To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service in 2016, Candice and I spent last Thursday at Acadia National Park in Maine – with thousands of our newest friends – to enjoy this magnificent landscape (and the first national park east of the Mississippi River).
On a beautiful summer day, the park was brimming with people taking every form of transportation imaginable to access a part of Mt. Desert Island. We enjoyed the loop ride, and stopped along the way to see treats such as the magnificent views at Thunder Hole. It was fun to see young couple skipping from rock to rock while grandparents pulled out their lawn chairs and sat in the shade just to watch the endlessly fascinating waves break against the shore.
Panoramic View of Thunder Hole
After a lunch in Seal Harbor, we headed up to Cadillac Mountain in the center of the park.
Cadillac Mountain, at 1,530 feet (466 meters), is the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard and the first place to view sunrise in the United States from October 7 through March 6. It is one of over 20 mountains on Mount Desert Island (MDI), Maine that were pushed up by earth’s tectonic and volcanic forces millions of years ago. Were it not for the once enormous glaciers that sheared off their tops, they would be even higher than what we see today.
View of Frenchman Bay from Cadillac Mountain
View looking west from Cadillac Mountain
We also took the time to hike part of the 45 miles of carriage roads in the park. Acadia’s carriage roads…
…are the best example of broken-stone roads – a type of road commonly used at the turn of the 20th century – in America today. They are true roads, approximately 16 feet wide, constructed with methods that required much hand labor….
The gift of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and family, (the carriage roads) weave around the mountains and valleys of Acadia National Park. Rockefeller, a skilled horseman, wanted to travel on motor-free byways via horse and carriage into the heart of Mount Desert Island. (The construction) efforts from 1913 to 1940 resulted in roads with sweeping vistas and close-up views of the landscape.
Signage along the carriage roads in Acadia National Park
View from a carriage road
We had a wonderful day and were reminded – once again – of why our national parks are “America’s best idea!”
For the past two years — and especially since my time last March and April at the American Academy in Rome — friends have enthused over Anthony Doerr‘s writing. My only experience was through his short memoir Four Seasons in Rome, which while an interesting read struck me as something he did because he had journals from his time at AAR and decided to make something of them. Not a terrible thing to do, but also not up to the level of the reviews of Doerr’s work I was hearing from friends.
Then over the first two weeks of August, I read All the Light We Cannot See. I’ll repeat myself. Now I understand.
What a lovely, rich, engrossing, and uplifting book. First of all, Doerr is a poet with words, but he has a scientist’s mind. This is as finely crafted a story as I’ve ever read, with the shifts in time and character all put together in an amazing sequence that pulls the reader forward with anticipation. I can easily see why it took him ten years to write All the Light We Cannot See. At the end I was sad there wasn’t more.
I won’t bore you here with the details…the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015, for goodness sake. Chances are you’ve read it. But if you haven’t, then take this advice from someone who doesn’t dive into fiction all that often: Read. This. Book.
Here’s the synopsis from Doerr’s website:
“Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks. When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris in June of 1940, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.
In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure’s.
Doerr’s gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of multiple characters, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.“
The synopsis of the story does not do this book justice. The language, the depth of characterization, the understanding of so many aspects that require detailed explanation, the keen tension that runs throughout…all are pivotal to this work.
A colleague of mine – Priya Chhaya – went to hear Doerr speak at the Arlington public library recently, and came away impressed by the power of words. She wrote about that topic on her personal blog, and I want to quote from her observations:
“Because of…current events I found Doerr’s presentation especially moving. He was charismatic and funny, serious and inspiring. He walked us through WWII Germany where cheap radios were used to prevent communication beyond its borders and citizens only heard propaganda giving them “enemies” to blame. There is no more real life evidence on the power of language and words than in the propaganda of the Third Reich.
However, the magic of Doerr’s book… is in finding hope through words despite their absence. In his story he uses radio waves (invisible, yet all around us) and brings together a blind girl in German occupied France and a member of Hitler’s army through storytelling. While fictional in form, Doerr is able to show the power of language when it is allowed to flow freely in all its forms – in Braille and through a hidden radio in an attic. In the talk he states that “literature is a gym for your empathy muscle,” and emphasized that the more you read the more you are taken beyond your own life and situation. Consequently embracing other visions, experiences and points of view living side by side with your own.“
I love the line “literature is a gym for your empathy muscle.” All the Light You Cannot See is a powerful book. As Marie Laure’s grandfather says in a lesson heard by Werner in his youth, that he remembers at the time of his most important decisions, “Open your eyes and see what you can see with them before they close forever.”
A dear friend from our days in Staunton passed away yesterday. Ted Jordan was much too young and vibrant, but an accident claimed his life and devastated both family and friends. A scholar, gifted writer, carpenter and general contractor, Ted would do anything for anyone. The 17 trips he took to Honduras to build schools and churches are but one example of the person he was. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife Dana and his boys – Ben, Grayson, and Tim – and their families.
I was fortunate to see and talk with Ted for a good while when I was in the Shenandoah Valley last month for the Red Wing Roots Music Festival. He was at the festival with his granddaughter, Violet and his son, Ben. I told Candice that evening that it was such a treat to see how much joy Ted’s family brought him at this new stage in life.
There was a time where Ted and I played music together at least once a week for a decade or more. One of our favorite tunes was the old Shaker hymn Simple Gifts, which we played as an instrumental. I would finger-pick the melody and Ted flat-picked a lovely harmony line. To this day, when I play that tune I hear Ted’s guitar doing its thing.
Another of our favorite tunes was Wondrous Love, where Ted played guitar along with my mandolin. When we got to the final verse, we would sing it a capella. Ted commented on more than one occasion that I would close my eyes for that verse and let the sound wash over me. He was right. There was something about singing on after being freed from death that spoke to both of us at a very deep level.
And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on,
And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on.
And when from death I’m free, I’ll sing and joyful be,
Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation
(In a recent post on the National Trust’s Preservation Forum blog, I highlighted the recent publication of 50 essays with ideas for the next 50 years of preservation. I’ve excerpted portions of that post for More to Come…. You can read the entire post here. Full disclosure: I was one of the contributors.)
The 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA)—the cornerstone of preservation practice in the United States—has spurred conferences, articles, and celebrations throughout 2016. One of the most lasting and influential looks to the future to emerge from this year could well be a new work from the University of Massachusetts Press, Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation in the United States. Edited by Max Page and Marla R. Miller, professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bending the Future features visions of the next five decades from some of the nation’s leading preservation professionals, historians, scholars, activists, and journalists. The editors invited “provocations,” and they certainly received a few. But what is almost universal across these short essays are thoughtful and insightful examinations of the roots of preservation and of where those foundations can take us in the future.
There is more agreement among the authors than I would have expected. As the editors note in the well-conceived introduction, there is strong agreement that we need “once more to nourish preservation as a grassroots movement.”…California State Historic Preservation Officer Julianne Polanco sees intangible heritage as a key to this new focus. Na Li—who is at the forefront of efforts to establish public history in China—proposes a “culturally sensitive narrative approach” that “prioritizes oral history as a tool to understand neighborhood preservation values.” There is also a strong call for preservation to focus on helping make communities more economically vibrant and socially just. Gentrification and displacement are key issues for a number of contributors, including Suleiman Osman, an associate professor of American Studies at George Washington University, and Japonica Brown-Saracino, an associate professor of sociology at Boston University. Brown-Saracino’s call for preservationists to advocate for affordable housing and for longtime residents’ businesses and institutions is echoed by other writers in Bending the Future.
Because the contributions are arranged in alphabetical order by author name, it is pure luck that the book begins and ends with powerful essays that force us to think deeply about the underlying assumptions that are part of the legacy of the NHPA. Michael R. Allen’s opening essay, “What Historic Preservation Can Learn from Ferguson,”tackles the way we should remember and preserve sites of the very recent past—such as the place where Michael Brown was shot by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. When Allen notes that, “Preservationists may be the last people to acknowledge the historic associations embodied by unlikely landmarks, and that is to our shame,” he calls on all of us to recognize that sites such as these are where “real, unresolved, and difficult history unfolded.” Among the lessons Allen feels we should take from Ferguson is to “listen to and support communities that ask open questions about the future of sites, not walk away when communities choose preservation plans that do not fit our models.”
The final essay, “Put on Your Hipster Hat,”from University of New Mexico Professor of Cultural Landscape Studies Chris Wilson, calls on preservationists to become “conversant with the principles of urbanism” and look for ways to “reconcile them with preservation practices.” This is more difficult than it may seem, Wilson notes, because preservation orthodoxy calls on us to preserve the most significant buildings and districts of every era, including suburbia and mid-century modernism. Wilson asserts that, “Facing the contemporary challenges of sustainability, resilience, and global climate change, we can no longer simply preserve the most significant remainders of every era that has passed the fifty-year cutoff.”
Wilson’s assertions—and those of other contributors—are sometimes contradicted by other authors in the book. That’s fine, as the editors were not seeking a manifesto, but instead were challenging all of us to dig deep and challenge our assumptions as we look to the future. I would have liked to see more Native American voices and a few more practitioners sprinkled among the academicians….But by and large, there is a wideness and optimism to the thought in Bending the Future that bodes well for the next 50 years. Recommended.
While driving through Central Maine to reach our destination on the coast, we passed a convenience store on a small rural road that had a sign which read:
Guns
Wedding Gowns
Cold Beer
We were laughing too hard to stop and take a picture, so you’ll have to trust me on this one. Depending on the willingness of both sides to get married, these three things comprise almost all the essential ingredients needed for a (shotgun) wedding. Add a Justice of the Peace (or these days, an internet-approved minister) and you’re all set.
Seriously, we’ve had a wonderful introduction to Maine. On Saturday we stayed at a B&B in Littleton, Massachusetts, to split the drive in two (the Lyttleton Inn), and in the small world department it turns out that the innkeeper is the aunt of a former colleague at the National Trust. We savored the delicious breakfast and interesting conversation with Mary (the innkeeper) before hitting the road north.
The second day’s drive was uneventful (just what you want) and we reached our destination – the Pilgrim’s Inn – by mid-afternoon. The building dates from 1793 and first served as an inn in the early 20th century. The current configuration as The Pilgrim’s Inn dates from 1977, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
As we were leaving our inn on Deer Isle last evening to head to dinner, we met a classical guitar player and his wife who are on a “more vacation than tour” tour. After talking guitars briefly, he said, “I’ll play anything…maybe we can get together.” Finally, at dinner last evening in Stonington, we stuck up a conversation with a couple while waiting for a table. It turns out he’s a retired Episcopal bishop from Texas and we were able to make all sorts of connections. As the evening ended he and his wife invited us to join them later in our visit to see E.B. White’s home. Candice – the former elementary school teacher – was all in. We already had plans to see other friends who have a home nearby while on Deer Isle, so our connections have tripled in the first night in Maine.
Nice folks here in Maine – even with the guns and wedding gowns. We’re looking forward to a rewarding and relaxing two weeks. (With thanks to Andrew and Claire for holding down the fort at the old home place.)
View from the deck at The Pilgrim’s Inn
More to come…
DJB
Image: Pilgrim’s Inn at Deer Isle, Maine, in the late afternoon light
The story of Virginian Robert Carter III and the emancipation of 450 enslaved individuals shortly after the founding of the United States is one of the forgotten stories of American history. However, in our current period of political unrest — much of it centered on racism and questions around who owns the American story — this is an appropriate time to look at how this act of emancipation, and similar acts that took place throughout the South before the Civil War, were buried and forgotten.
The First Emancipator by Andrew Levy
Thankfully, Andrew Levy’s complex and largely satisfying book The First Emancipator: Slavery, Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter brought this story the attention it deserves. Levy claims — powerfully and in a way that challenges our core national narrative — that Carter “did something that transcends our ability to listen to our own past.”
A recent tour of the National Trust Historic Site Oatlands outside Leesburg, Virginia, with several senior staff led to a discussion of the story of slavery at the plantation. Robert Carter III was the grandson of Robert “King” Carter — one of the wealthiest men in colonial America — as well as the father of George Carter, the founder of Oatlands. As one tours the house, a portrait of Robert Carter III hangs on the wall, with a copy of Levy’s book on a table below. The guide then explains Carter’s amazing story, and it was all I could do not to walk out immediately and run to the gift shop to buy my own copy. I had it in hand, however, before leaving.
As told in Levy’s work, Robert Carter primarily watched the American Revolution from the sidelines from his home on the Northern Neck. However, over the course of some 15 years, Carter went through a religious transformation. Levy does a wonderful job of showing how Carter began this religious epiphany as an Anglican, then as a Baptist, and finally as a member of the Swedenborgian sect. The book showcases the fact that the earliest Baptists in the South were freedom-loving outsiders who pushed against the establishment. (Very different from the dominant Southern Baptist Convention of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries in the South.)
This religious transformation led Robert Carter III to file a “Deed of Gift” in 1791 in Northumberland County, Virginia, for the gradual manumission of his slaves, according to the laws at that time which permitted owners to free their slaves as long as certain conditions were met. Carter’s Deed of Gift is believed to be the largest private emancipation in American history.
Levy tells this story in great detail, and it is worth reading. However, the most powerful pages in the 200-page work come at the very end.
In his review of Levy’s book, historian Adam Goodheart takes Thomas Jefferson to task, as does Levy in his work. Jefferson famously wrote of slavery, “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” However, Carter’s action – and similar emancipations by other well-known figures such as Edward Coles, and Richard Randolph (Jefferson’s cousin) as well as hundreds of property owners forgotten to history – shows that Jefferson was really not looking for an answer to the question of what happens once the slaves are freed.
Especially given the age we find ourselves in now, I want to quote extensively from the last two pages of Levy’s book.
“The possibility exists, of course, that we are the most equitable generation of Americans that have ever existed, and that we have grown comfortable with the ambivalent telling of American history because it is the only fair version. But we ought to consider the possibility that we are the shapers of history now, and that we have made for ourselves the only Jefferson and the only Washington that seem at home amid the struggling and contradictory progress toward racial equality of the last generation – an age that, like the Revolutionary epoch, was thick with political voices who knew how to say exactly what is right on matters of race but lacked the will to implement any motion that might be perceived as extreme. It is a sorry tribute we make to Jefferson, Washington, and the other founders that we continue to insist that they were larger than life so that we can blame implicitly our own confusion and ambivalence on the heroic power of their legacy of confusion and ambivalence….
It is infuriating in the early twenty-first century to consider this alternate history, in which Robert Carter is the founding father of the only American Revolution we truly lost. It is even more infuriating, however, to consider that we have been unable to find a single use for Robert Carter.”
Goodheart’s review picks it up here.
“..Levy ponders his subject’s near-total disappearance from the American consciousness. Unlike Jefferson, Carter ‘does not soothe us, excuse us or help us explain ourselves,’ Levy writes. ‘But what is most incriminating is that he does not even interest us, because that forces us to consider whether there now exist similar men and women, whose plain solutions to our national problems we find similarly boring, and whom we gladly ignore in exchange for the livelier fantasy of our heroic ambivalence.'”
A powerful read in troubling times.
More to come…
DJB
Image: Oatlands (photo credit: Virginia Dept. of Historic Resources)
Author Fran Lebowitz once wrote, “Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
I’ve been thinking about reading recently, because I will be out of the office as I complete the final two weeks of my sabbatical and link that with some personal days off.
I have the opinion that summer reading lists should be light, but that may simply be an excuse to read another baseball book. Since this time is tied to my sabbatical, I’m going a bit more serious this August and I thought I’d share a few of the books which will be on night stand.
(Regular readers can expect “mini reviews” in the coming weeks.)
I’m looking forward to digging into this work as one more way of scanning the current thinking about preservation’s future. (Full disclosure: NTHP colleagues Stephanie Meeks, Tom Mayes, and Susan West Montgomery joined me as contributors to this book.)
Tabula Plena
Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation(Edited by Bryony Roberts) – I met Bryony at the American Academy in Rome during the first part of my sabbatical, as she was the Rome Prize winner for 2016 in Historic Preservation. In this new work from Lars Müller Publishers, Bryony and a group of authors consider – in contrast to tabula rosa urbanism – “the possibilities of tabula plena – urban sites that are full of existing buildings, systems, and activities that have accumulated over time….The transformation of existing buildings conserves resources while opening up possibilities for design through collaborative authorship and interlocking architectural forms.” Her shop talk at the AAR on this work certainly whetted my appetite for this book.
After listening to my brown bag lunch talk at work about my time at the American Academy, a colleague – who is currently on her own sabbatical in her native Croatia – sent me a copy of The Other Venice: Secrets of the Cityby Predrag Matvejević, a “writer of the world.” I’m very much looking forward to seeing this wonderful city through different eyes. And finally, another colleague loaned me one of her copies of Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge(her “hands-down favorite book”) after reading one of my regular Monday email musings to our staff. She thought I would enjoy this work on uniting the knowledge of the sciences with the humanities. I have a few other books to consider as well, such as All the Light We Cannot See (by Rome Prize winner Anthony Doerr – see a pattern here?). It promises to be a stimulating August in many ways. Perhaps you’ll find something that piques your interest. I would like to know what books you’ve found worth reading this summer.
And by the way, Fran Lebowitz also said, “In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.” Whether true or not, I find that a comforting thought.
(NOTE: Two weeks ago, I presented the keynote address to the 40th annual meeting of the League of Historic American Theatres. The following is an excerpt from my remarks — given from a personal perspective — about why these places mean so much to me and other Americans.)
It is an honor to be here with so many individuals who work day-in and day-out to ensure that America’s historic theatres have a bright future.
I think of your work — in part — as a form of storytelling, and I am so grateful for the work you do to tell the story of your special places. Our efforts to identify and mark who we are is not only important to our history and our understanding of that history, but also to our understanding of the issues we face on a daily basis.
The places we choose to preserve around the country tell us a great deal about who we are as a people. Historic theatres are often beloved landmarks in our communities — places that matter — and we honor people when we save and reuse the places they love.
“This Place Matters” is a program we’ve used at the National Trust for the last decade to allow everyone to identify the places in their communities that are important to them. To many individuals in countless communities, the theatres you love and care for clearly matter.
Historic theatres not only serve as a place to tell stories to the public — through movies, plays, and music — but they also tell us what we value as a people and the stories we want to share together. These places speak of the type of vibrant economy and sustainable jobs — the type of future — we want for our citizens.
In a recent study by the Knight Foundation, their Soul of the Community project found that
social offerings,
how welcoming a place is to others, and
physical beauty
perform key roles role in attracting people to a place. In fact those things don’t just attract people to a community; they help them form an attachment to that place.
It turns out that attachment to place is an important indicator of how economically successful a community will be.
Just as actively engaged employees are more productive and committed to the success of their businesses and organizations, highly attached residents are more likely to actively contribute to a community’s growth. Your work in saving, reusing, and re-energizing America’s historic theatres — places that attach people and place — is key to the future of your communities.
It is no longer enough just to save a place we value. We also have to sustain them and re-weave them into the tapestry of our 21st century communities. I believe we do that best when we use places such as our historic theatres to tell a broader and richer story, that reflects the lives and stories of all Americans.
Like many of you here, I have my own personal story about a historic theatre.
Bearden-Brown House in Franklin, where my father grew up and where I mowed the yard during the summers.
My story takes place in Franklin, Tennessee, a small town about 20 miles outside of Nashville. Both my parents were raised in Franklin, and I went there often as a child to visit my grandmother.
My grandmother had a wonderful way with words, and I’ll never forget the times she told me to “Make yourself useful as well as ornamental!” Come to think of it, “Make yourself useful as well as ornamental” could easily be the goal for our historic theatres! My grandmother believed that idle hands were the devil’s workshop, and so my father went to work as a young teenager at the Franklin Theatre.
Franklin Theatre (Historical Photo courtesy of Heritage Foundation of Franklin & Williamson County)
For decades, I heard stories of my father’s job: taking tickets, making popcorn, and serving as the back-up projectionist. The theatre’s marquee was first illuminated on Franklin’s Main Street in the summer of 1937, inviting the public in to laugh, cry, and dream. Money was scarce, so my father appreciated the opportunity to see the current movies without having to pay for a ticket. Like many of his friends, he walked away from the theatre with a lifetime of memories.
The Franklin Theatre was one of the landmarks of this small Tennessee community. But over the years, it suffered the same fate of many theatres struggling to survive in the world of the Cineplex. Bad remodelings and time eventually took their toll on the movie house, and the doors closed in 2007 under the pressures of rising rents and the trend toward mega-theaters.
Franklin Theatre in the 1970s (courtesy of the Heritage Society of Franklin & Williamson County)
That’s when the Heritage Foundation of Franklin and Williamson County stepped in. Rather than lose the heart of Main Street, the nonprofit preservation group bought and rehabilitated the historic landmark. After three years of work — and an investment of more than $8 million — the historic Franklin Theatre re-emerged better than ever.
In his 80s, my father liked to connect with Mary Pearce and Rick Warwick at the Heritage Foundation. He attended the relighting of the marquee in 2010. Knowing of his love for this special place, my wife and I bought a seat in his honor as part of the restoration campaign. On a trip to Franklin just a couple of years ago, we toured the restored interior and showed him his name among the patrons of the restoration.
Tom Brown at the Lighting of the Marque at the Franklin Theatre
The new Franklin Theatre continues the cherished tradition of showing movies, but also adds a new dimension to Main Street: live music. With a state-of-the-art sound and lighting system, and undeniable charm, the Franklin Theatre is destined to be an entertainment and cultural icon for years to come.
Grand Opening of the Restored Franklin Theatre (photo courtesy of the Heritage Society of Franklin & Williamson County)
My father passed away just two months ago at age 90. Hard-of-hearing, he was never able to take in a new movie or show at the Franklin Theatre. But he was so proud that the place he loved as a child — and the place where he and my mom went on dates after the war — had a new life and proud future.
And I have taken up his passion. Just two weeks ago, my wife, son, and I saw a total of five different movies over three days at the AFI Docs Festival at the historic Silver Theatre in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland. It is a theatre as much the life blood of our town as the Franklin Theatre is to my parents’ community.
Why is all of this important? Because identity is important.
Old places embody our identity — both our personal identity as well as our civic identity. Historic places like the Franklin Theatre or the Silver Theatre also create a sense of continuity and variety that helps people feel more balanced, stable, and healthy. And they help us remember.
By saving and reusing these wonderful community landmarks, we can do our part to ensure that all of our citizens can see themselves and remember their stories in the work we do….
Let’s take a few minutes and consider why these places that we love so much point the way forward for your communities. And let’s do that by thinking anew about historic preservation. Today’s work in saving the things people value in their communities is not your father’s (or mother’s) preservation. We no longer have an exclusive focus on museum-like restorations. Instead, we speak to the need to reuse and recycle what we have. We speak to the need to use preservation to build sustainable communities. When you look up the definition of sustainable, it is about creating enduring value.
Preservation today is more about the future than it is the past.
Economic vitality which comes from preservation is directly linked to progress. Contrary to popular perception, change is constant and important to our work as preservationists. Buildings, landscapes, and neighborhoods all change. So do historic theatres. Progress is key to our work, because “Successful preservation makes time a continuum.”…
When thinking of preservation, many see a narrow set of interests focused on architecture. But as Herbert Muschamp, former architecture critic for the New York Times, has said,
“A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city’s memory.“
Americans care about the loss of places they love — the places that provide them with emotional resonance and a sense of continuity. In your community and in the work you do, we can choose to focus preservation on people…their memories…and their future.
More to come…
DJB
Image at top: Milwaukee’s Pabst Theatre (photo: DJB)
This seemed like an appropriate tune to feature on a weekend when the temperatures have approached 100 degrees, and the heat index is off the charts.
I’ve loved Sara Watkins’ version of this John Hartford tune since she released it on a solo album. Here she plays it with her old band mates from Nickel Creek.
Sara Watkins at Red Wing Roots Festival 2015
If you want to hear Sara play this by herself, with a little Hartford-like foot-tapping rhythm thrown in, take a look here.
Rainbow at Nats Stadium – proving it is a beautiful evening for baseball
In the past eight days I’ve been to Nats Park three times. And each game has been wacky and wonderful, in its own way.
I wrote about the “Rainbow” game in the title last Sunday, when my friend Dolores McDonagh and I watched Tanner Roark (our #4 starter) pitch masterfully for eight shutout innings, and Stephen Drew (remember that name) come in and smash three doubles to contribute to the win. So what does Drew do for an encore? Immediately catches some sort of flu and is out of action for six straight days. (But keep remembering that name.)
I also took one of my older score books to the game last Saturday. In looking through that book at the clinching game in 2012 (for the division title), and some other 2014 games, it brought back good memories of even-numbered years for this ball club. A nice start to the week.
On Wednesday, Andrew and I met at Nats Park after work to catch the Nats vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers. Since our Claire has moved to LA, she has gone over to the dark side, so we promised to troll her from the game.
And it didn’t take long for the Nats to strike – and for us to get in our gloating texts to Claire.
In the first inning, Bryce Harper hit a tater that almost landed in the Navy Yard. He scorched a home run into the far upper deck down the right field line that got everyone excited. It was the first of four home runs in what was an 8-1 Nats rout of the Dodgers.
But surprisingly, Harper’s moon shot wasn’t the most exciting play of the game.
That honor belonged to Trea Turner, who stole home when Danny Espinosa was caught in a run down between first and second. Turner inched down the line and then turned on the afterburners. The park went wild.
Andrew and I almost went hoarse from chanting N-A-T-S Nats! Nats! Nats! Woo!! (We do sit in section 313.) Gio even pitched well and got the win. It was the club’s first win since last Saturday, my last day in the park. Maybe I was on to something.
So when I arrived at Nats Park last evening on the hottest day of the summer (heat index somewhere north of 100 degrees), and with the Nats having lost on Thursday and Friday, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My friend Rich Turner joined me and I brought along another old score book that I had “semi-retired” because it wasn’t very good at recording wins.
(By the way, I did rescue this from the trash…which enabled me to use it last evening.)
Mad Max Scherzer pitched another masterful game, with 10 swinging strikeouts against the Padres in seven innings – striking out the side in his final inning. His only flaw (natch) was giving up a 2-run homer in the first. But the Nats offense went missing for much of the game, with Bryce Harper having an especially difficult game. I turned to a fellow fan who was scoring the game in the 8th and said that at least Bryce couldn’t get the third out in this inning – since he was up second in the order. (Bryce had made the final out in his first three plate appearances, each time with men on base.)
After Jonathan Papelbon escaped a ninth-inning mess of his own making (natch), the bottom of the 9th arrived with the bottom third of the order in line to hit. Luckily, that includes Anthony Rendon, who lashed a solid single to put the winning run on base with no outs. Danny Espinosa struck out (reverting to his former bad habits). Next Stephen Drew (remember that name) – available for the first time in six games due to that flu – pinch-hit in Papelbon’s spot. All he did was mash a triple off the wall between center and right, bringing a streaking Rendon home with the walk-off win.
Three-for-three. What a wacky, wonderful week.
Do the Nationals want to give me free season tickets? I have the score book to vouch for my good luck!
MORE TO COME... 