Continued
It
is, in other words, the battle plan that, in the last 20 years, has
transformed Mendocino Village into the dollhouse that it now resembles.
Nobody takes those words more seriously than the Mendocino Historical
Review Board - the County agency charged with historic preservation.
And perhaps nobody on the Board takes them as seriously as Clinton
Smith.
He
is, like Antonin Scalia, the Board's strict constructionist, seeing
little room for compromise when it comes to the sanctity of Mendo's
quaintness. No signs with logos, no tearing down chimneys - no matter
how dangerous or decrepit they might be. That's his mantra. And he
defends Mott's vision with such militancy that the Board has had to
make public apologies on his behalf.
In
April, one particularly heated exchange between Smith and Noah Sheppard
of the MacCallum House caused the Board's Chairman, the more tame
Lenard Dill, to not only apologize for Smith (who promptly told Dill,
"You don't apologize for me"), but to call that meeting
the "worst" he "had ever attended."
But
this is essentially ground-zero Mendo after all, and frenzied shouting
matches over chimneys and arbors and parking signs are par for the
course.
The
application before the five-member Board that sparked Clinton's Monday
night sermon came from Tom Honer, who, along with his wife, Penny,
own Fort Bragg's popular Harvest Market. They opened their second
Harvest store in Mendosa's, the ancient Mendo grocery, one month ago,
and wanted to make a few alterations to the building. Tom Honer seemed
keenly aware that they couldn't simply gobble Mendosa's up: He even
named it "Harvest at Mendosa's." This, of course, pleased
the Board - and the audience - to no end.
But
Honer, and his architect, Kelly B. Grimes, made a tragic mistake.
They wanted to build an arbor; they wanted to include Harvest logos
on the parking lot signs (so, they said, that non-customers would
know not to park there); and they wanted to tear down a nearly invisible,
non-functioning chimney in the back of the building. According to
Grimes, it was built with non-reinforced concrete and is potentially
dangerous.
Shame
on them.
Smith
said that regardless of its condition - and its location - a chimney
is a defining architectural feature. No exceptions. And the arbor
proposed by Grimes and Honer - which was decried as incongruous -
was simply hideous.
Not
everyone on the Board agreed. Of course.
Honer
and Grimes were vindicated, and the majority of the Board approved
their modifications. But Clinton's tear-jerker gave him the last word.
"It makes me cry," he said of Mott's essay. "And that,
folks, is why, in this meeting, I get frustrated, angered and saddened
by what I see happening here. Because the things that he has prophesied
... as minor as they may be, are happening here tonight in this room
in the form of a sign that has Harvest Market all over it."
