Having just arrived in Nashville for the 2009 National Preservation Conference, I find myself in the lobby of the Union Station Hotel waiting for a room and for my meetings to begin. That left me time to think…which can be dangerous.
Union Station is a Nashville landmark. It is a beautiful old pile of a building and the lobby (see photo) is stunning. But I think it is a landmark and was – in the end – saved from the wrecking ball because it has so many personal connections to people in Middle Tennessee. Take me, for instance.
My parents were part of the post-war (WWII) marriage boom that begat the well-documented baby boom. Both were from the small town of Franklin, located about 20 miles from Nashville. My father had just graduated from Vanderbilt and he and my mom were married in the First Baptist Church in Franklin. Before beginning his life-long career with the Tennessee Valley Authority, my father and his new bride had a honeymoon to take.
Luckily, they had relatives (my father’s sister) in Chicago, so they came to Union Station – like so many honeymooners, soldiers, businessmen (in those days), and families before them – and boarded a train bound for Chicago. I’ve heard stories my entire life about the plays they saw in the city, visiting Wrigley Field to see the Cubs (that must have been how I got those baseball genes), and so much more. But the stories always begin with that train ride from Union Station.
That’s why preservation is important. It helps save the places that matter to people. When I wrote the following in an op-ed in today’s The Tennessean newspaper, this is what I was referring to:
I have fond memories of growing up on Main Street in Murfreesboro, where our town square, library, school, grocery store and church were just a few blocks away. Much like East Nashville today, my hometown was designed in a way that connections between people were reinforced by everyday communications and interactions. It matters how we build our communities and how we preserve them.
Almost every preservation success story like Union Station has a thousand or more personal stories holding them up. I just happen to be in the lobby of the place that launched my personal history and that of our family. That’s why they are worth fighting for and saving.
More to come…
DJB
UPDATE: I didn’t quite get all the “facts” straight in this post, according to my father, the engineer. I was comfortable with “perhaps not factual but true. You can see the factual version here.
Over the past two days the National Trust Council has toured a remarkable collection of 
If Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum is a symbol of the city’s optimism for the 21st century (see my previous post), then the City Hall is a fine example of the community’s spirit and optimism for the 20th.
What do you get when you ask the public to download a simple sign, find a place that is important to them, photograph themselves in front of that place holding the sign and then download it to the Internet?
Last Friday as I boarded my plane in Dublin, I opened the overhead bin and came across a banjo case. A nearby passenger asked if it was mine, and I said, “No, but I was going to ask the same question.” A slight man with a female companion sitting across the aisle identified himself as the owner of the case, which he said held a 
We have just completed a wonderful International Conference of National Trusts here in Dublin—the 13th in the history of the National Trust movement. I suspect that when a small group of Anglophiles gathered together in the 1970s in Scotland for what became the first gathering of the world’s National Trusts, they could not have imagined either the spread of their movement or the diversity of people, countries, issues and models that we have seen this week from among the 200+ delegates in attendance.
As part of today’s International Conference of National Trusts, I joined a tour into the countryside to explore a bit of Irish history and see rehabilitation and interpretive efforts at work.
Today, we visited the battlefield where that victory was won: The Battle of the Boyne. It was here in 1690 that protestant King William of Orange defeated the army of the Catholic King James II. There’s a recently opened visitors and interpretive center which we toured with a guide from the site. As An Taisce put it in the conference materials, “the outcome of this battle has been the source of much bitterness historically and the correct interpretation of the site has been integral to the Irish Peace Process.” The closing line of the center’s interpretive film put it a little more directly: Issues arose in the battle that “reverberate to today.” The good efforts to focus on how different parts of Ireland view the battle and its outcome were obvious, showing another way historic places resonate even today. You could say that Irish history isn’t even history because it is as fresh as the morning’s news.
