NOREEN: Save the clock tower
“Save the clock tower!”
In “Back to the Future,” Marty McFly is approached by a woman distributing leaflets for a campaign to save the clock tower of the local courthouse, which was damaged by lightning many years earlier.
In the 1970s, and it wasn’t even in a movie, some now-forgotten visionless bureaucrats wanted to take a wrecking ball to the lovely, historic El Paso County courthouse. Community activists intervened, sanity prevailed, and the building that would become the Pioneers Museum was preserved.
If history teaches nothing else, it teaches that history repeats. So here we are again in 2009, trying to save the clock tower once again.
Falling victim to the same budget ax that hacked up the city transit system and other valuable city services, the Pioneers Museum is in grave danger.
Some employees might be laid off, but there is more to it than that. Any community that casually dismisses its history in this way is asking for trouble.
“One of the real challenges Colorado Springs has is we are such a transient community,” said Matt Mayberry, the museum’s director. “There has been such a loss of identity.”
There aren’t that many natives here. Most of us came from someplace else. The museum connects us with our past and lots of people move here from out of state and learn about their new home by going there.
“Maybe it’s a phrase that’s used too much — a sense of place,” Mayberry said. A sense of place combines what we know with what we feel, and in our city, the Pioneers Museum is the focal point for that.
“There are intellectual reasons for the museum, but there are heartstring reasons, too,” Mayberry said.
Councilwoman Jan Martin, who served on the museum’s advisory board for six years, said the old courthouse, with gorgeous marble inside, “tells a wonderful story about our roots.”
This year, about 10,000 school kids have been to the museum.
“Those are the things that really excite me, the chance to educate kids,” Mayberry said.
It appears the city won’t be able to rescue the museum by itself, but it’s not over.
“We have an immediate need to buy sometime,” Martin said.
Next week, the El Paso County Commission could decide to contribute $300,000 to $350,000 to keep the museum going another year.
Given that reprieve, supporters of the museum might be able to devise a long-range survival plan for it.
No one is going to say having a museum trumps having a policeman in a patrol car or a fully staffed firehouse. Those are settled questions. But a community that loses contact with its past won’t have much of a future.
Save the clock tower.
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