Changing Skyline | Let's not throw dirt on the city's history

Through ignorance, apathy and neglect, Philadelphia has demolished most of the house in which George Washington and John Adams learned to run the world's first modern democracy. Now, we're on the verge of obliterating from view the little that remains of the storied mansion where the Father of Our Country both nurtured a nation and enslaved nine individuals.

Is there any other country in the world so eager to bury the physical evidence of its birth?

All that survives of the President's House at Sixth and Market Streets are its 18th-century foundations, discovered during an archaeological dig that began in March. Once the old stones yield their secrets, they are meant to be preserved with dirt, and a memorial built above.

But no human hand can craft a better tribute to the first decade of the American presidency, or the nation's congenital defect of slavery, than those humble bricks, smoothed by time and the weight of the earth.

So why bother? Let the foundation stones testify to history. Keep them visible.

Most of the President's House was demolished in 1832 - before our young nation developed a consciousness about its past - to build commercial buildings. There was less excuse for razing the surviving side walls in 1951 to make room for a planned Independence Mall restroom. Today, we know far too much to justify landfilling the past yet again.

It's been five years since a Philadelphia historian published his startling findings about the President's House, and nothing has gripped the public imagination more than the current excavations. The house's form has emerged over recent days like the details of a photograph in a developing bath: Here's the floor of the kitchen in which Washington's enslaved African chef, Hercules, toiled. Over there is the outline of the curving neoclassical window that inspired the White House's Blue Room and Oval Office.

The crowds, which start arriving at 9 a.m., lean deeply into the observation deck erected by the National Park Service. They wait for history to be revealed as if it were the latest installment of American Idol.

What was that wall over there, visitors ask lead archaeologist Jed Levin. Where was Washington's office? Where did his slaves sleep? The archaeologist's chisel has become a time machine. With every new brick unearthed, the past gains tangible form.