Understanding where the building falls in the continuum of significance is
essential to determining the appropriate treatment, or even if you are the
appropriate person/agency to be guiding the treatment.  I agree with you.  I
like to point out that the closer one is to the family end of the scale, the
more right and perhaps responsibility you have to continue to build
significance, through living and recording your own life and times.

-jc

"John Leeke, Preservation Consultant" wrote:

> Cuyler:
>
> Thank you so much for your essay on BP. It has helped crystallize some of my
> own thinking as my mother gets ready to move out of her house in Lincoln,
> Nebraska. The parallels of your story to mine are uncanny: our house was
> built the year I was born, and it too has become a record of our family's
> life there. While this was an "ordinary" contractor-designed house, my dad
> was busy adapting it to our needs before it was even completed. The day the
> flooring subcontractor arrived he grabbed a hand-full of asphalt tiles and
> set up his scroll saw out in the yard to make a 3' bucking-bronco silhouette
> for the middle of my bedroom floor and handed the interlocking cutouts to
> the installer by noon-time. Many other "improvements" were made over the
> next 40 years. My mother now sits in her living room, which she calls "my
> museum" which is decorated with the many works of art and craft produced by
> our family over the past 50 years. Perhaps the significant difference is
> that the wrapping up at our house has taken place since my father passed
> away 10 years ago.
>
> Many times in recent years my clients will say, "Oh, our house is not
> significant in any way," meaning that George Washington never slept there. I
> explain to them my theory of building significance (family, local, state,
> national, etc.), and point out that "family" is listed first for a reason. I
> tell them that the highest order significance is family, after all, this is
> the place that is most important to them and their own family; and far many
> more buildings have family significance that national significance.
>
> John
>
> John Leeke, Preservation Consultant
>
> mail: 26 Higgins St., Portland, ME, 04013, USA
> Phone: 01-207-773-2306
> email: [log in to unmask]
> website: www.HistoricHomeWorks.com