The Arkansas Historic Preservation Alliance makes an annual attempt to pick a list of places from this state's rich past worth saving, even if all too often the attempt proves unsuccessful. Talk about Here Today and Gone Tomorrow--in these cases, it's Here Yesterday, About to Be Gone Tomorrow.
One poignant site on this year's list of eight worth saving is the Brittnum Rooming House in Little Rock, which has been due for demolition since the city's board of directors voted to tear it down earlier this year. It was the kind of decision all too familiar in a throw-away society used to neglecting the architectural treasures it has tucked away among its back streets and weedy lots. Till they fall apart.
Through the 1940s and into the '60s, this long deserted boarding house catered to black blue-collar workers drawn to the city by opportunity, and may even have counted some black ballplayers among its roomers when they played with the Arkansas Travelers baseball club. The building's glory days are well behind it, but a city and state with a sense of history and a sporting instinct wouldn't have given up on it. But would have saved it--as the Preservation Alliance has saved other old buildings, even putting them to new uses. Like community centers. It can be done if we but will it.
But without that will, an important part of Little Rock's past will be lost. Surely it is part of the universal human tradition to be moved by traces of our past even as they're disappearing before our eyes. To quote an ancient Chinese poet in his soliloquy on Passing a Ruined Palace:
"Heavy dew. Thick mist. Dense grass.
Trees grow on the broken balconies.
Willows choke the empty moat.
Fallen flowers litter the courts. . . .
The road has vanished. The landscape is the same.
The works of men are being obliterated.
When I pass by the broken gate
My horse whinnies again and again."
Today the look of an old abandoned rooming house in an historic Southern city inspires much the same feeling as it slips irretrievably into the past--but this past is not only retrievable but re-usable.
Why just shed the past when we can not only save it but make it part of the future, too?
Editorial on 05/19/2015