18 Aug 2025 Partners in Preservation: Michael Feldman, Feldman Geospatial
Partners in Preservation is a new blog series in which Historic Boston Inc. welcomes our 2025 Corporate Partners to share why Historic Preservation is important to them. Here, Michael Feldman, CEO of Feldman Geospatial, shares why he’s partnered with HBI to help save Boston’s historic places and spaces.
Many, many thanks to Feldman Geospatial and Long Live Roxbury Taproom for hosting HBI’s 3rd Quarterly Board Meeting and Reception on July 30th!
1.) What does preservation mean to your organization and your commitment to Boston?
MF: It actually means a lot and it really started with a Harvard Extension School class I took called “The History of Boston.” It was early in my career, and it was just so amazing. The teacher was great as well, but just to learn about the history of Boston in general, where we came from, and linking it to certain sites and buildings. Whether it was the Boston Massacre at the Old State House or things that went on at the Paul Revere House. This class also had a City of Boston archaeologist, and they really got me excited to think about the city and relative to what we do, the architectural treasures.
So we use this technology called 3D laser scanning which shoots millions and millions of data points at buildings, at landscapes, at anything you can see. With that, you can build models and see the exact dimensions within a quarter inch accuracy of what you’re looking at. So, it’s kind of a long answer, but preservation to our company was all about asking ourselves “how can we digitally archive some of Boston’s biggest treasures?” So, if anything were to happen like the Notre Dame fire, we would have all of the information to help people understand what it was. Then at the same time, without the disaster prevention aspect, maybe also start to provide a 3D database of these architectural treasures for people who maybe can’t afford to travel to Boston. So we started this pro bono laser scanning project where we would scan one or two historically significant buildings each year in Boston starting with the Paul Revere House. The funny thing is that was just our first project and that made it into the Boston Globe as a huge spread because when you combine history with technology, it attracts a lot of attention. So to our company, preservation is about really having great models and great archives of what buildings look like on an architectural and dimensional level.
And then preservation, what it means to me personally, is really what we did with our building. [Feldman Geospatial is located in an old 1850s Boston Piano Company building] Which is taking a beautiful old building and not thinking about “how do we knock it down and build something newer and nicer,” but “how can we preserve what it looked like and enhance the inside with kind of modern looks?” And further, “how do we not only preserve the physical part but preserve some of its history and then give it kind of a new breath of fresh air?” Like building the new access stairway addition we did for the elevator so it looks a little modern. Then, bringing our people into the office and then having a brewery tenant enhancing the retail experience. So, preservation kind of goes beyond just fixing up an old building, for us it’s kind of reinvigorating a neighborhood, which I believe is what we’ve done.
When you see a hundred people in the brewery space for jazz night, and see some of Boston’s best musicians playing, and then you look up and see these old floor joists –because it was a manufacturing building and they built pianos there for two years in the 1800s. To come back to this musical place means so much to me personally. After all these years, I go into that brewery and see all these people or I walk into my office and see all these people and think, before us this building was just kind of sitting here.
2.) How does working with Historic Boston Inc. further your own work?
Working with HBI is great because we can’t always choose all the clients we want to work for, but we love to work for organizations that have a similar vision and mission to our own. So, even though we work with other developers who build all kinds of new ground up construction and we support that and love that activity and what that can do for Boston and the surrounding towns, Historic Boston is amazing because you find these treasures that are so important to us and then you do your own version of breathing new life into them.
Before I even knew HBI, the Old Corner Bookstore was one of the sites that we scanned the outside of just to preserve it. And between that and what HBI has done at Fowler Clark Farm in Mattapan and then there was the old Hayden Building that was in Chinatown. All these beautiful old buildings that you guys took and restored, to me it just means a lot.
Whether it’s doing the initial survey work [for a potential HBI project] or doing the scanning work for the building or anything like that, we just love supporting that mission because it adds to so much of Boston. One of the greatest views of the City is from Memorial Drive in Cambridge. In a taller building you see Beacon Hill, the old city, you see all of that. And then behind it, you see the high-rises. That’s why Boston is so amazing because it is a modern, cutting edge city, but we’ve got the fabric of the old buildings and the historical significance attached to it. And that means a lot to our company to be working on all of that.
See how Feldman Geospatial has brought the old Boston Piano Co. Building full circle by catching their sponsored Jazz Night every Thursday in Long Live Roxbury Taproom.
