You can read the release here.
I recall visiting the Cyclorama building for the first time in 1967. At that point the Electric Map was still in private hands (as was a museum that looked as if you were walking through someone’s attic). One saw the Cyclorama, looked at dioramas of the Gordon-Barlow incident and Patrick O’Rorke (not Joshua Chamberlain) on Little Round Top, and then took a walking tour of the High Water Mark.
The building no longer serves those functions, and it’s become something of an eyesore in its present deteriorating condition now that the National Park Service has moved park headquarters to its present location. I hope that this finding paves the way for a final resolution of this matter.
To be honest, I never understood how that thing acquired any kind of potential preservation status, especially given where (in true Project 66 style) it was erected.. But then I clearly have no eye for good architecture.
Me either. In the four times I’ve been to Gettysburg, the Cyclorama is one of the few places I never got around to visiting. The battlefields and the buildings that were there in 1863 held much more interest for me.
Now they can get around to stopping the dumping on the UGRR site
I think as long as Dion Neutra (Richard’s son, worked with the senior Neutra on the Cyclo project) lives, he won’t give up. I wish he would, but it’s not going to happen.
Beyond being a unique design by a famed Modernist architect, the building failed on a lot of levels. The NPS got the visitor center functions out of the building by the early 1970′s, neat ideas like the reflecting pool were not there for later generations of visitors to see, and it was either poorly built or poorly maintained (probably both). Can anyone recall when they stopped letting people go on the observation deck, as I can’t recall it being open after my first visit in 1982. it’s just time to tear it down. Heck, it was that time 4 years ago.
There were so many things that went wrong for so many reasons. I think the water feature was stopped because, when it was operating, they couldn’t hold any functions in the auditorium because as the old farce stated, “You know I can’t hear you when the water’s running.” The great door that was supposed to slide to make functions open air settled. I think they opened it once with the help of tractors but were afraid, if they tried it again, they couldn’t close it.
The NPS was so unhappy with the Cyclo building that they turned the old Rosensteel Building, which they originally planned to tear down, into the VC after plans to build a new VC at, IIRR, the Butterfield Farm property fell through.