My Park Story: Craig Oleszewski

Craig Oleszewski and family.

Photo courtesy of Craig O.

At Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Sites, located in Hyde Park, NY we tell very different stories at each of our sites; from The Gilded Age, to the only National Historic Site dedicated to a First Lady, to the only four-term President of the United States. Much like our sites, our staff have very diverse paths that led them to their work. Join us as we highlight #MyParkStory and #OurParkStory.

Meet Craig Oleszewski, Project Manager at Roosevelt-Vanderbilt National Historic Site.

1. Where are you from?
I was born in Saginaw, Michigan, a mid-sized manufacturing city about 100 miles north of Detroit.

2. What interested you in the National Park Service?
I love to fix and preserve old buildings and the Park Service has the best stock of them. It’s also—literally the standard-bearing agency for Historic Preservation in the United States.

3. Do you remember the first park you visited?
That would be Sleeping Bear Dunes (SLBE) along the shores of Lake Michigan. I can remember being a small child, running in the loose sand and tumbling endlessly down the face of those enormous sand dunes.

Sunset from the Vanderbilt Mansion roof.

NPS Photo by Craig O.

4. What is your background? College? Study?
I first moved to the Hudson Valley as an undergraduate at Bard College, where I earned a degree in Philosophy. Then, after working as a carpenter and in the museum services business for about a decade, I went back to school and earned a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Columbia University.

5. What has been your path in the NPS?
I started out working right here at HOFR in 2008 as a term Exhibits Specialist for the Northeast Regional Office (Historic Architecture, Conservation and Engineering (HACE)). I spent my first year and a half rehabilitating the Home until HACE started sending me out to other parks around the region. I worked at Adams, UPDE, Charlestown Navy Yard (COMM), Thomas Cole, Weir Farm, MAVA, Fort Stanwix, just to name a few. In 2015, I took a new post running a crew of specialists out of Governors Island in New York City. The central focus of my work there was restoring the Trophée de Armes, a monumental sandstone sculpture of an eagle flanked by flags and weapons that sits atop the gate to Fort Jay. From that base on Governors Island, I handled projects in many of the parks in the New York Metropolitan area, including Federal Hall, Hamilton Grange, Castle Clinton, Thomas Edison and Sagamore Hill. In 2018, I left Manhattan to come back home to the Hudson Valley when I started my permanent position here at ROVA.

Smokestack with a yellow jacket nest.

Courtesy of Craig O.

6. What is your favorite part of the job?
I was raised to love my country and this is one of the best ways to show that love and share that feeling, by protecting and preserving our shared cultural heritage. I love learning new things about old resources and it keeps occurring to me again and again that this is really a beautiful place.

7. Any favorite/funny memories of the job?
I remember opening up one of the barn doors on the Stable at HOFR and seeing a pressure-treated 2x8 nailed diagonally across the inside of the door. Someone had hastily written, “TEMPORARY CROSS-BRACE” in Magic Marker and below that, “Installed, June 1992”. --I first saw that back in 2008. It gets funnier every year.

Another time, I had to operate a 135’ boom to inspect the lightning rod high atop the smokestack of the Thomas Edison Works in West Orange, NJ (EDIS). This was the Summer after Superstorm Sandy and the lightning rod had somehow come loose in the storm a few months before. Once we got all the way up there, we saw that the rod had just been clipped over a sheet of lead and the powerful winds were enough to flip the heavy sheet of lead back onto itself. The Chief of Maintenance and I were standing together in a 3’ x 4’ metal basket about 100 feet off the ground when we decided to try to just flip the lead sheet back where it belonged, only to discover that yellow-jackets had made a nest inside the folded lead and they were not happy about having their home disturbed. We ducked our heads and lowered the boom as fast as we could. And managed to not get stung!

Thomas Cole, Color Wheel.

Craig O.

8. Do you have any hobbies? Outside of the NPS?
I’m an assistant scoutmaster in my son’s Boy Scout Troop, I am a trustee at Starr Library in Rhinebeck, I’m on the Town of Rhinebeck Planning Board, I like to cook, ride bicycles, fix cars and make big plans for the future.

9. Favorite personal things – vacation, pets, food, tv, etc. . .
I’m teaching my 17 year-old son to drive and taking him around to the colleges where he’s applied to study computer game design. My daughter is a talented artist, dancer, aerialist and wit. My wife is my constant partner in crime if raising whacky, wonderful children is ever made a crime.

10. Anything Additional to share?
All the parks I have worked in are each like a little family. The ROVA family is a happy and healthy one and I am grateful to be a part of it.

Note about the Thomas Cole painting - In his diary, Cole wrote about creating this color wheel showing the relationship between colors and shades of light and darkness. Cole painted many iconic, idylic landscapes but this study gives special insight into how he represented the world through painting. It’s a post-modern masterpiece from the 1840s!