Carole Owens

My column entitled “Where our history is housed,” I tried to demonstrate that what happens in Lenox doesn’t stay in Lenox. At Spring Lawn in Lenox, a problem is highlighted that goes beyond a single house in a single Berkshire village.

In the 1980s I participated in writing the Stockbridge Cottage Era bylaw based on the Lenox Great Estate bylaw. In 2014, Stockbridge weakened our Cottage Era bylaw to accommodate a developer of Elm Court. In 2019, Lenox weakened that bylaw significantly by requiring only façade preservation and not preservation of the historic building as a whole.

The problem highlighted has two parts: What power does a municipality have to preserve and protect that which it considers a community asset, and on what basis do we decide what we save? On the problem of power: Today folks challenge rules and regulations rather than accept that they must abide by them. Municipalities cannot merely assert; they must be prepared to fight. Lenox Historical Commission is doing a good job, perhaps demonstrating a model.

For all of us in Berkshire County, our history is very much with us. We will better understand ourselves and our current communities by understanding our history.

Today we seek to demolish, to make way for the new and to calculate profit over almost all other things. We recognize the developer’s right to profit and forget the developer’s obligation not to change the things we residents prize and the very things they came for, rather than to join us in preserving that which makes the Berkshires unique and eschew that which homogenizes us. Our past tells us where we came from, how we got here and perhaps which way to head. Save it, and everything else comes with it: our character, our open spaces and the story that is us.

I hope the Town of Lenox will enact a bylaw that requires maintenance of historic buildings and clarifies that façade preservation and whole historic preservation are two options to be decided on a case by case basis We must seek to preserve that which informs us who we are today.

Editor’s note: In full disclosure, I am president of Berkshire Preservation inc. Carole Owens