Preserving our Community: Beatrice Sweeney
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. »
After drafting a good portion of my article about North Broadway for this week’s Preservation Matters article, I learned that Beatrice “Bea” Sweeney passed away two weeks shy of her 105th birthday.
While I could have waited to write an article about Beatrice, it would not have been published in May. As much as I hated to start an entirely new article because I am a slow writer, I simply had to do it – I felt it was important that she be remembered for the critical role that she played preserving our city during National Preservation Month, for without her, our community would be far different.
Today it is hard to imagine a time in Saratoga Springs when there were few hotel rooms.
However, by 1955 none of the large historic hotels on Broadway – Congress Hall, Grand Union Hotel, and United States Hotel – remained. The city was in a state of economic decline and was desperate to attract business and economic development. In 1956 a proposal was made to construct a 300 room hotel on the north side of the Canfield Casino.
Despite opposition led by Evelyn Barrett Britton, President of the Katrina Trask Garden Club and City Historian, the City Council received approval from the state legislature to discontinue the use of a portion of the park to allow it. Fortunately, construction proved to be too costly and the hotel was never was built. Yet, the authorization to lease the land for development remained in place.
Following the fire in 1965 that destroyed the 1893 Convention Hall located on Broadway that could host nearly 4,000 people, the City Council considered different proposals, a civic center auditorium that could hold several thousand people and a convention center and hotel. Both proposals would have irreversibly changed Congress Park.
Thankfully it was Bea who successfully led the opposition to lease four acres of land in Congress Park to construct a 150 room hotel attached to the Canfield Casino in 1968. In February of that year, Bea wrote to Ada Louise Huxtable, a prominent architectural critic – “This letter is written in haste and desperation…. The secrecy and speed of this present action is frightening.”
On March 10, the New York Times published “Saratoga Losing Race” by Huxtable. The introduction to the impactful three column article – “The latest beautification and preservation bulletin comes from Saratoga N.Y., a community known for its historic Victorian heritage and its new cultural center. It is not news to make anyone easy about the cultural state of Saratoga or the nation. It follows a familiar pattern of aesthetic and environmental erosion.”
She continued, “Turning a park into real estate is a barbaric betrayal of the public trust anywhere… and about to be violated is the celebrated Canfield Casino.” She described the use of the first floor of the Canfield Casino for public spaces for the hotel as “this kind of ‘preservation’ is akin to the successful operation where the patient dies.”
Huxtable’s article brought national attention to the efforts of those who opposed the plan. Bea helped circulate petitions against the plan. James Kettlewell, local architectural historian, recalls, “Bea set up tables on street corners to solicit the needed signatures for the petition.” The developer withdrew the proposal and within a year the city repealed the local law that allowed for the leasing of the land.
Bea’s efforts did not stop there. She was the first person in the city to recognize the value of the new federal law, the National Historic Preservation Act, passed in 1966. She understood that designation of historic properties provided a measure of protection, requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of their actions on historic properties and be publicly accountable for their decisions.
She immediately prepared applications to list the Canfield Casino, Congress Park, and Circular Street; the Drink Hall, 297 Broadway; and the Franklin Square neighborhood on the National Register of Historic Places.
Like many areas of Saratoga Springs, Franklin Square, was deteriorated. The federal Urban Renewal Agency was targeting neighborhoods to be razed. Bea did not want that to be the fate of Franklin Square and advocated for Urban Renewal Administration officials in Washington to determine how the funds could be used to rehabilitate the buildings in that neighborhood.
However, that was not the only threat to Franklin Square. In 1967, the New York State Department of Transportation proposed a four-lane east-west arterial through Franklin Square. The proposal would have required the demolition of the 1832 Marvin-Sackett-Todd House, 4 Franklin Square, and 35 other houses.
The combined awareness that Bea raised regarding the significance of the neighborhood, the pending application that she wrote for the Franklin Square Historic District, and the grassroots opposition that formed from the business community that did not want to see Broadway bypassed resulted in the arterial being abandoned.
In 1969, Bea was named the City Historian, a role she served for 17 years. Before 1978 our city historians did not have a dedicated