Time always wins in the end. Of course, that hasn't stopped people from trying to fight it.
One of the most infamous examples of a lost battle in historic preservation circles is the demolition of the original Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. The magnificent pink granite structure occupied 28 acres, and had 138-foot-high ceilings and a grand staircase that was 40 feet wide. When construction was completed in 1910, newspapers hailed it as a splendid gift to the city of New York. It cost more than $100 million to build.
That Penn Station was razed in 1963. Today's Penn Station, which is all underground, has 22-foot ceilings. It's an understatement to say the replacement lacks the grandeur of the original. The longtime architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who died in January, characterized the original station's demise as part of a larger poverty of imagination and ideals.
"Not that Penn Station is the Pantheon, but it might as well be because we can never again afford a nine-acre structure of superbly detailed solid travertine, any more than we could build one of solid gold," she wrote in The New York Times in 1963. "The tragedy is that our own times not only could not produce such a building, but cannot even maintain it..."
Three years after the original Penn Station was turned to rubble, the federal government significantly expanded its preservation efforts with the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. It was a reaction to the "wholesale destruction" of neighborhoods, often as a direct result of federal transportation and development programs, according to Paul Lusignan, who reviews applications for the National Register of Historic Places.
Now, nearly half a century later, there are more than 88,400 listings on the Register, according to the National Park Service. About 1,500 new applications come in annually and, because most of the vetting is done at the state level, the vast majority of applications are approved.
However, states can request that a site be removed from the National Register of Historic Places at any time, and for any number of reasons. National Park Service records obtained and analyzed by Digital First Media show that states have requested the removal from the Register of at least 1,752 previously designated sites since 1970. That's 2 percent of the total number of listed sites.
In the past decade, there have been about 51 removals from the National Register per year, with occasional spikes. In 1999, for example, 138 sites were delisted.
In Pennsylvania, 73 sites have been delisted since 1970, according to a searchable database at twincities.com. None was in York County. Two were in McSherrystown in neighboring Adams County: the Conewago Mass House on Route 476 and the Conewago Chapel Covered Bridge in Mount Pleasant/Conewago townships.
Pennsylvania has the third-most sites on the National Register -- 3,303 -- behind New York (5,462) and Massachusetts (4,201). But historians point out that numbers can be misleading. One historic district would be listed a single time on the Register, for example, but it could have 500 historic properties within its boundaries.
The number of removals per state varies. On average, states have removed about 36 of their previously listed sites. Vermont is the only state that's never requested a removal.Also of interest