Historic buildings line High Street in downtown Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. Photo by "Eye Captain" via Flickr
A behind-the-scenes effort to both protect Harpers Ferry National Historical Park from neighboring development and obtain land for a Museum of the National Park Service has been pulled off.
The complicated deal involved the purchase of 15 parcels of land encompassing 564 acres. The dollar-amount of the deal was not immediately announced, although details are expected to be forthcoming in the new few weeks.
In recent months there had been great concern that the so-called Old Standard Quarry property adjoining the park would be turned into a sprawling commercial center. However, this purchase effectively eliminates the current development proposals for not just the Old Standard Quarry property, but also for the Buglar’s Rest, Allstadt Corners, and Benview tracts.
Engineering the land deal was Concord Eastridge, a national player in putting together public-private partnerships. One of the company's affiliates, Stonewall Heights, LLC, consummated the purchases.
Under the deal, not only will much of the land that was purchased be protected by a conservation easement, but some will be set aside for the Museum of the National Park Service with an adjoining hotel and conference center.
"This is a fantastic ending to what could easily have been a catastrophe for one of the most picturesque national parks in the country," says Civil War Preservation Trust President Jim Lighthizer. "My hat is off to the development group that has made this win-win solution possible. It is further evidence that preservation and development are not mutually exclusive, especially when both sides communicate in good faith."
The Museum of the National Park Service had been recommended to be a keystone of the Bush administration's National Park Centennial Initiative. While it was absent from a list of 201 "eligible" centennial protects released back in August, there were rumblings that efforts were being made to see this facility materialize in time for the Park Service's centennial in 2016.
According to this week's announcement, the museum should be ready to open in 2009. It will house significant artifacts drawn from national parks and is expected to become the preeminent venue for the public to experience the diversity of America’s historic and scenic resources. Those familiar with the project say state-of-the-art multimedia and virtual reality displays could attract upwards to a million visitors a year.
The purchase comes after many months of sensitive negotiations between the consortium and local developers. Numerous local officials facilitated these discussions and endorsed the ultimate outcome as a major win-win for all parties and especially for Jefferson County, West Virginia.
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Comments
Thanks, Kurt. We're very pleased to see a developer working with the Park Service, instead of at cross purposes. We look forward to a community dialog about this proposal.
Joy Oakes
Senior Mid-Atlantic Regional Director
National Parks Conservation Association
Thanks Kurt, for picking up this story. The National Park Service is the first Agency in the world to attempt to preserve a Nation's legacy of natural and cultural resources. This project will be an attempt to communicate that 100 year long story.
We are convinced that this project will be very illuminating to the public and beneficial to the entire National Park Service, honoring its history, protecting its significant historical resources, recognizing the NPS organizational heritage, and paying tribute to those who have made "America's Best Idea" a reality.
"The further backward you look, the further forward you can see", Winston Churchill
This certainly seems like a desirable and ambitious project. Let's hope that the community dialogue doesn't result in delays such as the rehabilitation of Gateway's Fort Hancock has been subjected to. On that subject, I have difficulty resolving NPT's support of the Harpers Ferry project with its opposition to the Fort Hancock rehabilitation. If you compare that proposal, as described in Michael Huber's summary in his 2006 letter to the Asbury Park Press http://www.thefortatsandyhook.net/news.asp?newsID=33 , it's difficult to understand NPT's contrary positions.
Water Witch, I guess I don't see the contradiction. In the case of Fort Hancock, you have the Park Service giving over to a commercial developer publicly owned historic buildings that he plans to transform into for-profit enterprises.
At Harper's Ferry, not only are no park facilities be turned over to private developers, but conservation easements are being purchased to protect Harpers Ferry National Historical Park from outside development. True, a museum, hotel and conference center are being proposed, but these will be built from the ground up on land outside the national park.
If there's a contradiction, I suppose it might be, "If a non-profit solution can be achieved on such a scale at Harper's Ferry, why can't a similar one be fashioned at Fort Hancock?"
Guess the devil will be in the details on where the funds to purchase 15 parcels of land encompassing 564 acres will come from, and who will get what for it. The only named participants, “Concord Eastridge, a national player in putting together public-private partnerships [and] one of the company's affiliates, Stonewall Heights, LLC,” don't sound to me like “a non-profit solution” for Harpers Ferry. The concept expressed by Civil War Preservation Trust President Jim Lighthizer that you quote, "preservation and development are not mutually exclusive,” is valid. This was similarly expressed with regard to Fort Hancock by former Sandy Hook Superintendent Russel Wilson.
The core of Fort Hancock is approximately 140 acres of the 1,665 acres of Sandy Hook parklands otherwise protected as a natural and recreational environment. With more than 100 buildings, this area has been identified for adaptive reuse since the National Park Service first began administering Sandy Hook in the mid-1970s.
The concept of creating a "Gateway Village" for adaptive reuse was formalized in the 1979 General Management Plan for Gateway National Recreation Area. The 1990 General Management Plan Amendment for the Sandy Hook unit reaffirmed the adaptive reuse plan and identified a partnership between the National Park Service and private entities as the way to make it happen. Both planning efforts were the subject of extensive public review and comment.
The goal has always been to assure the long-term preservation of these historic military buildings by adapting them for a variety of compatible uses. The James J. Howard Marine Laboratory, Brookdale Community College Oceanographic Institute, the N.J. Marine Sciences Consortium and the Marine Academy of Science and Technology have been our partners in adaptive reuse for more than 20 years. This winter, the N.J. Audubon Society joins us following its rehabilitation of the historic hospital steward’s quarters as the Sandy Hook Bird Observatory.
We began an effort to further the adaptive reuse of Fort Hancock’s buildings through the National Park Service’s historic leasing authority in 1998. This authority allows for the leasing of excess historic properties in national parks for compatible uses to both public and private groups. http://honors.njit.edu/news/colloquium/previewf03/sandyhook.htm
I have followed this process for nearly 30 years. The present plan appears to be the best that can be accomplished. Fort Hancock covers less than 10% of Sandy Hook’s acreage. Of the more than 100 buildings within Fort Hancock, approximately 1/3 are used by the NPS, 1/3 by public “partners” as described above, and the remaining 1/3 subject to the proposed plan. Of that 1/3, 30% is required by the agreement to be used for educational purposes. This leaves about 22% of the buildings [let’s say 3% of Sandy hook] to be used for “commercial” purposes, many of which will support the existing NPS and public partners’ uses. With no new construction, and all rehabilitation conducted under the Department of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation and Reuse [and the even stricter ones of the NJ State Historic Preservation Office], this is a small price to pay for such an important cultural and historic resource.
It’s easy to criticize from a distance when you haven’t watched these buildings deteriorate more and more each year. From my up-close observation, I believe that public demand is just about satiated by the 60+ buildings in current use by the NPS and non-profit partners. I can’t agree with “principles” that would allow the remaining 36 buildings to fall down, or people who can’t suggest a viable alternative. What sort of non-profit solution would you propose for these 36? Should we take another 30 years to come up with one?
Kurt:
No one seems to know WHO Stonewall Heights, LLC is. Names are not being revealed. What's the big secret and how is their hotel and conference center different from what was just fought off with the last group of developers? They were building on their own land, too. The same property.
Thanks.
Or just maybe, since the NPS is so eager to spend money for the Jazz Museum in New Orleans, we can get the NPS Heritage Museum funded by the National Endowment for the Arts?
I've never been to the National Air and Space Museum, but how much floor space is devoted to the likes of the Apollo and Shuttle debacles? Although not a fair comparison because memorials for deceased astronauts are most proper versus exhibits to mismanagement and general incompetence, but hey, Trump has a tower, the Outfit has Vegas, Clinton has a library and Carter has Habitat for Humanity, so anything is possible. I hope they have the decency to show before and after pictures of what the lands were and what the NPS made them. Then the public could determine for themselves how effectively the NPS management public lands has been handled, and whether or not to maintain the status quo. Prior to inception of this undertaking, the sources for funding should be put forth for public consideration on a general election referendum, since we have one of those coming up in about a year. But that, like Beamis suggested simulation, ain't gonna happen, is it?
This is great -- another place I can volunteer when I retire to my cabin on the Potomac. I'll make sure everyone hears the stories of the NPS mistakes so they're not repeated by future generations -- feeding trash to bears, damming rivers then destroying the dam later, stocking National Seashores with non-native species, allowing commercial rave parties at Alcatraz, the list goes on. And with all those mistakes out there, the mission continues so that my great great grandkids can see some of the same things I did.
A million visitors does seem a bit optimistic, but I don't fault anyone for optimism. Harpers Ferry currently gets about 250,000 annual visitors a year, and Gettysburg, only about 60 miles away, gets over 1.5 million.
A museum dedicated to a federal bureaucracy? Will it be filled with life-sized photos of noted NPS bureaucrats? I wonder if space will allow for images of giant sequoias, grizzly bears, waterfalls, and exploding volcanos? Perhaps not, now that such concepts are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
During earlier dialog about the NPS, I believe it was Beamis who mentioned one of the agency's greatest evils: the tradition of employees rapidly moving from one park to the next for career advancement. The latest mantra is that career advancement allows an employee to embrace "new challenges." This has become the accepted group-think, much to the detriment of the parks and their visitors.
I know, I know...I've heard it before. "If the parks aren't frequently infused with 'new blood,' there won't be any new ideas." But many, many other avenues exist to introduce new idieas to an organization. Inter-park trainings and conferences are obvious ones (so long as they're about ideas and don't simply serve as junkets for bored employees). Reading a book or checking a website are others. Sitting down and thinking for an hour or so is yet another (but you'll have to turn off your cell phone or blackberry first). And never forget that old ideas are often the best. Try the NPS Mission, for starters.
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I think the career climbing tradition and the seeking of "new challenges" is incredibly selfish, especially when an employee leaves a park after only the typical three-odd years. The national parks deserve employees who will devote quality time to learning their place of employment...and growing to love it. Sorry, but employees need to care more about the parks and the public than their petty careers and soon-to-be-forgotten legacies. It's not about using one's career to bounce from park to park: that's what vacations are for.
Ever hear of a Seagull Manager? It's someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, poops all over everything, and then leaves.
Simple Proposal #7: Be an Eagle, Not a Seagull
Thanks, Frank, for you positive feedback. Back at ya!
Good to hear you had an independent thinking supervisor at Zion. Truthfully, I believe most NPS employees know the difference between logic and absurdity...but we exist in a culture where daring to speak common sense, for some obscure reason, seems "dangerous" and "revolutionary".
This will be the topic of a future Simple Proposal.
Bart
Has everyone seen the demotivational posters and calendars at despair.com? They're hilarious and they poke fun at those beautiful posters with inspirational messages. There's one with a picture of an eagle soaring above some snow-capped mountains and the caption at the bottom reads:
"Leaders are like eagles. We don't have either of them here."
If you've never seen this site before, bring your hanky and be prepared to cry from laughing so hard.
You're dead on target Jon. Any reader of those captions would be hard pressed to find even one that didn't apply across the board to what we're discussing on most every issue. Kurt should feature a link......
Plans revealed for museum near Harpers Ferry National Historical Park
By DAVE McMILLION [email protected]
CHARLES TOWN, W.VA
OK, so you have a four-part, $250 million museum you want to build on a high hill near Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Park officials, however, are aghast over how it will impact the historic area.
What’s an architect to do?
Rip off the top of the hill.
“Our proposal is to take the four components, scrape the top of the hill off, build the components and then put the hill back over the building,” Douglas Carter of Davis Carter Scott Architecture told the Jefferson County Commission on Thursday.
If that doesn’t impress you, maybe how the building’s designers plan to heat and cool it will.
Given its hilltop location and breezy conditions, wind turbines will be used to generate power and a “wind chimney” at the top of the building will draw naturally cool air from “cooling wells” within the ground, Carter said.
Rest of the article at: http://www.herald-mail.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=178203&format=html
Sorry about the bad link -- try this one:
http://www.herald-mail.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=178213&format=p...
Harper's Ferry already uses shuttle buses to get people into the town proper. There's a nearby flea market (a real eyesore) that wouldn't look any worse as a parking lot. Not that I'm in favor of parking lots...
Of course it's going up in West Virginia. Senator Byrd is the King of Pork! Some enterprising reporter or blogger should follow the money. Somehow it leads into Byrd's campaign coffers.
Building this museum will bring more Americans into the fold and actually be an important tool in the drive to get the message out about how important it is to support our national parks.
There... didn't want you to have to wait for that to happen. :-)
Of course, once the place opens for business, the waste will just be getting started. Speaking of...
During the past month I was required to attend four meetings. These consumed about 42 hours of my time (that converts to about 1,260 tax dollars). One of the meetings, which lasted a full three days, was attended by 16 people (that converts to about 11,520 tax dollars).
I have no issue with meetings. I only have an issue with stupid meetings. It so happens that ALL of the meetings I attended last month were stupid. Coincidence? Yeah, right!
These meetings resulted in the following accomplishments:
A bunch of people sat around and talked about their accomplishments. If the first person talked for five minutes, the next person had to up the ante and talk for eight minutes, and the next person had to up that ante and talk for twelve. I thought Show & Tell ended in the third grade.
We also spent a lot of time editing reports and plans. As many as 20 people would debate for up to an hour on the wording of a single paragraph. Really, shouldn't this be the work of one capable editor, if, indeed, the report or plan is necessary at all?
The third accomplishment, if we should call it that, was whining...LOTS of whining.
Very rarely did we accomplish what meetings are intended to do: allow for discussion and resolution of issues. Of course, such discussion requires independent thinking, speaking truthfully, and occasionally being contentious.
But hey....that's not in MY position description!
Simple Proposal #4: In lieu of the next meeting, get out in your park, identify a plant, clear a trail, or talk to a visitor.
I'm astounded... speechless. Americans love their National Parks, of this there is no doubt. It is one of the only efforts our government makes that actually preserves the natural beauty and historical sites of this country, and actually touches the lives of regular Americans. But a museum???? to the NPS???? Are they NUTS??? What a horrible waste. Right now there is a huge backlog of maintenance for NP sites, and they are going to spend money aggrandizing a government department? What's next -- a museum of the General Accounting Office?
"It will house significant artifacts drawn from national parks" - WHAT? They will remove artifacts from National Parks and re-locate them from where they have any relevence to some building in West VA?
Yes - this has Byrd poop all over it.