Win/lose

We’ve had some sad preservation stories recently here in southeast Michigan, with a few bright spots nationally.

• Old Tiger Stadium (near my house in Detroit) is now almost totally down, and folks are gathering pieces as mementoes.
• The Lafayette Building in downtown Detroit is being readied for demolition.
• The Michigan State Fair, the country’s oldest, really is shutting down (I was hoping for a deus ex machina).  The Archives of Michigan has been gathering Fair records–and don’t ask me what’s going to happen to the big stove.
• HAL itself is in limbo.
• Michigan History magazine has moved from HAL to the Historical Society of Michigan, but there were calls to privatize the magazine. (h/t Lisa Craig Brisson).

The good news is all cliffhanger saved-in-the-nick stories:

• Every library in Philadelphia was set to close, but, perhaps due to the public outcry, the state legislature passed a budget and saved the libraries.
• Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma (who has tried to defund museums in the past), as well as Sen McCain of Arizona, proposed amendments to the FY2010 transportation bill to prohibit transportation funds from being used for museums or historic preservation.  These were happily defeated in the Senate last week.

For good historic preservation news, the National Trust has some interesting content on Latino heritage in preservation.