[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 150 (Tuesday, December 20, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: December 20, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
          BLACKSTONE HERITAGE AREA'S NEW PRESERVATION APPROACH

 Mr. PELL. Mr. President, I would like to share with my 
colleagues an excellent cover story from the Christian Science Monitor 
of December 5, 1994, that examines the vision of the Blackstone River 
Valley National Heritage Corridor.
  This story is particularly timely because we will be seeking to 
reauthorize this corridor during the 104th Congress. As the Senate 
author of the current authorization, I am proud of the work that 
already has been done and the community pride that has grown with the 
corridor.
  I anticipate the reauthorization proposal will encompass the entire 
watershed of the Blackstone River Valley, which runs from Woonsocket, 
MA to Providence, RI. We want to highlight the role of the valley as 
the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution.
  This story also highlights the role of Jim Pepper, the executive 
director of the corridor commission. Jim has proven to be an able 
diplomat and an indefatigable advocate of both the corridor and the 
community involvement that has become its signature.
  As we start to reconsider the corridor authorization and the goals 
that it has developed, this story presents an excellent portrait of the 
corridor's accomplishments and potential. I hope my colleagues will 
join in supporting its plans for the future.
  I ask that the story, ``New Preservation Approach Aims To Save 
Cultural Landscape,'' from the December 5, 1994, Christian Science 
Monitor, be printed in the Record.
  The material follows:

       New Preservation Approach Aims To Save Cultural Landscape

                           (By James Andrews)

       Jim Pepper pushes aside brambles, strides across spongy 
     bottom land, and scrambles up a rocky embankment. About 50 
     yards from the road, he stops and looks around at what 
     appears to be nothing but a patch of Rhode Island woods.
       ``We're standing in the mill,'' he says. ``The water ran 
     down this trough,'' he explains, gesturing to stone walls and 
     arches under the overgrowth.
       Mr. Pepper is a visionary with a twist. Not only can he 
     peer into the future to see what might be, he also can gaze 
     into the past to see what has been. Now he is seeing Mammoth 
     Mill, once a bustling woolen factory on the Blackstone River 
     in Northern Smithfield, R.I. These neglected ruins are all 
     that remain of the 1836 mill, which was torn down in 1930--
     but to Pepper, they are the substance of things hoped for.
       Pepper is the executive director of the Blackstone River 
     Valley National Heritage Corridor Commission. He has guided a 
     pair of journalists to this obscure spot to make a point 
     about his job and the work of the commission.
       ``Mammoth Mill is symbolic of so many places in this valley 
     that are unknown and unseen. Our job is to make them known,'' 
     he says. Although Pepper has no plans for the site yet, his 
     imagination already is leaping ahead to a day when the plot, 
     tidied up and properly ``interpreted'' through signs and 
     diagrams, may inform tourists about America's early 
     industrialization.
       The Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor is 
     one of five regions that have been designated ``American 
     Heritage Areas'' by Congress. Besides the Blackstone River 
     Valley in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, there are the 
     Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor in 
     Illinois, the Delaware and Lehigh Canal National Heritage 
     Corridor in eastern Pennsylvania, the America's Industrial 
     Heritage Project in southwestern Pennsylvania, and the 
     Quinebaug and Shetucket Rivers Valley National Heritage 
     Corridor in Connecticut, which Congress approved just this 
     fall.
       If a bill in Congress that passed the House of 
     Representatives is reintroduced and enacted by the 104th 
     Congress, 10 more zones from Georgia to Washington State will 
     be designated national-heritage areas and become eligible for 
     federal matching funds. The legislation would establish a 
     mechanism whereby additional regions could obtain heritage 
     recognition by Congress in the future.
       As important as they are, however, federally sanctioned 
     heritage areas are just the crown jewels of a burgeoning 
     movement to revitalize distinctive but underrecognized parts 
     of the American landscape. Scores of places in nearly every 
     state have acquired or are seeking a degree of official or 
     unofficial classification as heritage sites.
       It is primarily a grass-roots movement, explains Shelley 
     Mastran, a program director at the National Trust for 
     Historic Preservation in Washington and the executive 
     director of the recently formed National Coalition for 
     Heritage Areas (NCHA). Referring to a long list of putative 
     heritage areas compiled by the National Trust, Ms. Mastran 
     says, ``These are initiatives that are or have the potential 
     to become heritage areas. Some of them are just self-
     anointed.''
       But many other heritage areas have progressed beyond the 
     gleam-in-the-eye stage, Mastran says. Their proponents are 
     working with state governments and the National Park Service 
     to create programs through which a heightened ``sense of 
     place'' can help achieve environmental, economic-development, 
     and historic-preservation goals.
       Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania have their own 
     programs for recognizing heritage areas, though sometimes by 
     other names. New York, for instance, has established the 
     Hudson River Valley Greenway Council, a regional-planning 
     compact among 240 cities and towns in 10 counties from Albany 
     to New York City. Despite its name, the members of the 
     compact are cooperating on a much broader array of 
     initiatives than are implied by the term green way, says 
     David Sampson, director of the Hudson River Valley Greenway 
     Council.
       Asked if he thinks that interest in heritage areas and 
     other forms of regional planning is growing, Mr. Sampson says 
     he responds to speaking invitations all around the country, 
     and he has traveled to the Czech Republic twice to consult on 
     green ways.
       What, exactly, is a heritage area? ``This question has as 
     many definitions as there are heritage areas,'' the NCHA 
     observed last January in the first edition of its quarterly 
     newsletter, Heritage Links, because ``no two heritage areas 
     are exactly the same. * * *'' But the organization says the 
     ``basic components'' of heritage areas include:
       A sense of place and identity.
       Regional scope and management.
       Large-scale natural or manmade resources that unify the 
     region.
       A variety of land uses.
       Predominantly private ownership of land and resources.
       Local, regional, state, or national significance.
       A common goal or ``big idea.''
       One could almost say (although it would make many 
     proponents of the concept wince) that heritage areas are 
     theme parks--except that the theme in each area is not 
     imposed by a Disneyesque developer, but rather grows out of 
     the unique geography, history, and living culture of the 
     region.
       In contrast to national or state parks, heritage areas--
     where most property remains in private hands--are an approach 
     to resource conservation and management that emphasizes 
     partnerships among all levels of government, 
     environmentalists, business people, and citizen groups.
       Pepper says that, in the Blackstone River Valley, he has 
     seen the regional cooperation that is fostered by the 
     national-heritage concept start to bridge divides between 
     environmentalists, historic preservationists, and community 
     planners on one side and business people and property owners 
     on the other side.
       ``If you push the time horizon out a distance, most people 
     all want basically the same things--livable communities, good 
     places for their kids to grow up, places with a mixture of 
     jobs and green spaces and recreation facilities,'' Pepper 
     says. ``Once you have identified common goals, then it 
     becomes a question of, `How do we achieve it?' That's when 
     meaningful planning really begins.''
       According to Pepper, planning for community development and 
     resource management is often misunderstood. ``Too many towns 
     just have a permitting process, not a true planning 
     process,'' he says. ``When communities and regions develop 
     real, long-term plans, there are fewer fights over specific 
     permitting issues. And people feel empowered when they have 
     effective planning tools in their hands.''
       Pepper was hired by the Blackstone River Valley National 
     Heritage Corridor Commission in 1989. A career employee of 
     the National Park Service who previously worked in Alaska, he 
     cheerfully calls himself a ``pro-government liberal'' and 
     says he came to the job with a wilderness lover's distrust of 
     business people.
       But Pepper says he has learned a lot about planning from 
     corporate executives. ``Business types often are more skilled 
     than bureaucrats and yuppie environmentalists at establishing 
     long-range goals and setting up implementation schedules,'' 
     he admits.
       As Pepper wheels a van along the highways and byways of the 
     Blackstone River Valley, the words rush out as quickly as 
     parts of the waterway that once was called the ``hardest 
     working river in America.'' In nearly every town and village 
     he passes through, indeed, around almost every bend of the 
     road, Pepper points to a historic site, a distinctive piece 
     of architecture or Americana, a scenic vista or significant 
     landmark, a restoration project, new heritage-area signage, 
     or--and there are still many of these--evidences of neglect, 
     disrepair, and pollution.
       ``The Blackstone River Valley, like many regions that are 
     candidates for recognition as heritage areas, had been 
     largely forgotten, Pepper says. ``There are many places in 
     America that have become anonymous, that we don't see, and 
     that have lost a lot of their own self-consciousness as an 
     identifiable place with a history and heritage that are worth 
     preserving.''
       The Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor 
     extends 46 miles from the outskirts of Worcester, Mass., 
     south to Providence, R.I., where the Blackstone River empties 
     into Narragansett Bay. The 250,000-acre zone encompasses some 
     40 cities, towns, and villages, together with forest and 
     farmland.
       While the corridor includes wilderness areas like the 
     rugged Purgatory Chasm State Park, its distinctiveness as a 
     heritage area stems from what Pepper calls the ``cultural 
     landscape'' more than from its natural features.
       A National Park Service publication calls the Blackstone 
     River Valley the ``birthplace of the American Industrial 
     Revolution.'' In 1790 Samuel Slater, an English mill boss, 
     engineered America's first successful watered-powered cotton-
     spinning mill on the river at Pawtucket, R.I. Over the 
     following decades, manufacturing spread along the swift 
     stream and its tributaries, dotting their banks with textile 
     mills and other factories, each surrounded by clusters of 
     worker housing. These company-owned mill towns are the 
     valley's most distinguishing feature.
       Based on a National Park Service inventory of the region's 
     natural and historical assets, Congress voted to help 
     preserve the Blackstone River Valley's cultural landscape in 
     1986. It established the boundaries of the national-heritage 
     corridor, created the commission to be a funding and planning 
     catalyst (but without zoning, eminent domain, or other powers 
     to regulate land use), and provided $250,000 a year--raised 
     to $350,000 in 1991--for the commission's operations and as 
     matching funds for a variety of conservation, historic-
     preservation, and economic-development uses. Congress also 
     has given the commission about $4.2 million over the years 
     for bricks-and-mortar projects.
       The annual authorization pays for, among other things, 
     Pepper's five-person staff, which includes a National Park 
     Service ranger and community planner. The staff works out of 
     a refurbished former depot of the Providence & Worcester 
     Railroad in Woonsocket that was donated by the state of Rhode 
     Island.
       But the real development money for heritage-area projects 
     comes from state, local, and private sources. Pepper 
     estimates that he has leveraged federal dollars with other 
     funds on a scale of 15 to 1.
       While the commission provides funds for historic 
     preservation, Pepper emphasizes that is not interested simply 
     in saving isolated structures or ``little vest-pocket 
     displays of historic sites.'' For instance, he says, when the 
     town of Blackstone asked the commission for funds to restore 
     an old church that had been condemned, the commission refused 
     to help unless the town developed a more comprehensive 
     heritage-protection plan, as it subsequently did.
       As another example of how the commission tries to spread 
     ripples, Pepper takes his visitors to small, attractive 
     riverside park where a mill once stood in Valley Falls, R.I. 
     Pointing to signs of refurbishment around the park, Pepper 
     says residents in the run-down neighborhood have become 
     convinced that their community has value.
       ``We're constantly on the lookout for these little `gene 
     pools' of potential revitalization, where we can make a 
     difference,'' he says.
       Pepper says he is heartened by the extent to which many 
     local companies have caught the spirit of the corridor's 
     purpose. For instance, he says, in Slatersville, R.I. 
     (founded by Samuel Slate's brother, John), Polytop 
     Corporation, a maker of container lids and other plastic 
     products, has spent more than $1 million to purchase and 
     rehabilitate a vacated mill and surrounding worker 
     housing. The company is collecting the stories of former 
     factory workers in an oral-history project.
       Despite such evidence of success, national-heritage areas 
     have encountered opposition from two directions: some 
     factions within the National Park Service, and the property-
     rights or so-called ``wise use'' movement.
       Skeptics in the park service voice doubts about heritage 
     areas primarily because they fear that money for such areas 
     will detract from funding for national parks. Moreover, 
     Pepper says, many of his colleagues in the park service have 
     what he suggests is a hidebound approach to safeguarding 
     precious national assets.
       ``They believe that to protect a resource, the government 
     has to own it,'' Pepper says. ``For them, Yellowstone is the 
     model: You put land behind red-velvet ropes and keep people 
     away except under tightly controlled conditions.''
       Pepper and other heritage-area supporters like A. Elizabeth 
     Watson, a conservationist and the chair of the NCHA, believe 
     that critics within the National Park Service are 
     shortsighted and are missing an important wave in the future 
     of conservation and environmentalism.
       ``Americans need more places to go to experience their 
     heritage,'' Ms. Watson says. ``We need to build partnerships 
     to preserve the American landscape, not just lock up land in 
     national parks.''
       Both Pepper and Watson see signs that some critics in the 
     park service are softening their attitudes toward heritage 
     areas.
       Resistance to heritage areas from the property-rights 
     movement is predictable, since some ``wise use'' activists 
     oppose government involvement in decisions affecting private 
     property.
       Heritage-area advocates like Mastran and Watson of the 
     National Coalition for Heritage Areas wonder if property-
     rights groups understand heritage areas and know that 
     management authorities in the areas lack coercive powers over 
     land use. ``I don't think they have a clue,'' Mastran says. 
     ``They just used the bill as another vehicle for raising 
     their favorite issues.''
       Sampson of the Hudson river Valley Greenway Council also is 
     puzzled by right-wing opposition to heritage areas. ``They 
     seem like a very Republican idea: Using private planning and 
     investment to improve the quality of life and to revitalize 
     communitys,'' Sampson says. ``It's a market economy that 
     makes heritage areas and green ways work.''

                          ____________________