Stipe evangelized preservation

He combined aesthetics, law

CHAPEL HILL -- He couldn't invest in real estate on a professor's salary, and he was no good with a hammer. But Bob Stipe had a hand in preserving so many historic properties in North Carolina and across the country that he might have warranted a brass plaque instead of a grave marker.

Though never a courtroom attorney, Stipe helped write the laws that allow local historical commissions to tell property owners what they can and can't do with their buildings. In a field fraught with emotional arguments over private property rights versus community aesthetics, Stipe could persuade people that there is a greater good in holding onto buildings and landscapes that connect us to our collective past.

"He was a little bit Ernest Hemingway and a little bit Burl Ives," said longtime friend David Brook, director of historical resources at the N.C. Office of Archives and History.

Stipe died Sept. 23. He had a history of diabetes and heart trouble.

Born in Easton, Pa., in 1928, Robert E. Stipe followed his sister to Duke University. There, he got degrees in economics and law and a partner for life: Josephine Davis Weedon. He called her Josie. They married in 1952.

When he finished school, Stipe took a job as a law clerk back in Pennsylvania, but, his wife said, "It didn't suit him."

At Duke, art history courses had piqued his interest in architecture. When he realized he didn't want to practice law, Stipe thought of a way to put his legal training to use in preservation.

The couple returned to North Carolina, where Stipe studied urban and regional planning at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 1957, he went to work at UNC's Institute of Government, where he was assistant director and a professor of public law until 1975.

During the mid-70s, Stipe taught courses at UNC in historical preservation and helped develop an annual short-course program that brought guest lecturers and students from all over the country.

Diane Lea attended the program and has worked in preservation in and around Chapel Hill for 30 years. She served with Stipe on the Chapel Hill Preservation Society, which helped get a dozen buildings and neighborhoods placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The two worked together in recent years to expand the Rocky Ridge Farm Historic District into the neighborhood of the Stipes' home, a midcentury contemporary design by Jim Webb. The state Office of Archives and History has signed off on the application and sent it along for consideration at the federal level.

"I think that what Bob and I saw together as friends and colleagues was that you simply cannot divorce yourself from your environment," Lea said. "There are certain values and qualities of life that exist in our historical neighborhoods and towns that nurture us."

Lea didn't always agree with Stipe on the aesthetics; she likes "new urbanism." He didn't.

A right to beauty

In a book of essays he edited called "A Richer Heritage," published in 2003 and used as a preservation textbook nationwide, Stipe repeated his seven reasons for historical preservation. In his typical, blunt fashion, he wrote:

"We seek to preserve our past because we believe in the right of our cities and the countryside to be beautiful. Here, regretfully, we must recognize the essential tawdriness of much contemporary design and construction. Much of it is junk. It assaults our senses. Thus, we seek to preserve the past, not only because it is unique, exceptional, architecturally significant or historically important, but also because in many cases what replaces it is inhumane and grotesque.''