Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office
Potters Mills? Story Maps? What are these things? This week’s post from guest contributor Charles Richmond will answer these burning questions and talk about this creative way to use 21st century technology to connect people to place and preservation.
In May of 2015, Governor Tom Wolf appointed 48 people to serve on the newly-created Governor’s Pipeline Infrastructure Task Force, which was charged with creating a set of recommendations for responsibly guiding the extraction and transportation of natural gas in Pennsylvania. The purpose of the recommendations was to suggest best practices that would avoid or lessen environmental, community and cultural resources impacts and address safety issues. Below is the who, what, when, where, and how of this task force, the PA SHPO’s role, and the group’s accomplishments.
There’s a scene in the 1960 classic, The Time Machine, where Rod Taylor escapes the imminent nuclear war by throwing his machine fast into the future. Quickly, the ground rises all around him and for what appears to be an eternity, he is sitting there isolated from the outside world. At that moment, as we watch him shivering, we wonder with him what is going on above ground. An archaeologist would empathize with Rod Taylor at that moment, not because he has put himself into a tight spot, but because Taylor’s experience is the experience of all artifacts in the ground. They are part of the world, then they are no longer part of the world, having disappeared beneath the earth.
Fostering a public appreciation for historic resources and archaeology is one of the most important keys to protecting our history.
Unfortunately, many cultural resources professionals struggle with how to make their work accessible and interesting to the general public. In this blog post, we take on this challenge and announce the launch of a non-scientific, but very intriguing experiment to explore how the public responds to different avenues of communication – brochures, social media and web tools. Continue reading
We’re all looking for ways to cool off these days – this heat wave is one for the records! Grab your iced tea, sit next to the AC, and take a few minutes to read this month’s PA SHPO Shout Out. We’ll cover an unusual historic marker, a really cool Section 106 project, and a reader submitted Shout Out. If you’re still looking for something to do while you cool down, catch up on any older posts that you might have missed and, if you haven’t already, take our Community Connections online survey to help inform Pennsylvania’s next statewide historic preservation plan. We’re at 1600 responses already! I really want to break last time’s record of 2,200 and I think we can do it. Continue reading
Arguably, like most any full-time hard working adult, there aren’t enough hours in the day to absorb all of the informative blogs and interesting articles regarding Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966 that traverse the “intra-web.” So no surprise, I recently came across a blog a mere 6 months after its initial posting that immediately grabbed my attention. On March 6, 2015, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Leadership Forum posted Elizabeth Merritt’s “Worst Practices for Section 106 Consultation.” Her blog very candidly captures the 10 worst approaches to Section 106, noting instead that Section 106 should in fact be a “team exercise, with all parties working together to come up with an agreed-upon solution.” Recognizing that historic preservation is a public interest, Section 106 is inherently a consultative process. But who should be included in that process or, in other words, who should be getting the invite to the party (after all, they are called consulting parties)? This blog hopes to provide some guidance on answering that question. Continue reading
Q: What do the National Register of Historic Places, Section 106 consultation, Federal Historic Preservation Tax Credits, Certified Local Government grants, Tribal preservation activities, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities have in common?
A: All of these programs (and more) are supported by the Historic Preservation Fund. Continue reading
The Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office (PA SHPO) is pleased to announce that it has begun moving forward on an exciting and historic new initiative to continue through 2017.
Special funding awarded by the National Park Service following Hurricane Sandy has enabled the PA SHPO to assist select counties with prioritizing their communities’ historic properties during the pre-disaster planning process—to help ensure they are better protected the next time a major disaster strikes the Keystone State. Continue reading
Many of Pennsylvania’s communities face the challenging task of adapting to a vastly different economic climate than the one that led to their historic growth and development. This new economic reality of dramatically reduced population, deindustrialization and loss of tax base has resulted in historic downtowns and residential neighborhoods pockmarked by disinvestment and vacant properties. Abandoned, demolished or marginally repurposed historic churches, schools and factories are especially vivid reminders of changing times and the large social and economic forces at work. Continue reading
I am dismayed to learn from reading this report that almost half of the twelve thousand structures listed in the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service have already been destroyed. This a serious loss and it underlines the necessity for prompt action if we are not to shirk our duty to the future.
– Lady Bird Johnson in With Heritage So Rich, 1966
In the waning months of 1964, a small group of preservation advocates, beleaguered by nearly two decades of Federal transportation and urban renewal programs that decimated historic communities across the country, gathered to strategize about a new national framework for historic preservation. They wondered whether the “progress” ushered in by the post war economic boom could be redefined in ways that would respect, and even enhance, historic places? Those efforts would eventually lead, in October 1966, to the adoption of the National Historic Preservation Act, the most comprehensive and fully articulated law protecting historic places in the United States.
The country is preparing to mark the 50th anniversary of the NHPA in 2016, and there are many preservation accomplishments to celebrate, but also much left to be done. Preservation50, a coalition of national preservation organizations and agencies is organizing the celebration of the NHPA anniversary and they need your input and involvement. Continue reading
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