RE: [UC] HD Saves Mount Airy From Rapidly Growing Fundamentalist Church

[Anthony West]

>>Sorry, you missed the point. It was that the Church couldn't justify the >>additional costs associated with keeping the existing buildings.   >Al, I think you picked a bad example that doesn't really further your cause. >The buildings in question are very legitimate historic assets to Mt. Airy, and >people were right to get up in arms about a fly-by-night congregation's >intention to raze them.   The real point is that these obsolete institutional buildings are seriously dilapidated and there is probably no market for them, for any use, if they must be rehabbed as costly monuments to 19th-c. architecture. In this case, HD designation is a likely sentence to abandonment and decay, which blights the unlucky neighborhood.   Another point is that, under HD, the social needs of vanished communities always take precedence over the social needs of contemporary communities. A church whose entire congregation disappeared 50 years ago is defined as a "treasure" for people who never had any role in it and who don't use it in any way except to look at it; by contrast, a church that is rapidly growing and serves hundreds or thousands of people who are alive right now in Philadelphia is defined as "fly-by-night."   But 100 years ago, every old church was new. Which means, I guess, that it was "fly-by-night" then. And someday, the institutions that the real people of Philadelphia are building to serve the city in 2004 will become "historic" -- IF we permit their new life and new architecture to come into being.   -- Tony West