Save the Date for the 50th Anniversary Celebration!!

In 1971, Alison Owings, a news writer and producer for WRC, was distressed about the steady destruction of Washington’s historic buildings. She wrote about losing her sense of history and place through the gradual loss of the historic cityscape. Owings felt a sense of urgency, a sense that the time had come to look at the city in a new way. Historic preservation efforts had been mounted in Washington before, but there was no organized movement to curtail the pervasive destruction that Owings observed. Encouraged by Washington Post architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt, Owings decided that an advocacy group was needed, and she came up with a catchy name, “Don’t Tear It Down,” which legendary New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable praised for its “wonderful, direct, hortatory explicitness in a time of cheesy euphemisms.”

On April 19, 1971, during the second annual Earth Week, activists marched from National Trust headquarters to the Old Post Office to join an enthusiastic crowd of about 250 placard-carrying preservationists, historians, planners, architects, and residents. It was Don’t Tear It Down’s first street action and received tremendous publicity.