Preservation act

John Nau is in the beer business down in Texas. It's a world of refrigerated warehouses, shining fleets of trucks, and company-sponsored softball teams. He's also a mover and shaker, on a national level, in the world of historic preservation, a realm of federal regulations, policy studies and ribbon-cuttings in dusty, windswept towns.

But Nau (History '68) is comfortable in both worlds. His natural business acumen, which has made his Houston-based Silver Eagle Distributors the second-largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship in the country, informs his approach to historic preservation. And he comes by his love of history naturally — from his time at, and continued involvement in, the University of Virginia.

Beyond Comprehension

Freshly reappointed by President George W. Bush to a second term as chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), he faces his biggest challenge — saving what's left of the physical history of the Gulf Coast after the double whammy of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“The simple scale is beyond our ability to comprehend,” he says from his well-appointed but no-nonsense office in Houston’s downtown warehouse district. “Having been there twice, I still don’t understand the event. Most people have focused on New Orleans. The raw impact where those levees broke and [flooded] entire neighborhoods — forget single houses — all you have now are foundations and every once in a while a tremendous debris pile. You’re in there and you’re going through military checkpoints. You have to say ‘Where am I? Is this America?’”

What Nau saw were entire cultures devastated. On his second visit, on a congressional tour as an ACHP representative, one experience drove home the link between the destruction of the physical features of home and community and the loss of culture. “It was an African-American community, on a bayou about two miles inland in Mississippi,” he recalls. “It was turning the page back a hundred years. We had a moving meeting in one of their churches, and you could see the water line on the church. The flood surge had come up the bayou, had a dramatic impact on a number of the structures, but it was the flush back — as that flow started moving back, that’s what took a lot of the artifacts. They said, ‘this is who we are as a people.’”

As he went by military helicopter along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, from Pass Christian to Biloxi, he saw homes that had stood since the 1840s and survived numerous hurricanes reduced to piles of kindling. “If there was a ground zero for cultural resources, historic assets, it would’ve been right where that storm hit,” he says sadly. “So, how do you get your arms around that?”

Initially, he says, “you don’t focus on saving old buildings when you’ve got people in trouble.” You begin by helping those people, reviving the economy and assessing the damage. “It’s taken nine months to begin to [assess] what can we save in terms of physical structures and then how those remaining structures can continue to convey the culture,” he notes.

Nau is a tall, broad-shouldered man with a direct manner (he favors dark suits and unlit cigars), and he brings a results-oriented business sensibility to historic preservation issues. Since his appointment to the Texas Historical Commission in 1993 (he’s been chairman since 1995), Nau’s approach to historic preservation has involved more handshakes than hands out. He believes that preservationists can accomplish more if they become partners with local and state government, private sector organizations, nonprofits and the business community. Where some might see strange bedfellows, Nau sees an economic model. “Heritage tourists will spend about $29 a day more than recreational tourists,” he says. “They stay longer. They’ll stay in bed and breakfasts” and dine in local restaurants. “Local politicians love that.”

Nau has had some notable preservation successes in Texas. In 1997, he helped create the Texas Heritage Trails Program, a regional heritage tourism network of 10 trails across the state. Two years later, he persuaded then-Gov. George Bush to create a legacy program to conserve and renovate Texas county courthouses. “It’s a significant collection of Victorian architecture, and some of them are just absolutely dramatic,” Nau says.

On a national level, as chairman of the ACHP, Nau has used his business and political connections to make the independent federal agency an influential advocate for preservation in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act. In 2003, the Bush administration issued an executive order launching the Preserve America initiative. The ACHP-administered program seeks to foster greater shared knowledge about the nation’s past, strengthen regional identities, increase local participation in preserving cultural and natural heritage assets and support local economies. In March, First Lady Laura Bush announced the first round of Preserve America grants, providing $3.5 million for projects in 28 states. The grants provide funds on a matching basis to assist Preserve America communities with heritage-based marketing, planning and educational efforts.

Encouraging Preservation

“We have Preserve America communities that encourage preservation through local support, crafting tourism programs,” he explains. “The administration is leading in local economic development by using various assets, whether they’re federally owned, state, locally-owned, or even private and saying to these locales, ‘We’re not going to tell you how to do it, but if you come up with a good locally-based program and have a set of standards and comply with certain fundamentals, your community becomes a Preserve America community.”

Nau is convinced that the ACHP can play a role in protecting the Gulf Coast’s heritage while spurring economic growth. Recognizing the enormous practical problems presented by the hurricanes’ damage, he sees complex but not insurmountable challenges. “You’ve got a home that’s 120 years old in an historic district. The owners have left. Does the city government condemn [the house]? What period of time do you wait for somebody to do it?  Does the city destroy it or do they try to preserve it? No one has ever addressed those questions. And what was one of the economic engines for the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and New Orleans? Tourism.

“We’ve got to be one of the catalysts.”
 
He’s hoping to use the upcoming 40th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act to reexamine the legislation in light of an unprecedented disaster. “Now we have questions that were never contemplated on a scale never imagined,” he says. “We’re going to take the opportunity of this anniversary to raise those kind of questions, so that 40 years from now somebody doesn’t say ‘what in the hell were they thinking?’

“The act has … served the American people very well,” says Nau, “but like anyone on their 40th birthday, you kind of take stock of where you’ve been. I think, once we’re done answering that, it will guide and set a course for historic preservation that is tied to economic development for the next 40 years.”