uExpress.com: National Perspective by David Shribman -- (08/03/1999) PROJECT TO PRESERVE AMERICA'S MILLENNIAL TREASURES

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PROJECT TO PRESERVE AMERICA'S MILLENNIAL TREASURES

08/03/1999

PROJECT TO PRESERVE AMERICA'S MILLENNIAL TREASURES

WASHINGTON -- The Alcotts' home in Concord. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong performing George Gershwin's "Summertime." A Lewis and Clark expedition campsite in Missoula, Mont. Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. An experimental breeder reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

These are all chips off the American block, parts of the American heritage, shards of the American experience. Separately they tell of the dreamers, crusaders, explorers, inventors, fidgeters, geniuses and visionaries who built a distinctive country and culture in only 223 years' time. Together they stand as testimony to the variety, drive, ambition and richness of a country that began as a colony and then, irrepressibly if not inevitably, eclipsed the old empires that founded it and helped shape the end of the millennium.

Now all these things -- the papers and the songs, the theaters and the churches, along with pueblo houses in New Mexico and the frock coat of a Civil War surgeon and a Wright brothers' flyer and Thomas Jefferson's poplar forest -- are being saved in a great burst of millennial-era preservation the likes of which this nation has never seen.

And with the change in the millennium is coming a change in the American character, subtle but significant.

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The nation that for two centuries prided itself on its obsession with the future is finding new meaning in its past. The nation that for decades has luxuriated in the disposable is becoming a country of collectors.

It's as if the whole country decided to go antiquing on the very same weekend.

"People are craving the real things, things that are genuine, things that represent our history," says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "The more schlock we put up -- the kind of soulless architecture you find in the suburban strip malls -- the more people want the real thing. Tourism is a huge industry in this country, and the fastest-growing part of tourism is heritage tourism."

It may be the timing, at the end of one millennium and at the beginning of the next, that has caused this new introspection. It may be the economy, which has made more money available for restoration projects, that has fueled the new boom in preservation. It may even be the end of the Cold War, which brought with it a debate about the end of history, that has contributed to the rebirth of history. But whatever its causes, the preservation instinct is growing and is itself a cultural landmark of the time.

The engine of the new preservationism is an initiative called "Save America's Treasures," which is raising money for an endowed fund to be administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and used to make sure that the bricks of history don't fall, the papers of history don't crumble, the sounds of history don't fade, and the sights and sites of history don't disappear.

"We're suddenly aware that this is a marker in time, a milestone in history," says Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, director of the White House Millennium Council, which is a partner in the Save America's Treasures program. "People are asking which of their values in history they want to take with them into the new millennium."

The preservation targets make for a dazzling list of American history and folklore, all the way from the Eli Whitney Boarding House for Single Working Men in Hamden, Conn., to the Honanki Cliff Dwellings in Sedona, Ariz. There's the Bread Street Shul in Los Angeles and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Berkeley and the Dutch Reformed Church of Newburgh, N.Y. There's the congressional cemetery in Washington and the Booth Historic National Fish Hatchery in Spearfish, S.D. There's the Thomas Edison National Historic Site in East Orange, N.J., where so much of the electric revolution began, and McClintock Well No. 1 in Titusville, Pa., where the oil revolution began.

Here are some more cultural landmarks: Neil Diamond singing "America" and Leann Rimes singing "God Bless America" and Denyce Graves singing "Sing America." And Paul Simon singing "Graceland" and Judy Collins singing "Amazing Grace," and Frank Sinatra singing "The House I Live In" and John Denver singing "Take Me Home, Country Roads."

These songs, led off by Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic in Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," are assembled in a new CD, "Sing America," produced by Warner Bros. Records as a fund-raising effort for the preservation project. It is a preservation project in its own right, ensuring that somewhere, someday in the future, people will hear America singing. And one of the things they will hear America singing is "This Land Is Your Land."