We Love Preservation Month

03 Apr We Love Preservation Month

Call us biased,  but May is one of our favorite months of the year! Each year, Preservation Month comes around and brings a slew of new tours, resources, seminars, and new ways to celebrate our favorite parts of our cities, towns, and everything in between. We’ve put a list of historic preservation items that will feed the hungry preservationist inside you. Check back for additions as things ramp up towards the beginning of May! Feel free to send your favorite accounts, reads, and publications about Preservation to hbi@historicboston.org .

To Watch on Netflix:

Amazing Interiors

To See on Instagram:

• @ShorpyPhotos: Get your historic photos fix from THE “Historic image archive. Old photos restored from our holdings and public sources. 24,000+ images.”
• @OldHouseLove – Revel in beautiful architectural details featured in an “Ode to Old Houses”.
• @USInterior – Prepare yourself for beautiful panoramic views dedicated to highlighting the conservation “America’s Great Outdoors and Powering Our Future.”
• @PRCNola – Get a taste of the Crescent City: “Preserving New Orleans’ historic architecture, neighborhoods & cultural identity through collaboration, empowerment & service to our community.”
• @HHPreserveitnps – Get ready for the dream team of Heritage and Historic Preservation. “ National Park Service (NPS) programs support preservation and promotion of our heritage and historic properties in communities across the nation.”
• @AtlasObscura – It’s a crazy world out there, “Discover the world’s strange and wondrous side.”

To Tweet on Twitter:

• @SavingPlaces
• @CityLab – “All things urban, from Bloomberg..”
• @BostonArchaeo – “Join Joe Bagley, Boston’s City Archaeologist, and the City of Boston Archaeology Program as we discover Boston’s archaeological heritage”.

To Explore Online: 

• Yosemite Valley: Take a minute to enjoy the great outdoors and see “The most popular region of Yosemite National Park is Yosemite Valley – an approximately 7-1/2 mile long section of the park comprising about 3,800 acres. While this is only about a half of one percent of the total area of the park, Yosemite Valley attracts by far the most visitors each year.” The website has a list of virtual sites to explore like El Capitan, The Ahwahnee Hotel, and more!
• Villa Lewaro: “Villa Lewaro isn’t usually open to the public, but you can still take a virtual tour of this historic property with narration from Madam C.J. Walker’s great-great granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles. The tour includes four interior rooms, terrace, swimming pool, and front of the home.” (PST… Love the tour? Try a double feature. Take a tour and then head over to Netflix for Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker.)

To Learn on Ted Talks:

To Read:

• The Past and Future City by Stephanie Meeks: You’ll devour this detailed description, supported by unique empirical research, of the many ways that saving and restoring historic fabric can help a city create thriving neighborhoods, good jobs, and a vibrant economy.

• Old Buildings, New Forms by Francoise Bollack. A survey of examples from across the country and worldwide demonstrating unique solutions to adapting historic buildings for contemporary uses.

•  Sustainable Preservation by Jean Carroon, A nuanced look at the hundreds of choices that adaptive reuse requires architects to make from ingenious ways to redeploy existing structural elements to time-honored techniques for natural ventilation to creation of wetlands that restore a site’s natural biological functions. The author covers design issues, from building location to lighting systems, renewable power options, stormwater handling, and building envelope protection and integrity.

• Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston by Mark Pasnik, Chris Grimley, and Michael Kubo presents the concrete structures that defined Boston during this remarkable period—from the well-known (Boston City Hall, New England Aquarium, and cornerstones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University) to the already lost (Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty’s concrete Lincoln House and Studio; Sert, Jackson & Associates’ Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School)—with hundreds of images, essays, and interviews by architectural historians.

• Why Old Places Matter by Thompson M. Mayes, Vice President and Senior Counsel National Trust for Historic Preservation. This book explores these deep attachments people have with old places –the feelings of belonging, continuity, stability, identity and memory, as well as the more traditional reasons that old places have been deemed by society to be important, such as history, national identity, and architecture. This book will be appealing to anyone who has ever loved an old place. But more importantly, it will be an useful resource to articulate why old places are meaningful to people and their communities.