Preservation: Choosing to do the Hard Things

Charles Rollins

One of the most compelling stories in Wildwood this year was moving the Shamrock house from its lot on Pacific Avenue to a new location  a few blocks away. People witnessed the engineering marvel of a historic building being saved from demolition by traveling on the back of a flatbed truck. As our recent article Moving a Historic House explains, it is no small feat to move a house. When many buildings are just torn down instead of moved or rehabbed, why in the world would anyone want to take on the difficulty of moving a house? 

The answer is that preservation is part of a long tradition of American grit and ingenuity. America was built by people who took on challenges and walked the path less traveled. These were the people when told something was not possible or couldn’t be done, they rolled up their sleeves and put in the work to prove the naysayers wrong. In today’s society, things have become more disposable and we’re moving towards a tendency to take the path of least resistance. If there’s an old home that has seen better days - tear it down, no way it can be saved, not possible to rehab it, too many regulations. Preservationists reject this defeatist thinking and like the American pioneers, inventors, and entrepreneurs of the past they realize that hard work can lead to great results. 

To paraphrase President Kennedy when he inspired the country to go to the moon, we choose to do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Yes, preserving an old house may not be the easiest way, but America was not built by people who took the easy way out. The owners of the Shamrock house could have given up and tossed their distinctive home in a landfill never to be seen again. But they chose to do the hard things by moving and preserving their iconic house for future generations. Maybe it’s time we stop taking the easy way out and recapture that American grit and ingenuity by stepping up to preserve and protect the Wildwoods’ older homes.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the editorial board.

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I Remember: A Wildwood Memory

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Moving a Historic House