MLK Corridor Cultural Landscape Beautification & Protection
The Fifth Ave-Pleasant St (FAPS) neighborhood is significant for community settlement and development dating to Reconstruction and before, for its African-American educational, religious and civic institutions, and for architectural and landscape historical traditions which define and tie the social history of those developments and achievements to a cohesive history. - Rick D. Smith, City of Gainesville Historic Preservation Planner
Constructed in 1944, the Old Mount Carmel Baptist Church was a center for Civil Rights activism in Gainesville through the 1970s.
Constructed in 1894, the DeBose house is a landmark for the intersection of NW 7th Ave & NW 8th St
Did You Know?
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The EPA estimated that 600 million tons of C&D debris were generated in the United States in 2018, which is more than twice the amount of generated MSW.
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We do not use bombs and powder kegs to destroy irreplaceable structures related to the story of America’s civilization. We use the corrosion of neglect or the thrust of bulldozers…Places where great American voices were heard, or where great acts of valor were performed, are lost. Connections between successive generations of Americans – concretely linking their ways of life – are broken by demolition. Sources of memory cease to exist.
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Why then are we surprised when surveys tell us that many Americans, young and old, lack even a rudimentary knowledge of the national past? We ourselves create the blank spaces by doing nothing when the physical signs of our previous national life are removed from our midst.
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– Albert Rains and Laurance G. Henderson in With Heritage So Rich, 1966
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A nation can be a victim of amnesia. It can lose the memories of what it was, and thereby lose the sense of what it is or wants to be. It can say that it is being “progressive” when it rips up the tissues which visually bind one strand of its history to the next. It can say it is only getting rid of “junk” in order to make room for the modern. What it often does instead, once it has lost the graphic source of its memories, is to break the perpetual partnership that makes for orderly growth in the life of a society.
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– Sidney Hyman, Pulitzer Prize winning author, in With Heritage So Rich, 1966
Lady Bird Johnson
First Lady of the United States (1963-1969)
I am dismayed to learn from reading this report that almost half of the twelve thousand structures listed in the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service have already been destroyed. This a serious loss and it underlines the necessity for prompt action if we are not to shirk our duty to the future.