All posts tagged: Historic Preservation

This Holiday Season: Buy Locally

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I have never been one to rush out to the local mall on the so-called “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving.  With a day off, and the opportunity to connect with friends, food, and football, what’s the point? But for the past several years we’ve returned to the beautiful Shenandoah Valley town of Staunton, Virginia, where we lived for 15 years in the 1980s and 1990s, to spend the holiday with good friends.  We make all those connections above (except for the football – our friends don’t have cable) but we add in lots of live music so it makes for a terrific respite. And we’ve taken to spending a good part of Friday in downtown Staunton.  I know this part of town intimately, having worked with the local merchants, property owners, residents and city officials to preserve it for 13 years.  My office was in the Wharf Historic District and our home was only 4 blocks away in the New Town Historic District.  Downtown Staunton is a National Trust Great American Main Street Award winner as …

Is This A Great Country or What?

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If you have had it up to here with screaming right-wing talk show hosts or pontificating left-wing bloggers or just three days of rain, I have the perfect antidote:  the Vintage Roadside 2009 Road Trip Slide Show. Each year Jeff and Kelly from Vintage Roadside travel the back roads from Portland, Oregon to the host city of the National Preservation Conference and take pictures and blog about the experience.  (Vintage Roadside makes great t-shirts that honor the wonderful mom-and-pop roadside attractions, motor courts, motels, tiki lounges, drive-in restaurants, bowling alleys and roller-skating rinks found along America’s back roads.)  This year the trip took them to Nashville, Tennessee.  You will laugh out loud, you will be amazed at the quirky attractions that still remain on America’s roadsides, and you’ll marvel at what a diverse country we live in.  So take my recommendation – visit their slide show and spend a few minutes with this great country. Thanks Jeff and Kelly.  It was wonderful to spend a bit of time with you in Nashville.  Thanks for what …

Why architecture matters: I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb’s Hancock Tower

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I’m reading Paul Goldberger’s new book Why Architecture Matters. As you would expect from Paul, it is a smart, well-written work that is designed to help the reader interested in buildings “come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually.” I’ve already come across numerous passages and examples that resonate, but last evening I was reading his take on I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb’s John Hancock Tower on Copley Square in Boston and was reminded of my last impression of that building when Andrew, Claire and I were visiting the city in March 2008. Paul, a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and a trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is describing the Hancock Tower in comparison to New York’s Seagram Building and G.M. Building.  All three are postwar American landmarks. It was great fun to introduce Claire and Andrew to Copley Square when we visited Boston in 2008.  We toured the great H.H. Richardson-designed Trinity Church, of course, and took …

Christ Church Lutheran Minneapolis: A Sacred Place Captured in Photos

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I am in Minneapolis/St. Paul for two days of meetings on saving Modernist and Recent Past places.  Minnesota and the Great Lakes region has a strong collection of buildings and landscapes from the Modernist period, so we’re in town to work with and learn from our local partners. Last evening’s opening session was held in a beautiful space:  the Eliel Saarinen designed Christ Church Lutheran sanctuary.  His son Eero designed the adjoining educational wing.  This supreme example of the Modernist movement is Minnesota’s only National Historic Landmark listed for its architectural importance rather than as a site of historic significance. The church – now working with a newly formed Friends of Christ Church Lutheran group – has done a wonderful job of preservation and stewardship of this place.  I spent a great deal of time last evening with Pastor Kristine Carlson, who opened with a moving testimony as to why this place matters.  As I said in my opening remarks, preservation generally happens when people – not necessarily professional preservationists – see the connection between …

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

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).  …

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 …

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

Heritage of the World in Trust

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Every two years the world’s preservation and heritage conservation community comes together for the International Conference of National Trusts, a wonderful gathering of colleagues and friends working together across the globe to protect, enhance and responsibly enjoy our planet’s fragile heritage.  To read my full post on the opening of ICNT13, check out the PreservationNation blog on the National Trust web site. More to come… DJB