Airport foes call in some big guns

Stress danger to famed battle site

By Richard Higgins, Globe Staff, 3/12/2001

CONCORD - They lost the first battle over Battle Road, the one played out over Massachusetts airport politics.

So opponents of commercial air traffic at Hanscom Field in Bedford are going national, calling in big-name historians and public figures to make the case that expanding Hanscom endangers America's national birthplace.

Some of PBS's most familiar faces, such as David McCullough, Shelby Foote, Doris Kearns Goodwin and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, have joined a group formed to protect Minute Man National Historical Park and have already spoken out on the topic.

''If there's hallowed ground in this country, it is right there in Concord and Lexington,'' said McCullough, the author of ''Truman'' and host of PBS's ''American Experience.'' He said that the ''seemingly irrepressible threats to our national parks and battlefields are an issue of enormous consequence.''

It's a tough sell. The 967-acre national park around the airport, the site of the Revolutionary War's first battle, would not be destroyed. Instead, Route 2A, which overlaps with the route that American and British soldiers took on April 19, 1775, would be widened into a broad access road to the airport.

Pushing the Hanscom expansion is the Massachusetts Port Authority, which owns the airport and wants it and other regional runways to relieve some of the congestion at Logan Airport.

It gave the green light to Shuttle America, a commuter carrier that began service from Hanscom in 1999 and now has 34 flights daily. Last month, the airline logged about 16,000 passenger trips in and out of the field.

Jose Juves, a spokesman for Massport, said fears of the airport's impact were overblown, noting that while Hanscom attracted 162,000 passengers last year, the park drew more than 1 million visitors.

While acknowledging that the park has national importance, Juves said Hanscom has to be ''part of the solution to the national problem'' of gridlock in the skies.

He also criticized bringing in celebrities, saying, ''We're more concerned about sound and fair transportation policy than a star-studded public relations ploy.''

In interviews, historians and other scholars said that while the park would survive, public access to and use of the park would be harmed by an upsurge in cars on Battle Road and planes overhead.

''The park faces an insidious, long-term threat, that of being slowly suffocated by development around its borders,'' said Ronald Bosco, a literature professor and specialist in Ralph Waldo Emerson at the State University of New York at Albany. Bosco is also president of the Thoreau Society.

Alan Brinkley, a history professor at the University of New Orleans, called the Minute Man park one of ''the four or five most important historical sites'' in the nation and said ''it belongs to Massachusetts no more than the Grand Canyon belongs to Arizona.''

He said the growth at Hanscom angered him. ''I'm shocked by the amount of congestion that already exists,'' said Brinkley. ''You go to the park for the solemnness of the experience, to recall the sacrifice and valor of your ancestors, and what you're going to be getting is a lot of turbo-jet noise and car horns. It destroys the spiritual essence of the place.''

The opposition to Hanscom - which encompasses two citizens groups, a coalition of four nearby towns, and the National Park Service which operates the park - is pressing its legal fight as it wages the public relations campaign.

Having lost in state court, they are now challenging the FAA's approval of a Hanscom-LaGuardia shuttle service in federal appeals court. They say the FAA ignored a federal law requiring a review of the impact a federal project might have on historical sites.

Although local activists have been fighting expansion at Hanscom for years, a three-year-old Concord-based citizens group, Save Our Heritage, is increasingly trying to stoke national interest, tapping people like singer Don Henley and actor Christoper Reeve to join its board.

''Local grassroots organizing is essential, but it's not enough by itself when the state and Massport are dead set against you,'' said Marty Pepper Aisenberg, projects director at Save Our Heritage.

Since there is little question that additional airport capacity in New England is needed, the core issue is whether the expansion would harm the park, which is devoted to events on the day the Revolutionary War officially began.

Massport officials are adamant that it will not. They say that flights are limited to 60 passengers, that any runway enhancements won't affect the park itself, and that, while traffic to and from the airport will grow, it can be accommodated without problems.

But the coalition of historians and preservationists disagree. Since 1995, they note, the park has spent $11 million in public funds to recreate the historical landscape of the late 18th century, restoring fields, removing or rebuilding stone walls, taking down metal signs and fencing, power lines and some modern structures - all in effort to revive the past in the imaginations of those who visit the park each year.

''This park is a kind of threshold between past and present that offers an evocative and authentic connection to our historical roots,'' said Elizabeth Merritt, a lawyer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. ''The danger of the encroachment of noise and traffic and visual intrusions is that they will break the spell as you seek to walk back in time.''

McCullough said the park could lose its ability to recreate the past. ''It's hard enough to project oneself back into a different time, but Minute Man park makes that possible, certainly in the company of a good guide or book or teacher,'' he said.

''We're raising a generation that is to some degree historically illiterate,'' he added, noting that many Americans think that the Revolutionary War began with the Declaration of Independence - 15 months after April 19, 1775.

''If we're interested in reversing that, one of the most effective ways to bring the past alive [is] just such sites as we have in Lexington and Concord,'' McCullough said.

Richard Higgins' email address to higgins@globe.com