Friday Roundup

Friday Roundup: Photos and Curated Reading

535 W. Cecil St.
This week, we added six photos of the house fire at 535 W. Cecil St., taken by C. W. Yerkes. You can see all the images at the end of the Cecil Street album, or at the top of our photostream on Flickr.

Happy Friday! While doing some filing this week, we discovered more photographs tucked in file folders. Look for some architectural treasure hunts coming in future editions.

We are hard at work behind the scenes on a number of projects, including (of course) Holiday House Tour (December 7 & 8 in the West Clifford and Amherst Street neighborhoods) and the Bough and Dough Shop. We are also planning to have walking tours at upcoming fall events downtown like Friday Night Live, Celebración, and Oktoberfest. We’ll let you know as we get closer to the dates on where to find our table.

We have another very special lecture and book signing in the works for Friday, October 4 with Thompson M. Mayes. Mr. Mayes is Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.  He is the author of many articles relating to, and has lectured widely on, preservation easements, shipwreck protection, historic house museums, accessibility, preservation public policy, and the future of historic preservation. Mr. Mayes is the author of Why Old Places Matter (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).  We are looking forward to hearing him speak on his book in Winchester this October. You can find a blog post covering his book at the National Trust, Why Do Old Places Matter? as an introduction to his book.

In a similar vein, you can also check out the blog and podcast from Strong Towns on Why We Should Build Cities for Our Unconscious Brains. The podcast is just a hair under one hour, so settle in with a snack or drink and enjoy the discussion. This is an interesting intersection of psychology and architecture – things that we “get” intuitively but often have a hard time putting those feelings into words. The next time you are out an about looking at buildings, see if you can spot how some of these traditional building techniques encourage social interaction, and, inversely, how more modern techniques can be off-putting or unpleasant.

Last, you may also enjoy the article Mapping the Effects of the Great 1960s ‘Freeway Revolts‘ and the related links from CityLab. It is not just a look at the successes of the protests that saved neighborhoods, but also at places where the revolts failed and those freeway projects fractured and destroyed neighborhoods. A freeway, in theory, should be a route of transportation to encourage travel point to point, but in many ways it is also a “pseudo-barrier” that unconsciously (or deliberately) prevents crossing that imposing concrete and asphalt line. For a deep dive into the research, you can find the working paper Freeway Revolts! at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.