All posts tagged: Historic Preservation

The Best Places to Raise Your Children…Murfreesboro Edition

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(NOTE: See my 2020 update to this post here.) Business Week magazine just included Murfreesboro, Tennessee as one of the best places to raise your children.  Well, if they’d just asked me I could have told them that a long time ago. For years now, I’ve been using a little vignette about growing up in Murfreesboro as a part of a talk I give about the livability of towns and cities.  While Business Week focuses on Murfreesboro as a recession-proof college town, I believe there’s a lot more to it. When I think of home, I remember 407 East Main Street in Murfreesboro.  I grew up in Murfreesboro when it was a city of 35,000 people.  My parents bought a simple 1880s-era home on Main Street because it had an apartment where my grandmother could live with us.  Over the course of twenty years, four generations of our family lived under this roof. Murfreesboro has a history that was very real and very present to me as a child.  I could walk four blocks to the town square, …

A fitting day for a Viennese funeral

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Today was cold, gray, and rainy in Vienna.  But since it was also the only day I had to tour the city, I hit the streets early bundled in my winter coat and sheltered (somewhat) by my travel umbrella.  It turned out to be a fitting day for a (Viennese) funeral. For someone interested in history, architecture, and cities, being in Vienna for only one day on your first visit can be as frustrating as being a kid in a candy store with a very strict parent.  There are only so many things you can choose.  Luckily, my friends Jim and Janet (they of the great Western trip itinerary) had steered me to a wonderful (and relatively inexpensive) little family hotel that sits astride the St. Stephansdom and Hofburg districts of the city.  These are the names for the medieval city and the imperial city respectively.  So I could jump back and forth with ease and, in the course of a day, see 4 of the best churches in the city while also spending an hour …

Dinner along the Danube

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Bratislava, Slovakia is the only world capital that borders two other countries.  (Isn’t Wikipedia a wonderful thing!)  And last evening I had the chance to enjoy some of the best of this city with my friends and colleagues from the International National Trusts Organisation (or INTO). After my all-night flight on election night, I arrived in Vienna around 9 a.m. local time and caught a bus from the airport that took me the 45 minutes to Bratislavia.  The countryside between the airport and the city was very rural, broken only by the occasional wind farm and two delightful small historic towns (one of which still maintained its historic city wall surrounding the town).  Since the hotel where I’m staying didn’t take guests until 2 p.m. and I needed to do something to stay awake, I ate a bit of breakfast and then strolled the streets of Old Town Bratislava. And I’m here to say that the historic core was hopping.  I was on the streets at lunch time and those streets were swarming with people eating …

What a strange, wonderful Election Day it has been

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Greetings from Bratislava, Slovakia!  Not your normal post-election day dateline for the More to Come…blog.  Let me tell you how I ended up hearing about the presidential election results while flying over the Atlantic. I woke up at home on November 4th and after the normal morning chores, I headed down to the library to vote.  Well, I wasn’t really surprised to find  that the line ran around the edges of BOTH parking lots and extended almost to the street.  Historic election indeed!  It was great, even if I did stand in line for 2 hours and 10 minutes before casting my vote.  But it felt good to be part of something so special and it felt REALLY good to vote with a positive feeling about a candidate (instead of the usual voting to play defense).  The local high school had some kids out selling coffee and pastries to help with relief efforts in Africa.  They did well, but they could have done gangbusters if they’d had chairs to rent or would have been able to …

Bearden-Brown House

Franklin’s heritage is my heritage

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Franklin, Tennessee is a gem of a little town.  I should know.  Both my parents grew up in Franklin and I spent many a summer hour visiting my grandmother’s house as I mowed her yard, played catch in the back yard, helped in the large vegetable garden that was on a lot behind the house, or ran down the street to Alfred’s (a small store in a converted church) for ice cream and candy.  Murfreesboro, where we lived, was a big city compared to Franklin, but that meant that Franklin had an intimacy that was familiar, welcoming, and walkable to a 12 year old boy. Franklin has changed through the years.  After my grandfather died, my grandmother moved to Murfreesboro to live with us and she sold the family house to the city, which let it fall into disrepair.  We would drive by on occasional trips back with her to visit friends and lament the shape of the old Bearden-Brown home place. But a wonderful thing happened.  The local preservation group – the Heritage Foundation …

Beauty in the Mountains

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I spent the last two days in the mountains of North Carolina.  A colleague and I had a meeting in the region and our timing could not have been better. Few things are as beautiful as the mountains of western Virginia and North Carolina during the fall.  This was my favorite season during the 15 years we lived in Staunton, in the middle of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.  So Tom and I were thrilled to find ourselves on a lake with a jaw-dropping historic dam and a shoreline filled with trees in all their fall glory.  We viewed a great historic property with the owner on Tuesday afternoon, but knew we had to get up this morning to see more of this wonderful place. After a restful night’s sleep (boy it is dark in the country), Tom and I hit the hiking trail this morning to walk around the lake, enjoy the wonderful light, and examine the dam up close.   As you can see from these pictures, the trees were spectacular and the dam was awesome in all …

Take Me Home Down Route 66

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Just arrived home after a week in Tulsa for the National Preservation Conference.  National Trust staff posted some great updates throughout the week on the PreservationNation.org blog which I recommend.  I did see some great art deco architecture and thought the Gilcrease Museum was a real treasure (check out the amazing Ansel Adams exhibit).  But since I spent the better part of the week in partner and board meetings, I’m not the best judge of all the city had to offer.  So I’ll just post this picture from last evening’s terrific closing party with Asleep at the Wheel and say thanks to Marty, Marcia, Cliff and all our hosts from Oklahoma for a great week. We’ll let Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel take us home with a great version of Route 66! More to come… DJB

Taking a Look at Tulsa

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I’m in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the 2008 National Preservation Conference and took some time this afternoon to become acclimated to my home for the next week. Tulsa is known for its great collection of art deco architecture, and on my way to the TV studio this morning to do a stint on Good Morning Tulsa I drove past the magnificent Boston Avenue Methodist Church.  What a building!  It was highlighted on the cover of the July/August 2008 issue of Preservation magazine in a beautiful photograph and – seen in the morning light – is even more stunning in person.  I hope to take some photos later in the week when we’re there for conference events. In walking around downtown on a beautiful fall day, I found a range of 20th century architecture – not just art deco.  The photo at the top of the post just gives a hint of the range of styles one sees when walking around with an open eye. The newest landmark in Tulsa just opened last August – the Cesar Pelli-designed …

Rosenwald Schools – Invested with Meaning

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I’m reading Mary Hoffschwelle’s The Rosenwald Schools of the American South, an inspiring story of a remarkable program.  Mary (Dr. Hoffschwelle) is a friend who happens to be married to Van West – one of my oldest friends from childhood and a professional colleague.  In this 2006 book, she captures the story of the Rosenwald School building project which eventually resulted in the construction of more than 5,000 school buildings for African Americans across the Southern states in the first half of the 20th century. Through its Rosenwald Initiative, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has worked with community groups to try and save the approximately 1,000 remaining Rosenwald schools.  It is very important work.  I spoke at a Rosenwald Schools conference at Fisk University several years ago and was inspired by the many stories of the former students.  I recommend a tour through the initiative’s web site to learn more about these remarkable community centers and what’s being done to preserve them.  I recommend Mary’s book as well. I came across the following in Mary’s …