Oct
12
Written by:
Photography
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Written by: Tony
CS Kern recently got to make a contribution to the public awareness of Muncie’s endangered structures. We did the photography, design, and printing of a poster showcasing 11 sites deemed worthy of saving.
The interesting part to me was the way the 11 sites were chosen. The Muncie Historic Preservation and Rehabilitation Commission set up a booth at the Old Washington Street Festival and at Artswalk. Visitors were encouraged to vote for the structures they deemed important, from a longer list of Muncie’s threatened places.
The “winning” structures were not chosen by a panel of experts, but by festival attendees. People could use their own personal experience in the community to decide which places were the most worthy of saving. They could pick buildings in the neighborhood where they grew up, or sites they visited with their parents, or those local landmarks that have simply been there for a lifetime and would take memories with them if they disappeared.
The choices ranged from Muncie’s original hospital, a small, dilapidated, house-like structure built almost 40 years before Ball Memorial Hospital; to the Roberts Hotel, a community showpiece that continues to tease us with the promise of economic viability.
My contribution was to put photography to work jogging memories. When you see a picture of a familiar place the memories come rolling back. To paraphrase Bill Morgan, Historic Preservation Officer, “Almost everybody cares about saving important old buildings. They just need to be reminded.”
Who knows if the project will help save any of the featured places? Step one is to get some attention. We can only decide to help a situation if we know about it.
Maybe a few of the places on the poster will survive into the next century. They won’t all make it, even if there are some excellent arguments for saving them. For a convincing list of economic reasons for historic preservation, see http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/hp/smartgrowth/rykema.asp.
But many won’t make it. They won’t get the backing of a place where Washington slept or Lincoln spoke, but we will need a few survivors because they’re important to the locals—important to preserve the history of the community, the history of the culture, and to educate us about where we’ve been. As James Nathan Miller wrote “ . . .our old buildings are the chroniclers of more than History with a capital “H.” They preserve the memory of our historical roots, with a lower-case “r.”
Acknowledgements
The poster was produced by the Muncie Historic Preservation and Rehabilitation Commission and made possible by a Historic Preservation Education Grant from Indiana Landmarks, the Indiana Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Bill Morgan, Muncie’s Historic Preservation Officer, with Susan Lankford and Josh Burton, Muncie Historic Preservation and Rehabilitation Commissioners spearheaded the project. Poster design by Lyn Whitesell. Printing by CS Kern. Thanks to Bill Morgan for help with this piece.
For a copy of the poster or more information about the buildings, contact Bill Morgan at bmorgan@cityofmuncie.com or 765-747-4825.