Introduction

[Stephen Israel] Ever walk into a historic building or place and find yourself imagining new ways to use it, like an art project or public event? Well, it’s one thing to have the idea but a historic placemaker like today’s guest, Dana Saylor, is someone who actually follows through. Dana is a prominent voice in placemaking, public art, and preservation, and she spoke with Nick from her home in Buffalo, New York about creative ways that people can use historic places.

This is PreserveCast. From Preservation, Maryland studios in the historic podcast district of Baltimore, this is PreserveCast.

[Nick Redding] This is Nick Redding, you’re listening to PreserveCast. Today, we are joined by Dana Saylor. Dana is an innovative thinker and real creative connector. Her work is about people, placemaking, as well as the built environment. She is an event manager, a published author, a public speaker, and an entrepreneur living in Buffalo, New York, who has worked with a wide variety of different clients across the region and the entire nation. She’s an adviser to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and also works on a wide variety of local preservation issues. And today, we’re going to be talking with her about creative placemaking, community change-making, and how to use historic places to activate space. Dana, it’s a pleasure to have you on PreserveCast today.

[Dana Saylor] Thank you so much for having me.

[NR] So we want to talk about all of these exciting things but before we get there, we want to know a little bit more about you. What got you into this field and how you started working on all these fun topics that you spend your days working on?

[DS] I started being interested in history, I would say, probably as a child. I was lucky to have parents who valued old things, old movies, old places, and I grew up in a small town in central New York. And, really, I would say that upon moving to Buffalo my interest in architectural history blossomed. Because Buffalo is such a wonderful museum of architectural history and the styles of buildings on any given street that you happen to go down are so diverse and so interesting that they just cause you to naturally ask some questions. So I have a lot of curiosity, so I think that’s a big part of what makes me interested in history. I want to understand a place where I live, so being in Buffalo for nearly a decade now, I began researching just the places that I happened to find myself. It became more of a personal thing initially. I have a little bit of research experience in family history and genealogy so some of that informed the research that I did on buildings, and architecture, and places, and the stories of people in those places. Then I would say – let me see – it was about the time of the National Trust conference in Buffalo in 2011 when I had begun writing some property histories and getting them published in Western New York Heritage and Buffalo Spree and a couple of other places. So I was beginning the processes of turning that initial curiosity into a little bit more of a business because as a lot of entrepreneurs will tell you, they start when people request their services because they hear about what they’ve done. So that was the case with me. It became something where people heard about what I had done or what I had written and they thought, “I would like to know about my own place or story and maybe you can help me.” So that was really how I got started launching my career into architectural history.

[NR] And is that your work day-to-day? I know that you’re involved in a lot of fun things, some of them paid, some of them not. But what has that been a mainstay throughout all of this? You do a lot of architectural research and building history, that kind of work?

[DS] Yes, I would say it is approximately 50 percent of my work. And sometimes it is voluntary for a preservation cause because someone wants to put something on the National Register or create a local landmark and they need research in order to ascertain its architect level of importance, history time frames, things like that. And then I am trained as an artist. My college degree is a B.F.A. in studio art. So I am bringing an interest the aesthetics of historic places too. So I alongside the research draw and paint imagery of architecture that fascinates me. So I’ve become a part of a number of different local art groups and co-founded an arts non-profit that sort of ended up becoming a de facto celebration of the architectural and art history of Buffalo in a way through our City Night events. So it’s kind of all connected for me and both of them inform each other, I would say. The research helps me have a deeper understanding of the places that I look at and by sitting there and staring at a building while representing it – either it live, in person, or from a photograph – I become more interested in the history and the research.

[NR] Yeah. No, I think staring at a place and really focusing on it allows you to see things that you might overlook otherwise. And I do have to say to the Preserve Cast listeners in the interest of full disclosure, I have two Dana Sailor art pieces hanging in my office right now reminding me of my Buffalonian heritage. They’re fantastic. So you’ve worked in all these different fields and as you say they all are so interconnected. But we want to talk with you because you’ve actually come and spoke here in Maryland on some of these issues about community change making or sometimes referred to as historic placemaking. There’s a lot of different definitions out there. If you were to Google this you’d probably come up with a ton of different ways of describing what it is. But I’m curious, sometimes in the definition, there’s a story. How would you describe that work? What is that? What is historic placemaking?

[DS] So placemaking is a term that’s sort of come about in the last – or I should say it’s come to prominence – in the last 10 years or so. People who are in that field I think have called it such for a longer time. But placemaking is to some people a little bit of a silly term because the place already exists, you’re not making it. I’ll tell you a brief story in a way to explain this and you might have to bleep me out [laughter]. So I have a friend who’s in marketing and branding and he likes to sit down with me and with other friends and sort of give us a little course on what it is that we could improve about the way we tell our stories as business people, as entrepreneurs. And he said to me “You know Dana, you call yourself a creative place maker and that is great because I understand. I know you as an artist, a historian, a person who’s interested in research, you’ve run events. Okay, so those are all things that you fold into this meaning. But when you tell people that you are a ‘creative place maker’ or a ‘historic place maker’ or a ‘community change maker,’ it means nothing to them. You have to explain what it is.” I said, “Well, yes. That’s part of the beauty of it. It makes them curious.” He said, “Yes, but people don’t like to feel dumb. No one wants to ask what the price is of an unmarked object. They don’t want to ask for directions or where something is in the store. So you have to sort of spell it out sometimes. What in three or four words is it that you really do?” I’ll give you the censored version. I thought for a second and I said, “I point stuff out. My role in all of these fields is to turn people’s attention to the valued building, the valued story, the important heritage object, the place of significance. And a lot of times what happens is over the years, places, their meaning may shift because of different cultural importance. We may not think of railroads in the same way that we used to and so why would a rail yard be as important as it once was? It doesn’t hold the same cultural significance. A lot of times my job is to sort of reinterpret a place as it was and sort of show people how it is relevant now. Or show people how its heritage, its meaning, its past can be significant even to them in their modern lives. A lot of what I do is really pointing stuff out. It’s saying, ‘Have you looked at this? Do you notice this? Hey, I found this. It’s really fascinating. I’m sharing it with you.'” So that tends to be the thread that runs throughout a lot of my work.

[NR] Would you say that that’s different from more traditional placemaking? You know, activating spaces and getting people to kind of engage in a place? Is it different or is it similar it’s just focusing on the heritage of a place?

[DS] I would say that I come at this quite differently than a lot of other people who might call themselves creative placemakers because many of them might have a background in urban planning or in government or in arts administration. So they kind of come to it as a curator or a planner or something like that with maybe a little bit more professional credentials in a certain respect. And that informs their thinking on who they have access to, how they discuss issues, how they may resolve a problem. I would say that my approach is a little bit more DIY. So I do talk to governments. I do get grants. I work within the system to a certain extent. But I also am willing to go it alone as an entrepreneur, talking to a building owner and saying “Hey, I think an art festival would be amazing here. What do you think?” and just flying by the seat of my pants in a little bit more loose kind of way, which is the beauty of my not necessarily having come up in this discipline and sort of DIY-ing my way into it. I would say there’s differently some differences but then you have people who are getting into creative placemaking who are artists who are frustrated with the status quo about something or a person who really values a place who realizes that it’s not being seen the way it could be. The story isn’t being told well enough and so they sort of volunteer and get involved in some fashion. It depends on the perspective of the person coming to it.

[NR] And I guess, kind of going back a couple questions here before we take a quick break. I’m curious, why Buffalo? I mean, you said you grew up in central New York. For those people listening who maybe haven’t been there and would question, “Well, is there really something to Buffalo? Is there placemaking opportunities in Buffalo?” I mean, is that what attracted you to Buffalo? Is it just rife with these opportunities? Why Buffalo?

[DS] I come from a very rural town in central New York. There are cities of over a 100,000  in central New York as well, like Syracuse and I lived in Utica for eight years, which is a much smaller city, about 60,000 I would say. And in a city of that size at that time – so we’re talking about 10 years ago or so – I found myself frequently frustrated feeling as though they were on the cusp of a lot of really great changes but it wasn’t coming at a rate that I felt was comfortable for me. I really wanted to push for some things and it was plotting along slowly. And I’m happy to say that now there’s a lot of really cool things that are going on there and that’s awesome. I knew that I needed a city with a little bit greater population, a little bit more connected to other large cities. I would say that even though Utica is much closer to New York City, Buffalo has a greater connection in the population to New York, Toronto, and other larger cities just because people move back and forth between them for school, for work, things like that. There always has been strong connections between Buffalo and New York City in the art community especially. So I think that having a bit more of a cosmopolitan feel was an important thing but also city that was small enough to make an impact was an important aspect for me when considering where to go.

So Buffalo absolutely is rife with placemaking opportunities because in any legacy city you’re going to find situations where there are underutilized properties, there are city governments or county governments that can’t necessarily keep up with the foreclosures or infrastructure challenges and things like that. There’s lots of opportunities within those problems and challenges, and usually it comes from a situation where the government really cannot take care of something or does not have the staff or the time to do something, and therefore it is a vacuum into which creative placemakers, volunteers, community members can step and say, “Hey, have you tried this? Can I offer this? Can we work together on this?” And those types of opportunities are really key I think in having an open-minded person who owns the building or city leadership or something because they’re not going to say no if they think there’s a possibility of improvement or change a lot of times.

[NR] Yeah. Not in a bad way but what do they have to lose, right? Why not take a shot at it?

[DS] Exactly. I was just going to say that that’s something that you may not find in a larger city that has more population growth, more income from taxes and things like that because a lot of those cities, it’s easy to become… when you get larger, the rules have to be made very standardized because there are more people to apply them to. It’s harder to be personal. I think that also makes it possible in a smaller city to do work like this because you can be known and you can become trusted as well.

[NR] Well, I think that’s a fantastic place to leave it kind of setting the table for maybe talking about some specific projects that you’ve worked on and how this actually is applied in the field, and we’ll do that after a quick break right here on PreserveCast.

And now it’s time for a Preservation Explanation

[Stephen Israel] Happy New Year! 2018 is here. And if you are like many millions of Americans around the country, you marked the actual moment that 2018 began by turning on the T.V. and watching the ball drop in New York’s Times Square. If you’re like me, you probably got to wondering, “How long have people been doing this? And why a ball drop?”

Well, as with many unusual holiday traditions, this one seems to have evolved with the help of a little friendly competition. In the 1890s, Manhattan saw the naming of two areas at the intersection of Broadway, 6th Avenue, and 34th Street– Herald Square, named for The New York Herald newspaper, and Greeley Square for Horace Greeley, owner of a rival newspaper, The New York Tribune. As these two plazas began to become more popular for public meetings and celebration Adolph Ochs, the owner of The New York Times, decided his paper couldn’t stand to miss out on this kind of public relations. When The New York Times moved its headquarters to Long Acre Square in 1904, Ochs convinced the mayor to rename the area Times Square. The location, the presence of The Times newspaper, and the influence of Ochs soon caused the area to become an extremely lively spot and already in its first year, people started ringing in the new year in Times Square.

But the 1906 ’07 New Year’s Eve celebration, a fireworks display put on by Ochs got too out of hand. And despite The Times reporting the revelers enjoyed the New Year’s celebration regardless of a dangerous botched explosion, the city government would not allow Ochs to set off fireworks from the building from 1907 to ’08. So scrambling for other options, Ochs decided to commission a five square foot wooden ball covered in electric lights (very high tech at the time) from the Artkraft Strauss design firm to do a ball drop that would be visible to the entire square from the top of his building. The idea of the time ball dates back to at least 1833 when a ball installed on top of England’s Royal Observatory in Greenwich dropped every day at 1:00 PM to help sailors and others coordinate their own timekeeping devices. And while Ochs was not the first to ever employ a time ball to mark a festive occasion, his ball drop was certainly on the largest scale ever in terms of publicity and in audience size. And based on the way the tradition continues to this day, it seems Ochs’ idea of a festive ball drop was a pretty good one. Anyway, there’s probably more to get into but my New Year’s resolution was not to hold you guys up from PreserveCast for too long so get back to Nick and Dana.

City of Night

[NR] This is Nick Redding. You’re listening to PreserveCast. We’re joined today by Dana Saylor who we have been talking to about community change making, creative historic placemaking, why she chose to settle into Buffalo. And we just got a really good definition and explanation of what it is that creative historic placemaking is all about. And we’ve sort of been talking in theoretical world, and now I thought maybe we would ask Dana to talk to us a little bit about some projects that she’s worked on where this has kind of all come together to give us a sense for how it works and maybe a roadmap for people who are listening who might want to attempt this in their own community.

[DS] So one of the projects that I became known for in Buffalo is the City of Night series of events. That was a project that involved myself and a whole team of other volunteers from my Emerging Leaders in the Arts Buffalo arts non-profit. That was a series of multidisciplinary art festivals that took place in and around Buffalo’s vacant grain elevator complexes.

Buffalo has one of the largest collections of extant, still-standing grain elevators in the world all in one place crowding around the Buffalo River. And it really creates this majestic, interesting industrial heritage landscape. When we initially proposed City of Night, there were no large-scale art festivals taking place in these buildings or even around them. I think a lot of people who visited them were just solo, urban explorer photographers, sometimes graffiti artists, and other people who were lone people who would go out and find these things and explore. But the idea of doing something somewhat sanctioned was new.

So we started that event, it became a success I think. The art inside the grain elevators was really fantastic and immersive, people loved it. But I truly believe that even without our… we’ve opened these grain elevators to the public and everything that we did was free or make a donation if you’d like. And I think people would have come up in groves no matter because they had never been given the kind of permission that they received to access these spaces and to wander in them and into staying in them and wander around and experience the landscape in the way that they did and think about perhaps their grandfathers who worked there. Or the heritage of these spaces and how they related to the Buffalo River, the ecology of it, the architecture, the influence on international architecture and design. So that was my first big creative placemaking project in Buffalo that followed on the heels of some preservation battles I was involved in. So I was lucky enough to have some support from the community already because of those preservation battles and people sort of seeing that I was a person that truly cared and was willing to invest myself and my time.

And then from there City of Night grew over the next three, four years, into a 17,000 person event. And if you can imagine – if you ever volunteered on a board or a committee for an event – you know how things quickly balloon and suddenly you’re taking a lot more than you might have originally expected. And City of Night became massive. We moved our venue after a couple of years and various logistical challenges and things like that, that we had to address. And then [within] the group, every person in the group started to have different life changes taking place. So I wouldn’t say the group dissolved, but just… there were a lot of changes taking place. So we took a hiatus on these events and into that space I was able to focus on some more of my own projects: the art commission that I spoke about earlier, the historic research projects that I do for clients and nonprofits.

But then also something that had been nagging at me for a number of years since researching in the vault at City Hall where they keep the blueprints and the city permits indexes was the number of historic blueprints sitting there untouched for many years, sometimes a 100 years, and crumbling in these very bad conditions. There was a lot of issues: misfiling, bad filing systems, things have been changed, and this led me to just say to myself that that classic question “Is someone is going to take care of this?” And the answer was “There is no one to take care of this. If it’s going to get done you need to do it yourself.” It just really began to be more urgent every time I would go in there and see [them] crumbling and pieces of the blueprints on the floor. And I did know that there were also a number of blueprints off-site in a storage location that was climate controlled but that they were in a similar condition and hard to access because when some of them were transferred the numbers were not kept correctly and the alignment of the numbers was not right. So basically the public is supposed to be able to access these documents if they need to and they truly are not accessible as they currently stand.

[NR] And so you’re working on that, and is that going to become… is that’s a documentary project or will that become something that tries to engage people?

[DS] Well, what I have done so far is to try and let the public know how important this collection is. And because of that, showing them imagery from this collection of landmark buildings that people love in Buffalo, and then I say to them, “This beautiful image was inside a crumbling blueprint rolled up on the floor in a corner, dusty, and with no label. Basically you could kick it every time you walked into the vault and you’ll never know what it was. And there’s no staff to maintain this, to conserve it, to scan it.” So this kind of becomes like this public– I wouldn’t say indignation – but sort of getting people to understand why it’s important up front, and that way I can gain support for it as a project and get directed towards potential resources. Things that the way I’m trying to bootstrap this project is by not trying to undertake it myself initially and then find funding and grants afterwards. I’m trying to do that upfront so that these resources can become available for everybody. And what I’m learning is that you need to tell that story really well at the beginning of a project and get people engaged and then you will probably get the support that you need. So [a] good project idea is to really get these images digitized so that the condition of the plans themselves will be irrelevant because they’ll be accessible to people. So that’s my concept.

[NR] So with these projects that you’ve done from City of Night to a more archival save-these-important-objects kind of project, are there bigger takeaways, things that you would suggest to someone trying to take on something like this that they should consider before they go down the road? I’m particularly thinking of the City of Night, which became such a success. And you’re on a hiatus, I guess you said, and maybe to be continued… But what would you wish you had known before you jumped into it? And if you were counseling someone on a history placemaking project of their own, that you would say this is really a few things you really need to know?

[DS] I would say that it is important to plan for growth, which may or may not come depending on what type of project you’re undertaking. But you need to have capacity. Capacity in the volunteer group that you are a part of. Or if it’s a for-profit venture, you need to have capacity of staffing and time and funding in case X, Y, Z possibilities take place.

City of Night was an unexpected success and our non-profit was – I wouldn’t say unprepared – but just caught off guard. We really didn’t understand what kind of an attraction we were sitting on. And the grain elevators weren’t even something that we controlled. Essentially, we rented the space for the use of it for the weekend and we didn’t understand the level of response there would be from the public. So that is sort of one of the lessons learned that I think I’m applying now with the other projects that I do as far as the idea of gathering information more upfront before launching into something.

Audacity is important. Having someone in the group that is willing to be the risk-taker, that is willing to leap. You know, “Leap and then that [net] will appear,” is one of my favorite quotes. You need that person and you need to not silence them. And as long as they have proven themselves a hardworking, dedicated person who finishes what they start in other realms, trust those people in your groups and on your non-profit boards. And even if it means that they run with a project that is smaller to start with, that isn’t as risky, let them do something audacious and let them do something interesting and unique and new. I think that at the National Preservation Conference and a lot of other events that I attend, people who are the old guard of preservation, of urban planning, of whatever field we’re talking about, really want to hear the voices of the – whether young or not young – the new people in the field. The people don’t have the training because their perspective on it is important and interesting. But the question is do you follow it through? Do you give those people the platform they actually need and the resources they need to succeed in whatever venture they want to start? Because it’s their energy that is going to carry organizations forward. So they have to feel listened to and trusted.

And then the other thing I would say is have a plan for what happens next. You should try to think about what if this works beyond our wildest dreams? What if this crashes and burns? Because a lot of organizations think only in terms of what if this crashes and burns [laughter] And that’s important to consider. I never recommend going forward with projects without considering that. But also, what if it succeeds? What if it’s amazing? What can you do then? How can you parlay that and be ready with a plan? And I would also say that in this age of images and inter-connectivity online, it is very important to capture imagery and video and to use those things cannily to tell and sell your story. You can talk about a project all day long, you can type about it. But to use imagery to excite people, it’s so much more powerful. So I would recommend that anybody undertaking a project have a plan for documentation, and social media connection, and branding even if it’s a voluntary, nonprofit type of a thing. Telling that story, and how do you weave that into your larger purpose, is just hugely important.

[NR] Yeah. And I think that we see that. I mean, I know I personally see that across the board in a lot of preservation work, whether it be placemaking or not. It’s that if we’re just doing the work for ourselves, and we don’t tell anyone about it, then to some extent, it’s like why is it even being done? Because you need to get people aware of what you’re doing. I mean, telling your story is such an important part of any type of marketing or getting people engaged and to advocate for anything. But I think, all too often, it’s like the first thing that non-profits are like, “Nah. Well, we’ll just cut that out.” And sometimes I think it should be the first thing you pay for.

[DS] Absolutely.

[NR] It’s critically important. And to the point that you made about success obviously, City of Night, people going into these silos, and seeing this place they hadn’t seen before, and experiencing art in that place… then that is all successful, and then it turns into this massive event and 17,000 people. That’s success. But what would you say in terms of… was it a success in terms of helping preserve the resource? For someone thinking about jumping into a project like this somewhere, they can point to “Well look what they did in Buffalo and this was just a smash success.” But at the end of the day, would you say that it’s helped with the preservation of that place, or is that story to be continued?

[DS] I believe that it was… I don’t want to take too much undue credit for any of that… But I think that Rick Smith who owns Silo City, which is this complex of five currently vacant (or partially, now something is happening) grain elevators, was already a person that I trusted with the resource. And that was part of the reason why I was willing to work with him. Because he seemed like a person who cared genuinely about Buffalo’s history and the heritage of this place. And even though he was probably hemorrhaging money by owning them, he cared and was willing to be a good steward of them. That being said, I believe that City of Night having been one of the largest events ever to take place there, got a lot of eyes on the place, got a lot of proposals sent Rick’s way, got a lot of interest. And the reality is that sometimes those proposals are non-fund-generating necessarily, they’re just people who want to do cool things there, which is great. But I believe that he’s also gotten a number of business proposals and is following through with some of them. So it has given him some, I think, stability to help go forward and continue to maintain aspects of them that needed some work, or areas that needed shoring up or securing and to have the space to sit back and consider what else could be a possibility. Because sometimes if you are building or a complex owner, whether that’s an nonprofit ownership situation or a private individual, if you’re spending tons of money just to maintain and tread water you really don’t have the time or the energy to plan for the future or to think big or to have big, grand ideas or to consider the ideas of other people who might propose to you. So I think that having that funding stream and that interest in tours like they do tours they’re constantly now and–

[NR] And you would say that that’s an outgrowth of that though? The tours and those sorts of things?

[DS] Yeah, I would say that our event was definitely responsible for a good percentage of that. And since then there have been many other events held there that I know paid a rental fee so things like that take place. And success can look different depending on what type of venue it is, what type of building, what condition it’s in. I’ve seen people presenting at the statewide conference here in New York who talked about a little chapel in a cemetery and that’s– their goal is to preserve this historic chapel. And if they manage to have like three events a year and they’re very small and 100 people attend them and people know that it exists, that’s success for them. Other people need to do radical work to a structure to save it. Knowing what is success and defining that before you begin is also really important.

[NR] Yeah, and obviously I think that the takeaway though is that placemaking is not just a one time thing. It can result in sort of lasting impacts and I think we’re seeing that not only in your project but projects all around the country so it’s definitely something to consider and to get involved in. Dana as we of move to a conclusion here, if people wanted to get in touch with you or wanted to hire you to do something, or to paint something, or to research something how do they find you?

[DS] They can find me at my website which is DaynaSaylor.com and that’s Dana Saylor, S-A-Y-L-O-R. And I’m on pretty much all social media as Dana Saylor so you can find me on Instagram, on Facebook, even Twitter but I like the visual ones better. And through my website there is a contact form should anyone have questions for me, want to know more about the projects that I’m doing. I am pretty much always available to consult whether it’s on creative placemaking writ large on specific project in a town wherever it might be. I have traveled to different places to give people my two cents on how to undertake something and who they should bring into a project like having spoken with X, Y and Z, have they thought about this angle so that’s something that I also do for hire so I’m happy to do that for anybody.

[NR] So you too listening can have your own City of Night just hire Dana, bring her out there and she’ll set you up. So last but most difficult question of the interview, this is normally when people try and hang up, which is what is your favorite historic building or place? It’s hard to narrow it down but we need an answer [laughter].

[DS] This is a tough one. When you sent it to me I thought long and hard about what that would be. But I have to stay that my favorite place that has meant the most in my life has been the little schoolhouse that my ancestors attended in Northern New York. I got a chance to go there and visit it, which is now a museum, run by an incredibly enthusiastic and energetic 80-something woman named Barb. And that building while incredibly humble was the type of place when you walked through the door you just get goosebumps immediately to know that my ancestors’ heritage was being preserved by a person I didn’t even know. And to see the care that she had put into the collections of family bibles and records and clippings, even a little corner that remains decorated like the old schoolhouse with the original desks and a dress from the teacher on a mannequin [laughter] so it’s a pretty special place. And that I think encapsulates “Why do I do this work?” Because our heritage means something to us – to each of us individually, but to us a society collectively. And even that small building, to know that it is preserved and that it is teaching people things about how life used to work is worth it all.

[NR] Excellent way to end this. And excellent choice! I think our first little schoolhouse. And a good way to wrap up 2017. So Dana, thank you not only for joining us today but for all the good work that you’re doing out there and hopefully we can have you back in another year’s time and hear about all the success associated with your blueprint project and how you saved the architectural history of Buffalo yet another time. So thank you for everything you’re doing and we’ll talk to you again soon.

[DS] Thanks, Nick. I appreciate the opportunity.

Credits

You don’t need to open a history book to find us and available online from iTunes and their Google Play Store as well as our website: PresMD.org. This is PreserveCast.

This podcast was developed under a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, a unit of the National Park Service. Its contents are the sole responsibility of Preservation Maryland and the Maryland Milestones Heritage Area and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the National Park Service or the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

This week’s episode was produced and engineered by Ben and Stephen Israel. Our executive producer is Aaron Marcavitch. Our theme music is performed by the band Pretty Gritty. You can learn more about them at their website: PrettyGrittyMusic.com, on Facebook, or on Twitter @PG_PrettyGritty.

To learn about Preservation Maryland or this week’s guests, visit: PreservationMaryland.org. While there, you can check out our blog and learn about what’s current in historic preservation. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Twitter @PreservationMD. And of course, a very special thank you to our listeners. Keep preserving!