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Historical reprint from The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, February 23, 1978. ©1978 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. By James M. Perry, Staff Reporter. Reproduced in The Paper, March 1978, page 6. Statements about grants and legal protections describe the period, not current law.
WASHINGTON—The federal government has a keeper. His name is William J. Murtagh. and his office is in an undistinguished building in a decaying corner of town. Understandably, he is bogged down with work.
Like most keepers, his job is custodial. But certain limits have been placed upon what Mr. Murtagh can do by the Historic Preservation Act of 1966.
Mr. Murtagh, who holds a Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture and whose specialty is Moravian barns. is the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places. He works in the Office of Archeology and Historic Preservation, which is part of the brand-new Heritage Conservation and Recreation Services, which is part of the Interior Department. And he is a key figure in the growing preservation movement.
The register Mr. Murtagh keeps is the nation’s official inventory of properties that are important for all kinds of reasons to the country, to the states, and to individual towns and localities. Reflecting the explosion of interest in preservation, the number of properties accepted for the Register has expanded to over 2,000 a year from 832 added to the list in 1970.
As it stands now, the register numbers 14,000 entries. They include everything from Lucy the Margate Elephant to Independence Hall to a lonely old cannon on a cliff overlooking Pago Pago in American Samoa to the section of railroad track where Casey Jones rammed his “Cannonball Express” into a freight train. And don’t forget the Alamo.
Discouraging the Bulldozer
Being listed in the Register gives a property a certain amount of protection. The people who run federal bulldozers have to think twice before they try to knock down register properties. The listing doesn’t provide protection from the states, localities or individual property owners. But entries on the Register are eligible for $45 million a year in preservation grants and loans, significant tax benefits and other incentives for people who would rehabilitate historic properties.
The trick is to get the property on the Register ahead of the wrecking ball. “Right now. for example, we’re in a desperate race with time to get Radio City Music Hall on the Register before someone tries to tear it down,” says Stephen Raiche, an official in New York State’s Historic Preservation Office. The Music Hall is scheduled to be closed later this year because of dwindling business.
To win a place in the Register, properties must meet certain criteria. “In the old days,” Mr. Murtagh says, “we thought about individual buildings and we asked: Who lived there? Who slept there? What happened there?” Thus, Independence Hall in Philadelphia meets the requirement that Register properties “be associated with events that have made a significant contribution” to U.S. history. And the section of railroad track in Mississippi where Casey Jones went too heavy on the throttle is an example of properties that “are associated with the lives of persons significant in our past.”
Elephantine Criteria
These days, though. Mr. Murtagh and his people like to emphasize other criteria, such as what kind of historic information the properties may yield or whether they have “distinctive characteristics of a type, period or method of construction” or “possess high artistic values.”
For example. the requirement for “distinctive characteristics” —if not high artistic values—covers Lucy the Margate Elephant. Described by the Register as an “architectural folly,” Lucy is a tourist attraction in Margate City, N.J. She is a wooden elephant 65 feet high, with a canopied seat called a howdah on top and spiral stairs in the rear legs. No entry in the Register ever had more friends: her supporters swarmed to Washington wearing “Save Lucy”. buttons. The keeper was impressed.
(Not everyone is impressed. with Lucy. Some critics contend she is a white elephant that isn’t worth the thousands of dollars of federal preservation grants that have been spent on her.)
Sometimes preservation officials must intervene to save historic buildings. Not long ago in Rapid City, S.D., federal urban-renewal bulldozers were prepared to level a nice block of commercial buildings. John Little, the state’s historic-preservation officer, appealed to the federal agency that referees such confrontations, saying that the buildings were eligible for the Register.
“We saved most of the buildings, and for a while we didn’t dare walk into town, people were so mad at us,” Mr. Little says. Now, though, the old buildings are on the Register, and some of them are being fixed up. One was sold to a private developer for $80,000, and it has been turned into an attractive restaurant.
“But,” Mr. Little adds, “we. have so much still to do.” He has his eye on Dell Rapids, S.D., where the commercial area was built with red and pink Sioux quartz.
Other preservationists agree that the stock of properties eligible for the National Register has barely been scratched. “We try to keep up and go as fast as we can, but this will take years,” New York’s Mr. Raiche says.
The number of nominations reaching Washington has jumped to over 2,300 a year from 1,389 in 1974, and Mr. Murtagh’s office has a backlog of 400 applicants. Some nominees are rejected, of course. Recently, Keeper Murtagh turned down a bid to register what was billed as the former Lochbee, Ark., post office because no one could prove it ever was a post office.
But, after the weeding-out process at the state and local levels, most nominations are approved. (In 1976, 2,057 of 2,360 nominations were accepted.)
Placed on the Register early this year was another Arkansas property—the childhood home of the late Martha Mitchell. the outspoken wife of former Attorney General John Mitchell. Its nominators said the house, built in Pine Bluff in 1896 and called the Ferguson House, is important because Mrs. Mitchell lived -there. But the house went on the Register. a spokesman for the keeper says, because it is “a nice Queen Anne-style, middle-class home of its period with interesting detail.”
Originally published in The Paper, March 1978.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: A few punctuation and OCR readings in this dense clipping remain flagged for editorial review; no original factual claims silently updated.
Original source: SD_Times1978_03.pdf, printed page(s) 6; PDF page(s) 6.
