Outracing The Bulldozers

By DANIEL S. LEVY

Carolyn Pitts runs her palm over the hand-tooled sandstone exterior of an old textile mill. "The stonework is marvelous," she says. "It was obviously ! meant to be a real showpiece." Built in 1849 in Cannelton, Ind., alongside the Ohio River, the brooding, fortress-like structure with twin turrets and heavily bracketed cornice was abandoned in the 1950s. Now the roof is a wreck, and starlings nest inside.

A recommendation from Pitts could save the mill. As the sole architectural historian working for the National Park Service's history division, she decides what structures should be considered National Historic Landmarks. Pitts walks through the mill's vast, empty work space and taps a few dusty columns. Her verdict: "I think I'm playing with fire, but I'm still going to try to landmark it."

Pitts outlines the next steps to her guides from Historic Cannelton, Inc. "It needs a roof, and you'll have to repair and remove those later excretions," she says, referring to an unsightly brick addition. "You have to shake the tree a bit. You just have to get as tenacious as the devil and generate publicity that this isn't a dead whale, that it's a useful community building."

Pitts, 65, is quite a tree shaker herself. Scholar, writer and bureaucratic infighter, she has done as much as anyone else to transform the field of historic preservation from a grass-roots trend to a mainstream movement. During her 16-year tenure with the Department of the Interior, she has helped designate more than 200 structures and districts as National Historic Landmarks. Among her assorted trophies are Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater house in Bear Run, Pa., and the elephant-shaped hotel in Margate City, N.J. While there are 55,000 sites, properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places, there are only 2,000 National Historic Landmarks. Being included on that exclusive roll is preservation's premier distinction.

A no-nonsense historian, Pitts does not merely scour written records but gets out and prowls city streets and country lanes for gems of the nation's "built history." And she is not averse to a touch of cloak-and-dagger. In 1976 she learned that the Chrysler Building in New York City was going into receivership and the owners wanted to raze it. She rushed to the city and slipped unobserved into the skyscraper. After a top-to-bottom tour, she saved the art deco masterpiece.

Pitts' professional fame -- and her reputation in some quarters as a "guerrilla preservationist" -- originated with an audacious maneuver she made 21 years ago in the seaside town of Cape May, N.J. The community is a melange of Victorian follies -- gingerbread homes with broad, windswept verandas -- that had once been a summer playground of the wealthy. But it fell from favor and became an oceanfront backwater.

In 1962, after a northeaster devastated the community, local officials opted to modernize. The Department of Housing and Urban Development prepared to bulldoze the town for urban renewal but first hired Pitts to study 600 of its battered older buildings. What she documented was one of the largest surviving ensembles of late 19th century frame structures. Aware that the community looked askance at preservation, she surreptitiously arranged for the entire town to be placed on the National Register. Tourists soon began pouring in, and in 1979 the revitalized town requested and received National Landmarks status.

At the Park Service, inadequate funding forces Pitts to plot her sweeps around the country carefully. Piggybacked onto her recent visit to Cannelton, for example, was an afternoon in Madison, Ind., a quaint riverside community that stagnated when railroads supplanted the Ohio River as the transport of choice. Two of the town's largest 1840s Greek Revival homes were real finds. At the first, the Shrewsbury house, she noted a sprightly spiral staircase and a spacious drawing room divided by paired fluted columns. At the nearby Lanier house -- a cupola-topped temple-form mansion -- Pitts was impressed that the interior had been restored in a later historical style than the house's. "A building doesn't die at a certain point," she says. "I'm not for freezing something in time. Buildings are, hopefully, around for a long time, and they should reflect that long life."

Back in her Washington office, Pitts will put the Cannelton mill and the two Madison buildings on the agenda of the History Areas Committee. If approved, they will go before the Secretary of the Interior's advisory board for its nod and then to the Secretary for his signature. By the time the owners receive their complimentary bronze plaque, Pitts will have been back on the road many times, searching for buildings. After all, it is often a race between her and the bulldozers. "Tearing down a building and putting up a parking lot is idiotic," she insists. "Designation says that there is something important here, that there are properties that tell us where we've been and what we are, and we ought to take care of them."