i CHARLESTON CONTRADICTIONS: A CASE STUDY OF ...

since the BAR did not receive the power to delay demolitions until 1959 and the power to
stop demolitions until 1966 (Weyeneth 2004, 273) While the district has been enlarged
many times over the years to include more of the city, the Board of Architectural Review,
operating with more power and structure, still oversees new construction, alteration, and
proposed demolition projects within the boundaries.
The federal government began to get more involved in historic preservation
during the 1930s. As a reaction to the Great Depression, when many architects were
unemployed, the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) was created in 1933 in
order to document historic buildings across the United States (Tyler 2009, 40). The
Historic Sites Act, which created the National Landmarks Program to recognize sites of
national significance, was passed in 1935 (Tyler 2009, 61). While the preservation
movement was starting to gain momentum, aside from the two local historic districts
(New Orleans and Charleston), there was very little actual legal protection for historic
buildings at this time. One of the issues for historic preservation, which is still an
important concern today, is the strong legal precedence for the rights of private property
owners to use their property as they see fit without government interference.
Because private and governmental preservation activities at the midpoint of the
twentieth century were largely separate, one of the most important developments of the
historic preservation movement in the United States was the formation of the National
Trust for Historic Preservation in 1949. The NTHP was a quasi-public organization that
sought to unify historic preservation efforts by combining the public and private
functions of historic preservation (Tyler 2009, 42). The NTHP fulfills several roles,
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