Tear it Down

One of my side jobs is as a docent at the Marshall House, where I talk to the folks about the life of James Wilson Marshall, finder of the first gold in California, and about the life of the house where he grew up. The story of the house, built by James Marshall's father in 1816, is fraught with drama. It sits next to the Catholic church, which used to own the house and a whole row of little houses much like it. They're all gone now, crushed under the bulldozers of the 1960s to make a parking lot for the faithful.

The Marshall House would be gone, too, if not for the efforts of a parishioner, Mrs. Alice Narducci, heroine of the Lambertville Historical Society. It is said that she stood in front of the bulldozers and screamed at the drivers to make them leave the Marshall House alone. The church deeded the house to the state, the state leases it to the historical society, and you can come and tour it on certain festal days and any weekend afternoon in the tourist season.

When I tell this story to the visitors, many of them turn pale. How could the church be so wicked? Then I have to explain what things were like in the 1960s, since many of them weren't yet born. The PBS presentations that explain those years to the young are focused on the war, the counterculture, the civil rights movement, and all those social upheavals that pitted one group against another in this country. They don't mention the bulldozers. But people in that time, as I remember it, had no idea that anything old was good, much less irreplaceable. Look what happened to Penn Station. It's dirty! Tear it down. There's plenty more where that came from.

Nearly everybody thought that way. Nearly everybody with money sought to modernize whatever they had control of. Every now and then an Alice Narducci would pop up and fight to save a part of the past, but mostly it went down the drain. Nowadays the pendulum has swung the other way. Everything must be saved. Antiques Road Show has shown us the way. Most of of us never did know the difference between our trash and our treasure. Instead of throwing away the treasure, though, now we save all the trash. And so it goes.