Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office

Category: Architectural History (Page 10 of 10)

National Transportation Week: A Road to the Past

On Saturday, April 27, 2013, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at a unique dedication ceremony at Fort Halifax Park in Halifax Township, Dauphin County, just north of the Borough of Halifax.  The ceremony was to dedicate numerous London Plane Sycamores recently planted to, if you’re feeling poetic, fix what time has wrought.  You see, these trees were planted to replace missing Sycamores in the National Register of Historic Places-listed Legislative Route 1 Sycamore Allee (see the nomination on CRGIS for more information and for references). Continue reading

Spotlight Series: The Ashland Mother’s Memorial

The Spotlight Series is an occassional series that highlights interesting people, places, programs, and partner organizations working on historic preservation issues.

Erected in 1938, the Mother’s Memorial is situated prominently in the town of Ashland, PA, in the anthracite coal region of Schuylkill County.  The Ashland Boys’ Association (A.B.A.), an organization of men and boys born in Ashland, raised the funds for the fabrication and erection of this monument in 1938.  Continue reading

Preservation’s Next Generation: PennDOT/PHMC Internships in Cultural Resource Management

Hannah

Hannah touring the Lackawanna Coal Mine

If you’ve been to a preservation or archaeology conference lately, you may have found yourself looking out at a sea of grey heads. The generation that began working on public projects in the 1970’s and 1980’s with the initial implementation of Federal and State Historic and Archaeological Preservation laws and regulations, is now retiring. These are the people who invented what is known as Cultural Resource Management (CRM). If important historic places are going to continue to be protected and managed for the future, a new generation of cultural resource professionals will have to carry the standard. Continue reading

Uncommon Modern

Professional Offices, Chester, Delaware County. Photograph by Betsy Manning.

Being one of the earliest areas of European settlement in the United States means that Pennsylvania has an incredible, and in some ways unrivaled, architectural legacy that encompasses every major era in American history.  We’ve got colonial taverns, frontier log cabins, charming farmhouses, monumental churches, imposing 19th century factories, one-of-a-kind government buildings, and everything else in between.  But being the place where so many important events of our nation’s founding took place, and where America’s industrial age flourished, also means that the buildings that came after those periods don’t often get the attention or respect they deserve.  That’s right, I’m talking about Modernism – the buildings of the post World War II era.  The architecture of the automobile.  The design of the Space Age.

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