Why is historic preservation important to you?
"I'm a nostalgia, history buff. I want to live in an environment that I feel has been there for generations or centuries. It's my connection to a past. And in America, which has such a short past really, any sign that we were here before 15 minutes ago reassures me. The only way to have that connection is to make sure our buildings, the ones that are 10 or 20 or hundreds of years old, are restored and kept alive. Not just restored but kept breathing."I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and have for the last eight years, and we have an extraordinary organization there called Cornerstones, which is committed very specifically to preserving the New Mexican heritage. They often and mostly work with the beautiful old Hispanic churches that dot the whole state. Some of those churches are tiny little family churches where just relatives worshipped and some are bigger, more recognizable ones. All of them have gone through the ravages of weather in New Mexico and need to be mostly completely rebuilt.
"How it works is, there's a volunteer core of hands-on workers under the guidance of an expert. Often, someone who is brought in whose family maybe built the church. They always get the community where the church is located involved. It's like this incredible community effort, a barn raising for lack of a better description. I think that the spiritual aspect is as important as the fact that the structure is restored to perfection. Because in most of those little New Mexican communities, the church was sort of the center of society.
"This way grandfathers are brought back, or people who have moved to other states but remember how the windows were done are brought back. And with us, the new generation, we have an opportunity to make the connection which is probably the reason most of us moved there to begin with.
"Some of the churches go back a very, very long way. They're beautiful, they're very personal, the decoration is very personal, every thing about it has the imprint of somebody's soul. And you know in a world of steel and glass and multi-malls, to be able to be part of an experience that's very soulful and about life and death, and survival, and generations of family, is a real treat."
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