May 24, 2009

Forty years ago, a 29-year-old pen-and-ink artist, Robert Miles Parker, hung out a banner on the outside of the Victorian-era house where he was living at First Avenue and Fir Street on the edge of downtown.

“Save This House,” it read, because the owners were calling in the bulldozers to build a parking lot.

Thus was born the Save Our Heritage Organisation, San Diego's leading historic preservation group. On Friday, SOHO honored Parker, now living in New York City, with a lifetime achievement award at its 27th annual People in Preservation program held at the end of National Preservation Month. Sharing the honors will be one of SOHO's founding members and a fellow artist, Carol Lindemulder, who lives in Borrego Springs.

“I'm real pleased with what is being protected,” said Parker, whose pen-and-ink drawings have been published in several books. His only regret is that by saving the 1887 Sherman-Gilbert House, he did not get to live in it when it was moved to Heritage Park in Old Town in 1971.

Lindemulder said grass-roots activism was much more time-consuming in the days before e-mail, cell phones and computers. But she wonders if something's been lost in the professionalization of preservation and other causes.

“If you don't have fun doing whatever you're doing, you might as well give it up,” she said. “I don't care if you're saving buildings or going for a science degree, you ought to have some fun.”

Fun and pride figured into Robert McLeod's restoration of a vandalized bungalow, built in 1919 on Hawk Street in Mission Hills, and conversion of the 1,200-square-foot house into his law offices. He is receiving a People in Preservation Award for adaptive reuse – a common aim of preservationists who look for new uses for old buildings.

“I took it on as a little project and a hobby,” McLeod said.

Having worked in downtown office buildings for 39 years, McLeod said his new digs provided some added benefits.

“It's just delightful, compared to the downtown space which is sealed and soundproofed,” he said. “It's wonderful. This is by the parochial school (St. Vincent de Paul), and I can hear the children laughing and playing. There's an ocean breeze that comes up Washington Street from the bay that circulates through the house nicely. What you never hear downtown is church bells, and St. Vincent's up the street – it's very pleasant.”

For another winner, Gary Fogel, chairman of the Torrey Pines Soaring Council, the chance to campaign to preserve the Torrey Pines Gliderport from development incursions offered a compelling contrast to his day job.

“I'm a biologist,” he said, “and I like to see science continuing. At the same time, I'd like to see historic resources protected. I'm of mixed emotions. There has to be a balance between science and our history.”

State Sen. Chris Kehoe, D-San Diego, is being honored as Preservationist of the Year for her work in transferring the surplus Caltrans Building on Taylor Street to the Old San Diego State Historic Park.

But the former San Diego city councilwoman said the kudos didn't all belong to her but to the preservationists in the trenches.

“They're the ones doing all the heavy lifting,” she said.

~ Roger M. Showley: (619) 293-1286; [email protected]

Robert Miles Parker, Recipient of SOHO's Lifetime Achievement
Award for People In Preservation, 2009

Robert Miles Parker, an artist and preservationist whose pen-and-ink drawings of urban landscapes displayed a whimsical delight in storefronts, apartment buildings, houses and theaters, died on April 17 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood where he could often be found working at a makeshift drawing board in a lawn chair on the sidewalk with a pet Norfolk terrier on a leash sitting patiently beside him. He was 72.

His partner, David Van Leer, said the cause was undetermined, adding that Mr. Parker had been treated for numerous ailments since he learned he had AIDS more than two decades ago.

Classic New York Theaters were among Robert Miles Parker’s favorite subjects; he enjoyed their profusion of detail.

Though Mr. Parker also painted in oils — portraits and floral still lifes as well as cityscapes — it was his pen-and-ink work of aspects of Manhattan’s architectural profile that garnered the most attention. Lively and reverently joyful, representational but far from architecturally precise, his drawings were shown frequently in both private galleries and public places, including the Empire State Building, the New York Public Library and the Museum of the City of New York.

“Upper West Side: New York,” a book of Mr. Parker’s drawings of buildings, street scenes and cityscapes, along with personal commentary, was published by Harry N. Abrams in 1988.

Most recently Mr. Parker was known for his drawings of Broadway theaters, both their facades and their interior details, portraying the handsome intricacies of their designs with suggestive loops and squiggles, a kind of controlled capriciousness.

They demonstrated the evolution of work that had grown more fanciful over the years. Beginning in the 1980s, making his way through more than 30 Broadway theaters, Mr. Parker made well over 200 drawings, like those of the Shubert on West 44th Street, depicting it as the home of “A Chorus Line,” and the Majestic down the street, where “The Phantom of the Opera” remains a fixture.

“I am obsessed with their details, how much beauty there is in each one, how much care,” Mr. Parker told The New York Times in 2006. “They’re full of ghosts. Theaters are phenomenally holy places.”

Robert Miles Parker Jr., called Miles by his friends, was born on Aug. 22, 1939, in Norfolk, Va. His father died when he was a boy, and his mother, Helen Elizabeth Treakle, married a Navy sailor, David L. Bratton. The family moved to San Diego. Mr. Parker returned to Norfolk for his senior year in high school and graduated from William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., then returned to the West Coast to earn a master’s degree in arts education from San Diego State University. He later taught drawing at Parsons the New School for Design in Manhattan.

Not one to hide his light under a bushel, Mr. Parker was, as a friend once described him, tall and thin with “a soup strainer mustache and a head of thick white hair that looked as if an eggbeater had just passed through it.”

An iconoclastic personality and a willful self-promoter — “Let’s just say he was a holder of strong and not always supportable notions,” Mr. Van Leer said — he became known in San Diego as an effective gadfly on behalf of the city’s Victorian architecture, much of which he drew.

In 1969, surmising that a crumbling home dating to 1887 known as the Sherman-Gilbert House was to be demolished, he posted a hand-lettered sign in front of it, reading, according to various reports, “Save Me” or “Save This House,” and included his phone number.

The tide of calls he received from passers-by was overwhelming, and in response he founded the Save Our Heritage Organization, known as SOHO, which eventually raised the money and exercised the local clout to reclaim a number of Victorian houses and other neglected buildings in the city. With the County of San Diego, SOHO also created Heritage Park in the city’s Old Town section, where a handful of historic structures, including the Sherman-Gilbert House, were relocated.

In addition to Mr. Van Leer, a retired literature professor whom he met in Los Angeles in 1984, shortly before moving to New York, Mr. Parker is survived by a brother, Henry Bratton, and a half-brother, Tom Bratton; Mr. Parker retained his birth father’s name.

Mr. Parker’s other books include “L.A.,” featuring drawings of Los Angeles, and “Images of American Architecture,” a collection of drawings from around the United States. But New York was evidently where he found he most belonged.

On a visit to his former home in 1989, he told The San Diego Union-Tribune: “When I lived here, I felt too unique, too unusual. In New York I feel normal. The more absurd I dress and act, the more I feel at home in New York.”

My friend Miles, 1964, in Carlsbad, CA in our first teaching job. Kit