Ken Lustbader New York's Municipal Art Society is working to save the "Survivors' Stairs" at the World Trade Center site. Leading from the center's low-rise buildings to Vesey Street, the steps provided an exit route for some on 9/11. The National Trust for Historic Preservation included the stairs on its 11 Most Endangered Places list this year.

By Patricia Lowry, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The extraordinary efforts of planners and presenters produced an intensive and wide-ranging exchange of ideas at last week's National Trust for Historic Preservation conference. For the 2,300 attendees -- the Trust's third-highest attendance ever, after Savannah, Ga., and Boston -- it was a chance to see and hear about what Pittsburghers do best. For those working in the trenches of historic preservation and green design here, it was an opportunity to show off what they've done and reaffirm why they do it. Even the weather behaved: mostly sunny and crisp.

Keynoters Bill Strickland and David McCullough set the tone for the week with inspirational talks that tied their early memories of growing up here (Strickland in Manchester, McCullough in Point Breeze) to the work they do now. Showing photographs of students and events at Manchester Craftsmen's Guild and Bidwell Training Center, Strickland illustrated how he grew his row-house, after-school art program and an inherited, failing job center into a dynamic force for human development and a national model for similar programs in San Francisco, Cincinnati and Grand Rapids, Mich.

McCullough sounded his evergreen and urgent themes: the value of the arts in education; the Pittsburgh work ethic and innovations in industry and media; the "historical illiteracy" in even "the very best schools in our country." The author and historian lamented today's use of dull textbooks that "seem designed to kill any interest in history," and advocated teaching history alongside art, music and theater.

"If a child gets to play the part of Daniel Boone or Dolley Madison in a school play, they'll never forget that."

Both men emphasized the importance of their early teachers as mentors, and both emphasized a philosophy oft expressed by the late child psychologist Margaret McFarland, one of Fred Rogers' mentors:

"Her great preachment was that attitudes aren't taught but caught," McCullough said. "Show them what you love."

Historic buildings (the passion of all in the Benedum Center audience) "are an expression of the continuity of a place," he concluded, and "without continuity civilization comes apart very fast."

In Washington, D.C., Patsy Fletcher uses social history to get residents of African-American neighborhoods interested in preserving them. In a session called "Empowering Neighborhood Organizations," Fletcher, a community liaison specialist in the city planning department, described how she sets up history committees in communities where historic preservation is regarded as white and elitist. With small ($1,500 to $5,000) grants from the D.C. humanities council, the committees gather neighborhood stories and connect them to place. The strategy has meant an increase in grassroots nominations of individual buildings for historic designation, as well as increased demand from residents that their historic resources be protected in community and transportation planning.

In New York City, in a hangar at JFK Airport, hundreds of building fragments salvaged from the World Trade Center site are in storage, along with wrecked fire trucks and eerily unscathed statues of Bugs Bunny and Foghorn Leghorn from the center's Warner Bros. store. Some will be incorporated into a museum and memorial, said participants in a session on preservation at Ground Zero. Among the most evocative are the S-shaped I-beams and the congealed masses of layered concrete and pulverized debris, in which the 12 feet between floors have been reduced to 12 inches. Now the Municipal Art Society is butting heads with developer Larry Silverstein and architect Norman Foster over saving, in its original location, the "survivors' staircase," a two-story concrete stair that is the only remaining above-ground element.

In rural New York, preservationists are weighing the repercussions of the 2,200 to 3,300 wind turbines anticipated by 2013, most of them upstate and in communities where farmers welcome the extra income they bring, even if most of the power they generate goes elsewhere.

In the Cooperstown region, 75 steel turbines are proposed, each 400 feet tall -- about four times as high as the tallest trees, said consulting landscape architect Patricia O'Donnell.

"The local review process is currently incapable of addressing cumulative impact" on historic agricultural landscapes, said Daniel Mackay of the Preservation League of New York State. "We think the state has to create site selection, review and development processes and declare some places off-limits."

Nearby, in western New York, the National Park Service is about to establish the country's first food-based heritage area, said Duncan Hilchey, an agricultural development specialist at Cornell University, in a session on the role of foodways in heritage area development.

For Hilchey, "food is the ultimate expression of place," from the cranberry bogs of Massachusetts to the chili peppers of New Mexico's Hatch Valley.

Pittsburgh, of course, knows all about that: the Rivers of Steel bus tour, which visited the Edgar Thomson steel plant, Carrie Furnaces, Bost Building and nearby Pump House, stopped at the Bulgarian-Macedonian Cultural Center in West Homestead for a buffet lunch: tomato-cabbage and chicken noodle soups, cheese bread, tomato-cucumber-feta salad (heralding the colors of the Bulgarian flag) and a fragrant, flavorful apple strudel.

Clearly an army of preservationists travels best on a full stomach.