It sounds like a reasonable compromise.
Haverhill's Historical Commission recently unanimously adopted what it calls a Procedure for Processing Demolition Requests.
What that mouthful of a title means is that instead of a property owner or city officials having to wait for as much as an entire year to demolish a building, the commission will conduct a relatively brief — generally no more than a month — review of the historic significance of buildings before signing off on a demolition.
This is a much more sensible approach than the proposed "demolition delay" ordinance that the City Council wisely rejected in 2008. That would have imposed an automatic one-year hold on a demolition.
But it is important that even this much shorter review not be used simply as yet another delaying tactic. The preservation of a community's history is important, but many of the buildings with true historic significance already have protection — more than half of the city's 1,142 buildings that are considered historic fall under the protection of the National Register of Historic Places.
Commission Chairman Richard Raiche and other local historians have argued that there are hundreds of other buildings with more "subtle" historic significance.
Surely that is true, but subtlety should not be pushed too far when a building is deteriorating, as is the case with the old Woolworth's building, which has sat vacant at the eastern entrance of the downtown for more than 40 years. City Councilor William Ryan recently called for it to be torn down.
Raiche said that building has historic significance because of its art deco architecture.
But those characteristics are becoming more subtle all the time. The most prominent thing about the building is that it is crumbling due to decades of neglect. It is a piece of history the city can well do without.
In short, historic preservation must be balanced with common sense. The commission's new approach looks like it will do that. But Mayor James Fiorentini and councilors should make sure it works as advertised.
