Native American leaders focus on holy sites

[Source: Joanna Dodder, The Bugle] -- American Indian officials spoke at the State Historic Preservation Conference in Prescott Thursday about their efforts to save their holy sites such as the San Francisco Peaks, Fossil Creek and Apache Leap. "We're here to let you know about some of the battles we're going through ... in order to continue to exist," said Vernelda Grant, tribal historic preservation officer and archaeologist for the San Carlos Apache Tribe. Destruction of one holy site impacts them all, added Angela Garcia-Lewis, assistant cultural resource specialist for the Gila River Indian Community. Grant has helped draft a Declaration of Unified Tribal Nations that calls for protection of holy places. "Many of these scenarios are repeating themselves across Arizona and the nation," said session moderator Alida Montiel, a Pascua Yaqui who is the health and cultural project specialist for the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona.

Archaeologists, historians and cultural resource specialists from the Yavapai-Apache, Gila River and San Carlos Apache tribes in Arizona all called for better understanding and communication from government officials. For example, government officials rely heavily on the written word when American Indians might have trouble putting their cultural perspectives into writing, said Barnaby Lewis, cultural resource specialist for the Gila River Indian Community. 'We want to get the message out that (documents) do not define us," Garcia-Lewis said. "A lot of tribes distrust the written word because it's not precise." Federal officials must consult with tribes about how projects on federal lands could impact their cultural resources on their ancestral lands. Private developers must report ancient burial sites. It would be better if they start that consultation in person instead of writing, she said. "We have to fight for our holy places because they're all off the reservation," noted Yavapai-Apache Historian Vincent Randall (pictured). Randall referred to his 2005 testimony in Prescott's federal courthouse against the Snowbowl ski area's plans to use wastewater for snowmaking on the San Francisco Peaks on the Coconino National Forest. Several Indian tribes still are battling the plans in court. [Note: To read the full article, click here.]

L. Ron Hubbard House in Phoenix wins Governor's Heritage Preservation Honor Award

[Source: PR-inside] --The Friends of L. Ron Hubbard Foundation and the Church of Scientology International received the Arizona Governor's Heritage Preservation Award this week for the painstaking restoration they did of the house where L. Ron Hubbard lived from 1952 to 1955 in Phoenix, Arizona. Presented by Mr. Vince Murray, President of the Arizona Preservation Foundation, the award recognizes people, organizations, and projects that represent outstanding achievements in preserving Arizona's historic and prehistoric resources.

Two years of intensive research went into the planning of this restoration project to recreate the house and its furnishings exactly as they were at the time Mr. Hubbard lived there, more than 50 years ago. Those carrying out the project found and interviewed Scientologists who had attended the courses and lectures Mr. Hubbard conducted while in Phoenix and who had visited the house. Project personnel studied and used Scientologists' photographs and memorabilia from that period, they pulled documents that were on file with the City of Phoenix planning office, and an historical restorations expert who directed the project conducted a thorough inspection of the building against all the information that was collected, all to create a completely accurate reconstruction of the house. But while the project made sure of the accuracy of every detail, it is half a century since L. Ron Hubbard lived and worked there, and it would not have conveyed the essence of the building and its history if the furnishings and fixtures looked brand new. So care was taken to ensure it looked the way Camelback House would look in the 21st Century had it been kept and maintained by the Church ever since Mr. Hubbard lived there. [Note: To read the full article, click here. To view video footage of the Preservation Award's Grand Prize Winner click here.]

Arizona tribes unite against mine

[Source: J. Craig Anderson, Tribune] -- American Indians from several Arizona tribes set aside centuries-old differences to speak in unison Wednesday against a plan to mine copper underneath land that San Carlos Apache leaders say has been part of their religious and cultural activities since time immemorial. But San Carlos tribal council Chairman Wendsler Nosie isn’t expecting unity among the tribes to keep government and copper mining interests at bay. That’s why the tribe has hired a Scottsdale lawyer and plans to fight for the 3,000 acres of Tonto National Forest (pictured) subject to a proposed federal land exchange with Resolution Copper Mining, the Arizona joint subsidiary of Britain’s Rio Tinto and Australia’s BHP Billiton.

“This has unified the tribes to start defending the land,” Nosie said. “We’re looking forward to the days to come.” A protest and blessing ceremony on Wednesday at Oak Flat campground near Superior drew about 300 American Indians from six tribes and their supporters — an event that tribal leaders say has not happened in Arizona’s modern history. The mining company’s plan for Superior involves opening the most productive copper mine in North America and pumping 1.8 billion gallons of treated wastewater from previous mining operations into an irrigation district between Florence and Queen Creek. Culling pure copper from the new mine’s underground ore deposit would require an additional 6.5 billion gallons of water each year. The proposed mine “is exclusively driven by the need to obtain the greatest profit for its mostly foreign shareholders,” according to a joint resolution addressed to President Bush and signed Wednesday by leaders of the San Carlos Apache, White Mountain Apache, Camp Verde Yavapai Apache, Tonto Apache, Hopi and Hualapai tribes. [Note: To read the full article, click here.]

Multicultural celebration in Tucson marks official dawning of summer

[Source: Albert Ching, Daily Star] -- There's no hiding from the summer in Southern Arizona, so why not greet its official start the right way with a solstice party? That's the attitude at the Arizona State Museum, where you'll get that chance with "Marking the Summer Solstice" on Saturday. "The event actually started nine years ago," said Lisa Falk, the museum's education director. "It grew out of a summer cultural program we did in collaboration with the public library. It started very small, and we did it for two years." Falk then came on board, and decided to expand the event to celebrate a diverse range of cultures.

"I'm from the East where there are lots of festivals, and here there didn't seem to be much to do to bring families out of their air-conditioned homes," she said. "It grew from about 200 people that they were getting, and now we get about 1,200 people." The event aims to be a veritable smorgasbord of culture presented by local groups, with performances from Ballet Folklorico Tapatio, Irish music from Halfway Round the House, Japanese drumming from the Tucson Taiko Kyokai, Cuban salsa with Cuban Connection, and Apache hoop performance from the Yellow Bird Indian Dancers. Tucson pyrotechnic theater troupe Flam Chen will perform for the event's "grand finale" with the Dambe Drum Ensemble. The event also boasts educational talks from cultural experts, including Navajo physics and astronomy instructor David Begay and Arizona State Museum head of collections Patrick Lyons. [Note: To read the full article, click here.]

Yavapai County projects take home good share of state archaeology awards

[Source: Joanna Dodder, The Bugle] -- If awards are a good indication, Yavapai County is making a noticeable contribution to the protection of archaeological resources. People and projects in the Prescott and Verde Valley regions received six awards Thursday at the 2007 Awards in Historic Preservation at the Elks Opera House in Prescott. The Grand Award Winner this year was the rehabilitation of the 1908 Karlson Machine Works Building/Southwest Cotton Company in Phoenix. The awards were part of the fifth annual Arizona Historic Preservation Partnership Conference, which takes place in different cities each year.

The Arizona Preservation Foundation is the main host of the annual conference, which ran Wednesday through Saturday and featured dozens of educational sessions, workshops, tours and speeches. Four of the 10 Governor's Archaeology Advisory Commission Awards in Public Archaeology went to Yavapai County residents and projects.

Verde Valley recipients of the Public Archaeology Awards were:

• Avocational Archaeologist: Jerome Ehrhardt, who as a leader in the Arizona Archaeological Society's Verde Valley Chapter has helped professional archaeologists learn more about prehistoric sites in the Sedona region and Agua Fria National Monument.

• Tribal Program: Chris Coder, the Yavapai-Apache Nation's archaeologist for 11 years who has led work on documenting sites important to the tribe.

Tucson's Downtown Alliance broadens its scope

[Source: Rob O'Dell, Daily Star] -- Over a couple hours Wednesday, with little fanfare, the Tucson Downtown Alliance became the mega public-private partnership intended to prod Tucson to revitalize its Downtown core. The Downtown Alliance's board voted unanimously to reincorporate itself as the Downtown Tucson Partnership — an expanded group that now includes influential developers, investors, politicians and community activists. Their plan is to merge several existing Downtown organizations and efforts to oversee redevelopment there. The proposed private-public group would help raise money and bring together business deals aimed at creating a vibrant Downtown, along with picking up TDA's mission of largely providing an extra level of security and maintenance for Downtown.

It also will continue to get the $800,000 in property taxes and city assistance TDA has received annually. The new organization would be 35 to 40 members strong, with an additional 12 to 15 nonvoting members, including politicians. Larry Hecker, who will be a member of the new board, said it was legally easier for the TDA to transform itself into the new organization than to start over from scratch and file incorporation forms with the state and the Internal Revenue Service. "There's a corporate structure that avoids having to form a new corporation," Hecker said. "Its mission recognizes the overall importance of a vibrant Downtown to the wider community." For the time being, Donovan Durband, TDA's executive director, said the paid staff will remain the same, and "it will be business as usual." [Note: To read the full article, click here.]

Promoting cultural & heritage tourism

Departments and agencies of the federal government and a number of travel-related organizations in the private sector are working together and separately to persuade Americans and visitors from abroad to visit the nation's cultural and historic treasures. There have been successes and disappointments along the way, but the effort has encouraged cultural and heritage initiatives across the country. Cultural and heritage travel differs from other mass-market tourism, noted a position paper released at the U.S. Cultural & Heritage Tourism Summit in Washington, D.C., last October. The document defines the segment as unique, authentic and a one of a kind, non-cookie-cutter experience. "Consumers "don't want it (cultural and heritage travel) packaged, noted another summit paper by New York University's Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality. "They are after experiences" such as sampling local food, learning about ethnic groups and visiting museums, according to a study released at the summit. "They don't want 'generica.'" Earlier studies by the Travel Industry Association noted that cultural and heritage tourists say longer and spend more than other travelers.

Phoenix to update historic preservation design guidelines

[Source: Barbara Stocklin] -- Heritage Architecture and Planning, Inc., began the update of the City of Phoenix General Design Guidelines the week of June 4 - 8,. City staff will be working closely with the consultants on the project and there will be many opportunities for public involvement, beginning with two stakeholder workshops on August 28 and 29. The purpose of the project is to update the existing historic preservation design guidelines to make them more accessible and user-friendly for the end user.

City of Phoenix receives two 2007 Governor’s Heritage Preservation Honor Awards

[Source: EVliving.com]--The city of Phoenix accepted two of the 10 Governor’s Heritage Preservation Honor Awards at a special ceremony 5:30 p.m. Thursday, June 14, at the Elks Opera House, 117 E. Gurley St., Prescott. The two awards are for the Phoenix Union High School Exterior Rehabilitation for the University of Arizona College of Medicine and the Post World War II Commercial Historic Building Photography Project. The awards, presented by the Arizona Preservation Foundation and Arizona State Historic Preservation Office/Arizona State Parks, are to promote public awareness and recognize various groups and organizations that promote the goals of historic preservation in Arizona. “The preservation and rebirth of the city’s first high school have given three of the city’s most important historic buildings a future, and allowed them to play an exciting new role in education for the 21st century,” said Mayor Phil Gordon.

Three vacant historic buildings on the Phoenix Union High School campus were saved from the wrecking ball by the city and are now the centerpiece of a modern medical campus for the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix. The Domestic Arts and Sciences Building, Auditorium and Science Hall (pictured) were transformed in 18 months with new interior state-of-the-art facilities while preserving key historic features such as wood floors, coffered ceilings, display cases and grand staircases in the auditorium. More than 200 wood windows were replicated in the three buildings based on historic photographs and their historic exteriors were restored to original condition. The historic flagpole and World War I Memorial Sundial in front of the auditorium also were restored. The result has been to save three significant historic buildings and provide a University of Arizona medical presence on the biomedical campus in downtown Phoenix. This project was a partnership between the city of Phoenix, Arizona Board of Regents and University of Arizona College of Medicine. [Note: To read the full article, click here. To view video footage of the Preservation Award's Grand Prize Winner click here.]

This Day in History

June 19, 1885 : STATUE OF LIBERTY ARRIVES IN NEW YORK HARBOR. Nine years late, the 300-foot statue was a gift from the people of France, who had been the Patriots’ primary foreign ally in the War for Independence, to those of United States as a celebration of the Declaration of Independence’s centenary in 1876. The monumental work is mounted on a steel framework designed by Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the statue, originally titled “Liberty Enlightening the World” from copper sheets upon a steel frame. After completion, the statue was disassembled into 350 sections and shipped in 214 crates to New York Harbor.

Over a year later, on October 28, 1886, the statue was reconstructed and dedicated in a large public ceremony by President Grover Cleveland. The statue’s pedestal bears the words of poet Emma Lazarus, written in 1883: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. When the Ellis Island immigration center opened its doors on an island in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty in 1892, Lazarus’ words welcomed the 12 million immigrants who passed by “Lady Liberty” after trying trans-Atlantic journeys on their way to becoming Americans.

Tucson cemetery to be home to reburials of soldiers’ remains

[Source: Bill Hess, Herald/Review] -- The remains of soldiers who died more than a century ago will have a new resting place in a “cemetery within a cemetery,” (pictured) said Joe Larson, administrator for Southern Arizona Veterans Memorial Cemetery. From the mid 1860s to mid 1880s, soldiers from Fort Lowell were buried in what became an abandoned cemetery in downtown Tucson. At least 10 sets of identifiable graves and 50 containing the remains of unknown soldiers have been found in a military portion of the old cemetery, which experts said holds more than 1,000 burials in the entire burial place of slightly more than 4 acres, Larson said. “There could be more (military),” he said, adding some could be family members of soldiers. The cemetery in Tucson is located east of Stone Avenue between Toole Avenue and East Alameda Street.

The cemetery was abandoned about a year before the United States entered World War I. The gravesites were covered by homes and later became a commercial area, as Tucson grew in the 20th century. The graveyard was primarily a site for civilian interments, with a small defined area, generally in what is an alley now, for military burials. The relocation of the graves is part of a multimillion-dollar project preparing the ground for a new Pima County and city of Tucson court complex, said Roger Anyon, program manager for the Pima County Cultural Resources and Historic Preservation Office. At least $10 million is budgeted for the project’s archaeological aspects during a multi-year period, he said. The identification of gravesites began in November and reburials are not expected to take place until early 2009. While that seems to be a long time off, there are many legal steps that must be done to ensure the treatment of the remains is done with dignity and they are provided to any known next-of-kin or “lineal descendent” group, such as Indian tribes, Anyon said. [Note: To read the full article, click here.]

Historic label not likely for Tempe's Maple-Ash neighborhood

[Source: Katie Nelson, Arizona Republic] -- Tempe's oldest existing neighborhood likely won't be granted historical designation. And a new voter-approved state law is the reason. Maple-Ash is a high-visibility neighborhood, tucked into a corner between downtown Tempe and Arizona State University. The shaded, quirky university-influenced character of the neighborhood has long been touted as a point of pride for the city. But the city's Development Review Commission this week decided it won't back the designation for Maple-Ash. The basis for its decision was Proposition 207, which requires cities to reimburse homeowners whose property values are negatively affected by zoning changes. It's a sign, although not a sure one, that the designation won't go forward.

The resident-run commission will submit its recommendation to the City Council. The council tentatively is scheduled to make the final decision in July. The Maple-Ash neighborhood's historic designation fight has garnered attention in both Tempe and in the city-governance community. The case is unusual because of the neighborhood's multifamily zoning. Most single-family communities have zoning that allows only single-family homes. Maple-Ash's multifamily zoning heightens the stakes because it is more favorable to developers, ratcheting up the property values by leaps and bounds. A handful of Maple-Ash neighbors initiated the request for the historical designation, a measure that allows a neighborhood to establish suggested standards for building exteriors in order to preserve an area's character. But while no one seems to dispute that Maple-Ash is something special in a Valley full of cookie-cutter homes, the request was hotly contested. [Note: To read the full article, click here.]

Quirky lodgings along Route 66 listed as endangered

[Source: Bob Dart, Washington Bureau] -- Preservationists are warning that coming generations of Americans won't be able to get their kicks on Route 66 unless steps are taken to save the aging neon-lit lodgings beside the storied highway. The often tacky, always memorable motels along U.S. Highway 66 — once called "America's Main Street" as it bore travelers between Chicago and Los Angeles — will be included in the 2007 list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places, to be released today by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Forlorn neon greetings, forgotten Art Deco castles, vacancy signs on motels shaped like wigwams and empty booths in diners designed like coffee pots now line the road once romanticized in the TV series "Route 66" and by its hit theme song. These "quirky roadside attractions and mom-and-pop motels . . . offered travelers essential amenities and a touch of fantasy," the Trust said.

But the Trust said these historic motels are now caught "in an economic squeeze" — some rural ones dying after motorists deserted them for interstate highways and chain establishments and others pressured by high taxes and development in growing suburbs. "Route 66 is a road of memories and adventures, many of which began at one of the hundreds of historic motels along this storied highway," said Trust president Richard Moe. "If we don't fight hard to save the Route 66 motels, there won't be anything left to break up the monotony, and a distinctive, irreplaceable part of this nation's history will be lost forever." In the 1950s, for example, Central Avenue in Albuquerque, N.M., had more than 100 motels, the Trust said, but now there are about 25, and more are closing despite efforts by the city to protect signature motels such as the DeAnza Motor Lodge and the El Vado. The Trust urged local governments to develop policies and financial incentives to support these motel properties. The Munger Moss in Lebanon, Mo., and the Blue Swallow in Tucumcari, N.M., are examples of motels that cater to a growing base of heritage tourists looking for an authentic Route 66 experience. "Route 66 has to be by far the most famous road in America," Moe said. "It tells the story of western migration during the Dust Bowl and beyond.

[Note: To read the full article, click here. Photo source: Peter Tobia, Philadelphia Inquirer.]

Jerome's new water tank grant delayed

[Source: Philip Wright, Verde Independent] -- Plans for a new water-storage tank in Jerome hit a snag in May -- actually, four snags. But those snags appear to have been removed and the town likely will be on track again for funds through a Community Development Block Grant in January. The Town Council voted in mid-April to use grant money to build a new 200,000-water tank on Sunshine Hill instead of an alternate site on Montana Hill. At that time, everything seemed to be on course for work to begin on the $236,000 project. The deadline to have everything turned in to CDBG was May 31. Unfortunately, that date passed without all the paperwork being completed.

During May four hurdles appeared that ultimately caused the town to lose out on the grant, this time around. The first problem came when the State Historical Preservation Office questioned the placement of the proposed tank. "They said it would ruin the historic integrity of the town," said Al Palmieri, town manager. "But they had already approved it." Palmieri said Phelps Dodge came to the rescue and produced historic photos showing water tanks sitting almost exactly where the new one would be built. The second problem surfaced when Yavapai County got involved. "The county called," Palmieri said. "They were concerned because the site is in the county and out of the Town of Jerome." Once again, Phelps Dodge stepped in and answered the county's questions about lease arrangements. Problem solved. [Note: To read the full article, click here.]

Regional heritage tour map available

The Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance has produced a regional "heritage tourism map" to help direct visitors to some of Southern Arizona's historical and cultural attractions. The colorful map, which includes markers for historical sites, scenic spots and wineries, is being distributed to visitors bureaus and local government offices throughout Tucson, Marana, Oro Valley, Nogales, and other locations in the Santa Cruz Valley, according to the alliance. The organization is also working on an online version for its Web site.