Demo at Cape Cod National Seashore

Our greatest land steward has struggled as a property manager

Former military living quarters, North Truro. Courtesy Cape Cod National Seashore

With Cape Cod National Seashore poised to demolish 44 buildings within its sprawling boundary — multi-demo in North Truro, a sprinkling from Eastham through Wellfleet — it’s a good moment to remember how the Seashore came to own all these buildings, and why its track record as a land protector and steward is so stellar but as a property manager much less so.  

When the Seashore was created more than 60 years ago, it was most unusual in the giant National Parks system.

Our park was superimposed and carved into longstanding communities (by European standards). In a different dynamic from wild flagships like Yellowstone, the Tetons, and Glacier, private homes were usurped using eminent domain to force owners to sell while others were allowed to remain — depending on complicated one-off deals, long-term or perpetual leases, grandfathered deeds.

Some devilish details of this controversial hodgepodge were written into the legislation President John F. Kennedy signed in August, 1961; some evolved.

Scores of private homes came into Seashore purview, hideaways down dirt roads inhabited by eccentrics and literati, single-family ranches and mansions on paved streets, motels, restaurants, even dune shacks that people fought tooth and nail to keep the Seashore from razing; the rabblerousers won and the funky shacks were deemed “historic.”

To complicate further, in the 1990s the Seashore took over moribund North Truro Air Force Base, dozens of barracks and living quarters, radar and communication facilities, officers’ hangout, even a bowling alley – all slowly rotting.

Maintaining inherited structures has never been a Seashore strongpoint (some would say that’s charitable). This makes sense; a federal entity with a mission to protect and create access to natural habitat would by definition have a fraught relationship with human construction. That national conflict plays out locally where human settlement is older than the nation itself.

Another way to put it:

As budgets come and go, maintenance and upkeep of vestigial properties never got priority compared to protecting nature, let alone hiring rangers and lifeguards.

Now comes The Great American Outdoors Act, ushered in by the Biden administration, which earmarks $1.3 billion a year for five years for National Park restoration and demolition. A Cape piece this year is $8.38 million to demo 28 buildings in and around Highland Center (the old Air Force base and Fox Hollow site), with another 16 sprinkled through Eastham, Wellfleet and Truro.

They are considered “too far gone” to resurrect, says Lauren McKean, who has been working on these issues for decades. The General Services Administration (GSA for those who like acronyms) stipulated none could be salvaged to house homeless people. The Massachusetts Historical Commission agreed none have historic value. There needs to be work isolating asbestos and other hazmat, but buildings should start coming down this month.

This being federal, the contractor is far from local. Cherokee CRC, based in Tulsa Oklahoma, won the bid and as the name suggests has Tribal ownership. Their subcontractor is a company called Select Demo out of New Hampshire.

The old base, aka “Highland Center,” left, red buildings going going gone. The bigger picture is on the right. Courtesy Cape Cod National Seashore

Two buildings in Wellfleet (as a result of purchase and trade) will be removed as part of the Herring River restoration project, so there’s another motive there. But zero doubt that at the base especially, these buildings are beyond gone, no rehab possible. They are dangerous, and the Seashore will be a better place when their present incarnations vanish.

But it wasn’t always that way. For many years community leaders schemed and dreamed about how we might use empty federal buildings that were sound in the 1990s, the 2000s, even the 2010s. Affordable and workforce housing? Community centers? A university satellite campus?

There was some use and rehab at the old base, but the main act there has been the tent at Payomet Performing Arts Center, which makes no use of decayed buildings (at least so far), succeeding in spite of them.

Decades of brainstorming by hundreds of creative people went for naught.

There are many reasons from physical, political, and psychological to national bureaucratic hurdles and local fractures. As years passed it also became clear that the Seashore had adopted a laissez-faire approach:

Let Nature become a partner. Let decay and dissolution slow-motion eliminate any alternative but demolition.

We are there now.

Some of the fewer and fewer remaining servicemen with strong emotional ties like Rick Cockrell, protectors of Bauhaus architecture or others who see merit in modest buildings tucked into scrub landscape, might bemoan this.

Some might even wonder what “preservation” really means:

Preserving a snapshot that existed when the Seashore came into being 60 years ago? Apparently not, seeing as all these buildings existed then. Erasing as many human footprints as possible to come closer to what was here (and not here) long before that?

These questions continue to loom. But as demolition moves forward, know this:

We are now witnessing one of many possible eventualities — that became an inevitability.

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