreck of a building, has very little capital to invest itself and I am assuming that they pay very little rent on the place as a result and cannot afford to move to nicer digs. It's a pity that they have decided to fight us all the way to City Hall over this little patch of land next door to their facility that they do not even own in the first place. They are, in effect, claiming "squatters rights" since they've been granted use of it for the past two decades by its owner, and now they seem to feel somehow cheated out of something they never owned in the first place and never made a move to claim for their use in perpetuity. Rather unfortunately, in a court of law, they would stand no chance of legal recourse. I feel badly for this group that they find themselves in this quandary and have decided to try to raise controversy over it and engender ill feelings toward our group as a result, but there's not much can be done other than for them to express their displeasure at losing 800 square feet of a chunk of land that only constitutes half of the land we are buying. We are granting them use of the rest of the land to do with as they please, and they ought to be very happy that they will still have land on which to carry on their mission while gaining meeting and programming space in the process. We shall see how all of this plays out in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.......