Author: DJB

From the Stage of the Ryman Auditorium…

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Even for a guy who gets to work with some amazing people and visit some of the country’s most wonderful historic places, yesterday was an extraordinary day.  (And not just because I passed 10,000 visitors to More to Come…the DJB Blog – thank you readers.) Nope, the picture says it all.  I was privileged to open the National Preservation Conference from the stage of the historic Ryman Auditorium. For a bluegrass loving preservationist to have a chance to speak from the place where Earl Scruggs came onstage some 60 years ago with Bill Monroe to play White House Blues and give birth to bluegrass music was an honor.  To be able to tell 2,000 conference attendees why this place matters was a thrill.  To be able to hear the bluegrass I’d chosen over the Ryman’s speakers for the 30 minutes before we kicked off the conference was just a rush.  I knew it was going to be a great evening when the Laurie Lewis tune Who Will Watch the Home Place? – with its haunting …

Sleep is Overrated When You’ve Got Music to Fuel the Soul

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At the end of a busy first day at the National Preservation Conference in Nashville, I took off to the Grand Ole Opry House with about 20 close friends for the taping of a PBS special celebrating 40 Years of Rounder Records.  (Look for the show on March 10, 2010.)  While it started late and ended even later, it was an amazing evening of music. Here’s just a few highlights: Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas playing that great accordion-driven dance music from Louisiana, where the “crawfish got soul and the alligators got the blues.”  My accordion-playing friend Jim Harrington would have loved it.  As my colleague and seatmate  Caroline Barker said, “If I could move my feet like Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas I’d be a dancer instead of a preservationist (perhaps).” Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn singing and playing Keys to the Kingdom.  I heard them do the tune at Merlefest, but it was even better in the controlled setting of the Opry House.  Then Bela and Jerry Douglas played a duet …

Union Station: A Personal History and a Preservation Success Story

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Having just arrived in Nashville for the 2009 National Preservation Conference, I find myself in the lobby of the Union Station Hotel waiting for a room and for my meetings to begin.  That left me time to think…which can be dangerous. Union Station is a Nashville landmark.  It is a beautiful old pile of a building and the lobby (see photo) is stunning.  But I think it is a landmark and was – in the end – saved from the wrecking ball because it has so many personal connections to people in Middle Tennessee.  Take me, for instance. My parents were part of the post-war (WWII) marriage boom that begat the well-documented baby boom.  Both were from the small town of Franklin, located about 20 miles from Nashville.  My father had just graduated from Vanderbilt and he and my mom were married in the First Baptist Church in Franklin.  Before beginning his life-long career with the Tennessee Valley Authority, my father and his new bride had a honeymoon to take. Luckily, they had relatives (my …

Preservation Roots Music

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I’m headed to Nashville this week for the National Preservation Conference where we’re sure to hear great preservation stories and good music.  Putting the two together, I have collected some Americana and roots music for the conference staff to use prior to the Opening Plenary. I kick off the set with the Martha White Theme (just seemed appropriate given the setting).  However, finding preservation-based roots music can be tough.  Most country songs that mention “home” generally deal with the loss of mother and dad or a true love – but not too much about the loss of the actual building.  So most are instrumentals.  The set does include that preservation bluegrass classic The Old Home Place by J.D. Crowe and the New South.  However, my favorite is the Jim Lauderdale/Ralph Stanley Highway Through My Home. In honor of the Overton Park (Memphis) and 710 Freeway (California) battles…and so many more…click on the video below and enjoy. More to come… DJB

Wright in Wisconsin

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Over the past two days the National Trust Council has toured a remarkable collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture located in Wisconsin.  Along the way we saw icons and surprises. The surprises came first. We went to see a grouping of six houses on Burnham Street in Milwaukee that were designed by Wright in 1916 for what today would be called “affordable housing.”  I knew about his later Usonian houses, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Pope-Leighey House, which were focused on the same audience.  But decades earlier Wright designed over 950 plans for “American System Built Homes.”  Approximately 25 were built and six survive along Burnham Street.  The Wright in Wisconsin organization owns several and has restored one which is open to the public.  It provided us with a fascinating look at how Wright approached architect-designed houses on a budget, as you’ll see in the photos below. Yesterday we visited three more Wright buildings.  The first was Herbert Fisk Johnson’s home in Racine, Wingspread.  This was Wright’s “last” Prairie style home and …

Milwaukee City Hall – Looking Back, Looking Forward

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If Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum is a symbol of the city’s optimism for the 21st century (see my previous post), then the City Hall is a fine example of the community’s spirit and optimism for the 20th. But not content to remain in the past, City Hall is primed – after a 1988 interior restoration and a beautiful exterior restoration completed in 2009 – to showcase this unheralded gem of a midwestern city. We were meeting across the street yesterday morning at the Pabst Theatre – another fine preservation project – when a number of us walked over to see what a colleague described as “an atrium you don’t want to miss.”  Man, was he right! The pictures here don’t really do the interior justice, but you’ll just have to take my word.  This well in the central section of the building in the portion behind the tower is 20 feet by 70 feet and rises the full eight floors. Enjoy the photos of City Hall (plus one I’ve thrown in of the Pabst Theatre).  …

Moved by Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum

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Oh my…what a building, what a sculpture, what a space, what an experience!  The power of place indeed. Just two weeks after seeing his bridges in Dublin, I had the opportunity to visit the Santiago Calatrava-designed Milwaukee Museum of Art today.  I had seen the building on a drive-by a few years ago, but this was my first time to see it both inside and out.  The internet is awash with both images and verbiage about this wonderful space.  I’ll only quote the dean of the school of architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (and a member, along with our host, of the selection committee for the building) who told our tour group today, “We got Calatrava when he was unknown and yet at the peak of his creative powers – sort of like the early Beatles, before they became superstars and started adding too many orchestrations.“ What you’ll see below is a series of photos showing the “flapping” of the beautiful white wings (really a sunscreen)  from open to close.  Extraordinary as that sounds, …

This Place Matters – Vote for Your Favorites

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What do you get when you ask the public to download a simple sign, find a place that is important to them, photograph themselves in front of that place holding the sign and then download it to the Internet? You get This Place Matters. More than 2,000 people took the National Trust for Historic Preservation (full disclosure: my employer) up on their offer, and the results are fascinating.  When you have some time, go to the site, click on the slide show, and sit back and watch.  I guarantee you’ll love it! And now, the Trust is having a This Place Matters photo contest where you can go online and vote once per day for your favorite This Place Matters photo.  The top three photographers win a digital camera.  (Full disclosure:  I am not eligible.) You can guess which photo I’m voting for: Miller’s Grocery (shown above) in Christiana, Tennessee.  (Full disclosure:  I do not know the photographer or the subject.)  I just love this picture. Perhaps it is because it comes from my home …

Serendipity and The Fretboard Journal

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Last Friday as I boarded my plane in Dublin, I opened the overhead bin and came across a banjo case.  A nearby passenger asked if it was mine, and I said, “No, but I was going to ask the same question.”  A slight man with a female companion sitting across the aisle identified himself as the owner of the case, which he said held a bouzouki. Well, my antennae went up and I recalled an article I read on the flight over in the new issue of my favorite magazine, The Fretboard Journal. I dug in my bag, quickly found the article about bouzouki maker Edward Victor Dick and passed it along.  It came back as the bouzouki owner pointed to a picture of Tony McManus in another part of the magazine and said, “I know this guy.  He’s played on some of my recordings.” At that my new acquaintances were asked to change seats so I could enjoy having a family with two children under the age of 4 across the aisle for a …

Why Should We Care About an International National Trust Movement?

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We have just completed a wonderful International Conference of National Trusts here in Dublin—the 13th in the history of the National Trust movement. I suspect that when a small group of Anglophiles gathered together in the 1970s in Scotland for what became the first gathering of the world’s National Trusts, they could not have imagined either the spread of their movement or the diversity of people, countries, issues and models that we have seen this week from among the 200+ delegates in attendance. To read my full post on the wrap-up to the ICNT13, visit the PreservationNation blog. More to come… DJB