Dear HCN,
Hooray for Tom Casey who
wants to preserve the nuclear power plant structures west of
Olympia, Wash., according to HCN’s Heard Around the West column
Oct. 16. They are an honest representation of our cultural
heritage, and, like charming 1800s brick buildings, their presence
on the landscape tells us, over time, just where we’ve been and
what we’ve done.
In Denver, metro Denver
preservationists advocate leaving the haunting chemical
manufacturing plants and six-story concrete nerve-gas plant
standing on the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. The plants are the reason
the 27-square-mile place was set aside to serve World War II, then
the Korean, Vietnam and Cold wars. It’s also why the Army and Shell
Chemical are engaged in a multibillion-dollar cleanup and,
ironically, why the arsenal is now home to hundreds of deer and a
large complement of prairie birds and wildlife: 50 years of urban
development drove them in.
Demolition of such
complex structures is a dubious expense, while their cultural
value, like their physical presence, is monumental. For Olympia’s
nuclear plants and the arsenal’s chemical plants, U.S.
environmental law and the International Chemical Weapons Treaty,
respectively, will probably dictate that we spend the millions to
demolish these landmark behemoths of war. That’s convenient for the
many whose rather simplistic wish is to return the land to its
“natural” state.
Prior to World War II, the
arsenal land was farms and communities; before that it was buffalo
range; before that it was woolly mammoths; before that dinosaurs
and an inland sea, and before that … ? Which “natural state” do
we restore it to? After the Superfund cleanup, the refuge will be
“kind of natural’ – a 17,000-acre fenced zoo of man’s design,
fashioned roughly, hardly completely, on the romanticized era prior
to European settlement. But the arsenal will retain the lakes and
ditches built for irrigation and the imported plant species because
they aid the wildlife (and please the visitors). But not those
horrid old chemical plants. We’re losing one heck of a history
lesson.
Chris
Ford
Denver,
Colorado
Chris
Ford is on the board of the Urban Design Forum, which serves
metropolitan Denver. She can be reached at
303/573-5551.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline What’s historic? What’s worth preserving?.
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