Author Archives: Max van Balgooy

About Max van Balgooy

President of Engaging Places LLC, a design and strategy firm that connects people to historic places.

Pine Point: Interpreting a Vanished Town

Pine Point, an interactive Web documentary by The Goggles.

Last week I had a chance to visit Bill Adair, director of the Heritage Philadelphia Program and one of the co-authors of the new book, Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. As usual, we had a wide ranging discussion which included his interest in the work of The Goggles, an award-winning Canadian design group headed by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons. He was particularly taken by “Pine Point,” an interactive web documentary about a northern mining town that closed in 1988 and was demolished. Through oral histories, documents, video, and artifacts, the story of this ghost town is told in a mesmerizing scrapbook style. If you’re looking for a way to interpret a place in a new way on the Web, this might provide some inspiration.

Ragan Folan Appointed President of Old Salem

Ragan Folan

The Old Salem Museums and Gardens Board of Trustees accepted the resignation of President and CEO Lee French and appointed Ragan Folan to replace him, effective February 1, 2012. Ms. Folan, a leading community volunteer, has been actively involved with Old Salem as a member of the Board of Trustees since 2005 and as Chair of the Board since May 2010. She chaired the Strategic Planning Task Force that developed the Long Range Strategic Plan currently being implemented. The Board elected Tony Furr, past Chair, to fill her term as Chair through May 2012. Located in North Carolina, Old Salem consists of two museums–the Historic Town of Salem and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA)–along with award-winning heirloom gardens.

Lee French, who leaves the historic museum after five-and-a-half years of successful leadership, informed members of the executive committee of the Board some months ago that he desired to leave OSMG to explore other professional objectives and to satisfy some personal goals. “Based on a number of factors that include personal, professional and family objectives, I decided some months ago to Continue reading →

Urban Land Institute Recognizes Recently Restored Historic Places

Ron Nyren of the Urban Land Institute recently recognized ten projects completed in the past five years that brought back “valuable community resources from decline and neglect.” Nyren notes the importance of these places because they, “serve as a link to the past, a site for shared memory, and an anchor in the often-changing urban landscape.” We’d call them historic sites, but no matter, we’re happy to see more examples of great places reborn, especially when they seem like white elephants, such as:

a 1930s Ford assembly plant in San Francisco, now a performance, conference, and dining facility, with a patio facing the wharf. The rest of the building was repurposed for offices.
a twelve-story hotel from the 1920s in Mississippi that’s reopened as the Hilton Garden Inn Jackson Downtown in early 2010, with 186 rooms and 64 luxury apartments.
a nineteenth-century city jail in Massachusetts turned into 23 condominiums, a restaurant, and landscaped open space–and a jail cell preserved as a museum.
a twelve-story department store in Chicago converted to a mixed-use project with retail, offices, and restaurants.

Don’t let anyone tell you a saving an historic site is impossible and it can’t be reused. When you’ve seen these projects, you’ll know it just requires creative thinking and a good plan (and yes, money–but rarely is anything free).

Christine Madrid French leaves National Trust

Christine Madrid French

The Modernism + Recent Past program at the National Trust for Historic Preservation (aka TrustModern) has been absorbed into its Preservation10X effort, a new strategic plan for its programs and sites, eliminating the director’s position held by Christine Madrid French.

Under Chris’ leadership, the Modernism + Recent Past Program raised public awareness and supported grassroots advocacy across the country through the Modern Modules events and printed booklets, the Modernism in Hawaii context study, collaborative efforts with the Farnsworth House and the Glass House, and the Angel Grant Program. TrustModern was established in 2009 and supported in part by the Henry Luce Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the LaFetra Foundation.

Christine will be moving on to new opportunities including teaching architectural history at the University of Central Florida, continuing her efforts in preservation advocacy, and working with Balcony Press to publish her book on mid-20th century Mission 66 visitor centers in our national parks. She received her Master’s degree in architectural history from the University of Virginia and is a frequent writer and speaker on modern architecture but is best known for Continue reading →

Stowe Center Launches Essay Contest to Promote Social Justice

Historic house museum workshop participants taking a tour of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in 2003.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Connecticut has always impressed me ever since I taught a historic house museum workshop there nearly a decade ago. It’s an unpretentious site with two Victorian-era houses somewhat overshadowed by the adjacent high school and Mark Twain House and Visitor Center. Despite its modest appearance, it has a big ambitious mission:

The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center preserves and interprets Stowe’s Hartford home and the Center’s historic collections, promotes vibrant discussion of her life and work, and inspires commitment to social justice and positive change.

This mission infuses their programs and activities, connecting Stowe’s issues to the contemporary face of race relations, class and gender issues, economic justice and education equity. They recognize they’re not a traditional historic house museum, indeed they call themselves, “a 21st-century museum and program center.”

It’s gutsy, but if you’ve ever met Katherine Kane, the executive director, you’ll know the source (there’s something about the name Katherine that inspires moxie: Catherine Beecher, Katharine Hepburn, Catherine the Great of Russia. . .) and she’s pulling it off impressively. Take a look at their website and you’ll see they offer Continue reading →

New Guide for Historic Sites on the Scottsboro Boys Trials

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Before I left the National Trust last October, I was the director of the Interpreting African American Historic Places Project, an experimental initiative funded by the Ford Foundation. One of the elements was a grant program for collaborative projects between universities and historic sites to improve interpretation of African American history and culture through historic places and for a few years, the National Trust supported some amazing projects that are now just beginning to bear fruit.

One of the most interesting projects was the interpretation of the infamous Scottsboro Boys Trials of the 1930s by the New College at the University of Alabama and the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center. Ellen Griffith Spears and Shelia Washington initially sought to mark a few sites related to the trial in Scottsboro, but after some discussions with them, broadened their scope to look at all the places that were associated with this major civil rights event, providing a geographic context that’s often overlooked. They’ve just shared with me Continue reading →

Laurie Ossman Departs Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House

Laurie Ossman and Max van Balgooy meeting serendipitously in San Francisco in 2011.

Laurie Ossman has recently departed as director of Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House, a National Trust Historic Site in Virginia, to advance her interest in re-imagining historic sites for today’s audiences through project-based endeavors and writing. Her innovative work to reinterpret and reprogram the site has been featured by the American Association of Museums and the Washington Post, including the path-breaking Arcadia partnership with the Neighborhood Restaurant Group. During her tenure, she also completed two major books with Rizzoli–a survey of Great Houses of the South and a study of the architectural firm of Carrere and Hastings (selected as the Washington Post‘s photo book of 2011)–which will be focus of several lectures in the coming month at Vizcaya, The Flagler, and the Sulgrave Club. Laurie received her PhD. in architectural history from the University of Virginia and was previously responsible for the collections and scholarship at such nationally renowned historic sites as Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and Ca’ d’Zan at the Ringling Museum of Art. She can now be reached at LaurieOssman@Comcast.net.

Susan Hellman has been promoted to Acting Director of Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House and can be reached at Susan_Hellman@nthp.org. Woodlawn and Pope-Leighey House are owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is one of 23 National Trust Historic Sites.

Exclusive Twitter Account Launched

If you use Twitter to keep up with what’s happening, you can follow this blog @MaxvanBalgooy. Every blog post is automatically shared on Twitter, plus I often use Twitter to quickly report on immediate events at meetings and conferences as I encounter them, such as a speaker’s pithy quotes and breaking news. If you’ve been following @MaxvanBalgooy, those tweets will now focus on my professional work in historic preservation, community engagement, and urban design (and I’ve moved my personal tweets about my hometown of Rockville, Maryland to @MaxforRockville). Thanks to Scott Wands at the Connecticut Humanities Council for the suggestion (and alas @EngagingPlaces has already been taken).

Volatility Ends the Year

This will be the last post on EngagingPlaces.net for the year. With the holidays, I typically take a two week break from blogging, unless some important news comes up that just can’t wait. I’ll be posting again on Wednesday, January 4 with the goal to maintain 2-4 posts weekly for 2013. Thanks to everyone who visited and commented in this inaugural year of the blog, and for your kind comments at conferences and via email.

Historic and cultural organizations are undergoing tremendous change, so you’ll be delighted to know that “volatility” has been named the Web of Language Word of the Year for 2011. Were they thinking of us? How did they know? Dennis Baron, English professor at the University of Illinois and author of the Web of Language blog, shares his thoughts about volatility and other words of the year, including squeezed middle, truthiness, retweet, tergiversate, and bunga-bunga on the Visual Thesaurus blog (an online thesaurus that I find increasingly useful for my writing). How many of those words did you recognize?

Best wishes for the holidays and 2012 (just remember, next year is a new year, thank goodness).