A plan to fill the sunken area surrounding the 1960s reconstruction of Fort Pitt's Music Bastion in Point State Park is drawing fire from people who say it should be preserved.

	John Heller, Post-Gazette Planners recommended filling the ditch at Point State Park so that concerts and other activities could be held on the "city side" of the park, east of the Portal Bridge. Click photo for larger image.

"It would indeed be ironic if Pittsburgh celebrates the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War and the 250th birthday of the city by burying the past," said Wilfred Rouleau, a retired mechanical engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

"The bastion is an irreplaceable asset of Point State Park -- the only place that gives you any sense of scale," said Richard Lang, an anthropologist who lives in Maine and worked on the archaeology of the site in the 1960s. While the 2004 master plan calls for outlining the bastion walls in the grass, as was done with Fort Duquesne, Lang said that won't provide a sense of the bastion's vertical scale.

Their comments came yesterday morning at an invitation-only meeting at Fort Pitt Museum. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission arranged the gathering, which attracted about 35 people, to give objectors a chance to air their views and to give the master plan's sponsors -- the Riverlife Task Force and Allegheny Conference on Community Development -- an opportunity to explain how, why and by whom the decision was made. The public planning process, begun in 2001, recommended filling the ditch so that concerts and other activities could be held on the "city side" of the park, east of the Portal Bridge.

"It will free up the Point area for more passive contemplation of history and the environment," Riverlife director Lisa Schroeder told the group.

For the most part, it won't be the distant past that will be buried.

"The reconstruction of the bastion is too young to be considered an important part of the historic aspect of the park" according to the state's history code, so no special review is required, said Bill Callahan of the commission's Bureau for Historic Preservation.

"If you say a reconstruction has no value, then you're saying that Fort Ligonier and Fort Necessity have no value," said historian Robert Matzen, who opposes the plan. Matzen produced and wrote the 2001 French and Indian War documentary, "When the Forest Ran Red."

Fewer than 10 people have sent letters or e-mails to the commission expressing concern, said Donna Williams, the commission's director of historic sites and museums.

Landscape architect Bill Mullin, the only surviving member of the original team that designed the park, said he has mixed emotions about filling in the ditch. Mullin did most of the construction drawings and site observation on the bastion project and participated in the recent master planning process. While most of the wall isn't authentic, he said, "it creates a sense of history."

The ditch is expected to be filled by the end of the year