Associated Press: Historic City Can't Afford Its Past (From 2005)

St. Augustine: Historic city can't afford its past
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. (AP) — Here, in the nation's oldest city, history has become a burden.
March 18, 2005

By Amy Sancetta, AP

It's not that locals don't appreciate their hometown's long, colorful past. To the contrary, many are fiercely proud that their city, founded by Spanish conquistadors in 1565, is the oldest, continuously occupied settlement of European origin in North America.

Richard Bowers, for one, bristles whenever he hears people chatter on about the Pilgrims being America's earliest settlers. "Listen," the Flagler College professor sniffs, "by the time the Pilgrims arrived, St. Augustine was ready for urban renewal."

This city possesses one of the oldest and largest collections of historical structures in the country — no fewer than 1,200 are listed in the National Register of Historic Places — and a large number of colonial-era buildings than would rival those of Williamsburg, Va.

"Oldest, oldest, oldest, first, first, first — there are an awfully lot of oldests and a lot of firsts in St. Augustine," says Susan R. Parker, a historian with the Florida state Division of Historical Resources. "Wherever you step, history is under your feet."

Which, as it happens, is precisely the rub: This place has SO much history, SO many surviving structures of historical significance, not to mention undiscovered buried artifacts, that experts say it could take tens of millions of dollars for the city to acquire and preserve them all.

Raising that kind of bullion might be doable — in a New York City, say, or a Chicago. But this is St. Augustine, population 14,000, where money for preservation must come from a relatively meager property tax base — 6,590 parcels of land, according to the St. Johns County tax appraiser's office.

It certainly doesn't help that 38% of all land in St. Augustine is off the tax rolls.

The Old City, for example, a 22-block district on the edge of Matanzas Bay, is a random miscellany of "501C3s" — IRS code for tax-exempt institutions, which include a cathedral, four churches, a Franciscan monastery, a convent, the 1808 City Gate (complete with causeway over what formerly was a moat), Flagler College, the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, the headquarters for the Florida National Guard and a national cemetery.

Here, too, is the country's oldest fort, the Castillo de San Marcos (begun in 1672, finished in 1695), which was built by Spain to fight off pirates, hostile natives, the French, the British and, later, South Carolinian forces.

Florida used to ante up millions of dollars each year to preserve St. Augustine's treasures, but now that the state has a huge hole in its budget, that's history, too.

Costumed guides welcome visitors to Castillo de San Marcos, the nation's oldest fort built by Spanish settlers around 1675 to fend off pirates, hostile natives, British, French and, later, South Carolinian forces.

In a different age, perhaps, the state's disinterest might not alarm preservationists. Today, however, there is this troubling fact: on average, one historic structure is now demolished each month in St. Augustine, located about 40 miles south of Jacksonville.

To the north, the city of Jacksonville is bursting its seams, extruding Home Depots, Best Buys and Burger Kings, setting off a development tsunami that is washing over St. Augustine and driving up land prices. The problem is exacerbated by the growth of Flagler College, and the resulting increased demand for student housing and parking lots. Finally, aging Baby Boomers are flocking here, looking to retire in a low-key, authentically historical setting.

There is an added complication: St. Augustine is a place where anyone can buy a historical house, completely remodel the interior, and live in it — or, if one chooses, tear it down.

Homes built before 1821 do have a bit of protection. According to St. Augustine's demolition ordinance, the city can order new homeowners to wait one year before touching anything. In theory, that gives the city the opportunity to buy and preserve the structure.

But in practice, officials say, the city doesn't have the money to buy colonial buildings, some of which are valued at several million dollars. And once an owner has waited a year, there's nothing the city can do to stop a demolition.

Several years back, a group of prominent citizens, including Ronnie J. Hughes, publisher of the local newspaper, The St. Augustine Record, started a foundation to raise seed money to help the citizenry buy and restore historic structures.

Unlike in Williamsburg, however, no great benefactor has come forward; and the state of Florida has shown no interest, either. (In Colonial Williamsburg, John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought many historic structures, including 70 colonial buildings, between 1926 and 1928.)

This makes Hughes nervous. With development pressure building in St. Johns County, Hughes figures the city has 10, maybe 15 years to acquire the most important, threatened properties and keep them from being transformed by a carnival of neon and cinderblock.

"And the clock is ticking."

Susan Parker, with a squint and a smile, halts before the house at 46 St. George Street. On this morning, she's taking a visitor through the Old City, showing off the city's "crown jewels."

In 1821, she says, there were 300 buildings in the city. A century later, just 36 of those structures had survived, including this one, the Arrivas House, built for a Spaniard named Don Ramundo de Arrivas in 1748.

Parker is saying, "This one was all set to be demolished. Destroyed forever. Can you imagine that? Well, thank goodness it didn't happen. In the early '60s, the state of Florida stepped in and rescued this one from the brink."

Her eyes skip over the facade. For a house that's 256 years old, it doesn't look a day over 30: the coquina walls appear sturdy, its wraparound porches on the second story, which hang over the street like dark, Spanish eyebrows, seem solid in repose.

Parker, moving on now, passes the entrances of some whitewashed, Spanish colonial reconstructions. They've been fashioned into trinket and T-shirt shops, craft stores, a pub, a gallery, a boutique that sells glass figurines.

"It's sort of a pity," she says. "This street ought to be a little less about selling stuff and more about heritage."

To maintain the old structures, she says, the city has four sources of revenue: museum admissions, museum store sales, grants and gifts, and income from renting commercial property. The city is the biggest landlord on St. George Street.

"We'd like to see more historically oriented shops," Parker says. "You know, antique stores, bookstores, maybe a nautical shop." For now, though, the bottom line has the upper hand: T-shirt and key chain merchants may be tacky, but they pay the rent on time.

Atop the Castillo de San Marcos, on the broad gun deck, Parker recalls a time when this fort was the northernmost outpost of Spain's New World empire.

"The king of Spain kept a garrison here — 300 soldiers — to offer cover and protection for the silver fleets that rode the Gulf Stream all the way home. See, straight out there? From that point, the Stream veers east and goes ZZZZIIIPPP! toward Europe."

The south side of the fort had what may be the first flush toilets in the New World — a couple of latrines washed out twice a day by the tide.

The Spanish, she says, weren't the only ones to leave something behind in St. Augustine. Prince Achille Murat, the short, portly nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte who married George Washington's grandniece, boarded at a coquina dwelling here in 1824 (The Murat House has been preserved.); William Dean Howells, the American writer, wintered here at a Colonial Revival home in 1916. (It, too, has been restored.)

In the early 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. staged civil rights sit-ins in St. Augustine. In 1964, he attempted to eat at the whites-only Monson Hotel and was arrested. Parker slows her gait, then stops. "That," she says, pointing across Avenida Menendez, to a construction site across the road, "is where the hotel once stood."

In a block-long, rectangular lot, workers are putting the finishing touches on the Hilton Garden Inn Monson Bayfront Resort. It's a series of two-story wooden structures, painted in pastel colors, quite in keeping with the colonial style of the Old City.

The problem, Parker says, is that the Hilton added a new, underground garage on the site. In doing so, it removed tons of soil that contained Spanish and Indian artifacts, some four centuries old, and afterward poured a concrete foundation, entombing what little was left.

Some artifacts were recovered by volunteers who worked, intermittently, for three years before the garage was built. They found a 1750 square-bottomed bottle, probably used to hold ale; an 1850 rubber statuette of the Virgin Mary cradling a baby Jesus; bowls, plates, tumblers and goblets from the 17th century.

However, Carl Halbirt, the city's staff archaeologist, estimates that 90% of the archaeological treasures beneath the Monson property perished.

Bill Adams, director of this city's Historical Preservation and Heritage Tourism department, opens a Ziploc bag and spills 302 years of American history out on to a 17th century table.

This nugget is a cast-iron grapeshot, about the size of a golf ball. Adams says, "We moved a 1915 house, the Peck House, that was sitting on a British siege line dug in 1702 across the street from the fort. And this was lying right there, plain as day."

He picks up another plastic bag, shakes out a brass button. It came off the waistcoat of a Spanish soldier — in 1720. He selects another Ziploc and pours out a U.S.-pattern dragoon sword hanger, from the Second Seminole War in 1833.

"All this came from just one small area, off the surface," he says. "Imagine what we'll find when we start digging." He reaches for another bag. "Want to see something really valuable?"

He holds up a shiny, square object. "Look at this. A chinstrap buckle from a U.S. soldier's cap. This is 180 years old. The whole colonial city is full of this stuff." He composes himself. "This is tangible evidence of who we are as a people. This proves it — it's not just words in a textbook."

Unfortunately, these treasures — and thousands more like them — are sitting in boxes and dusty drawers, waiting to be analyzed, cataloged, curated.

St. Augustine has enough money for one staff archaeologist, Halbirt; and he is so busy trying to salvage artifacts from sites that are to become parking lots, hotels or student dorms, he's got no time for historical analysis.

The result, Adams says, is treasure without context.

Between 1959 and 1997, when the state funded preservation in St. Augustine, a veritable think tank of historians handled the analysis. That stopped, though, when the legislature turned off the cash.

It still steams Hamilton Upchurch, a local lawyer and preservationist who, from 1977 to 1985, was a member of the Florida Legislature. In his estimation, $10 million is needed to get a serious preservation campaign off the ground, although, "to be truly effective on a Williamsburg scale, you're looking at $80 million to $100 million, easy."

Adams, the city's preservation director, says if restoration money doesn't arrive soon, all Americans will be the losers.

"Ultimately, the attrition of time will wear away at these national treasures," he says, "and they'll gradually disappear, like footprints in the sand."
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.