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Landscape Preservation and Interpretation: Issues of Use, Historical Experience, and Myth at Gettysburg National Military Park.
Critical analysis of National Park Service interpretive policies at Gettysburg NMP with special coverage of Neutra's Cyclorama Building (ca. 1961) and its place on the battlefield of Gettysburg.
Thesis by Nathan Jefferson Riddle (Columbia University, 1998).
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree
Master of Science in Historic Preservation
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Columbia University, May 1999
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. History, Preservation, Landscapes, and the Present
III. Landscape Theory
IV. Commemorative Landscapes
V. Gettysburg National Military Park
VI. Conclusion.....135
The Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania is currently involved in a major planning development process that presents dangerous precedents for federal historic preservation in the United States. Two integral components of the 1998 Draft General Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement are the restoration of the battlefield to an 1863 appearance and, as a consequence of the desire for a recreation of the place, the demolition of Richard Neutra’s 1961 Visitor Center and Cyclorama Building. Various groups are opposing the removal of the historic Mission 66 visitor center, but the preservation arguments forwarding its importance are myopic. Focus on the building looks only at its historic architectural significance, without considering the obvious subtext of the park service’s plans, the need, even if based upon false pretenses, to create a visually ‘authentic’ harmonious refuge from modernity. Demolition of the historic modernist building represents only one aspect of a flawed plan.
Period restoration of the landscape deserves censure on two accounts. First, it is a misguided, spurious effort because the landscape is covered with over one-thousand nineteenth and twentieth-century monuments whose profusion precludes an ability to create an appearance of what the soldiers experienced at the Battle of Gettysburg. Secondly, the motive upon which the planned restoration is based is a dangerous supposition. Entrenched false, historical lessons define current park interpretation, and guiding the park service’s efforts is the desire to clarify the narrative by cleaning up the scene in which it is presented, without addressing its reified symbols. Beginning with its creation in 1864, the battlefield has undergone several periods of ownership, during all of which proprietors used and physically altered the landscape for various political purposes. Current interpretation presents a selective historical account that refuses to differentiate between the various layers of public memory inscribed upon the landscape. Gettysburg National Military Park is a coherent symbol of Heroism/Reconciliation/National Progress. Discussions of cultural contexts that shaped the park in both physical and ideational terms are nonexistent. Furthermore, slavery never enters the park’s collective memory.
By proposing a management plan whose primary goal is the restoration of a landscape to an historic appearance so that visitors may authentically experience the past, the National Park Service advocates and gives consent to the creation of historical simulacra for educational and entertainment purposes. Visitors will not know that the landscape is a reconstruction of the historic terrain, and they will concurrently be told that modernist architecture is non-historic and anathema to the values of the past. The park service is attempting to create a landscape to juxtapose and contemn modern society. For the National Park Service, the nation’s official historian, to unqualifiedly suggest that the ideological, moral, and spiritual values of the past were superior to those of modern culture is a deplorable situation. What makes the Gettysburg plan so invidious is the fact that the lessons which the park service seeks to emphasize are historically and morally circumspect.
The landscape’s narrative, its interpretation, posits that death and violence are honorable if they are the results of idealism and patriotism. At Gettysburg, all the soldiers are equally honorable because they all fought for abstract causes, they all fought and died for what they believed in. The attempt to perpetuate a society based upon slavery never enters the interpretation of the battlefield. The ‘causes’ of the Union and the Confederacy are presented as the same thing, as having both been abstract variations on the proper form of constitutional government. Abstracting the causes of the Civil War and bestowing honor on the conflict suggests, rather blatantly, that violence is an acceptable means of achieving a social end based upon ideological principles. The frontispiece of this thesis shows, in front of the equestrian statue of U.S. Major General Oliver Otis Howard, a child wearing a Civil War cap and holding a gun play fighting with another child, who is outside the frame of the picture and who wears the cap of the opposing army. These children have obviously learned from American culture that the Civil War was exciting and honorable.
This thesis attempts to dissect the park’s proposed management plan to suggest that the National Park Service’s preservation arguments at Gettysburg are drastically flawed. The park service needs to renounce their intention to create an authentic, historic landscape appearance. Reconstruction of a landscape is as dubious as that of a building, and in the case of Gettysburg, reconstruction leads to and results from an extremely selective interpretation of history. Furthermore, the park service needs to repudiate their claim that historic sites necessarily offer important lessons.
Anti-modernism should not influence the preservation efforts of the federal government. Gettysburg, and other historic sites, should be used to illuminate continuities between the past and the present and should encourage critical debate. Interpretation at Gettysburg, however, negates informed discussion. The battlefield could be used more effectively for present relevance by discussing not only the Civil War but how the landscape has been used politically and socially to shape public memory. Finally, the National Park Service needs to immediately question their role in presenting symbols of national progress which imply that the nation’s institutions and power were built upon the efforts of idealistic and heroic patriot-soldiers.
V. C) Richard Neutra's Cyclorama Building
A Determination of Eligibility written in 1995 by the architect and an historian of the Gettysburg National Military Park concluded that the Cyclorama Building was not eligible for the National Register of Historic Places because of technical and design flaws and because it intruded on the historic and sacred site of Ziegler’s Grove. The State Historic Preservation Officer concurred with the report. In 1998, the Keeper of the National Register found the building to be eligible for the register under Criteria A and C. The Keeper determined that Neutra’s building was significant because it was "associated with events [the Mission 66 program] that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of history" and it represented "the work of a master".
The proposed management plan for Gettysburg has garnered criticism, but initial concern primarily focused on the commercial operations included in the new visitor center. Attempting to disarm opposition, the park service eliminated all commercial ventures, with the exception of a cafeteria and a bookstore, but the demolition of the Cyclorama Building drew criticism from architectural interest groups such as the Society of Architectural Historians who encouraged the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to seek the opinion of the Keeper of the National Register.
The majority of the debate on Neutra’s structure centers on the fact that it is a work by an important architect. Largely ignored is the building’s historical and cultural importance. The park service drafted the management plan with the a priori decision to demolish the structure because it was modern and, therefore, an intrusion, and they wrote the DOE in a contrived fashion in order to portray the building as a failure, whose future contained no plausible options other than demolition. The Society of Architectural Historians did recognize the selective historical approach used by the park service in their various planning documents. In a letter to John Latschar, the park Superintendent, the Society emphasized the building’s prominent place in the history of the park. They argued that the "importance of this setting, then, is not just as a historic landscape documenting a narrow time frame, but also as a cultural landscape that has evolved over a considerable length of time.... At Gettysburg, we believe it is imperative to develop an agenda that is more conservation-oriented and holistic in addressing the significant past. The Cyclorama [Building] should be a key part of that agenda".
Typically, preservationists focus their efforts on architecture, with the result that they relegate the concept of landscape as a cultural whole to a peripheral position. In "Age and Artifact", David Lowenthal argued that historic "landscapes are harder to protect than buildings partly because few view ‘natural’ features as historic". At Gettysburg, Lowenthal’s observation is reversed. The natural elements are the primary landscape components of historical importance. Fences, walls, and farmhouses, in the assessment of the park staff, are natural features no different from ridges and trees because they figured into the topography of the battlefield. They are not important as someone’s house or as a wall marking a particular lot-line but instead as elements of the terrain which influenced movement and action during the battle.
The monuments that cover the battlefield are allowed to be a part of the landscape because they are connected to the events of July 1-3, 1863 through the veterans who erected them, and furthermore, because as the landscape has become symbolic of certain lessons and truths, the monuments have become an intractable aspect of the symbolism. As they were grafted onto the landscape, they achieved symbiosis. Due to a process of naturalization, a viewer can now not contemplate the landscape apart from the monuments since they form an organic, metaphorical whole. According to this conceptualization, the Cyclorama Building is a lethal parasite feeding off of its historical host. Metaphors aside, the Cyclorama Building is as relevant a part of the battlefield as the Copse of Trees or the Pennsylvania State Memorial.
Instead of excising a modern intrusion, removing the building will excise a piece of the collective memory of Gettysburg. The structure tells a unique narrative about the battlefield and about an era of America’s past. Neutra conceived of the work as a sacred memorial, as another monument to peace and unity. It also relates information about the Mission 66 program, which itself provides insight into mid-twentieth-century America. Regarding the Cyclorama building as a modernist intrusion only reinforces the nostalgia, de-historicism, and sacralization corrupting the interpretation of the landscape. Improved interpretations should be the park’s primary management goal, but exposition should not be a rigorously defended selective interpretation of the Battle of Gettysburg and the subsequent period of commemoration that, in the park service’s analysis, ended in 1938 with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the battle. In actuality, the park’s significance continues into the present, and in order for the battlefield to retain its relevancy, it should be accordingly analyzed and presented to the public as a site with many interrelated layers of history, none of which can be ignored without a subsequent loss of meaning by the others.
The Determination of Eligibility report elides a consideration of the Cyclorama Building’s importance as a work of the Mission 66 program. The report instead emphasizes the building’s design failures and its egregious site location. Designed by the architectural firm of Neutra and Alexander in 1958 and completed in 1961, the Cyclorama Building was a major project of the Mission 66 program. The National Park Service commissioned the structure to be the park’s visitor center, and they wanted it to be ready for the Civil War Centennial in 1963. Richard Neutra was ecstatic over the commission, and he remarked that "The building will last forever. Many honored guests will come here and many distinguished speakers will speak. Their speeches must be brief because the building itself is most important and comes first. This building will be a shrine for many nations and the free world ... It is a building that is built for the future, to endure forever. It will symbolize that thing which we all cherish [peace]. It will long stand on a cherished site. It is a building for eternity because it has deeper characters than any of the finest ancient buildings of the world". As a Mission 66 visitor center, the Cyclorama Building represented a new building type and materialized the visitor-oriented efforts of the National Park Service to improve the sites under its care.
The park service stipulated that Neutra also design the building to house Paul Dominique Philippoteaux’s 1884 cyclorama painting, "The High Tide of the Confederacy". Bought by a group of citizens in 1913 and brought to Gettysburg, the painting achieved status as a National Historic Object in 1944. After acquiring the painting in 1942, the National Park Service prepared designs for a new building built specifically for the presentation of the painting. In 1947, the in-house architects designed a Beaux-Arts facility to be located on the same site where the current building sits. Funding delayed the adoption of a design and construction.
In 1956, the park submitted its prospectus according to the guidelines of the Mission 66 program. Based upon historical research and planning analyses of current and future visitor patterns and land use, the prospectus aimed to maintain the park’s memorial character. It also called for the need of a building to jointly house the cyclorama painting and serve as a visitor center. Arguing that the facility needed to be near the most historic area of the battlefield, the park staff believed that a visitor center would be best situated in Ziegler’s Grove near the field of Pickett’s Charge in view of the symbolic Copse of Trees and High Water Mark Memorial. Proximity to the park’s historic core would hopefully improve interpretation and facilitate visitor orientation.
Siting of the Gettysburg Visitor Center demanded a high level of consideration because it was to contain the cyclorama painting. Park staff claimed that the work should be as close as possible to the landscapes that it portrayed since this would serve to improve visitors’ educational experience. Dion Neutra, Richard’s son and the manager of the project, claimed in a 1994 letter to Superintendent Latschar that "I think the original impulses were correct: As one of the MOST heavily visited sites in the nation, placing the painting as close as possible to its vantage-point, and allowing the public to view the scene from essentially the same viewpoint from the roof, is the most impressive and immediate way to interpret this site".
The Mission 66 prospectus took great care in drawing guidelines for the preservation of the park’s historic character that would concomitantly improve visitor experience. Richard Neutra approached his commission carefully. As constructed, the building consists of large drum, situated amongst the extant historic trees of Ziegler’s Grove, and a long, low office wing that runs along Cemetery Ridge, pointing toward the High Water Mark Memorial. Discounting the current criticisms of the park staff, the Cyclorama Building is thoughtfully situated in the landscape. See (Fig. 1-3).
In the Determination of Eligibility report, the park service contended that since "the many technical short comings of this building and the display conditions of the painting reflect poorly on the building and its architects", it, "though the work of a master architect, can not be considered to be an exceptionally significant example of Neutra’s work, and therefore is not eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places". The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation concurred with the National Park Service and Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Officer’s determinations. After the Keeper of the National Register found the Cyclorama Building to be in fact eligible, the Council asserted that several factors mitigated the adverse effect of demolition on the Keeper’s determination. In a Section 106 Case Report, the ACHP claimed that because of technical failings, the Cyclorama Building could no longer perform its original functions. The resulting compromise in its integrity nullified its eligibility for the National Register.
The Gettysburg park staff tendentiously approached writing the DOE with the intention of portraying the building’s mechanical and maintenance problems as inherent design flaws. The motive of the park service was to portray the building as a lesser, pitiful example of Neutra’s work, designed when he was in poor health and at the end of his partnership with Robert Alexander. Based upon an anti-modern conceit of the park Superintendent, the analysis is slanted and misleading. Latschar’s intentions and the arguments used to support his proposals pose dangers more general than to just Neutra’s building. The National Park Service acts as a preservation mentor for the nation, and in this regard, if the argument becomes accepted that the technical failings of a structure render that work of negligible significance, then the county would lose many of cherished architectural icons. Both Fallingwater and Lever House suffer major technical failings, which in the case of Lever House, has changed the building’s appearance. Fallingwater’s cantilevers potentially face the danger of collapsing.
Besides illustrating the mediocre nature of the design, the park service uses the problems of the Cyclorama Building to suggest that it can no longer be used for any purpose. Even if it is determined that the painting must be placed in another structure to prevent further deterioration, Neutra’s building can still be used for interpretive purposes. The "GMP Newsletter 4" claimed that the "condition of many of the park’s resources is desperate [and] .... Intrusive buildings, offering out-of-date interpretation, occupy what was the center of the Union line". Inadequate storage facilities, old interpretive exhibits, and the Cyclorama Building’s modernist design are all conflated in a lambaste of the building, which at its core is truly directed only towards the facility’s modernist appearance. Antiquated interpretation is the fault of the park service and not of the building. In their arguments, high-quality interpretation translates into a new, high-quality, revenue-producing building. In refutation to the park service’s analysis, successful and cogent interpretation can be presented in the Cyclorama Building, even if the painting is removed.
To provide support for their decision to demolish the Cyclorama Building, the Gettysburg National Military Park staff discuss in the DOE how the building is deficient according to five themes that define Neutra’s best work. The characteristics are taken from Thomas S. Hines, Neutra’s biographer, and they are, the use of a "long, thin sparely supported pavilion", the "development of a simpler, lighter, more modular and skeletal industrial aesthetic", a "rational and functional design, determined by client, site, and program", an "interpretation of Inner and Outer Space", and the "horizontal orientation and integration of the building and landscape". Even if the Cyclorama Building was found lacking in one or more of the motifs, that atypicality would not render the building insignificant.
The DOE repeatedly points out how the visitor center differs from Neutra’s residential work, like his Tremaine House, and is in fact more similar to the work of Le Corbusier. The Cyclorama Building is not a residential design and should not be judged as such. It represented a unique, new building type with a program specific to its site and client. Engaging in fallacious analysis, the park service, in the Determination of Eligibility, presents their presuppositional goal of demolishing the building as the proper conclusion drawn from the evidence discussed in the report. In assessing the building’s relation to each typical theme of Neutra’s work, the park service succumbs to subjectivity and, as a result, relies on faulty arguments. Each point deserves to be discussed in turn.
Although the report contends that the office wing of the Cyclorama Building is a typical Neutra pavilion, it claims that the west elevation is uncharacteristic of his design because of an external concrete ramp which leads to the rooftop observation deck. The ramp itself is an anomaly in terms of Neutra’s overall body of work but it responds to the program of the building. Originally, the site plan was flipped with the drum at the southerly portion where the pavilion now sits. A viewing promenade lay under the overhanging eave of the drum while an observation tower was incorporated into the structure near the entrance lobby at the northern end of the building. Review by the park service and consultation with the architects resulted in design and plan changes. Reversing the site plan necessitated an observation deck on the office wing. The DOE report criticizes the ramp because it obscures the view from inside the offices on the western side of the pavilion. "Therefore, the office wing, while at first appearing typical of Neutra’s design, does not function in the typical Neutra manner". The ramp’s atypicality does not lessen the significance of the building. It responds to a particular function and should not be judged in comparison to the fact that other works by the architect do not contain external, concrete ramps.
Secondly, the report criticizes the building’s use of concrete because it does not fulfill the criteria of the architect usually working with a "simpler, lighter, more modular and skeletal industrial aesthetic". The report compares the use of concrete in the Tremain House and the Cyclorama Building. Concrete slabs and thin posts in the residential work expressed lightness and opened the structure. The concrete walls of the visitor center’s drum, however, are heavy. Furthermore, construction involved much labor as the drum was poured-in-place, instead of being made with precast, modular components. The report argues that the "material, used in this way, results in a building that is the antithesis of the ‘replicable, prefabricated, mass-produced, low-cost, high-quality’ that Neutra pursued in his earlier work". Again, this building should not be compared to his other work. It was a unique building type where the program of housing a cyclorama painting and acting as a visitor-orientation facility did not call for a mass-produced, replicable building. (Illus. 1-3).
The authors of the report again criticize the ramp for blocking the western view from inside the pavilion and for resembling the concrete work of Le Corbusier rather than its own architect. "Since the ramp is not characteristic of Neutra’s style of decoration or construction," the report concludes that "it almost seems as though it were designed by someone other than Neutra himself". The park service implies that the ramp was a mistake which originated in the animosity and confusion arising from the dissolution of the Neutra and Alexander workshop. Their arguments do not allow for the experimentation of architects; in their assessment, architects must develop and maintain a particular style from which they must never deviate, even as they mature and culture changes.
This section of the analysis of the second theme also addresses the building’s use of stone. Neutra used local fieldstone to integrate the structure into the landscape, and he raised the drum on thin stone fins to lighten its appearance. The DOE only argues that the use of stone was ineffective in relieving the characteristic coldness and tenseness of Neutra’s work since it was "relegated ... to areas that are now seldom seen by the public". Although this stone would have been more visible if the drum had occupied the southern portion of the site plan, it continues to perform the same function. Furthermore, the southern end of the office wing contains prominent stone piers, which the report fails to mention. Throughout the Determination of Eligibility, the park service faults the building because it differs from the other works of the architect; this rhetorical device aims to suggest that the building is a failure. What is at fault, however, is the architectural assessment that refuses to analyze the building on its own terms in relation to its particular functions, site, and historical context.
In regard to the third characteristic of Neutra’s work, "rational and functional design, determined by client, site, and program", the DOE argues that the "cylindrical painting demanded a round drum ... and Neutra’s use of the cylindrical from was apparently a simple response to the painting. The two previous homes for the cyclorama painting were also cylinders.... Several [earlier] designs by the National Park Service proposed very similar solutions to the problem; one even placed the drum over the exhibit space with a spiraling ramp, similar to Neutra’s, for access to the cyclorama gallery". The drum, therefore, appears, in the argument of the report, to be an exemplary example of both a rational and a functional design that responded to the client, site, and program.
In a bizarre logical jump, the report next claims that "Neutra’s use of the cylinder for the cyclorama painting did not possess the philosophical or poetic undertones that other modern architects brought to their designs". The DOE argues that the lack of poeticism and metaphysical discussion in the design of the drum renders the building secular, mediocre, and devoid of architectural significance. This argument is nonsensical. While the park service is supposed to be assessing the degree to which the building achieves a rationality and functionality of design, they censure it precisely because it is rational and not poetic. Although "Neutra’s use of the circular form is here certainly functional, it apparently does not reflect any new direction or change in Neutra’s design philosophy, as the use of these forms did for so many of the modernists of this period. Neutra’s use of the circular form in the Cyclorama building is simply a response to the size and shape of the cyclorama painting".
Following through with this argument would seem to suggest that the building was a typical and, therefore, significant work of the architect. Earlier in the DOE, the park service derided the building precisely because it differed from his body of work. Here, they attack it because it fulfills one of his characteristic themes. In 1998, Dion Neutra argued that there were philosophical motivations toward the design of the drum, at least on the interior. He claimed that continuing Southern hostility towards the memory of the Civil War "would become an ongoing consideration in our approach to the design of the building. It was one of the reasons we decided to ‘kick the cyclorama painting upstairs’ so that visitors would not have it intruded into their consciousness unless they sought it out".
An interesting feature of the Cyclorama Building is the rostrum located at the base of the interior ramp of the drum. (Fig. 1, Illus. 2). It is composed of lightweight steel tubes that are also used to enclose the interior ramp. Beside the podium, the base of the drum contains exhibit space. An auditorium lies between the lower exhibit area and the lower lobby of the office wing. When the rostrum was in use, the back wall of the auditorium could be opened to enlarge the spectator’s gallery space. Furthermore, sliding glass walls opened the podium to the outside lawn on the eastern side of the building, thus integrating the interior and exterior spaces. The DOE argues that the sliding glass doors were typical of many of Neutra’s buildings and that the "function of these movable walls [in the Cyclorama Building] is not architectural, but programmatic". Dion Neutra recently claimed that the "conception of a ‘historic rostrum’ ... was not in the program, but which the park service allowed after learning our concept. It was to symbolically recreate the notion of a ‘speech of a commemoration’ that might occur here annually on the anniversary of Lincoln’s talk". Richard Neutra conceived of the building as a memorial to Lincoln and his famous address, and the rostrum performed an important symbolic function in the design.
Unfortunately, foundation settlement rendered the sliding doors inoperable a year after the building’s completion. The park service describes this unfortunate problem as a design flaw that nullifies Neutra’s attempt to create an interpenetration of indoor and outdoor space. The building’s two-level floor plan also receives criticism for further lessening the connection of interior to exterior space. The lower lobby is partially below ground since the building sits into the grade of Cemetery Ridge. According to the park service, the ramp (again criticized) further creates an enclosed space separated from the landscape.
The original design, before the plan was reversed, consisted of a lobby open on both its eastern and western sides. (Illus. 2). Rather than lessening "the inside outside feeling so characteristic of Neutra or the International Style," as argued by the park service, the two-level lobby efficiently directs visitor flow. People enter the visitor center through the east side as they approach from the parking lot. They are then directed through the exhibit space, up the interior ramp to the cyclorama painting, back down, and then up to the second floor lobby and onto the battlefield. The building thus rationally moves visitors through its interpretive exhibits and out onto the commemorative landscape. Tim Sullivan, in a master’s thesis on Mission 66 visitor centers, claimed that "movement through the building is logical, well thought out and flows easily from one area to the next". Even though "the building is modest in size, it handles easily, any number of tourists, even at peak visitation - a fact that even its most outspoken detractors at the park concede".
The Determination of Eligibility report continuously focuses on specific aspects of the building and misconstrues their purposes and importance in order to support preconceived notions of what the report is to accomplish, which is an irrefutable argument for the demolition of the building. Each contention in the report can be countered. An overwhelming flaw is the avoidance of an architectural analysis of the Cyclorama Building for what it is, a visitor center and exhibit space for the cyclorama painting. The report consistently compares the building to Neutra’s other works, to which there are no direct, cogent comparisons.
Addressing the fifth characteristic to which the building should purportedly conform, the park service claims that unlike "most of Neutra’s buildings, the Cyclorama Center is much more like the buildings of Le Corbusier. While the office wing does seem to lie in the landscape, the cyclorama drum stands up on pilottis.... This schizophrenic dialogue between the cyclorama portion and the office wing allows the drum to dwarf its counterpart". This statement alludes to the report’s underlying contention that the building is a modern intrusion on the battlefield. Visual obtrusiveness is however entirely subjective. Depending on whether a viewer is on the eastern or western side of the building, the drum appears to be of different heights. The Cyclorama Building nestles against Cemetery Ridge so that the lower level on the western side is below grade; the drum on this side, therefore, seems closer to the ground. Raising the drum on fins, between which are glass walls, lightens the form as it appears to hover over a void. Visual intrusion is further lessened by the fact that the drum portion is situated amongst the trees of Ziegler’s Grove. The office wing also serves an integrative function by following and highlighting the terrain. The Determination of Eligibility actually spends little effort in discussing the relationship of the building’s form to the landscape.
The reader of the report at this point would have already been bombarded by the notion that the Cyclorama Building, simply by its presence, is an inexcusable intrusion on the battlefield.
Assessing the "orientation and integration of the building and landscape", the park service focuses on design elements of the site. They construe the term landscape to mean landscaping as an aesthetic activity. Neutra’s original design concept included an extensive use of reflecting pools, but the National Park Service took over the design of the site and the parking lot and subsequently eliminated the pools located outside of the building’s footprint. The DOE claims that the constructed pools were not successful landscape elements and effectively blames the architects for poor design. The remaining water elements, which were eventually removed in the 1980s, consisted of a ground pool near the eastern lobby entrance and a pool running the length of the observation deck and connected by a waterfall to a pool on the roof of the auditorium. Confusingly, the report compares the rooftop pool to the reflecting pool on the mall in Washington D.C. merely because it was long and horizontal. This inconceivable comparison allows the park service to argue that the pool failed since, as an imitation of the pool on the mall, it meant to reflect the drum like the other reflected the Washington Monument; but it "reflected only a portion of the cyclorama drum at a time, as its long narrow shape was not designed to reflect the horizontal cyclorama drum". In order to give themselves a way out of this ridiculous analogy, the authors of the DOE suggest that if, "on the other hand, the pool was intended to dramatize the view, it was placed behind the visitor and the view of the battlefield. The view to the east was toward the parking lot". Even if this contention is correct, the failure of the pool would be due to the actions of the park service who assumed control of the landscaping efforts. This design flaw could be easily remedied by constructing new pools, rather than demolishing the entire building. Dion Neutra gave a different reason for the placement of the rooftop pool. He claimed that is "formed a point of interest toward which I figured the kids would drag their parents, thus thinning out the crush at the top of the ramp".
Finally, the Determination of Eligibility argues that several technical failures weaken the significance of the Cyclorama Building. According to the park service, the Cyclorama Building is a poor, shoddily constructed and designed example of Richard Neutra’s work. Foundation settlement disabled the various sliding doors from being opened. The effects of settlement continue to cause the underslab HVAC ducts to fill with water when it rains. The HVAC system now pumps moisture into the archival storage spaces. The reflecting pools suffered cracking, and leakage occurred through the roof of the observation deck; in the 1980s, the park service removed the pools. Leaks also occur through the roof of the drum. Aluminum louvers on the eastern side of the office wing were meant to move automatically by way of a timer with the movement of the sun; the timer malfunctioned and now the louvers must be moved manually to keep direct sunlight out of the offices. The most significant technical problem, and one which merits concern, is the condition of the cyclorama painting. It is hung improperly, and as a result, it is deforming. Folding is visible in several areas. Water leaks directly onto the painting and humidity problems create further damage.
Since, according to the park service, relocation to another facility is necessary to preserve the painting, derived of its primary function, Richard Neutra’s Cyclorama Building must be demolished. In discussions of the situation of the painting, various park goals are confounded. Preserving the cyclorama painting and restoring the landscape are inextricably conflated and they both result in demolition. There are problems with the way the painting is hung, but nowhere is it clearly presented whether the improper positioning of the work is due to the building itself or later restoration efforts of the park service. Having suffered extensive damage before 1961 when it was placed in the current building, the work underwent restorative efforts in 1961 and again in 1975. The painting might have been improperly hung as a result of interventions in the 1970s. Its deformation stems from the fact that it is parabolic in shape. This necessitates having a bottom circumference that is larger than a top circumference; however, it is hung as a cylinder, and this is causing folding. Dion Neutra argued that in the "programming stage, we were given the dimensions to which to design. The Park Service finally designed and installed the wooden structure to support the paining upon completion of construction. To give the impression that the Neutra firm goofed up the supports and/or undersized the drum for the painting is yet another distortion that tends to discredit the design effort and shift the blame for the subsequent degradation and distortion of shape that the painting has sustained since. It never had a parabolic shape originally; in the last 30 years, it seems to have stretched more towards the bottom rather than the top".
The deterioration of the painting is obvious, and actions need to be taken towards its preservation. If it can no longer be stored in the Cyclorama Building because the size and structure of the drum preclude the necessary conservation measures, the painting should be relocated. This action, however, does not unequivocally demand the demolition of the building. A multitude of historic structures are used for purposes other than that for which they were originally intended. Adaptive reuse is one of the proper goals of historic preservation. The majority of building failures appear to stem from a lack of maintenance on the part of the park service rather than from design flaws. Arguing that technical shortcomings transform a building into a useless and unimportant piece of architecture is spurious. The step by step descriptions of weaknesses of the Cyclorama Building, as perceived by the park service, is a contrived, biased device. The report undermines the significance of the building so that the reader will accept the proposal for its demolition.
The greatest excoriation of the Cyclorama Building focuses on a purported violation of sacred ground. Located approximately 600 yards south of the Cyclorama Building on Cemetery Ridge are the High Water Mark Memorial and the Copse of Trees. Dedicated in 1892, the monument marks the symbolic turning point of the Civil War and the physical goal of Pickett’s Charge. A climactic episode of hand-to-hand fighting occurred on that spot, and historians subsequently viewed the failure of the charge which broke at the Copse of Trees as the High Water Mark of the Confederacy. For even though the Union army failed to pursue their advantage taken on that day, the Confederacy never again invaded the North. Ziegler’s Grove, where the Cyclorama Building is located, served as a cover for artillery and infantry units on July 3, and although it did not witness hand-to-hand fighting, it was severely buffeted by Confederate artillery and sharpshooters. After the war, the veterans of the battle memorialized the area around the Copse of Trees, but they paid scant attention to Ziegler’s Grove. The Determination of Eligibility attempts to argue that the grove is more significant than the High Water Mark, not to rectify any historical inaccuracy, but to create a specious argument for the demolition of the Cyclorama Building.
The DOE suggests that the events of July 3 "ultimately made Ziegler’s Grove a landmark in America’s history. It was to be on this climactic day of the battle that the grove became a focal point of the conflict, when fire from Seminary Ridge reduced its great oaks to splinters. So decimated was the landmark that, ultimately, most of the veteran trees, the landmark, and the associated significance of the site were lost". A physical feature for whose importance the park service argues and upon which the Cyclorama Building is improperly located does not exist as a historical artifact.
In the 1880s, the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association purchased tracts of land, including the grove, to memorialize Cemetery Ridge and the site of the culmination of Pickett’s Charge. The GBMA constructed Hancock Avenue along the ridge to provide a memorial avenue for the situation of monuments. The High Water Mark Memorial indicates that the Copse of Trees was the objective of the fateful assault. John Bachelder, a historian involved in the creation of the park and memorial landscape, in the 1870s promoted the sanctity of the Copse. In 1882, he convinced the GBMA to purchase them, and in 1887 he urged the association to enclose them in a fence to protect them from relic gatherers. (Fig. 20). At the same time that "the ‘Copse of Trees’ was not only protected from vandalism or inadvertent injury but was enshrined as the most important of natural features.... one of the most prominent of natural features on the 1863 battlefield - Ziegler’s Grove - was physically shrunken". The DOE contends that even though there had been no hand-to-hand fighting amidst the trees of the grove, that site was "of at least equal significance to Union defender and Confederate attacker during the last drama of the battle. There were even those who publicly disagreed with Colonels Harrison and Bachelder, early stating that it was Ziegler’s Grove (and not the celebrated ‘Copse’) that was the objective point of Longstreet’s assault".
A reunion of survivors of the charge further sanctified the Copse in 1887. Veterans of Pickett’s Division and Webb’s Philadelphia Brigade met at the site to symbolically shake hands. Union and Confederate veterans again met at the Copse of Trees during the fiftieth anniversary of the battle in 1913 to clasp each other in an act of reconciliation. In arguing that Ziegler’s Grove was the true objective of the charge, the park service is less interested in correcting a historical myth than in portraying the Cyclorama Building as a failure and a mistake. Even if the memorialization of the Copse of Trees occurred due to a historical misconception, the site is nevertheless the symbolic center of the commemorative landscape. A history of sacralizing the trees has imbued them with importance.
By establishing the significance of Ziegler’s Grove, so that it now supersedes the Copse, the park service is only attempting to provide a rationale for their a priori decision to remove the Cyclorama Building. Logically, their argument actually works backward from the way it is presented in the Determination of Eligibility. The logical sequence of the argument proceeds as follows: 1) Remove the Cyclorama, 2) The Cyclorama is modern, 3) It is intrusive, 4) Ziegler’s Grove is historically significant. In the DOE, description begins with a historical description of the grove and concludes with the building’s failings. Claiming that the grove of trees is historically and culturally important does not symbolically change the memorial landscape of the High Water Mark portion of the battlefield; it only serves to make the intrusion of Neutra’s building more flagrant, something which is confutable.
Park service documents repeatedly refer to the building as a non-historic or modern intrusion on the sacred site of Ziegler’s Grove. The term intrusion connotes an egregious out-of-placeness on the part of the visitor center. This contention is intentionally deceptive. Ziegler’s Grove was not a pristine landscape feature to be intruded upon. The majority of historic trees were destroyed during the battle by Confederate shells, a fact related by the DOE. After the war, even more of them were cut down as they were on private land. In 1876, David Ziegler sold his property to Frederick Pfeiffer who used the grove as a brickyard until 1882 when the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association purchased the land to be a part of the Hancock Avenue memorial corridor. Philippoteaux’ cyclorama painting of 1882, which depicts Pickett’s Charge and Cemetery Ridge, does not show Ziegler’s Grove because it no longer existed in 1882 when the artist visited the site. (Fig. 34, 35).
The DOE claims that "the earliest visitors to the battlefield were likely not to see the kind of Ziegler’s Grove which had been such a battle landmark and which had served a military purpose to screen Union batteries". Judging from the cyclorama which was based on photographs and a visit, tourists in the nineteenth century were not likely to see any Ziegler’s Grove. In 1895, the War Department, as part of their effort to fully mark the battlefield for military training purposes, sought to replant the grove. They did not plant trees according to the grove’s historical boundaries because they followed incorrect lot lines, and in any event, most of the trees died soon after they were planted. The War Department periodically engaged in replantings. Now, the park service is acting duplicitously in suggesting that the Cyclorama Building is the cause of the loss of Ziegler’s Grove. The landscape feature had already been lost, with most of the historic trees having been gone for almost a century.
Not only was the grove no longer in existence when the Cyclorama Building was constructed, but all of Cemetery Ridge had been transformed by the memorialization efforts of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association and the War Department. Monuments cover the landscape around the Copse of Trees as well as the site of Ziegler’s Grove. The Cyclorama Building thus follows a tradition of intrusion. The park service can not argue that the monuments are acceptable since they are part of the historical commemorative landscape, because there are modern monuments near Neutra’s building, one from 1965 and the other from as recent as 1994. Since the park service has no intention of removing these monuments, it is physically and conceptually impossible to restore Ziegler’s Grove to its 1863 appearance. Once the building is removed there will still be a monumental landscape that contains two recent, modern additions. Furthermore, the 1956 monument really has no bearing on the Gettysburg campaign. It depicts Albert Woolson, the last surviving member of the Grand Army of the Republic and Union veteran, who, significantly, did not serve at the Gettysburg campaign. (Fig. 4,5).
The Cyclorama Building continues a tradition of both physical intrusion and use on the site of Ziegler’s Grove. Conceiving of the building as a sacred symbol of peace and a memorial to Abraham Lincoln, Neutra thus related his work philosophically to all the other battlefield monuments. The park service commissioned the structure as a visitor center to serve the functions of interpretation and orientation. Research by the park indicated that in 1895, a "fifth (and the last) steel observation tower was envisioned for location at Ziegler’s Grove, to afford a view from the very center of the battlefield and the park". Standing well above the trees of the grove at over 60 feet, the tower on Cemetery Ridge "soon became an attraction to many park visitors because of its location". To connect the High Water Mark to the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, the War Department built a trail through the grove, thus further depreciating the historical appearance of the site. "Ziegler’s Grove, with its tower and connector trail, became a pivotal interpretive and inspirational point in an individual’s visit to Gettysburg". The federal government in 1896 and again in 1958 conceived of Ziegler’s Grove as a point of orientation to the battlefield. (Fig. 6). Early twentieth-century visitors climbed the 1896 observation tower to view the landscape which consisted of both historical topographical features and commemorative monuments. There is no qualitative difference between the tower and the Cyclorama Building other than superficial ones of form and style. The DOE attempts to portray Neutra’s building as a non-historic intrusion, as a feature on the landscape possessive of no connections to its site, when in reality the work conforms to a history of constructing monuments and interpretive facilities. The park service and Neutra located the Cyclorama Building purposefully after much research and deliberation.
The park service contends that the Cyclorama Building should be demolished because it is not historically or architecturally significant, it is a technical failure, and it is an intrusion on the landscape. These suppositions are all dubious. First, the building is important as a Mission 66 project, a fact ignored by the park service’s Determination of Eligibility report. Secondly, if the only way to preserve the cyclorama painting is to relocate it, the current building can still be used for interpretive purposes. Thirdly, since it too is a monument, albeit one in the International Style, the building is not intrusive, and furthermore, it serves to orient visitors like the tower did which preceded it. Most importantly, the historic landscape was not intact when the building was constructed between 1958 and 1961.
In the discussion of Neutra’s Visitor Center, several questions arise which are most likely unanswerable but are nevertheless worth posing. If the building were in another less-historic location, perhaps where the new, proposed visitor center is to go, but still suffered from the same maintenance and storage problems, would it still be demolished to construct a new home for the painting? If the Cyclorama Building had been built elsewhere, leaving the 1896 tower to remain in Ziegler’s Grove, would the tower be demolished so that the 1863 appearance of the landscape could be restored? The other three towers are not slated for demolition. If the 1947 Beaux-Arts visitor center had been built on the same site, instead of the modern Cyclorama Building, would its demolition now be proposed? The underlying assumption governing the building’s future is that the park service finds it objectionable because it is stylistically modern. For this reason, the park service is guilty of an extremely selective interpretation of the park’s history. The purported reason for the building’s removal, the restoration of Ziegler’s grove, produces another set of problematic issues concerning the preservation of the Gettysburg battlefield and, by extrapolation, of other historic properties owned by the federal government.
Preserving Civil War battlefields appears to be an unquestioned necessity for American society. Revisionist tendencies are acts of heresy against the national mythology. Contemporary culture is facing deterioration due to inherent commercial malignancies, and any efforts to subject to critical evaluation the lessons inscribed upon the sacred soil of Civil War landscapes or to question the needs for and methods of preserving battlefields endangers the American social fabric. Citizens need these places, for without contact with their symbols, Americans risk falling deeper into the slough of materialism. For these places are described as being sacred, their features relics capable of mystical possibilities. Contact with a battlefield, stepping upon the very soil into which leached so much blood ideologically shed in the name of civil liberty, imparts the pilgrim with the holy American spirit of the heroes of the Civil War. Americans need to occasionally partake of a communion with history, imbibing symbols of patriotism and heroism. Standing on Cemetery Ridge, surrounded by memorials to righteousness, standing on the sacred soil of the battlefield perusing the visually harmonious, serene landscape, the visitor, mystically through the power of his own imagination, aided by the spirit of the place, experiences the events of the first three days of a July one-hundred and thirty-four years ago. Driving home after the pilgrimage, the visitor is instilled with the glory of the past and a rejuvenated, and perhaps even new, patriotic love for what it means to be an American.
The National Park Service and historians need to ardently reassess the argument for preserving Civil War battlefields. The planning process and the proposed product at Gettysburg National Military Park is not an isolated case of preservation. Describing the landscape as sacred, possessive of didactic capabilities, and pursuing period restoration govern the park service’s practices at all of its Civil War holdings. These arguments and methodologies also guide the National Park Service’s preservation of other types of historic properties. Desiring authenticity in physical fabric and historic experience, whether achieved honestly of fictitiously, is a proclivity of American culture. Colonial Williamsburg is a much maligned preservation effort, often presented as being an anomaly, as a misguided product of a recent past that lacked the informed historical consciousness and preservation methodologies of the present. Rather than being an anomalous product of a specific cultural context, the desire to clean up the past, to create an ordered, socially stable, nostalgic presentation of the past, evident in Rockefeller’s interpretation of colonial history, is a pervasive American tendency. Williamsburg "commemorated the planter elite, presented as the progenitors of timeless ideals and values, the cradle of the Americanism that Rockefeller and the corporate elite inherited and guarded.... Colonial Williamsburg was the appropriate past for the desired future". Throughout the twentieth century, Gettysburg has also been defined and presented as a symbolic past from which the present needs to receive lessons in order to be able to proceed virtuously into the future, dedicated to the ideals of the American Revolution.
Using the past for present purposes is not inherently malicious or necessarily a suppressive tool of those in power. History’s relevance derives from its abilities to provide understandings of not just the past but of the present. Specific lessons may not be learned but an educated awareness of the past enables critical thinking and strengthens the possibilities for rational action. Uses of the past, however, can be iniquitous. This is what needs to be questioned at Gettysburg, where the park service continues to present the landscape’s lessons and symbols as if they were inviolable historical truths. But each one of the ostensibly factual metaphors was a construct of a specific culture, and they had unique, clearly recognizable contingent meanings to the society for whom they were presented. These cultural contexts are invisible in present interpretive efforts. The landscape is one harmonious symbol of heroism and reconciliation. Of course, visitors come to Gettysburg with their own preconceptions of the landscape and understandings of the Civil War, and the reception of texts, whether understood in traditional or postmodern terms, is never a process of simple imposition. Evaluation of information is a subjective process, but rigidly circumscribing the presented interpretation of the text, or in the case of Gettysburg, the landscape, limits the ability of visitors to assess what they are shown and told.
Being repeatedly bludgeoned by stories of patriotism and national progress anesthetizes an ability or willingness to more vigorously scrutinize official narratives. The National Park Service needs to stop their preservation efforts at Gettysburg because they are based upon the worn supposition that the battlefield is sacred and for that reason must be preserved. The must in the argument needs to be subjected to rigorous criticism. Presenting the Gettysburg battlefield as a didactic, rhetorical relic of a prelapsarian past is a dubious activity.
Since most adult "Americans get their continuing education in history from the parks than from almost any other source", it becomes imperative for the National Park Service, the proprietor of these parks and the official interpreter of the nation’s past, to ask themselves why they are preserving Civil War battlefields. It will most likely be discovered that the answer is because they have always done so. The 1998 Gettysburg GMP is a case in point because it bases its arguments upon the enabling legislation which began the park’s history in 1864. Analysis will most likely suggest that the reasons behind creating the park and giving it certain missions are no longer relevant, and may possibly even be deleterious, to present society. The historian Mike Wallace argued that most Americans know relatively little about their past and have an underdeveloped sense of how history happens. This is not a reflection on popular intelligence, but an estimate of the strength of our historicidal culture. People are clearly interested in the past, but when they seek understanding they are confronted with institutions ... that tend to diminish their capacity to situate themselves in time. The political consequences of this impoverished historical consciousness are profound.
Institutions, such as the National Park Service, "should walk that difficult line between fostering a definition of the present solely in terms of the past and disconnecting the past so thoroughly from the present that we forget that people in the past produced the matrix of constraints and possibilities within which we act in the present". At Gettysburg, revisionism offers the possibility for disassembling the historical myths of the place to thereby create new possibilities for current relevance. The National Park Service needs to confront two issues guiding the preservation plan at Gettysburg: landscape restoration and the interpretation of the battlefield.
Restoration of the landscape to an 1863 appearance purports to create a conduit to the past. This medium of natural features will enable a visitor in the present to interact with ghosts of the past, picking up some important moral guidance in the process. In the park service’s analysis, visual unity will recreate historical authenticity, but restoration faces the hurdles imposed by the monuments. There is no point on the battlefield where one is out of contact from their visual presence. Period restoration is thus an impossible effort; moreover, it is an intellectually spurious endeavor. The Gettysburg landscape is already infused with historical fabrications; restoration will only make the invented myth complete.
Standing amidst a scene recreated in its entirety will absolutely disassociate the viewer from the present, an effect which will make nostalgic impulses even more insidious than they already are on the battlefield. Dell Upton argued that "Landscape - the scene - undeniably offers itself to us as a transparent totality, coherent, and final. Compared with the ephemeral nature of human consciousness and social action, the continuity of the material world and its apparent unchangeability seem to promise constant or certain meaning. Yet the stability of physical form falsely certifies stability of meaning; there may be no meaning at all". The Gettysburg landscape already contains reified meanings that present an appearance of having remained stable since their inception. Return to an authentic historic appearance can only make these symbols seem to be even more factual, more natural in their existence and truthfulness. Further complicating the issues is the fact that the Gettysburg battlefield has not existed as the soldiers saw it since they first trod upon its fields. Various authorial interventions followed the destruction of the land by the armies’ shells. Monument building and farming followed the destruction of war. Restoration can not be to what the soldiers experienced; it will instead recreate what existed before the battle. If the plan is implemented, what a visitor will experience is a serene farmland untouched by war. The monuments, however, will confuse even this basic visual appearance. Their ubiquitousness precludes an imaginable battle experience.
Restoration and reconstruction are carelessly proposed as the means of preserving the Gettysburg battlefield to the result that the General Management Plan proposes the physical creation of a false historical setting. Not knowing that Ziegler’s Grove or the Peach Orchard are new growth, visitors will imagine that they are standing amidst the trees which shielded some fortunate men and fell shredded to the ground for their immobile efforts. Due to its deceit, a false setting can not present true historical narratives. This acceptance of restoration as a viable means and end of preservation is a problem associated not just with Gettysburg. The Antietam Civil War battlefield is protected from commercial encroachments upon its land and into its viewsheds by land acquisitions and easement strategies. Reforestation is also being used to fill in missing, natural historic pieces of the landscape. This approach is the guiding principle behind the preservation and management of all of the National Park Service’s Civil War holdings. Battlefields are treated by the park service and by the public as untouched sylvan retreats from the present where one, in mythological fashion, may happen upon an oracle, hidden amongst the ancient natural landscape features, from which one may learn mysterious and empowering secrets of the past. Anti-modernism permeates the preservation arguments of the park service. Gettysburg, Antietam, and other historical sites represent a past where one may seek physical and spiritual refuge from the present. Since the 1930s, park service officials have made this characterization explicit.
A desire to keep a landscape historically accurate as an artifact turns it into a museum piece, while, in contrast, continuity engenders periodic renewals of social meaning. Even the power of archaeological sites derives not solely from an authenticity defined as a rigid concept pertaining to issues of siting, materials, and state of intactness; a great amount of their historical power stems from an ineffable spiritual presence that only ruins can generate. Edward Gibbon’s mystical encounter in the Roman Forum that became the genesis for his eighteenth-century The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire lay in a sense of continuity of place as he watched Christian monks in the pagan landscape. Meaningful connections to the past are made through a continuity of use. Gettysburg is such a continuously used place, and attempting to sever it from the present with a boundary between history and modernity will antiquate it by effectively sealing it from contamination by modern public memory.
Most Western countries, with the exception of the United States, heavily discourage reconstruction or period restoration. The 1966 Venice Charter, drawn by the Second International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, serves as the officially accepted preservation criteria for those in charge of cultural property in the West. Article 11 reads, "the valid contributions of all periods to the building of a monument must be respected, since unity of a style is not the aim of a restoration. When a building includes the superimposed work of different periods, the revealing of the underlying state can only be justified in exceptional circumstances and when what is removed is of little interest and the material which is brought to light is of great historical, archaeological or aesthetic value, and its state of preservation good enough to justify action". Article 15 claims that "All reconstruction work should however be ruled out a priori. Only anastylosis, that is to say, the reassembling of existing but dismembered parts can be permitted". If the United States had signed the Venice Charter, the act of nonagreement signifying a cultural disinclination to compromise on a unique American methodology of caring for the past, the Gettysburg plan would be severely in violation. Demolition would be precluded because the Cyclorama Building is a valuable historic component of the commemorative landscape, and it reveals the park service’s historical and managerial attitudes during the 1950s and 1960s. Reconstruction of the landscape would also have to be avoided since very little of Ziegler’s Grove remains and other parts of the natural landscape no longer exist.
Recognizing that the Venice Charter applied to monuments rather than to more broadly conceived cultural sites and that the charter did not exactly fit the unique needs of Australia, Australia ICOMOS drafted the Burra Charter in 1977. Article 16 reads, "The contributions of all periods to the place must be respected. If a place includes the fabric of different periods, revealing the fabric of one period at the expense of another can only be justified when what is removed is of slight cultural significance and the fabric which is to be revealed is of much greater cultural significance". The Gettysburg landscape consists of a complex layering of history in which the Cyclorama Building is an important piece of the commemorative landscape and of a record of the park’s ownership. Removing it will excise from the landscape an important memory of the park service’s history. Mission 66 was a culturally important project whose history deserves to be interpreted at Gettysburg. The merit of preserving the battlefield primarily lies in its ability to recount the historical uses of a specific place and the concomitant public memory of particular cultural contexts.
Even though the "Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties" claims that "The replacement of intact or repairable historic materials or alterations of features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided" and that "Changes to property that have acquired historic significance in their own right will be retained and preserved", the Standards are rather permissive of reconstruction and period restoration. The Gettysburg plan reveals flaws in American arguments for preservation. Authenticity is the guiding principle behind the park service’s efforts, but they construe authenticity in a paradoxical fashion by defining it as the creation of an experience that abides by fanciful, nostalgic notions of what the past should have been like, rather that what is physically intact. Since true authenticity of the Gettysburg battlefield is a product of its layering, restoring the landscape will create an inauthentic place in physical and ideological terms. Fences, trees, grading, and other features will all be new landscape elements masquerading as the ones that existed in 1863, while the image of Gettysburg, the historical concept, will be a romanticized myth. The Society of Architectural Historians complained to the park Superintendent that if the plan is implemented "What visitors will experience, then, is neither a mid-nineteenth-century landscape, nor one of later decades, but a new quasi-historical patchwork.... Equally disconcerting is that this new creation is likely to be interpreted, and will readily be seen by most visitors, as an authentic one. And even if this program is carried out to the full degree proposed, it will always be compromised by changes wrought in the twentieth century over which the Park Service has no control". Criticism of a restoration of the park can not be considered without a reevaluation of what the park teaches since a clarification of the lessons drives the park service’s arguments for a need to restore visual harmony and authenticity.
The Gettysburg landscape proclaims that America’s progress and America’s periodic regenerative experiences, which led to recommittals to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, occur through violence. It is the National Park Service’s duty to reject this myth and clearly say that the Civil War was not a knightly war fought by idealistic heroes - that the Civil War was not fought over abstract causes - that reconciliation did not occur as easily and as completely as has been traditionally suggested - that equality and democracy were not achieved in totality through the five years of bloodshed. As the narrative is now constructed, it mocks the history of black Americans since no mention is made of slavery at Gettysburg. Claiming that the war solved issues of inequality insults the history of all ethnic groups in America. Racism against the Irish, belied by the presence of Gaelic monuments at Gettysburg, was violently present in the North at the time of the Civil War. Presenting the war as a conflict between competing conceptions of constitutional government commits an act of fallacy by omitting the very real role slavery played in the rhetoric of the time. What are we as Americans bequeathing future generations, not to mention the falsehoods we are committing in the present, by exonerating the Confederacy and covering the Gettysburg battlefield with an impenetrable shroud of heroism and idealism?
Selective memory diffuses controversial issues from the past, and this prettying-up of history is a malignancy in American public culture. Entertainment and patriotism, inextricably intertwined, create a myth of progress that negates continuing social struggles and lessens Americans’ abilities to adequately and honestly deal with present issues. Anti-revisionism is, however, not all-pervasive; the Little Bighorn Battlefield now tells a story with more concern given to Native American viewpoints, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. questions America’s involvement in Vietnam. But with the exception of a few examples, propagandistic symbols of mythical history permeate the American landscape.
During my several trips to the battlefield, I heard, repeatedly, men, who obviously knew the history of the battle, recounting to their wives, girlfriends, children, and male friends stories of heroic deeds enacted upon the landscape. Inevitably, comparisons were made, empirically, of past and present weapon capabilities with wonderment expressed towards how the war would have preceded if only the men of 1863 had possessed modern weapons and known modern battle tactics. Through the presence of actual cannons, printed displays, and videos of reenactors in full action, a large exhibit in the Visitor Center museum tells the viewer how nineteenth-century artillery operated and just what it could do. The war everywhere appears to have been a glorious, romantic, and idealistic contest for honor. I never heard, or read for that matter, true accounts of why those men had been fighting. Neither is death as a concrete fact discussed, even though there were 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg. The battlefield tries to push the visitor to lament, If only we could be so honorable. If only we lived in a time when men fought for what they believed in, were in fact willing to die for a higher cause, than in this materialistic world most flagrantly symbolized by the proliferation of McDonalds and shopping malls and the errant ways of a profligate President.
The invidiousness of Gettysburg, and of a deeply nostalgic American desire for clean, stable, and orderly historic settings of which it is a product, stems from the severance the landscape makes with the present. Looking at Gettysburg, one is well aware of the fact that the landscape is not a coherent remnant from the nineteenth-century, but the park service tells the visitor that the national park is a sanctuary and a memory fragment of a better time. The National Park Service needs to renounce anti-modern tendencies in their preservation of historic sites. Interpretation should emphasize continuity, not of a stable transmission of meanings but of use and adaptation through time.
At Gettysburg, the park service needs to recant their desires for the restoration of historical periods and should instead focus their energies and resources towards maintaining what they hold in their care. This includes measures necessary to preserve the Cyclorama Building. Secondly, the park service needs to reevaluate current interpretation. The narrative should honestly investigate the war’s causes and results and the uses to which the park has been put. Explication of individual monuments and of the different periods of commemoration needs to be undertaken. No longer should the Gettysburg National Military Park be an unquestioned symbol of honor, heroism, and reconciliation that glorifies violence in the name of patriotism and national progress.
Primary Sources
1) Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. A Plan to Preserve the Historic Resources of the Gettysburg Area of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.1977.
2) Gettysburg National Military Park. Determination of Eligibility, the Cyclorama Building. 1996
3) Gettysburg National Military Park. Draft General Management Plan/Environmental Impact Statement. Plan Summary. June 17, 1998.
4) Gettysburg National Military Park. Draft General Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement. August 1998.
5) Gettysburg National Military Park, Newsletter 1. (April 1997).
6) Gettysburg National Military Park, Newsletter 4. (December 1997).
7) Gettysburg National Military Park. Report From a Panel of Historians Peer Review of the Process Developed by GNMP Planning Staff and Historians to Determine Significant 1863 Landscape Features, Their Relationship to the Outcome of the Battle and Extent of Their Change Over the Past 135 Years. March 1998.
8) Greystone Communications, Inc. Gettysburg Battlefield Tape Tour. 1996.
9) Hawthorne, Frederick W. Gettysburg: Stories of Men and Monuments As Told by Battlefield Guides. Association of Licensed Battlefield Guides; Gettysburg, Pa., 1988.
10) Hines, Thomas, "Which of All the Pasts to Preserve?", New York Times. (February 21, 1999): 48
11) Marquis-Kyle, Peter and Meredith Walker. The Illustrated Burra Charter. Australia ICOMOS; Brisbane, 1996.
12) Moe, Richard. Letter of Response to Gettysburg NMP Section 106 Case Report. January 19, 1999.
13) National Park Service. Conservation Considerations and Recommendations Regarding Exhibition of the Gettysburg Cyclorama. November 1998.
14) National Park Service. Section 106 Case Report, Cyclorama Building, Gettysburg National Military Park. January 1999.
15) National Park Service. Statement of Denis P. Galvin, Deputy Director, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, Before the Subcommittee on National Parks, Historic Preservation and Recreation, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Concerning the Visitor Center and Museum Facilities Project at Gettysburg National Military Park. February 24, 1998.
16) National Park Service. Statement of Denis P. Galvin, Deputy Director, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, Before the Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands, House Committee on Resources, Concerning the National Park Service Draft General Management Plan and Visitor Center Proposal for Gettysburg National Military Park. February 11, 1999.
17) Neutra, Dion. Letter of Response to Gettysburg NMP Section 106 Case Report. January 11, 1999.
18) Neutra, Dion, "Gettysburg Visitor Center: To Old to Be Chic; To Young to Be Revered, AIA Architect. (February 1998): 5
19) Neutra, Dion, "Gettysburg Revisited: Memories of an Architect Son", AIA Architect. (April 1998): 20
20) Scott, Janny, "National Parks Get Low Marks in History", New York Times. (November 15, 1997).
21) Second International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments. Venice Charter. 1966.
22) Society of Architectural Historians. Letter of Response to Gettysburg NMP Section 106 Case Report, Richard Longstreth, President, Society of Architectural Historians. January 6, 1999.
23) U.S. Department of the Interior. National Register Bulletin #22. Guidelines for Evaluating and Nominating Properties that Have Achieved Significance Within the Past Fifty Years. 1996.
24) U.S. Department of the Interior. The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties. 1995.
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