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The National Park Service plan to restore the 192-year-old home once inhabited by Alexander Hamilton-known as the Hamilton Grange-seemed so practical to many of its backers that they still cannot believe the controversy the proposal has generated.
Since 1992, Hamilton's two-story, Federal-style house has been closed to the public because of structural rot, its 70,000 annual visitors an increasingly dim memory. The Park Service proposal: move the Grange from its cramped quarters in the Hamilton Heights section of West Harlem to St. Nicholas Park, 500 feet from where it now rests, in order to allow for the best possible renovation.
But what no one had counted on was a fierce two-year battle that pitted community residents against one another as the question was debated: Is it better to commemorate in a proper style Hamilton's place in U.S. history or preserve the history of a contemporary American neighborhood?
"I was really sort of shocked, not at the opposition but at the amount of opposition and the really horrifically nasty and bitter dimensions that it took on," said area resident Michael Henry Adams, president of the Upper Manhattan Society for Progress Through Preservation.
The Park Service, with the support of Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), hopes to spend an estimated $11 million to restore Hamilton's summer home. A Revolutionary War patriot, the first secretary of the Treasury and creator of the...