Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Feeling Rushed or Shy?

If you are feeling shy about being first to comment on our blog, here’s a way to contribute without spending a lot of time mobilizing your thoughts, writing, revising, and spell-checking.


Please share one or two of your favorite preservation quotations (with credits or citations, if possible) to help build a collection for the Preservation Plan.  Check the current plan for examples, such as:

“What do we mean by planning? We simply mean providing in advance for the best ways of meeting our expected future needs and avoiding potential problems. We all make plans in arranging our own individual affairs. Those who do not plan ahead soon find themselves and their families in serious difficulties. If personal planning is necessary, it is equally important for us as individual citizens to join together in planning for our community. Indeed, it is even more important, for lack of personal planning ordinarily hurts only a single individual or family; failure of a community to plan may cause untold problems affecting all its citizens.”
Acworth New Hampshire: Comprehensive Master Plan, 1979.  Acworth, NH: Town of Acworth, 1979.

Or think about Daniel Webster’s famous observation (an online search will return multiple versions):  "It is wise for us to recur to the history of our ancestors. Those who do not look upon themselves as a link, connecting the past with the future, do not perform their duty to the world." 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here is a quote from Peggy Moretti of The Historic Preservation League of Oregon (not sure when or where she said it): “Some think of historic preservation as nostalgic and clinging to the past. But we’re all about the future and reusing resources that, in addition to holding great cultural and aesthetic value, embody enormous economic and environmental value.”

Anonymous said...

The author Howard Mansfield (Same Ax, Twice; In the Memory House) lives in Hancock and is eminently quotable:
In remaking an ax, in restoring a house, we carry the fire of the original spirit. We commit anew, plant, put our hands to touch the work of a craftsman hundreds of years gone, and then once again feeling that work, pick it up again. And therein lie renewal and hope.”
—from The Same Ax, Twice.

Somewhere I have another quotation from him that might work better for your purposes. Maybe you could even ask him for a few words!

MKR said...

A great quote from Jane Jacobs:

"Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation -- although these make fine ingredients -- but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings."

She goes on to make the point that older buildings can support lower income businesses -- neighborhood bars, "ethnic" or foreign restaurants, good bookstores, art studios, music stores, small cafes and galleries -- because the overhead is less expensive. She made this point in 1961. Before the modern preservation movement began, really.

Donovan Rypkema makes a similar point about older, smaller buildings being incubators for new local businesses.

Gracie in Contoocook said...

Here's a great quote from Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright," read at Kennedy's inauguration:

The land was ours before we were the land’s /
She was our land more than a hundred years /
Before we were her people....

This might be a good jumping off point to say that we and the landscape are intertwined, that it helps define us.