Historic Preservation & Community Character
Meeting Date: 7 November 2006
Prepared by: Brian Roseth, Planning Services Manager
City Council
Agenda Item Summary
Name: Consideration of a request to review issues related to the Historic Preservation Program and to provide policy guidance.
Description: Staff is requesting policy guidance from the Council with regard to the Historic Preservation Program and the scope of the Context Statement update. No formal action should be taken.
COMMENTARY
The purpose of a Historic Context Statement is to provide qualified architectural historians a historical context for a survey of historic resources. A historic context, as defined by the National Register’s Guidelines for Local Surveys, “is a broad pattern of historical development in a community or its region, that may be represented by historic resources.” Hence, the historic context statement’s purpose is to assist qualified architectural historians in the assessment of historic resources by providing categories of significant periods of development within the city.
A historic context is usually the first survey task “as it provides an organizational framework of information that is based on a specific area, theme, and period of time. This framework is recommended as a way to organize information that is pertinent to survey results.”
Importantly, the NATIONAL REGISTER BULLETIN states, “Historic contexts are almost always refined, modified, added to, and elaborated on as the survey itself proceeds. At the point of planning the survey, it may be feasible to define them only in broad, general terms; sufficient flexibility should always be maintained to allow changes to take place as the survey progresses.” Ideally then, the “City” of Carmel-by-the-Sea should not view the Historic Context Statement as a statement to be micromanaged and narrowly defined by non-qualified historic preservation experts, namely, City Council Members, the City Administrator and the Planning Services Manager.
Note: A CONSULTANT SERVICES AGREEMENT between the City of Carmel-by-the-Sea and Archives & Architecture for the update of the City’s Historic Context Statement was prepared and ready to sign in June 2006.
(Reference:
NATIONAL REGISTER BULLETIN
GUIDELINES FOR LOCAL SURVEYS:
A BASIS FOR PRESERVATION PLANNING
U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service
National Register, History and Education
Chapter I: Planning the Survey
Elements of Survey Planning
What are historic contexts?, http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/nrb24/chapter1.htm)
2 comments:
In George F. will's "irrational exuberance" column, he wrote, "And we may hope that as director of the CIA he learned the most important thing a government can know - what it is that it doesn't know." Substitute station chief for director of the CIA, she for he and we have a mayor who fails to understand "the most important thing a government can know." She doesn't know a lot, LCP, historic preservation, Inventory, Mills Act, historic context statement, et cetera.
SAVE THE SCOUT HOUSE. Let us restore it
and use it for the community's sake!
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