"See where the color changes? These are all Fort Pitt bricks," Richard Lang said in the dry moat surrounding the fort's reconstructed Music Bastion in Point State Park.

Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette An early morning view of Fort Pitt's re-created Music Bastion, where steps lead to a dry moat. The section on the left contains original brick from the fort. On the right, the end of the brick wall indicates where the fort's earthen walls began. Only the city side of the fort's walls were faced in brick. Within the bastion, the garrison's buglers are thought to have played. Click photo for larger image.

If anyone knows a Fort Pitt brick when he sees it, it's Lang. Forty-two years ago, the Maine anthropologist was crew chief on the excavation that uncovered it, working under James L. Swauger, associate director of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Bricks from the fort, Lang said, stretch for about 53 feet from the beginning of the southern end of the reconstruction. While the color and texture changes are discernible when Lang points them out, they are subtle ones because in the wall's 1960s reconstruction, attempts were made to match the original brick.

Last week, on the lawn above Lang, children from the Northside Urban Pathways Charter School played kickball as two young men in business clothes practiced juggling in the moat.

"A lot of people escape down here to read, to sunbathe, to have private conversations," Lang said. "It's a place where people seek solitude. You can lose a lot of the city sounds."

But by the end of the year, and likely by the end of the summer, it's the bastion itself that will be lost, buried under ground so a level field can accommodate a more active use of the "city side" of the park, as called for in the 2004 Point State Park master plan. One of the goals of the plan, sponsored by the Riverlife Task Force and Allegheny Conference on Community Development, is to remove concerts from the "water side" of the park, near the Point, which wasn't designed to accommodate the vehicles needed to support such events or the crowds they attract.

	Map: Location of old Fort Pitt and its Music Bastion in Point State Park.

The re-creation of the Music Bastion is regarded as nonhistoric and expendable. The master plan's cultural resources survey says photographs reproduced in the report show it "looks nothing like the original archaeological feature [as it was found]. Although the quoins appear to be the original stones, they have been reset. The bricks appear to be modern replicas."

But the survey, produced by Christine Davis Consultants of Verona, doesn't further explore the design and materials of the Music Bastion reconstruction. Davis said that's because it was produced before burying the bastion became part of the master plan.

Now, as Lang and others raise concerns about the burial, the idea deserves a closer look. How authentic are the bastion and its moat? Why are they there and what do they communicate? If they're filled in, what would be lost?

An unexpected find

For the better part of two centuries, the remains of Fort Pitt lay beneath the rail lines, houses and commercial buildings of Pittsburgh's Point -- until 1942, when excavations uncovered portions of its brick walls in the hope of establishing a national park. That dream ended when funding for all national historic sites was halted for the duration of World War II.

Three years later, when the Allegheny Conference on Community Development held its first planning meeting for the park, the focus was on whether Fort Duquesne or Fort Pitt should be restored as the park's central exhibit. Eventually, the decision was made not to restore Fort Pitt because the highway that would bisect it was deemed more important. Instead, the fort's walls would be located so its perimeter could be outlined as a concrete sidewalk. That digging, also overseen by Swauger, got under way in 1953.

But when the entire Music Bastion was found intact, the discovery caught the public's imagination. "Expressions of public dismay followed at burying forever what had so lately been uncovered," Robert C. Alberts writes in his 1980 book, "The Shaping of the Point." In April, Swauger told the newspaper that a section of the brick walls might be preserved.

The brick and sandstone walls of Fort Pitt's Music Bastion as excavated in 1965. Click photo for larger image.

As it happened, the bricks were preserved, but the wall wasn't.

"It was taken down and the bricks were sort of scattered around," said landscape architect William Mullin, who did most of the construction drawings and site observation on the bastion project, under Ralph Griswold. "The whole wall was basically reconstructed. [The original] wouldn't have lasted, with exposure to the elements."

He agrees with Lang that the fort's original bricks are on the southern end of the bastion wall but thinks the percentage of old brick in that section is between 40 percent and 60 percent.

"I didn't know the level was that high," Davis said. But if the project was done today, she points out, it would be interpreted in a more authentic way. "And the new material would have to be differentiated from the old material. You don't want that level of confusion."

As for the moat, the original was significantly wider and deeper. In one section, Swauger and Lang hit water before they hit the bottom of the fort's stone foundation. While they documented some of their work in a 1967 publication, "Excavations at the Music Bastion of Fort Pitt, 1964-1965," Mullin said the reconstruction of the bastion, designed by Griswold and park architect Charles M. Stotz, was not recorded.

Bad interpretation

"Let's assume that it's incorrectly reconstructed," said Carnegie Museum anthropologist James Richardson. "My view is, do it right. Do some more archaeology and reconstruct it right. It's the public face for entering this gigantic fortification that was so important in the French and Indian War and Pontiac's War and the Revolutionary War. With all the overpasses, it really is the only place on the Point where you can interpret and get a sense of the size and magnitude of this fortification. The Flag Bastion is tucked and hidden. And with the museum itself, nobody really gets a sense that this was a fort. It's only with the Music Bastion and the moat that you get a sense of the scale."

When the bastion and moat are filled in, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission is requiring that the contractor protect them with a "geo-textile" lining; use only clean, uniform fill and not disturb the configuration. But some doubt that will be enough to protect it from earth-compressing equipment.

Everyone agrees on one thing: The interpretation and maintenance of the Music Bastion have been abysmal. Yet on the eve of the bastion's burial, there is still no interpretive plan for it and other historic and natural features; Riverlife director Lisa Schroeder said a concept interpretive plan, without specifics, awaits state approval. It's a long time coming. The master planning process began four years ago with heavy public participation, and the contracts for Phase 1 are out to bid.

For whatever reasons, some with concerns about the bastion were late to make them known, but it is also true that Riverlife, the Allegheny Conference and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission waited too long to address them, in a meeting last week that gave them too little time to present their arguments.

Lang and some others would like to see the Music Bastion itself become the new stage, an idea that seems, at least, both poetic and practical.

If the bastion can't be saved at this time, it shouldn't be buried without a full written report that documents its early history, its reconstruction, the decision to bury it and the dissenting voices. It also shouldn't be buried until an alternative interpretation is created with public input and presented in a public forum. One idea is to trace the outline of the Music Bastion with granite in the grass, but we can and should do better: Preserve a small section of the bastion and identify the original brick in a modern wall tied to the city's first Renaissance.

In making the park more recreation-friendly, we must also better teach the strategic role it played in the nation's settlement and Pittsburgh's rebirth.