Pittsburgh Magazine: A condemned house at 7101 Apple St. in Homewood that is the birthplace of the National Negro Opera Company was named today by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to its annual list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. The designation could bring renewed efforts and funds to save the long-vacant and boarded-up Queen Anne house, built in 1894.
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This was a beautifully written article that gave me insight into something I had never given thought to before - the work that has to be put into preserving pieces of landmark history. The way we are taught history (in grade school, at least) is that these events were important and fundamental to our history and, therefore, we will preserve the connections we have with it. My biggest example is the Anne Frank house - every child is taught about her journey through the Holocaust, as they should be, but we are also taught to remember the Annex as a historical place that is now memorialized as a museum. So in my head, and I'm sure many others, we just maintain that this will be applied to all places that have shaped our human history. As the article mentions, however, this is not the case. Instead, places like this condemned house in Homewood must be put on a special list in order to prevent their demolition. Reading this also made me think about how many places I've just passed by that were likely birthplaces of important ideas or thoughts - but those moments of history have been masked with time.
This makes me so happy. I’m glad they have an annual list to bring awareness to places like this that need funding. They created the list 10 years ago to give people the opportunity to invest money to save them and its extremely effective, less than 5% of all the properties have paid been demolished since the list was created It’s also timely that a lot of them are historic sites that have to do with the civil rights movement. Places that important need to be preserved so that they can be remembered and learned about for decades to come. What is really cool about funding people that preserve historic sights is that they can RESTORE a lot of these places to their former glory. It reminds me of art restoration. You can preserve art in a case but if you want to restore it you need to take the old, tinted varnish off and put a new coat on. This reveals the true colors that the artist intended. That satisfying feeling of fixing up something summer important with a lot of significance is just wonderful.
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