FROM THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT. Seen here is the roofline of York's Coventry Hall from an interior window. While the current owners are dedicated to restoring Coventry Hall, historic properties like this one are subject to building laws that make preserving the features of the past secondary to other concerns.
Photo by Tori Rasche
York Historic District Commission Chair Bob Cutts has the common sense idea that stairs that have been used for over 200 years ought to be given some consideration as having stood the test of time, especially in cases where homeowners are seeking to preserve or restore the legitimate historic value of their property. We agree.
Unfortunately for Cutts and other proponents of historic preservation, York's building codes say differently. Applying modern standards of "safety" as being the primary concern, issues of historic preservation are given diminished priority. Instead, the focus lies in bringing buildings "up to code." While an exception does exist in that the mandate to bring historic structures up to code does not come in to play until the cost of the renovation work being done exceeds 50 percent of the building's value, most serious restoration efforts, especially those using qualified builders, craftsmen and materials, easily pass that threshold.
The resulting dilemma effectively forces historic homeowners to either allow their homes to deteriorate, or to gut them of much of their historic essence in order satisfy our present code restrictions. This is not only a needlessly bad choice to inflict upon owners of historic homes, it is shortsighted as well.
Living in an old historic town, in the oldest part of our country, we often forget how young, in comparison, we still are. In contrast with the often grudging support granted to historic preservation throughout the United States, in which maintaining the exterior shell of a building while ripping out its interior is routinely mislabeled as "restoration," our European cousins place a much higher value on their architectural past, providing substantial incentives and support for those who choose to own historic properties. Building codes there seek more often to place the importance of preserving historic character at the forefront of restoration projects, rather than making them wholly subservient to modern, changeable notions of "safety."
Certainly, as pointed out by Old York Curator Tom Johnson in our article on page 7, our history is very different from that of Europe, a continent whose wars destroyed much of their own architectural history forever. No doubt it is that memory which in large part causes their current views toward the importance of historic preservation to differ so dramatically from ours.
Nevertheless, from our view, there is something to be learned here. In any case, we are far less worried about the "safety" of Mr. Cutts' steep wooden stairs than we are about the 16-year-old driver behind the wheel of a two-ton SUV, or any of the other countless real dangers that statistically are far more likely to harm us than allowing mature adults to decide they want to preserve an old, historic house.
At the end of the day, it is the subjectivity of our modern American view of "safety" that is at work here, and, as an historic community we ought to give that some real thought. More enlightened codes can and should be applied, and we encourage that discussion to come to the forefront.
