Editor's note: Following his diagnosis with ALS in the late spring of 2005, Ron Neely met several times with colleagues and old friends to reminisce about the early days of historic preservation in Georgetown. He covered the period from 1968, the year he arrived in Georgetown, into the 1980s. These sessions were taped, and below are excerpts from some of Ron's comments and stories, as transcribed and compiled by Bill Wilson, with minor editing.
The germ of an idea
…Then, Cindy Neely, John Calhoun, and I-it must have been 1969, Christmas Eve-[were] sitting in front of the fireplace at the Alpine, drinking cognac. The fire was going, it was chilly outside, and we got to talking about the Winter Games, the threat of the Olympics, and the adverse impacts of those Winter Games that were proposed for 1976. Of course, it was defeated by referendum prior to that time. That must have been in '72 that it was defeated. In our case, we weren't necessarily pro or anti Olympics, but we were becoming increasingly aware of the fact that nobody was speaking out on behalf of Georgetown. You remember it was about that same time, too, that Public Service Company was constructing the high-voltage line to Henderson [Mine], so that was another aggravating circumstance. Although they did switch from metal poles to wooden poles, if there had been an organized voice there, they would have rerouted the whole thing outside of Georgetown instead of going down 7th Street.
So we concluded that we needed to do something about it. One thing led to another, and the next month we started meeting with Bob Bolander and Bob Gibbs, because Gibbs at that time was on the Planning Commission. He and Bolander bought in very, very early to what we were thinking about, and we recognized-Calhoun, Cindy, and I-that we had no clout. Cindy got here six months before I. All of us were in the 20s to 30 bracket and not being old timers in the community, we really were just sort of rabble-rousing. John was doing his PhD in theater at CU, and he talked to one of his professors or somebody to come up and meet with Bolander, Gibbs, and Wally Baehler. We met at Bolander's house. Then we started talking about the preservation ordinance, as the first step in all of this, before HGI even came along. The idea then was just to stabilize some of the obvious attacks on the architectural character of the town. Buildings weren't being torn down, but they were about to be torn down. At that time, we looked at a preservation commission and ordinance as a way to stop that. Shortly after that we looked at it as a tool to enhance the community.
Inspiration from James Grafton Rogers
I don't remember the date [that I met with James Grafton Rogers]. It would have been shortly before he died. I would say 1970 or '71. We incorporated The Georgetown Society on May 4, 1970, and we bought the Hamill House in June of '71-it was probably right in that period. Polly Chandler and I were discussing the preservation of Georgetown and probably Hamill House and some other things, and she suggested that we meet with James Grafton Rogers, who at that time was living in the University Club in Denver. He had an apartment there. So we made arrangements for lunch down there, because he was pretty old and he couldn't get out and certainly couldn't come up here. We met down there-it was a fall day, I recall. I knew who Rogers was - I had never met him, but by reputation I knew who he was. I knew of his work up here as far as moving the highway…I think during the time that he was mayor we had one of the first sign-code ordinances for a small town in Colorado.
Anyway, we met at lunch in the dining room at the University Club. He was just delightful; he was very cordial, very alert. But I was pretty much in awe of the guy, because of all the things he had done in his life. But we were talking about Georgetown, just doing kind of small talk…We would talk about an issue concerning economic impacts, then we would talk about some unrelated thing, then seemingly another unrelated issue. All of a sudden I said to myself, "This guy's got a great brain, but where is it going-all of these unrelated issues?" Now I began to have doubts about that brain being in very good shape, because we kept talking about these unrelated things. Polly would make a comment and I'd make a comment and he'd make a comment. About an hour into the meeting he took all of those unrelated points and tied them up in a little box with a little bow on it and said, "Here, now what are you going to do with it?" Really what he was talking about was the heart and soul of what this historic district is all about. It really got down to not relying on what he or I thought other people had done, but what were you going to do?
That was really it; that was part of my inspiration, because he was able to see points that I had never thought about, which translated into political points, economic points. I think as a result of that I always had Rogers in the back of my mind whenever I said or did anything about an issue relating to preservation of Georgetown. He did things on a much more massive scale-not that a sign code is massive, particularly-but getting the Georgetown Loop District preserved was a massive undertaking. The fact that in doing that he had sacrificed his house down at the junction (the Robert Old house) showed how much he cared and how much he could do. It was just overwhelming, both in terms of what he said and the way he said it...
I had no idea where Historic Georgetown was going to go when I went into that meeting. After that meeting I had a better idea that we had to make some things happen if it was going to go anywhere, because we recognized-in that conversation it became evident-that it wasn't Historic Georgetown that was going to preserve Georgetown, it was the people who love this town that were going to preserve Georgetown, and that any organization at that time and in this place could have done what Historic Georgetown ultimately did by putting in its two-cents' worth as to what this Landmark District is all about. Again, it just boiled down to the fact that you can't expect anybody to give you any money unless you've done it yourself first, unless you've made that contribution. What Rogers was saying is that you can't expect anybody to support you unless you've done something first, something meaningful, that has a direction that's a part of an overall plan or scheme of what you envision the future to be.
|
|
|
In his venue:
Ron posed at the corner of Sixth and Rose Streets some time in
the 1980's. By then the Downtown Improvement District had put
in curbs, gutters, flagstone sidewalks, and cast-iron light poles.
Photo by Christine Bradley.
|
…In reading "My Rocky Mountain Valley," in general, [Rogers] talks a little bit about the history, the flora, and the fauna, but you can begin to see, to get a little insight into the man, in terms of his sensitivity toward the subject at hand, which is Georgetown. [The book] wasn't just about buildings, it wasn't just about chipmunks; it was about people, and how they view what they're doing, the places they live in. That becomes very self evident in that book…
Passage of the historic-preservation ordinance
…The idea for [a historic-preservation ordinance] came out of our first meetings with Bolander and Gibbs (I think Bolander was on the Planning Commission at that point, and Gibbs was the Chairman). I don't know if we looked at it as a simultaneous deal where we would create both a historic-preservation commission and Historic Georgetown, but we may have. We may have said that it would be helpful if the town had some sort of legislation to enforce new construction and rehab of buildings and that sort of thing. At that time, we had been a Landmark District for four years, but of course the Landmark designation provides no teeth to do anything. I think there were some incentives there, but no real teeth to try to do anything. It may have been that we wanted to establish a historic-preservation commission and then form Historic Georgetown, which could then be a non-profit voice in the preservation of the district, rather than one without the other, which would have been much weaker.
[The idea] was popular but very controversial, because there had been no legislation of that kind adopted by any municipality in Colorado. You had the Denver Landmarks Commission, but that was authorized just to designate specific sites. There was nothing that really addressed the preservation of a whole community. In this case it was preservation of Georgetown we were talking about-new town, old town, in-between town. It was Bolander who suggested that we get a hold of an attorney who was prone to do these kinds of things. His name was Robert Keating. Through the Planning Commission, with Gibbs and Bolander, it gave the examination of the idea a legitimate platform. The idea was to try to prevent a visual deterioration as well as the destruction of historic buildings. The destruction of historic buildings at that time wasn't the issue. Nothing [of that sort] had happened in Georgetown for probably five years.
In any event, we got Keating on line and I think the town and HGI (then unincorporated) paid his fees-I think it was a partnership thing. He had several drafts that we used at various Planning Commission meetings. That must have continued over a 6-8 month period of time, as I recall. As I mentioned, no towns in Colorado [had such ordinances], so we had to go elsewhere. The two that we looked at the hardest were Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the French Quarter in New Orleans, as types of legislation that we were after… Ultimately, all of that research and meetings brought [us] to a very select meeting. It must have been in February of 1970, because the ordinance became effective in March, 1970. Of course, it was passed by the Board of Selectmen, not by a vote of the people. Under the portion of any local government charter you could pass that kind of legislation to meet public needs or perceived threats, and the perceived threat, again, was the Olympics that were scheduled for six years from that time.
I don't remember who all was on the Board of Selectmen. There were four members of the Board, and Jim Abbott was the Mayor. We had a public meeting in the Town Hall, on the second floor of the Star Hook and Ladder building. It was a little larger on the inside than it is now, because a couple of those offices weren't in there. The place was packed to the rafters. There was a lot of audience input, pro and con. Charlie Christiansen was one of the con voices there. He literally had a little wooden box, which I said was a soapbox, that he stood on, and he made this impassioned plea to the Board not to pass this legislation, because it was considered by many to be a taking and condemnation.
That's when Charlie coined the phrase, "transient empire builders, barren of leaves and fruit," referring to those of us who were trying to get the ordinance passed. That was the first time I had heard that-I've never forgotten it, and still from time to time I will get a basket of leaves in the fall, with a couple of pieces of fruit, put on the front porch of the Hamill House or some such. It was a pretty controversial issue. It came down to the vote by the selectmen-Helen Rockwell, Jerry Buckley, and Fred Maag-I can't remember who the last selectman was. Fred was one of the ones that voted against it (he was an old-timer in Georgetown). Jim Abbott wore a hard hat, a miner's hard hat. Actually, he put it on as he came into the meeting, and it added a little levity to the proceedings. It was probably a good idea! When it came to the vote, it was two for and two against, and Jim cast the vote in favor of the ordinance. It became effective the following month.
[Property rights] was one of the big issues that was discussed [at
that meeting]: did the Town of Georgetown have the legal standing to
[pass such an ordinance]? We maintained that they did, although there
had never been a case in Colorado saying that this type of legislation
was within the purview of the Board of Selectmen. That wasn't determined
until we went to the Supreme Court some ten years later, where we lost
the Leavenworth Mountain battle…The Supreme Court did uphold the
constitutional right to pass this legislation. It wasn't beyond the
authority of the town to do it. Indeed, it was well within the authority
of the town to do it. In any event, [the ordinance] passed, and then
the Georgetown Society was incorporated a couple of months later.