Hysteric preservation.(historic landmark)

In the midst of an enormous real estate boom in Washington, D.C., one 25-acre parcel remains empty and wasted. Though well-located, it is nothing but a muddy flat pocked by crumbling silos and small abandoned shacks. The parcel could normally fetch $1 billion or more on the local market. Yet the District government will probably have to offer assistance to get developers to even consider touching it.

The reason: the entire area has received designation as all historic landmark. Which shack, you ask, is being protected? Actually, none of them. The landmark designation primarily protects some underground chambers filled with sand and a few silos storing more sand--which were once part of the city's old water-filtration plant. The shacks, for their part, served as pump houses.

The plant shut down in 1985, and the land has sat fallow ever since. Developers can't do much. Because they are over 100 years old and built out of unreinforced concrete, the catacombs can't support any structures on top. The sand-storage silos--misshapen, unornamented lumps of decaying building materials--are also placed in such a way that a developer would have a hard time building around them.

Not even the most imaginative LSD fiend could call any of these structures beautiful. And they are not rare--cities all over the country built virtually identical water filtration systems. Most absurd of all, the structures are nothing that people can visit, enter, walk through, or revel in the history of. They are, literally, just old plumbing.

It's quite true that some reused industrial sites can make beautiful living, retail, and work spaces. But everything about this mostly subterranean network suggests that such ...