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The Preservation Technology Podcast

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Preservation Technology Podcast

Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation.

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62. Digital Documentation and Reconstruction of Old Sheldon Church with Chad Keller (Podcast 62)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation, Technology, and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Chad Keller, professor of historic preservation at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In this episode Chad talks about a SCAD class project to digitally document and reconstruct Old Sheldon Church in Yemassee, South Carolina.

Old Sheldon Church Old Sheldon Church

Chad Keller: This was a ruin that was constructed in 1751 in Yemassee, South Carolina. It’s an angelican church and at this point it’s a ruin. One of the things that we are really interested in and excited about this was the fact that it is a ruin, that it had been destroyed twice. The first time was during the Revolutionary War and then it was subsequently reconstructed around 1825, and then it was destroyed again in 1865 during the Civil War.

Since then it has sat as a ruin. More recently, probably in the last 10 to 20 years there’s been more interest in the site and it has been cleaned up. Have images from about 1940 where you can see all the growth and things like that that have been embedded within the brick work and such. That has at least been taken care of.

This project was really part of a new class that was introduced at SCAD and it’s called Digital Technology and Historical Preservation. Really what it’s about is utilizing newer digital technologies within the research process. Primarily what we want to do is we want to be able to create new avenues of research, new types of documentation, and then thinking of ways that we can reuse the material that we have collected for site interpretation so that eventually it can be disseminated to the public.

To that end, this project involved using both traditional analog methods but then also digital methods of documentation. When I say analog, that’s just basic, traditional tools that we’re all used to with pencil, paper, and a tape measure. Some other things that we ended up doing with that project was also laser scanner and also photogrametry. It might sound in some ways like over kill, but this class was focused on introducing students to different ways of documentation.

Some of the things that we do with that is that with the laser scanning we were able to convert those back into two dimensional drawings. Some people might question, well why if you’re collecting this three dimensional data because that is what you’re collecting with the laser scan data. Even with the photogrammetric data you’re collecting three dimensional points. Those three dimensional points can be pologomized, turned into a 3-D model. As I said previously, people might question why you’re converting those back, but according to HABS standards, things need to be in two dimensional drawings. The whole point of this is to be able to at some point, to possibly submit them to HABS but then, even for students that are going to be working in different industries like per se construction, that they’re still going to be requiring, at least at this point, two dimensional forms of drawings.

Maybe 10 years from now we’ll be looking at things at 3-D on a construction site or on some sort of hand-held portable, but at this point the most accepted method of measured drawings is in two dimensions.

Jason Church: Now you say HABS wants them in two dimensional. Is that for view-ability, or archives, why is HABS

Professor Chad Keller with students at Old Sheldon Church. Professor Chad Keller with students at Old Sheldon Church.

looking for the drawings?

Chad Keller: It’s primarily I think for the way that they have set up their archiving. With the methods that are important to HABS with the 500 year old of ink and then the fact that needing to be carbon based you can’t have digital. That’s the methods that they’re wanting you to be able to submit these things. That’s all about archiveibility at this point. That’s some of the reasons of having to create the 2-D drawings.

Jason Church: The church you’re talking about, what is it’s surrounding area, what’s the landscape? Is it situated in a town, is it in a rural area?

Chad Keller: Yeah, it’s outside of Yemassee, South Carolina. It’s called Old Sheldon Road, the name of the church is Sheldon Church. It pretty much sits in the middle of nowhere, but at one time it sat pretty centrally to some major plantations within the area. It was the seat for the Bull family. The Bull family was instrumental in laying out Savannah. William Bull was instrumental in doing that. There’s evidence through the written record of where there was the Bull family crest that was located within the church. As the Bull family would walk into the entrance of the church, which at that point would be on the south side of the building, on the north side of the building is where the family crest would be. As they walked in they would be able to view upon their family crest.

Jason Church: You collected this digital data. What’s your plans to do with it, with these scans and the photogremetry?

Chad Keller: At this point one of the things was it was primarily an exercise for the class to be able to understand the differences between collecting data through the traditional methods. Doing this documentation traditionally and then being able to see what it was like using these newer, digital technologies. That was the main goal of the class, but what could be done with this information is that it could easily be handed over, with definitely some more work to create some sort of HABS format for that.

Some of the other things that could be done is that this digital information could be re-purposed for site interpretation. At this point there really isn’t any interpretation of the building on site and there really isn’t much of an interpretation of the building on the web so that you could have more of a web presence with that.

With these laser scans you can create 3-D models out of them. One of the things that the students did with this project, as I said it was a ruin, one of the things I was really excited about was the fact that they actually reconstructed the building and created a 3-D version of what they thought the building looked like in 1825 when the building was reconstructed the second time.

One of the things too is that in choosing the fact that it was the 1825 period and not the 1752 period from when it was originally constructed, is that there just wasn’t much information within the historic record. The students, through their research, were finding more information about the 1825 period and we agreed upon that that has the most information, and that should be the route of restoring that period.

How they ended up doing that was through the written record, through traditional research, and then also going around and looking comparatively at other churches within the region that were constructed around the same time period. Taking into consideration that this was a bit of a rural church and you wouldn’t find necessarily the same ornamentation that you would might find in a church in Charleston, but they were looking at other rural churches within South Carolina within the period at that point.

This could easily go onto a web site. They create a 3-D model of it that was put into Google Earth so this is something that could easily create some walk through or fly through at least to give people an idea of what it looked like. The other thing too is that this project could easily be continued because with 3-D modeling, sometimes people get the perception that, and especially with a rendering, that this is the final product and that’s really not true. This is more or less the first iteration. One of the things that could happen is for this to be passed on to other scholars of angelican churches of the period and for them to be able to vent this model and be able to say, “Well this isn’t accurate here. You might want to go back and re-think this aspect of it.” It could be an integrative model. This might be just the first generation of it.

Jason Church: It could easily be taken out and interpreted further and built onto.

Chad Keller: Exactly. Yeah, and then we could easily begin to show the whole process of creating the model and showing the different iterations and the different interpretations of that. In ways that through documentation and recordation, we always talk about process, especially in 3-D you can begin to show this process as well visually of how you first started out with the model and you have this first idea of what you thought and proposed it would look like. But then after further research and further discussion with colleagues and experts in the field, you’ve come to find out that maybe there was initial errors but then you’re going to go back and change that.

Jason Church: We need to keep in mind as conservators and historic preservationists doesn’t mean we’re architectural historians or curators so it’s good to involve the other fields into those decisions.

Chad Keller: Yeah and I think that brings up another point is that with the way the technology is going, there are so many other people that we’ve been able to work with through digital technology. That’s been exciting and I think it opens up opportunities to work with people that traditionally we haven’t worked with in the past. In some ways the field is expanding, but it gets a little bit smaller at the same time too. That’s been nice.

Jason Church: What other projects do you have planned in the future for your students?

SCAD students scanning the church grounds SCAD students scanning the church grounds.

Chad Keller: Well, this is actually for the first year it’s going to be mandatory. For all students in the preservation program, like last year was the first year that it was offered, it was an elective. Now it’s going to actually be part of the program so every student is going to have to take this course. Which is great because this is the way that the field is going as we see here with the summit. We know a lot of people from other industries and other universities are talking about these things, doing research, so all of these students are going to be getting exposed to that.

It’s really going to be on a per-project basis. I’m not set on this sort of model that we did the last time which was the project at Old Sheldon. Those things will be discussed, but we’re looking at other projects, other opportunities to do things in Savannah. For instance there’s been talk of doing more historic GIS projects. It’s really going to be dependent on what sort of things are available at the time.

I do want to try and mix it up. As I said, this year might be GIS, maybe the following year we go back to more reconstructions and things like that. It’s going to vary but still stay within the core of looking at these different digital technologies that are available.

Jason Church: Well thanks for talking to us. We look forward to maybe talking to you in the future about other work that your students are doing.

Chad Keller: Yeah that would be great. Thanks, it was nice talking to you and thanks to NPS and NCPTT.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, good bye everybody.

Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Chad Keller, professor of historic preservation at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In this episode Chad talks about a SCAD class project to digitally document and reconstruct Old Sheldon Church in Yemassee, South Carolina.

61. The Molecular Weight of Silk and Interpreting “Biscuits” (Podcast 61)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of Americas Heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Kathryn Hallett, preventive conservation manager, Historic Royal Palaces. In this episode, Kathryn is talking about her time as an NCPTT intern and the conservation career that she has had since.

Jason Church: Kathryn you have the distinction of being the first summer intern at NCPTT, which we’ve had lots of and we’re doing several interviews with past interns currently and you’re actually the first. So can you tell us a little bit about spent your time at NCPTT?

Kathryn during her NCPTT internship. Kathryn during her NCPTT internship.

Kathryn Hallett: Sure, I didn’t realize that I was the first intern so that is quite an honor. My internship was in the summer of 2001, between roughly the beginning of June to the beginning of September. The internship came about because, at the time I was carrying out a master’s program in conservation science in London, and that was at the Royal College of Arts. I was doing a placement at The British Museum and my supervisor there was a scientist called Sue Bradley, who was a contact of the materials scientist at NCPTT, Mary Striegel. I was looking for a summer internship as part of my master’s program and Sue suggested that she thought I would get a lot form working with Mary, and I was interested in working abroad.

I contacted Mary and she very generously accepted my request for an internship and I yes, flew over a very long journey over to Alexandria airport which, for me was quiet an eye opener, tiny airport via Houston. Mary herself came and picked me up and was so very generous with her time and hospitality. While I was at NCPTT, the main project I worked on was … well I was working on a small part of a larger research project, to evaluate an awful organic polymer that was proposed for use on limestone. The aim of this polymer coating was to try and reduce sulfur dioxide deposition. It was an ongoing program and a joint research project between NCPTT and DuPont, the chemical company.

I was working with Mary and with another scientist called Elizabeth Bede, and a further scientist called Deig Sandoval. Together they had put together this project with DuPont, and I was able to go and work for a few months to carry out some of the practical work. I was working with the environmental chamber that had been built in the lab at NCPTT, so I got to know that piece of equipment, which is quite an amazing resource. I pretty much was able to take it apart and clean it and put it back together again and all of that sort of thing. Mary and Elizabeth taught me how it worked, what it was for, lots of buttons and switches. Essentially enabling them to expose samples of stone to very carefully controlled and monitored environments. So, things like the wind speed, the concentration to the various pollutant gases, temperature and humidity and all of that sort of thing.

We would then expose samples of limestone, some of which had been treated with this proposed polymer coating and some of which hadn’t been treated as a control setting. Then following the exposure to sulfur dioxide in the big environmental or chamber, we then extracted any deposited pollutants from the limestone and analyzed them using the ion chromatography equipment, which I think you just had upgraded. Then we were looking for, obviously sulfates, dissolved sulfates that might have been deposited on the stone to indicate how effective the polymer coating had been. A fascinating project to be a very small part of.

Jason Church: After you left your summer at NCPTT, where did you go from there, back to your master’s program?

Kathryn Hallett: Yes, That’s Right. I then went into the final year of my master’s program. It was a three-year master’s program because essentially it was run on a part-time bases. I would be part time at the Royal College of Arts, and part time in the labs at the British Museum, so it’s well over three years. My internship at NCPTT was between the second and the third year. Once I got back to London, then I was into my final year at the British Museum and writing up my dissertation, which was on a completely different topic. I was looking at lighting conditions for ethnographic exhibitions, so something quite different. Then I completed my master’s in 2002, then I was job hunting and I was really, really fortunate, I managed to find a job pretty much straight away. I then was working for Historic Royal Palaces, where I still am today. I was very fortunate to find employment, from yeah, right from the moment I graduated in 2002.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about your job now, with The Royal Palaces.

Hallett using an HPLC for size exclusion chromatography to determine the molecular weight of tapestry silk. Hallett using an HPLC for size exclusion chromatography to determine the molecular weight of tapestry silk.

Kathryn Hallett: When I was first employed, back in 2002, I was taken on, on a research contract. Over here in Europe, we have a funding program that’s run by the European Commission and at the time, in 2002. There was a funding round available for cultural heritage research projects. Historical Palaces was a partner in a European research project to study the deterioration of tapestries, so I was taken on as scientific researcher to work specifically on it from size exclusion chromatography to evaluate the molecular weight of silk.

We were looking to see whether we could use that technique as a marker of damage in silk, to help us to understand how deteriorated were the tapestries in the collection at Hampton Court. There were over seventy historic tapestries at Hampton Court, so it’s a fantastic collection to work on. That was the first three years. That project I was using size exclusion chromatography and I really benefited from the experience I had had in Louisiana because although ion chromatography and size exclusion chromatography are different techniques the actual equipment I was using was not so different. Obviously, I was using a different solvent and a different separation method, but in terms of the software, writing programs and how to care for the equipment, there was a lot of similarities so I was able to hit the ground running on that research project, which was very helpful.

As a result of that research project, we were successful in finding a good analytical method for identifying the level of deterioration in silk for tapestries. We were correlating the molecular weight of silk with the tensile strength, although obviously, the tensile strength tests were done on samples, because as you can imagine it’s very difficult to take the right sort of sample from a historic tapestry that one can then use for tensile strength testing, it just wasn’t going to work. So, from the historic tapestry samples, obviously very, very tiny, that we were able to take I could use size exclusion chromatography on those samples, but for the correlation between molecular weight of silk and tensile strength, those experiments were all done on model samples.

So yes, it was a fantastic project to be involved in, working with a great collection. That was up until 2005, when that project completed, then I was fortunate enough to be taken on a permanent contract as a Conservation Scientist at Hampton Court. I carried on some of the research that we’d started on the tapestries, but I also broadened out the research, really to support all of the conservation functions of the royal palaces. The charity is an independent conservation charity that at the time looked after five historic sites in the UK. As well as Hampton Court, the charity is also responsible for Kew Palace, which is in Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, the Tower of London, obviously an iconic historic site, world heritage site, Banqueting House in white, which is home to an amazing original Rubens’ painted ceiling, and also Kensington Palace, which is in Kensington Gardens and is still partly occupied by the royal family.

From that three year research project, from then being taken on as a permanent member of staff, I was able to widen out the research to underpin all of conservation functions of the department at Historic Royal Palaces. At that point, I started work on other materials, as well as tapestries and in fact also returned to stone conservation for a time. I was involved in a research project looking at preventive conservation Reigate stone, which is a particularly troublesome type of stone we have her in the UK. It’s a kind of sandy limestone or a limey sandstone, depending on who you talk to, incredibly porous and incredibly soft. Large parts of the Tower of London and Hampton court are built from Reigate stone and it causes us to have a big problem in terms of its preservation. It was great to be able to draw on some of the knowledge I’d learned with Mary Striegel and other colleagues at NCPTT about stone conservation to work on that project too.

Jason Church: That’s fantastic we would have ever known the connection between the two.

Kathryn Hallett: I know. Yeah, all of the research I was involved in, in Louisiana really helped me in many ways, not just learning about how to conduct a rigorous and large scale research project, but small things like, as I said, how to operate chromatography equipment, information about the chemistry and morphology of limestone’s. I’ve drawn so much on what I’ve learned from Mary and her other colleagues; it supported me very much in my career at Historic Royal Palaces.

Jason Church: That’s very encouraging, thank you. Any funny or interesting stories about your time here in Natchitoches?

Kathryn Hallett: Oh well, quite a few I guess, I’ve been racking my brains to try and think of some funny stories, and I’ve thought of quite a few actually. I guess, one of the first things that I noticed when I was in Natchitoches was the cultural differences between that town, and obviously I was use to London, but it gave rise to quite a few humorous situations for me. One example, I was staying in university accommodation for part of my internship and there was a supermarket quite a short distance away really, so I would obviously regularly go and visit the supermarket to stock up on my food. I didn’t have a car while I was in Louisiana, I didn’t really see the need for it, Natchitoches is quite a small town as you know.

I didn’t really expect to travel far, so I didn’t drive a car, but I found that that made me quite an oddity. When I would walk from my accommodation to the supermarket, a couple of times I had people pulling over an asking if I was all right because they were so unused to seeing people walking along the road. Whereas, of course, in London it’s the opposite really and people are very accustom to walking from a, to b, but I found that in Natchitoches that made me quite an unusual being. Especially when I was walking along the road in the August heat carrying my shopping bags and all of the kind folks in Natchitoches would think I was probably quite odd and pull over with their cars and see if they could help and give me a ride.

Jason Church: Yes, we’re not much of a walking town, for some odd reason.

Kathryn Hallett: No, which yeah, I found funny. Let me think, What else? Well as I said, Mary Striegel and the other colleagues I worked with, Elizabeth Bede and Deig Sandoval particularly, were so very kind to me, and the hospitality they showed me was amazing. They were always inviting me out for lunch and dinner, and showing me round and introducing me to people, so I really felt part of the community. One of the fun events they invited me to, and I don’t remember the name, but it was a festival, it was held at the university, in I guess one of the sports halls, it was over a weekend I think. During the festival I got the chance to try out some unusual cuisine, gator on a stick I had never had before and was quite unwilling to try, but I did give it a go. Everyone said, “Oh, it tastes like chicken,” wasn’t sure about that, but I gave it a go. I also got to soak up some of their fantastic blue grass music, have some daiquiris I remember was a big, lots of daiquiris, and enjoy the atmosphere there. That was fun. We had a great social life and everybody was so kind. I remember visiting a colleagues house for a crochet evening with lots of daiquiris. That was fun too. As well as all of the hard work that we did, I really enjoyed meeting everybody at the center and everyone was really kind in helping me feel at home.

Jason Church: Fantastic. You must have gone to Louisiana Folk Life festival.

Kathryn Hallett: Yes, that sounds about right, yeah.

Jason Church: Still a very standard festival for all of our interns to attend.

Kathryn Hallett: Oh good. It was a great experience and great chance to immense myself in Louisiana culture and have some of their Cajun cooking, yes all of that really. The cultural side of the internship, I enjoyed very much indeed. I remember being quite stunned about biscuits because in London or in the UK, a biscuit is something sweet that you have with your cup of tea, but something quite entirely different in the south of America. I enjoyed finding out about that to my surprise as well, that it wasn’t quite the biscuit I expected.

Jason Church: Well any projects that you have coming up that you want to mention to us, anything you have coming up in your current …

Hallett investigating the condition of the 16th century terracotta roundels at Hampton Court Palace. Hallett investigating the condition of the 16th century terracotta roundels at Hampton Court Palace.

Kathryn Hallett: At the moment, I’m working on a project to look at a Terra Cotta conservation. Again, as I mentioned, in my current roll I really focus on whatever material is required for the sort of conservation projects that we have coming up. So I can be working on any material from textile to arms and armor to gilded furniture, and so on and so forth, all of the contents of a royal palace. At the moment, my main research project is looking at a set of Terra Cotta roundels that are mounted on the gate houses of Hampton Court. They’re a fantastic survivor; they actually were commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey who was one of Henry the IIX advisors in 1521. There are eleven of these Terra Cotta roundels, they depict Roman Emperors we believe, and they’re still mounted outside on the gatehouse at Hampton Court.

We have been involved in a research project now since, gosh, probably 2008 to study the materials of these Terra Cotta sculptures to understand there manufacture original decoration because we know from the accounts at the time that they were originally painted and gilded, although they don’t appear that way now, to look at how they deteriorated. Some of them are in really good condition and others are in less good condition and then obviously to look at options for their conservation in the future. This research project has involved really every facet of conservation science, everything from looking at the geological provenance of the clay, we’ve been involved in ICP-MS trace element analysis to try and identify the geological provenance of the clay, that we believe is a local London clay.

I should say we know that the sculptor was Giovanni da Maiano, who was a famous Florentine sculptor, who worked at the court of Henry the IIX. We were looking at the geological provenance of the clay, so whether he brought his clay with him from Florence or whether he used a locally available clay. We’ve also been looking at thermoluminescence dating, because we know that all of the sculptures have been moved and have been restored in one way or another over time. We wanted to try and find out which where the original pieces and which are native additions. We’ve also been carrying out pigment analysis and using mammon microscopy, as I mentioned, to try and look at the decoration that might be remaining. We haven’t found very much, but in certain crevices and behind ears and noses of these Roman Emperor sculptures, we have found some traces of polychromy.

The second phase of the project has been looking at conservation options, so we’ve been trialing laser cleaning, for example, so that has been really successful. Removing black soiling from Terra Cotta is quite a challenge, because don’t have the same ease of color difference between the soiling and perhaps a paler substance like a paler stone, but we’ve been getting really good results with very little discoloration. That’s been very successful. We’ve also been looking at options for consolidation and various water repair compositions. We’ve been looking at different samples of mortars, different mortar mixes, different levels of hydrochloric lime components and we’ve actually been making samples and weathering them up on the roof of Hampton Court to help us decide which recipe of mortar is the right one to use. So, which one is going to weather well and be robust, but not so strong that it risks damage to the Terra Cotta itself. So really all encompassing holistic observation project that I’m really enjoying being part of.

Jason Church: Oh that sounds fascinating, maybe we’ll get to talk to you in the future, when you make some decisions on the sculptures, what decisions you made and why.

Kathryn Hallett: Yes, that would be great. The project is nearing its completion now so we’re starting to look up publishing. We published a paper in the ICOM-CC conference that was in New Delhi a few years ago. We published a paper there about our project and what we were looking at, obviously we’ve moved on since then and we’re now pretty much finishing off our ideas about the treatment phase. So yes, absolutely I’d be happy to talk to you about it another time.

Jason Church: Kathryn, thank you so much for talking to us, we’re glad to have caught up with you and to hear what our first intern has done in your time since here at NCPTT. We really appreciate it, we hope to talk with you again in the future.

Kathryn Hallett: Great, thanks Jason it’s been really great to catch up and relive my wonderful memories from Louisiana.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Katheryn Hallett Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Katheryn Hallett, preventive conservation manager, Historic Royal Palaces. In this episode, Katheryn is talking about her time as an NCPTT intern and the conservation career that she has had since.

60. Laser Cleaning and Laser Scanning with Martin Cooper (Podcast 60)

Transcript

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Dr. Martin Cooper, a Conservation Consultant with Lynton Lasers. In this podcast, Martin talks about his work with Laser Cleaning.

Jason Church: Dr. Cooper, we know you mostly through lasers, that’s how I was introduced to you. How did you get into lasers and conservation?

Dr. Martin Cooper: Pretty much by mistake. I studied physics at University in Loughborough in England, applied for a few jobs, and didn’t get offered anything, and was toying with the idea of doing some research, PhD, and I just happened to see one day in the department there was an advert for a PhD looking into developing lasers for cleaning sculpture, in particular, bits of medieval cathedral from Lincoln. I thought that sounded interesting so we had a chat to the supervisor, who I knew, and I thought, “Yeah, I have a go and see what happens.”

Jason Church: How long did you stick with that?

Martin Cooper testing the Lynton Phoenix laser at NCPTT. Martin Cooper testing the Lynton Phoenix laser at NCPTT.

Dr. Martin Cooper: I spent three years at Loughborough working with Dr. David Emmony in the Physics Department there, did my PhD. Basically we were looking at different types of lasers for removing in particular hard black pollution crustaceans from limestone, medieval limestone carvings. I spent three years studying that. We ended up developing a prototype laser cleaning system that we tried out on a few bits of Lincoln Cathedral with the permission of the conservators there, of course, and that was pretty much it. Three years at Loughborough.

The work at that time, initially it was sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London through John Larson, who was head of the sculpture conservation there, so he got that program set up and running. He then, while I was doing my PhD, moved up to Liverpool to National Museums Liverpool so this project went there with him. By the time I finished my PhD, John had managed to get more funding to continue this research and development work we were doing. I finished my PhD then moved up to the Sculpture Conservation Department of National Museums Liverpool.

Jason Church: You were there for…

Dr. Martin Cooper: Initially I thought I was going to be there for a couple of years, ended up sticking around for twenty. No real planning there. Initially, we managed to get some funding from various charitable foundations in the UK to continue the work and help introduce this technology in the UK and training up conservators at the Museum there. Many sculpture conservators to work with the laser. It became fairly routine standard technique that they were using. We started to run training courses where we had conservators coming from around the world started running four of those a year. Yeah, I spent I guess about ten years working with the laser cleaning side.

I’m looking at the interaction of laser ablation of different materials as well, so all sorts of sculpture materials, things like limestone, marble, conductor stone, terra cotta, plaster, also doing various projects with students, so I’m looking at interaction of laser ablation with textiles and parchment and so on. After about 10 years, we began to get a little bit more interested in 3D laser scanning and we were successful in getting a big grant from the UK Government, which enabled public sector organizations such as the National Museums to basically generate funding instead of start to commercially exploit the research and development that they were doing.

The Museum in Liverpool, which gleaned that we started offering our services on the laser cleaning side and sculpture conservation, but also on the 3D laser scanning side to other museums, to heritage organizations, Liverpool authorities, and so on, as a way of furthering the technology, introducing it, and so on. Also, it’s we’re generating income potentially for the Museum, which could then go on to funding more development and research work and so on. I think I spent about 10 years working with my colleagues there, Marie la Ponce and Joe Parsons and various other people looking at developing 3D laser scanning techniques for cultural heritage applications, so very accurate 3D recording of sculpture, for example, monitoring decay, or replication artworks, which were at risk, that kind of thing, and also for reverse engineering and producing missing parts of sculptures and monuments that were being restored.

Jason Church: You mentioned replicating. How does that process working?

Dr. Martin Cooper: We were using; we were keen to develop or look into application of 3D scanning on the replication side. Being able to use that in a way, which allowed us to replicate sculpture without touching the surface. We were working with very fragile pieces, which you just couldn’t touch, you couldn’t take a mold from, maybe a piece where maybe it’s been outdoors, it’s so badly degraded, someone’s decided it has to come indoors, and then we can create a very accurate copy, which can go back in place.

We would typically scan the original object, two resolutions of about .1, .2 millimeter, then process the data to produce a very accurate 3D computer model, and then that could then be used to create the physical model and physical replica either go down two different routes that you go down, one of which would be computer-controlled machining where we could use the data captured from the scan to control a very accurate 3D milling machine to cut out a copy direct into a block of stone or we could use 3D printing technology, again, using the scanned data, to print a very accurate model, which itself could be the replica piece on this piece or we could then use that as a master pattern and take a mold from it and then cast into whatever material we want to use in these sorts of technologies. We are able to very accurately replicate marble busts in marble or into bronze, all those kind of things.

Jason Church: You moved on from that. Now you’re with Lynton Lasers.

Dr. Martin Cooper: That’s right.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now.

19th-century Istrian limestone panel relief from St. George’s Hall, Liverpool 19th-century Istrian limestone panel relief from St. George’s Hall, Liverpool

Dr. Martin Cooper: I left actually Museums of Liverpool just over a year ago. I’ve known the guys at Lynton for 20 years, and Doctor Andrew Charlton, who’s the Chairman there at a meeting we had a Liverpool University years ago, got talking, and realized that the laser cleaning technology that we were using, for sculptural conservation, was very similar to the technology that Lynton Lasers was using for cosmetic and medical applications such as things like tattoo removal, for example, it’s the same type of lasers. They were, Andrew was very interested in getting involved in conservation side, same kind of technology, new income streams.

We worked with Lynton for a few years there to turn the prototype laser cleaning system that we had in the studio into a more user-friendly commercially-available piece of laser cleaning equipment. I think initially when Lynton got involved in the conservation side; they were expecting conservation to be quite a lucrative market. I’m not sure where he got that idea but I think quite quickly I realized that wasn’t the case but it was a very interesting field to be involved it.

The bulk of the company’s business is medical and cosmetic but they’ve been involved with conservation now for 20 years, small parts of the business, but interesting part of the business, and yeah, when Andrew found I was leaving the Museum, he offered me some work at Lynton just to see if we could spend a bit more time concentrating on the conservation side to help it develop and maybe offer a few new things, not simply building the lasers to sell, but also offering things like training courses, consultancy, testing, that kind of thing as well.

I’m now involved on working full time with Lynton purely on the conservation side and so helping them make contacts in the conservation field, sell lasers, install lasers, train up conservators to work with it, work with conservators to carry out testing, that kind of thing.

Jason Church: What kind of things do you cover in the training workshops that you do?

19th-century Istrian limestone panel relief from St. George’s Hall, Liverpool after laser cleaning. 19th-century Istrian limestone panel relief from St. George’s Hall, Liverpool after laser cleaning.

Dr. Martin Cooper: Usually start off with a bit of background information about laser cleaning, where it’s come from, right from the beginning when lasers were first built back in the 1960s, when the pioneering work of Dr. John Asmus in the early 1970s and a bit of the history of the laser cleaning, look at what basically what a laser is, what laser radiation, what’s unique about laser radiation, why is it useful for cleaning applications, properties of laser radiation, look at a little bit about how the actual cleaning works, so what mechanisms, the underlying mechanisms behind laser cleaning. We’re working on artworks, and then obviously there’s the practical side and just going through setting up the laser, how to use it safely, looking at the health and safety issues, of course, also how to use it safely on an artwork as well from testing to practical work.

Jason Church: Can you tell us about interesting projects that you worked on in your career with both laser cleaning and scanning.

Dr. Martin Cooper: Certainly on the laser cleaning side, it’s only, if you were lucky enough to visit lots of interesting places both here in America and Boston and Philadelphia, and more recently I’ve been out to Australia to work conservation workshops there. I’ve certainly been lucky enough to travel and meet very interesting people. The thing about particular projects in the early 1990s, when it was still a relative, although John Asmus has done a lot of the work back in the 1970s, in the 1990s, it was still pretty much a new and innovative technique.

We did quite the interesting tests there where we would take out our old prototype Nd-YAG laser cleaning system that we’ve thrown together in the lab in Loughborough, where we’d literally you’d just gone and bought a laser off the shelf, built a trolley, screwed it together, stuck an arm on top, and there you go. That was our prototype piece of kit, which we would then shove in the back of a very clapped out old van and take to various places and doing all sorts of cleaning tests on bits of cathedrals such as Lincoln, we’d go ahead and do some work there with the conservators.

We’re doing some cleaning tests on the outside of Victoria and Albert Museum years and years ago, quite high up, various other cathedrals in the UK, we did some work on the Houses of Parliament as well. Certainly around the UK, we’ve left our mark usually in the form of a few cleaning squares, maybe a few centimeters square that probably touched since we’ve been back. We did one some cleaning tests with Lynton when I was at the Museums of Liverpool, we out to Copenhagen to what’s called the Marble Church in Copenhagen now where the conservators were very interested to try and look at using laser technology to remove thick, black pollution crusts from things like Swedish limestone and then Norwegian marble on the cathedral, on this particular church, but that was a long up from the scaffolding. I remembered that from moving and the wind quite hairy moments where we shipped, we’d flown the laser out, which at that time was quite a big, heavy unit, seen that it was all weighing maybe 100 kilo.

It was hoisted up on a very fragile-looking hoist. I’ve still got pictures of it being suspended 100 feet in the air, fingers crossed, hoping that it was going to get onto the scaffolding okay. It turned out all right. Looking at the scanning side, because again, there were a few people in the UK doing the kind of work we were doing at that time, we tended to get involved in all sorts of weird and wonderful projects that no one else would go near. You had other laser scanning bureau services, more typically we used to scanning engineering parts, bits of cars, that kind of thing, nice, smooth surfaces, but they wouldn’t be interested in scanning bits of artwork, which obviously far more complex and involve a lot more processing of the data afterwards to get good results.

We tended to get the most interesting projects, which initially we would take on and that sounds good and then you scratch your head a bit and think, “I’m not sure quite sure how we’re going to do this,” but we muddle through and get some quite interesting results and we help develop the applications and the technology, but we were involved in reproducing a marble bust of Emperor Caligula for the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, which is one of the early projects we got involved with, and also we did a gilded bronze head of Minerva for the Roman baths in Bath in the UK, which was quite nice.

Obviously that involves quite a few steps in the process so basically this head of Minerva is one of their main pieces, important pieces, gilded bronze head; it was too fragile to touch. You can’t take molds from it so we were able to scan this head. We then printed a master pattern into nylon, our process called selective laser sintering, and to finish that off, so take out the build layers so that these models are built up in layers of about 0.1 in thickness. Take out these contours, hand finishing, that was then sent to the foundry, that was cast into bronze, then came back to us, patinenated the surface and re-gild it, conservators in the sculpture department worked on that one.

Remember, we’re doing one project, which lasted a bit longer than we anticipated. We’re working for Manx National Heritage for the conservator there, Christopher Weeks, who I’ve known for years, who was interested in scanning a boat, 18th century boat, I think the last of its particular type, so it’s about 8 meters long. Normally to scan something of that scale, you wouldn’t use close-range laser scanning, so you wouldn’t be scanning it to a resolution of .1, .2 mill. You’re using one of the longer-scale scanners type thing that we can use on buildings.

The problem was, this particular boat was in a cellar, this old building, and there was only about a meter clearance all the way around, and it was actually very close to the sea, very muddy cellar, and in the olden days, this boat had gone out of the doors, which you could go straight out into the docks, so basically when the tide came in, the wind was blowing in a certain direction, this is on the Isle of Mann, the water came in, because you couldn’t get one of these long-range scanners to scan it, the only option was to use a close-range scanner.

We took this really expensive, very accurate piece of kit from our studio, nice warm studio, into this cellar, and spent a week, the two of us, me and Annemarie La Pensee spent a week in this basement in January in the Isle of Mann, freezing cold, water coming in, lapping at your heels, scanning this boat, basically having to leapfrog the tripod all the way around, so we ended up with something like 16 different stations or positions where we’ve done the scanning from. The only way you’re going to capture that data, great resolution, any problem you then got is how do you stitch all this data together into one model that’s useful for someone?

We got there in the end several months later well Annemarie did, you basically generate huge amounts of data and try it turn it into something, which is useful, but maintaining the accuracy of the models, so it’s quite challenging, so we learned a lot from that particular project.

Martin Cooper testing the Lynton Phoenix laser at NCPTT. Martin Cooper testing the Lynton Phoenix laser at NCPTT.

Jason Church: Martin, Dr. Cooper, thank you for talking with us today. Hope to see you in Miami at AIC. I know Pam Hatchfield at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is putting together a laser workshop as part of the AIC Convention this year, coming up in Miami, so I hope to see you there.

Dr. Martin Cooper: Yeah, I’ll see you there.

Jason Church: If not, maybe we can catch up with you at the next LACONA Conference.

Dr. Martin Cooper: Krakow, in Poland, 2016.

Jason Church: All right. Thank you for talking with us.

Dr. Martin Cooper: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to the today’s show. If you would like to more information, check out podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye, everybody.

Lynton Lasers Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Dr. Martin Cooper, a Consultation Consultant with Lynton Lasers. In this podcast, Martin talks about his work with Laser Cleaning.

59. Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission (Podcast 59)

Transcript

Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Megan Lord, Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission. In this podcast, Megan talks about her work in Alexandria, Louisiana and her experiences since interning at NCPTT.

Megan as a 2005 intern, documenting graves in Pineville, LA. Megan as a 2005 intern, documenting graves in Pineville, LA.

Church: So Megan, you were an intern here in 2005 in the Materials Research Program?

Lord: That’s right.

Church: What did you do when you were here?

Lord: Thanks for having me today. I’m glad to be here and that’s right. In 2005, I worked with you in Materials Conservation working on cemetery monument conservation training. So I did a lot of work in the Catholic Cemetery learning to reset monuments, mostly marble monuments that had broken, looking at learning to properly clean cemetery monuments, historic stone and putting together training methods to bring to church groups, people who are interested in taking care and properly maintaining their cemeteries.

Church: That’s right and you and I taught the first Cemetery Monument Conservation Basics Workshop in Anacoco, Louisiana, and that program has gone on now to teach two or three a year nationally that we do, and you and I were the first, that’s right. You helped do the curriculum for that program. So after you left here, what did you go on to do?

Lord: Well, I went back to SCAD, Savannah College of Art & Design for two more years. I finished my preservation degree there in Savannah and then the next summer and fall quarter, I spent at SCAD Lacoste in Lacoste, France, and so I studied there and got some hands-on preservation work. We restored a Lavoir there in sort of the valley where Lacoste is located. That was a great experience. Again, hands-on preservation work, masonry, restoring a stone Lavoir wash basin where they washed clothes around this farmhouse complex which is now, I have heard, one of the highest ranked most beautiful dorms in “House Beautiful”. It’s listed as one of the most beautiful dorms, so definitely wonderful facilities when I was there, not quite what they are now, but I actually worked on those facilities that they have now so I hope everyone appreciates that. Now, I had a great time at Lacoste doing hands-on preservation, really experiencing a historic small French Provence village and the lifestyle that goes along with it and traveling on our weekends and that sort of thing. So that was really an inspiring educational experience for me. I came back to Savannah the next year and ended up getting my MA in Architectural History also from SCAD. So I was really able to take advantage of the preservation in architectural history programs there and you know, those are just two things that are really, the hands-on preservation work and then the social and architectural historical contexts really go hand-in-hand and I am able to use those things today.

Church: I know you’re from Alexandria (Louisiana)…

Lord: Yes.

Church: …and I remember having conservations when you were here as an intern about how much you really loved your home town and wanted to come back and make a difference there and it’s interesting that you’ve literally traveled the world learning preservation, doing preservation and ultimately to do what you wanted, which was to come back, so what do you do in Alexandria?

Megan as Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission Megan as Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission

Lord: Sure, I am the Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission so we’re a division of the Planning Department in the City of Alexandria. Our Historic Preservation Commission is a little unlike other preservation commissions in that we are not regulatory. So we do not have guidelines that residents of the historic district have to follow. That gives us a little freedom to do some other events and sort of PR and outreach for preservation and educational programming and that sort of thing, so that we can educate people and give them good technical preservation information about how to do the proper repairs on their home, how to keep their historic windows and insulate properly in the colder months, that sort of thing instead of making them do it, but we give them the information and hope that they make the right decisions on their own. I’ve been there for four years now. We have seen a lot of interest, growing interest, from the community and from the historic district residents and even those outside, people wanting to move back into our historic districts. So we’re really happy with the momentum that seems to be gaining and we’ve had a lot of recent tax credit projects in our districts which are great because as everyone knows, when you do use state and federal preservation tax credits, they do require that you follow the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Preservation and so we don’t have to be seen as the bad guys enforcing those but we know that quality work and proper work will be done and our architectural history will be preserved there.

Church: You said historic districts, how many districts do you have?

Lord: We have three local historic districts; so we have our downtown area, we have the west end area, which at one time was its own small incorporated city before being annexed into Alexandria, and then we have the local garden district, which is probably the most well-known residential area, sort of a 1930’s suburb in our largest historic district and those are local districts. We have two National Register historic districts so a smaller portion of our local garden district is a National Register district and then we have a new National Register district that’s the Alexandria post war suburbs. National Historic Register district listed it in the summer of 2013 and so it is a post war district and we’re really excited and proud of this district. It is the very first mid-century modern district in Louisiana. It’s sort of a hidden treasure in Alexandria and we came together with some of the local preservationists and some people in the neighborhood and we were able to put together a successful nomination with the National Register and are really proud to be the very first mid-century district in Louisiana.

Church: So I know that was a really big project of yours, what other projects are you working on?

2-IMG_7019Lord: Sure, we currently are working with the Garden District Neighborhood Foundation for the local garden district group to put together our very first annual holiday tour of homes. So we’ll have four historic homes on tour December 13th and it’ll be an evening, they’ll be decorated for the holidays but we’re putting together the sort of historical tour version. So we’ve done research and worked with the homeowners on each of the houses and we’ll have a great tour that goes through and inside each of the homes. One of those homes is the Omar Bradley home, so when the Louisiana maneuvers occurred in 1942-1943 training for on-ground efforts in WWII, Omar Bradley, Eisenhower, they were all in Alexandria and sort of commanding this training and he lived in one of the houses. Another home on tour is Scott Thomas McDaniel home, which has been in the same family for 100 years and so it’s got a great family history. They’ve added on even a second story early in the 1920’s and so you really get to see sort of a Louisiana Planter’s cottage grow into this colonial mansion and the history that has gone along with that as far as it’s family history. There are some really neat details and kind of an evolution of architectural history too there. And then two other really interesting structures are; one is the Bottle House which is in someone’s backyard so a lot of people don’t know it’s there, but it is a home built entirely out of pharmaceutical and wine bottles from a pharmacy that’s located right on the corner. The owner of the pharmacy built the structure from the left over bottles. He built it in the backyard so it will be a night tour; it will be lit from the inside of those glass bottles and kind of glow. It’s really, really interesting the construction methods, the walls are entirely of glass bottles and all put together with bricks and railroad ties, so it’s really vernacular and local construction and it’s a really fun structure to visit. Then we’ll have the Walter Hill home on tour, which is just a beautiful Italian Villa in our garden district. The owners took on a seven year restoration doing most of the work themselves. It’s really beautiful, they did everything right and they took their time hand laid the tiles and the flooring themselves and a lot of care put into it so it really shows hands on preservation work done by the residents themselves, really bringing beauty back into a historic home. And we want to show people through these tours and other events that we do, that preservation isn’t out of reach. It’s not something that just happens in New Orleans or Savannah or Natchitoches but can happen in Alexandria too and you can do it yourself and it’s within your reach and it is well worth it and it makes a difference for our community. It establishes our sense of place in our districts. That’s something we don’t want to lose.

Church: Do you have any future projects that you want to mention to us?

Lord: Yes. One thing we did last year and we’re going to do again this year is our historic house fair. We do that in the spring and we got the idea from the Main Street program. We are not a Main Street community in Alexandria but we work with our State Historic Preservation Office and it’s an event that other Main Streets have done and we thought that sounds like a really great opportunity to get people in our historic districts out on the streets interacting with one another in a way for us to give them information about tax credits or preservation practices and connect them with local salvage companies and that sort of thing. Last year in the spring, we worked with homeowners on one block in our Garden District and we chose this block because it had recently had several homes on either end of the block restored using the tax credit programs. So they used tax credits so the restoration work was done the right way, not only did they receive a huge incentive by using the tax credits; we wanted to show off a really transformed block. You saw a block that had several rental properties, private residences that had been converted to duplexes and triplexes in some cases and absentee landlords. An investor who lived locally in the neighborhood and purchased those homes with the intent to restore them to single family dwellings and so did a great job of doing that and sort of bookended that block with other primary residences on the home, people who took great care of their property and valued their historic property. So it was a great way to show off preservation making a difference, revitalizing a neighborhood, an individual block really within a year’s time. So we took that, had some open houses, invited the community organizations to come out and had a little jazz band and created a great atmosphere for preservation, got people walking around the streets and had a good morning celebrating our neighborhood, our historic district and exchanging preservation ideas.

We have a great commission, we have a lot of people who are dedicated and have been for a long time to promoting preservation in Alexandria. So I really love my home town, never thought I would be back as soon as I did come back, but I have really enjoyed being able to work with people who are dedicated who know so much about the history of the town and a lot of that hasn’t been written down, so that’s one of the things that we’re working on is gathering that information. A lot of it is oral history, riding with some of the longtime residents and they know when a house has been altered or changed, they know the history of who lived there and so I’m collecting that information and writing it down and recording it for the next generations. And then we’re seeing younger generations move into our historic districts that have families that want their kids to grow up in the neighborhood with character and where they know and talk to their neighbors. So that’s really encouraging too and we’re seeing those younger people wanting to get involved. I really enjoy working with people in our districts and I think that’s something I learned when I worked in New Orleans. After I finished grad school, we moved to New Orleans and I worked with the state with the grant program helping people restore their homes after Katrina. We often called it social work for historic houses because everyone has a story that goes along with their house, everyone had a Katrina story that was really relevant and you needed to hear before you could help them be ready to make those changes and those repairs to their home. So not only did those stories come after a disaster but they come anytime you have a significant event history with your house. I really enjoy hearing those stories and helping people to do the right thing, make the right repairs and continue telling those stories through the architecture of the home.

Historic House Fair 2013 Historic House Fair 2013

Church: Thank you so much Megan. We look forward to hearing more about all the work you’re doing in Alexandria. I will definitely be down for the house tour. I want to see the bottle house now that you told us about it.

Lord: Yes, it’s really cool.

Church: Thank you, we hope to hear some more from you and maybe some of those house stories as well.

Lord: Yes, I’d love to share.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Megan Lord, Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission. In this podcast, Megan talks about her work in Alexandria, Louisiana and her experiences since interning at NCPTT.

58. Conservation of a World Wrestling Entertainment Costume: Alison Castaneda, Conservator (Episode 58)

Transcript

Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Alison Castaneda, Conservator at the Textile Conservation Workshop of South Salem, New York. In this episode Alison is talking about a recent treatment to a WWE wrestling costume.

Church: Alison, you had a very interesting poster here at AIC entitled “Adhesive Smackdown: Consolidating a Synthetic Leather Wrestling Costume.” Tell us a little bit about first of all, about what you do and where you work and then what was this project about.

Castaneda: Sure. Well I work at the Textile Conservation Workshop in South Salem, New York. I have been in textile conservation for about five years now. After graduate school, I trained there and I learned a lot. A Few years ago we got a call from the World Wrestling Entertainment. They had an outfit from Shawn Michaels, who is in the Hall of Fame, and they did not know what to do with it. It was synthetic leather, it was flaking really badly, it had been stored in a plastic Tupperware for many years so they brought it out and we tried to untangle all the chains, all the elaborate crosses and male symbols and finally we found just this really degraded synthetic leather chaps and top. So we were trying to figure out what we should do with it and we realized the first thing was to find out what sort of synthetic leather it was.

With some research and some testing, the Biostine Copper Test to be precise, we determined that it was polyurethane. Now there are two types of polyurethane, polyurethane ester and polyurethane ether. By boiling some of the flakes found in the box and sodium hydroxide for thirty minutes, we found that it was polyurethane ester. With that knowledge we started looking into previous conservation treatments and it turns out that a lot of polyurethane ester sculptures have been conserved in Europe and they’re using a lot of different adhesives but Impranil DLV and Plextol B500 seem to be the most successful. So using that research and also some of the other employees there, Mary Kaldany in particular is very knowledgeable in adhesives. She suggested I might also want to try gelatin and B72. So we bought some lengths of nylon fabric and we sprinkled the little flakes onto this nylon fabric and we tested the adhesives using the ultrasonic nebulizer. Now that broke up the adhesive into very, very tiny atomic particles so it would seep through the flakes and adhere them and not just rest on the top. We chose the nylon fabric because testing the piece that came in, we found that it was the polyurethane ester foam adhered to the nylon fabric substrate.

Pre-treatment detail top WWE, Ring Entrance Costume Top Pre-treatment detail top WWE, Ring Entrance Costume Top

So with the tests, we then had everything adhered and we wanted to see how well they were adhered. We used a blower, a brush, shook it a little, tried to move it with our fingers and we found that the Impranil DLV definitely adhered the flakes the best. So this is a polyurethane based adhesive so it makes sense that you would want to use it on polyurethane synthetic leather. Once we found that out, we vacuumed the costume. The structure of the foam with the nylon substrate then slightly expanded the foam layer very thin and then the embossed skin layer on top, so where the skin layer had fallen away there was just some powdery foam. We weren’t interested in preserving that. It wasn’t what the piece would have looked like; it was basically just adding dirt and texture and drawing in environmental pollutants. So we vacuumed that part up, the part where the skin layer was left. We kept it and then we sprayed the Impranil DLV in a 22% solution with the ultrasonic nebulizer. It adhered pretty nicely. Of course it’s not going to bring back the flakes that have already completely detached but it will keep anymore from falling off.

We then packed it up in an archival box, tied all the chains in place and hoped that they wouldn’t be swinging back and forth knocking into the flakes we just so time consumingly re-adhered and we gave it back to the WWE who was very happy and they have just brought us three more costumes for us to conserve in the same manner.

Church: In addition to the skin, did you have to do any conservation treatment to the chains and the charms hanging from them? Castaneda: Yes, actually. When the polyurethane degraded, it becomes very tacky and it sticks to the metal aspects. This costume also had mirrors so it was on the mirrors and using a dilate solution of ethanol, we wiped it off with some swabs and some mechanical action. They polished up quite nicely.

Church: What’s the age of this costume, do you know?

Sean Micheals Ring Entrance Gear Conserved Shawn Micheals Ring Entrance Gear Conserved

Castaneda: It’s not too terribly old. I think it’s from the late eighties. They seemed a little unsure. They did have records but they weren’t looking into them for this purpose. I think that’s the time of Sean Michaels.

Church: What is the future for this costume?

Castaneda: It’s too degraded to ever be displayed. So they just wanted to keep it in their archives, in their storage units, and I think for the most part the costumes they’re bringing us are set for long term storage, not to be displayed. I think they mostly try to display costumes that don’t need conservation as of yet. But polyurethane synthetic leather is a material that just naturally degrades. It basically has such inherent vice that air, moisture; anything will cause it to degrade over time.

Church: So the three they brought you now, do you know anything about those?

Castaneda: They’re actually all Shawn Michaels.

Church: Oh, okay.

Castaneda: Yes, they were from giant wrestling festivals, they’re yearly events that they use for; I’m not sure what they’re called actually. They are something else. One looks like a take on a gladiator’s outfit, another is somewhat zebra like and the third is red synthetic leather with black chains everywhere and the gentleman in charge of the archives told me that two sisters have been designing these costumes since the start. They got their start when one of the sisters had a crush on Shawn Michaels and mailed him a costume that she made just because she liked him and he was such a fan, he asked that the WWE take them on as staff costumers.

Church: Do they design just for Shawn Michaels or others as well?

Conserved Shawn Michaels Ring Entrance Gear Conserved Shawn Michaels Ring Entrance Gear

Castaneda: No, they’ve branched out. They do all the costumes now.

Church: Are they still using synthetic leathers?

Castaneda: It seems like yes.

Church: So there will be a lot of work in the future?

Castaneda: Yes, absolutely.

Church: So what other projects are you working on at the textile workshop?

Castaneda: We have got quite a bit of modern artwork now. We’ve been lucky enough to have some Matisse silkscreens. We’ve gotten a fabric panel from the Modern Artist Blinky Palermo. Other aspects of older textile art, we do a lot of silk embroideries, silk paintings, I specialize in the costume conservation and right now we’re working on a 1920’s English court gown, very extravagant, a long train, big feather headdress, fans, it’s quite beautiful but we also get a lot of flags. Those are always popular.

Church: I’m sure it’s always something new. It sounds like a huge variety of materials to work on.

Castaneda: Yes. Textiles are really in everything. You don’t realize how much they are.

Church: And where did you go to school? What did you study?

Castaneda: I went to FIT’s program in textile conservation. They also have a branch of curatorial but I love working with my hands and sewing so I stuck with the conservation track.

Church: Well thank you for talking to us and we’re excited to see more of the WWE outfits come out of conservation and hopefully one day be on display. So thank you for talking to us.

Castaneda: Thank you.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Alison Castaneda, Conservator at the Textile Conservation Workshop of South Salem, New York. In this episode Alison is talking about a recent treatment to a WWE wrestling costume.

57. Plinth Magazine: Lessons Learned from the Small Museum (Episode 57)

Transcript

Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTTs’ Jason Church as he speaks with Christian Hernandez, writer for Plinth Magazine. In this podcast, Christian talks about his work with Plinth Magazine and lessons learned from the small museum.

Church: Christian, a lot of us know you as a textiles conservator and your work with museum collections management, things like that, but today we’re here to talk to you about your work that you’ve been doing with Plinth Magazine. Tell us what is Plinth Magazine?

Hernandez: Thank you Jason. It’s great speaking to you. So Plinth Magazine is a magazine geared toward promoting interesting and innovative people and programs and exhibitions in museums mainly in the U.S. but really across the world and we have the main goal of promoting things that are great and we want them to be more noted.

Church: Now what format does this magazine come out in?

Hernandez: So right now this magazine is an online magazine that is coming out quarterly starting in September but we originally started as a blog with blog posts maybe once every week or two, or one blog post every week or five days and then we turned into a monthly magazine in January and we’re turning into a quarterly magazine starting in September.

Church: So as a reader what kind of articles could I expect to read in Plinth?

Hernandez: You can really expect anything from one on one interviews with directors of museums to interviewing people behind the scenes or front of house or exhibition curators, it’s really everything that can happen in a museum is up for grabs and we will profile it. Some of the things that I particularly love profiling is, kind of the more humanitarian aspects of museums, so how they help the visitor and how the visitor leaves with a more well-rounded perspective of the world around them.

Church: Is it focused mostly on art museums or is it fairly open to just the museum world?

Kath and Kiva, watercolor with birds as part of SPARK. Kath and Kiva, watercolor with birds as part of SPARK.

Hernandez: It’s fairly open to the entire museum world. So the American Alliance of Museums defines a museum in general as a collection of anything and that includes zoos, aquariums, science centers, art galleries to the more traditional museums where objects are on exhibit. Plinth really covers everything. So we’ve profiled science centers, museums, I recently did an article on a conservation lab and I have dreams of one day profiling a museum that has some work with an orchestra or symphony and then have a tie in with just culture in general. So Plinth is really interested in profiling anything.

Church: Now how did you get involved with Plinth?

Hernandez: I got involved because there was a call for writers on LinkedIn and at this point I had just left my job at an architectural firm, and I was looking for something to do in museums and culture and I had also just finished my thesis, so I used to write a lot and once my thesis was finished, I wasn’t writing anymore so this was just the perfect time to use the skills that I gained as a writer and focused more on museums because I had gone to a Museum Studies Program with the conservation track. I was always very aware that publicity is a very important part of museums but it was never really a part of my schooling, so this was a really good way for me to learn about it. I submitted a resume and a writing sample for some blogs that I had written for some local conservation groups in New York City and then I was accepted as a writer and my first post was in October.

Church: Tell us about some of your favorite articles that you’ve written and deeply worked with.

Hernandez: Okay so one of my favorite, favorite, favorite articles was actually my very first article, which is on SPARK, which is a program with the Racine Art Museum and ten other museums and cultural institutions in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I had the opportunity to interview Tricia Blasko, who is the Curator of Education at the Racine Art Museum. She spoke to me about the program which is geared toward providing a safe space in a museum for people with memory loss so they have Alzheimer’s or dementia or Parkinson’s Disease in general and also their caregivers because a lot of times people with memory loss have a caregiver who is oftentimes their partner. So they have a lot of programming devoted to care couples and they provide through this variety of programming a safe space for people to have fun with art and that can be anything from painting a picture inspired by a piece in an exhibit or they get an artist to come in and help with some arts and crafts activities. Sometimes there’s music involved, sometimes there’s lectures involved and it sounds like a really great way to just stimulate the mind. SPARK is sponsored in part by the Helen Bader Foundation but it continues to grow and it hopes to be able to grow with more institutions and more states as they continue to get more funding.

Kids at the American Gothic House. Kids at the American Gothic House.

Then one of my next favorite articles that I wrote was actually for the American Gothic House Center in Eldon, Iowa. I wrote that for our December issue. The American Gothic House Center is the house painted in Grant Woods 1930 American Gothic. What I found most interesting is that even though Eldon, Iowa, as a city has just over 900 people, this museum, because it’s so well-known and so a part of this iconic painting it gets 15,000 visitors to the museum. I spoke to one of the two staff members of this museum because it’s actually a small museum and I just had the opportunity to speak to her about how this museum, which in general has a staff of one, deals with 15,000 visitors a year and she was talking to me about some of the public programming that she does and some of the ways that she could help her visitors without having to really focus on them one on one. So she has a very dedicated volunteer staff and then she also when the museum is closed, has some information about the museum located outside of the actual building. So there are some QR codes that if you scan them you can get your own after hours tour through this QR code and I really loved that article.

And one of my other favorite articles was for Art Out of the Box which is a program done in conjunction with the

Art In A Box, hospital kit. Art In A Box, hospital kit.

Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Children’s Hospitals of Minnesota. I had the opportunity to interview Krista Pierson who is their Community Arts Associate and Art Out of the Box is essentially a pizza box filled with craft supplies and some information about art. Then there’s a box that is given to the children and they have the opportunity to go through the craft program with a nurse who is trained in how to deliver this program and just have fun, which I think when you’re in the hospital and a child who is a patient, there is a need for a happy distraction. I remember Krista was talking to me about how there was this young child who was getting this painful but regular medical procedure. She used to not like it because it was just something that, although needed, was very hard on her body. So one day she was given a pizza box and her nurse helped her through the actual program. At the end of the program she actually wanted to go to the museum and it’s that sort of inspiration that I’m drawn to as a writer and I really feel is a very integral part of a museum’s place in the community.

And then one final article that I really love is for the Black History 101 Mobile Museum and I had the opportunity to interview Khalid el-Hakim who is this great guy who saw a need to teach African and black history to his local community but because a lot of children didn’t really have the opportunity to go to a museum, he just started a collection and put it in a truck and actually sets up exhibitions at schools around the various states. He also just sets it up in parking lots and streets and people can go to the truck and get a little bit of history and he’s actually had the opportunity to visit over 23 states and is publishing a book called The Center of the Movement, Collecting Hip Hop Memorabilia and he’s in the process of setting up an exhibit called The Peacemakers, which focuses on 15 men and women of African descent who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has dreams of setting up other exhibits on music, black inventors, and then black Greek fraternities and sororities, and I think it’s his grassroots desire to teach history that I’m also really attracted to and I was really honored to have the opportunity to profile him for our Plinth.

Artifact from the Black History 101 Mobile Museum. Artifact from the Black History 101 Mobile Museum.

Church: That was one of my favorite of the articles I’ve read as well.

Hernandez: Thank you. Thank you.

Church: We’ve moved forward and I know Plinth is re-doing the format. As we move forward, what are we the readers expect to see out of Plinth?

Hernandez: One of the things that Plinth is hoping to do is to get more fund raising. We are hoping to actually be able to have a print format so there could very well be a time where you pick up Plinth Magazine and you would get it in the mail and you could read our articles. One of the things that we’re hoping to do, we are doing it September and we will continue to do it is to have more themed issues. So our theme for this coming September is education. We are just using that broad topic of teaching and being taught and seeing how museums and the people who work in museums teach and have been taught by others. I think themes and a print format are some of things that we will hopefully be doing in the future and we’re hopefully going to be having more of an online presence on our Facebook page and Twitter but Facebook and Twitter and all forms of social media take a lot of time. As a volunteer staff, it’s something that we are really getting better at but we still need more manpower to do it.

Church: Sounds great. Well we look forward to continuing to follow Plinth in the future and for our listeners, if you haven’t please go to the website and read the back issues and the current issues of Plinth as they come out. I personally have found it a very interesting magazine to look at, especially some of the smaller museums that you’ve interviewed, sort of as you said, how they handle crowds and how they promote themselves and things like that; I found it very interesting and very informative.

Hernandez: Thank you so much Jason.

Church: Thank you. Hope to talk to you again in the future.

Hernandez: Awesome, thank you so much.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

Today we join NCPTTs' Jason Church as he speaks with Christian Hernandez, writer for Plinth Magazine. In this podcast, Christian talks about his work with Plinth Magazine and lessons learned from the small museum

56. Goatscaping at Congressional Cemetery (Episode 56)

Transcript

Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Margaret Puglisi, Vice president of Congressional Cemetery about their recent goat grazing project.

Newly arrived landscape worker. Newly arrived landscape worker.

Puglisi: So Congressional Cemetery was trying to figure out the best solution to some unmaintained land that was just south of our gate. We were having invasive vines choking out the tree growth and the trees were dying and falling on the monuments, so this is a really serious problem when you have a site that has 206 year old gravesites.

Church: So what sort of solution did you guys come up with?

Puglisi: Well we looked at various factors that we needed to consider. We had environmental impact, we had our societal impact because we have a canine dog walking membership so we have a lot of animals on site and we also needed to make sure that the monuments were considered. So we chose between mechanical, chemical, human or grazing which would be the goats and we came to the goats because there wasn’t an adverse impact on any of the conditions we were looking at and it also worked out better for costs.

Church: So you looked at mechanical and what sort of adverse effects did that have?

Puglisi: Well it’s using fuel and also in the case that we had at Congressional, there’s a large ravine and it is such dense overgrowth, there’s large trees, there’s large logs down, it would have been pretty hard for that. Also that wouldn’t have really killed anything because the seeds would still be there. With the goats, their digestive tracts decompose the seeds.

Church: So now you said you also looked at a chemical possibility but you decided against that. So what sort of chemicals did you look at and what was the decision there.

Puglisi: Well it was mostly herbicides and as we all know that’s really bad for headstones but then we also had the run off to consider and into the Anacostia River because it is so close and we had our dogs to worry about. We’re fond of them and we don’t want anything to happen. So it was cost and it was prohibitive with our considerations that we wanted to adhere to.

Church: So you decided on the grazing option.

Puglisi: Uh huh.

Church: Historically, had there ever been grazing at Congressional Cemetery?

Puglisi: We don’t have any record of it.

Church: Where did you, how do you go about finding a troup of goats?

Kids Watching the Kids. Kids Watching the Kids.

Puglisi: Well there’s actually a company called Sustainable Resource Management and they have a large herd of goats. They’re called the eco goats and this is what they do, they get sent around all over the place to eat invasive vines and take care of areas. The week following that they were hanging out in Congressional Cemetery, they were headed to the beach. So they clear out some of these yards.

Church: A little goat vacation. Okay.

Puglisi: Yeah.

Church: And this may sound like an odd question, are there specific types of goats that work better for this?

Puglisi: There are a whole wide variety of goats that came. We had pygmy goats, we even had, I think his name was Larry, he was almost as tall as me whose had a large differentiation of what they’re appetites were. They sent goats that liked kudzu, liked poison ivy, apparently they have different tastes so he had to kind of put them together to make sure that we had all of our plants taken care of and also they had unique personalities. I became very attached to a little brown pygmy goat named Weird Al.

Church: Nice. I would not have considered that they had names. That’s nice. Alright so now did you let them run freely through Congressional Cemetery or were they contained?

Puglisi: They were contained on the exterior of the cemetery. There was only one time that we let one out and I picked Weird Al to go with me so that we could do some photo shoots where there were headstones in the background, but he was on a short tether and he was really only interested in the grass. So they were on a one and a half acre tract of land that was outside of the cemetery gate.

The Goats Were Not Expecting Such a Crowd of Reporters. The Goats Were Not Expecting Such a Crowd of Reporters.

Church: How many goats do you think were in this project?

Puglisi: We had fifty-eight.

Church: Fifty-eight goats for one and a half acres?

Puglisi: Uh huh.

Church: What was our time frame? How long were they actually in the cemetery during the day?

Puglisi: They were there the whole time for eight days. Towards the end of the last day, they, Brian is the name of their guardian, he came and he got half of them and took them to the next project because they were doing so well they were losing finds to eat and he didn’t want them to get bored. So they eat everything from about all the way up to about six feet.

Church: So it took that time period for them to clear the one and a half acres, so if you were for some reason looking at a larger site, would you increase the goat population or do you think you would just have them do their job for longer periods of time?

Puglisi: I think it was a good number of goats. I think if you just gave them a little bit more time they would be able to accomplish the goal.

Church: Of course one of the immediate questions everyone has about the goats is what about waste management?

Puglisi: So they were not within our gates so that wasn’t really a problem for us but it’s fertilizer. I’ve actually heard people who say that while the invasive vines are there and the dense growth, wild flowers aren’t able to grow but you know with the fertilization, if there are seeds there, they pop up the next spring so we’re hoping to see that.

Church: Yeah, I guess the lack of competition now and the new fertilizer.

Puglisi: Right. Yeah.

Church: What was the public’s reaction, the general public’s reaction to the goats?29. Before & After

Puglisi: I’ve never seen people so excited about goats. We appealed to the public, the neighbors, the social media, we were on Al Jazeera, it must have been a slow week in politics because we had so many different media sources, international and national. We had school groups, it was really educational. People found a lot of different values and benefits from it.

Church: Now I’ve heard from you that it was successful and that you were very happy with the results, what about cost effectiveness? How do you feel that worked into the factor?

Puglisi: Our president actually did the math and figured out it was about twenty-five cents per goat to be out there. That’s pretty low manual labor rate and they did a great job in a timely fashion so.

Church: Yeah you can’t beat twenty-five cents. Okay. Do you think this something that the cemetery would ever consider for the inside grounds, inside the gates?

Puglisi: It would have to be, we’d have to put a little more consideration into it. We don’t really have the invasive problem within the cemetery so my concern would be that they would get bored and not be focused on eating and would climb on the headstones and that would not be worth the risk.

Church: Now I know you mentioned briefly before Congressional Cemetery has a very famous dog walking park, you have the K-9 Corps. Tell us a little bit about them?

Puglisi: They’re actually the reason I would say that we’re so successful because they create an environment that people want to come in, there’s people there, they’re smiling and they started in the nineties. They were tasking themselves to mow the lawn because we were in such a state of abandonment. They were just a really strong presence on our site and…

Church: …and people pay a subscription to become members…

Weird Al's Gravestone Photoshoot. Weird Al’s Gravestone Photo-shoot.

Puglisi: Yeah, they pay an annual membership and that goes directly towards our conservation of headstones.

Church: And is the cemetery available 24/7 for the dogs?

Puglisi: Uh hum, yeah so that also makes a really good security feature with our dog walkers there, they know when something is going on and they’re very happy to tell us if they see some suspicious activity.

Church: Now how did your very well-known dogs get along with your now very well-known goats?

Puglisi: Towards the beginning the goats were a little bit afraid of the dogs but we had a chain link fence between them and we asked the dog walkers to keep the dogs away because they weren’t familiar with dogs but by the end of the week, I think that the goats were a little bit more intimidating to the dogs after they realized that the dogs couldn’t get to them. They wouldn’t run away from the fence anymore, they would stand and nay and talk to the dogs.

Church: Is this a treatment, does the cemetery plan to repeat this in the future and if so how often do you think you might need to repeat it?

Puglisi: Right. So we have many other places that we could put the goats where there are areas with invasive vines and dying trees so we could do it all around the cemetery really. We’re thinking every two years it will be possible to fund it to bring them in.

Church: Now will there need to be treatments to the invasive species between that period or do you think an every two year cycle will be enough?

Puglisi: We’ll have to have a crew go in and chop down the actual, they only eat the green foliage so we’d have to have somebody come in and chop down the rest of the bushes to keep them low.

Church: Is this something you would recommend to other sites as well?

Margaret Posing with Weird Al After His Massage Margaret Posing with Weird Al After His Massage

Puglisi: I would as long as you’re able to protect the monuments. If the goal is to save the monuments from dying trees you don’t want to inflict more damage by having goats climbing on them.

Church: So what projects does Congressional have coming up now?

Puglisi: Right now we have, we received a $50,000 grant from Partners in Preservation and right now we’re working on the restoration of our mausoleum row of roofs and in that we’re fixing the drainage system, making sure that they’re water tight and also applying a live roof which we are going to put, we have six beehives at the cemetery so we’re going to put them on the live roofs and the circle of feeding the bees and the bees pollinating the flowers should be a good combination.

Church: Now we’re there live roofs there traditionally?

Puglisi: Grass on them and then I would say probably somewhere in the seventies, eighties, they paved it in concrete which is causing a lot of trouble with the interior and drainage.

Church: Now are you going to remove the concrete that’s currently there put on in the seventies and eighties?

Puglisi: Yes and we actually have Worcester Eisenbrandt is our contractor. We have an annual “Day of the Dog” where we have vendors set up, we put up an obstacle course, we have a lot of dog adoptions typically and it’s just a day to have the community come in.

Church: When is that?

Puglisi: That’s August 30th.

Church: And is that open to the public or just the dog walkers…

Puglisi: Open to the public, yes.

Church: Open to the public, alright.

Puglisi: It’s a good time to visit us and see if your dog enjoys running around then you might be interested in membership.

Church: Well thank you for talking to us Margaret about all of the animals of Congressional Cemetery. It’s gotten quite the reputation for it’s animals and quite the star goats recently so we look forward to finding out what you guys are doing in the future.

Puglisi: Thank you.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, good bye everybody

National Park Service LGBTQ History Month Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Margaret Puglisi, Vice president of Congressional Cemetery about their recent goat grazing project

55. Lavender Landmarks of Charleston, South Carolina (Episode 55)

Transcript

Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Mary O’Connell Murphy, Library Project Manager at the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University. In this podcast, Mary talks about her work with Lavender Landmarks, LGBT sites in Charleston, South Carolina.

Church: Before we get onto our subject, tell us a little bit about the Schlesinger Library.

Murphy: Okay, thanks Jason. I’m glad to be joining you on this podcast today. So the Schlesinger Library is one of many Harvard University research libraries within the university system but our library focuses specifically on the history of women in America. We collect both published and unpublished materials of women across America, both common women, everyday women, as well as more well-known women including suffragettes, famous second wave feminists like Betty Friedan and now third wave feminists. We’re really reaching out to try to collect those women’s papers as well. So the library originally began as part of Radcliffe College and now we are part of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Church: Very nice and today we’re here talking about the National Park Service has initiated June as LGBT month. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a project that I knew that you did in the past called Lavender Landmarks of Charleston, South Carolina. I have not heard the term Lavender Landmarks before, so what is that?

Murphy: So that is a term, I can’t remember if I made that up or if that was already floating around so, I started doing my research in this area in 2003 going into 2004 and it took me, I researched it for about a year. So the concept of studying historic landmarks associated with the GLBT community was sort of young in and of itself. The earliest that I could date the study of it was really in the late 90’s, around 1997 there was a lot of research that emerged, although I’m sure there was more before then. So the term Lavender Landmarks was just easy to remember, right. Lavender is a color that is associated with the gay rights movement, lavender, pink triangles, so on and so forth and so I just used that and then tied it to the built environment, Lavender Landmarks. I thought it was sort of handy and wrapped into the context of Charleston, South Carolina.

Church: For this project, Lavender Landmarks in Charleston, you actually made a historic walking tour of sites in Charleston that are directly tied to the gay rights movement. Can you tell us a little bit about the sites that you picked, why you picked them and what made them important?

14 Queen Street, Charleston, SC 14 Queen Street, Charleston, SC

Murphy: Right. So first of all, I will stipulate that the sites that I chose were not necessarily related to the gay rights movement. They are sites associated with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-gender history. So there’s one of the sites that I researched, 14 Queen Street, which was actually the home of a hate crime that occurred in 1958 between a navy serviceman and another local man who was robbed, murdered in that home there. The man who perpetrated the crime was not held accountable by any means and the writing of what happened that night was really scathing and today we would look back and understand that that was a hate crime that occurred there and one that was significant in documenting the way, the poor way, that gay men were treated under the law in the 1950’s. So that was one of the sites and just an example that it was a sad history but one that was also significant.

7 Gibbes Street, Charleston, SC 7 Gibbes Street, Charleston, SC

So the other sites that I did, I sort of organized them in chronological order. We have 7 Gibbes Street, which is one of the most famous streets in downtown Charleston and that was home to Laura Bragg and she was the first female director of the Charleston Museum. So I thought that the site was significant in terms of women’s history in and of itself. But she shared the home with Belle Heyward who was a socialite in Charleston at the time. They were considered Boston wives. The assumption has to be made that they were a couple. Their history of course dates to the 1920’s and they started a salon in their home for significant poets in the area. This group that began inside the home on 7 Gibb Street would later see poets like Gertrude Stein and Edna St. Vincent Millay participating in that organization. So that’s the first site that I chose and some of the oldest GLBT history that I know.

56 Society Street, Charleston, SC 56 Society Street, Charleston, SC

I’m going to just skip ahead and say that two most interesting sites personally to me was 56 Society Street, which was the home of Gordon Langley Hall and he was a transsexual person who was very involved in the restoration of 56 Society Street and who in his personal life transitioned to a female and was involved in the first interracial marriage that took place in Charleston and that was in 1969 and it was the first interracial marriage at all in the city of Charleston and little is it known that that marriage involved a transsexual person and that ceremony took place in the basement of 56 Society Street. What I found so alarming is there was no note of this in the general history of this building. Many of the historic sites in Charleston are well documented and this house is also very well documented in the history of the original architects and so on and so forth but there is nothing noted about this key piece of history that took place there. It wasn’t until the historian James t. Sears, who is a southern traditional American historian who was interested in GLBT history, discovered this place and this story and then I, using his research went to the site, went to the place and documented the bricks and mortar history of it as well as of this tale.

So I thought that one was really important to me and I think one that is worth checking out and then

5 Liberty Street, Charleston, SC 5 Liberty Street, Charleston, SC

of course, 5 Liberty Street, which was the home of the Arcade Theatre and the Liberty Mix Nightclub and that is now, where today the College of Charleston School of Business stands in this place that once was home to very well-known drag queens of the era. It was a place that really documented the mid-twentieth century gay life history, right, it was the cultural headquarters for avant-garde artists and other gay Charlestonians and it was one that really marked the first time that the Historic Charleston Foundation put it’s toe in the water to defend a GLBT historic site when they were notified that it was going to be demolished. I happened to be doing an internship with the Historic Charleston Foundation at the time and we worked together to try to fight that demolition but unfortunately we were unsuccessful. So those are really interesting sites.

Church: …the time period of the Arcade Theatre and nightclub?

Murphy: Okay, so the Arcade Theatre was built by Augustus E. Constantine. He was a Greek born architect. He built a number of different buildings in the Charleston area but he did build the Arcade Theatre in 1947 and in sort of the art modern style. I actually had an opportunity to go inside the arcade with my boss at the time, Katherine Saunders of the Historic Charleston Foundation, and that was really neat. It was everything that you would think; a lot of wrought iron and rounded corners and I think carpet at the time. But its GLBT history started basically in the late seventies and ended in the early eighties. Once it was a movie theatre I believe. In 1984 it opened as the Liberty Mix. This was really an interesting time of course in the GLBT and GBLT America in the early 1980’s of course as the Aids crisis was sweeping through and so you have to make an assumption that that was also a really prevalent component of the history there too in the city of Charleston. It was this tiny little building that was sitting on a very lucrative piece of real estate but I don’t know. Today if the city of Charleston was looking at it again and if Charleston College was looking to build their business school today, I don’t know, maybe they would think twice because of where we are in the country about preserving Lavender Landmarks and the gay rights movement as a whole.

Arcade Theater, Charleston, SC Arcade Theater, Charleston, SC

Church: I noticed in the brochure that the nightclub operated until 1997 when its license was revoked because if it’s controversial nature.

Murphy: Yes, so again you have to remember that there was so much pushback at the time. It’s hard to almost put yourself in that place now. GLBT citizens have really enjoyed this remarkable revolution that’s been going on over the course of the last five years I would say. But in the south and in the eighties and nineties, it was a different story and I think that I can make the assumption that the over-the-top nature, like a maybe what some people would say, “in your face” community or culture of that nightclub was maybe not palatable for a lot of citizens and as a result they shut the nightclub.

So there are very few images that exist of the nightclub. I took them on my own. Both that nightclub and also Charleston’s Club 49, which was another gay nightclub that of course was flattened into a parking lot on King Street. There’s very little documentary evidence of these places. I think if there was piece of the history of Lavender Landmarks, it’s about sort of a secret history, a place where people could slip out of their normal lives and into their personal lives in these personal places even though they were in public if that makes any sense. So I actually found it quite difficult to find images of the buildings. There is one of the Charleston’s Club 49 at the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston that I know of.

Church: Other than yours, have you seen many other tours that dealt with the social history of the LGBT movement.

Murphy: Right, so the most famous is of course, there’s a couple of tours in San Francisco in the Castro District that I know of. There are also a number of public art projects that have happened in New York City but I know that the history based tours really do center in San Francisco. I know there’s one that focuses on Don Harvey Milk and I know that there’s one that just focuses on the Castro District as a neighborhood. But I think that may all be changing now right? I mean just the fact that the National Park Service is making this effort to roll in GLBT history under their larger umbrella of areas that they want to document in terms of bricks and mortar places and sites. More and more will pop up. There’s a couple of books out there too, like Historic Gay and Lesbian Walks of New York. There’s a couple of books like that that you can just Google search them online and they’ll pop up and you can do them on your own.

Church: Well hopefully you’re right. As organizations like the National Park Service publicizes this, maybe we will get more landmarks noted and more history will come out. Maybe people who have these photographs that you looked so hard for will come forward with them and then more progress will be made on documenting some of these sites.

Murphy: Right and I think that the same can be said generally for archives as well. Gay and lesbian archives, there’s a few really well known ones across the country but just a handful. So the power to be honest of Web 2.0 technology like flickr are really beneficial in this area because people have their personal collections at home that they’re now scanning and putting online, so I know researchers are doing a lot of their studies that way as well. But again for me, I started my research about historic sites in 2003 and to really see how far this world has come is really quite fascinating to me and you know there is a financial benefit to these things which was part of my research, that cities really if they want to embrace these histories and the National Park Service wants to embrace this under their umbrella, they will reap the benefits of communities of people who want to go see them and we’re seeing that as well or states and cities that are opening their doors in their communities to gay marriage.

Church: As we reflect on the gains and public recognition over the ten years since you began your research I think we can be very optimistic for what the future might hold.

Murphy: I know right, and I hope that people do check out the brochure online and try to do the walk. It’s all in a very dense area within Charleston. I sort of would like to do it again. It’s good to do over coffee like on a Saturday morning.

Church: Thank you Mary for talking with us today. We hope to hear more form you in the future, maybe any future research that you’re doing.

Murphy: Sure thing, yes, if you ever want to do a podcast on historic sites related to women’s history, give me a ring.

Church: That sounds good, thank you Mary.

Murphy: Thanks Jason. Bye, bye.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody

National Park Service LGBTQ History Month Celebrating the National Park Service LGBT History Month, NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Mary O'Connell Murphy, Library Project Manager at the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University. In this podcast, Mary talks about her work with Lavender Landmarks, LGBT sites in Charleston, South Carolina.

54. National Mall Plan Project Part 3 (Episode 54)

Transcript

Kevin: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Paul Cady as he speaks with Sean Kennealy, the Chief of Division of Professional Services and currently Chief of Facility Management for the National Mall. In the second of this three part series, they’ll talk about the installation of the National Mall turf renovation project.

Paul: Ok Sean, can you describe the Mall turf project as it has been implemented?

Sean: Well, the Mall turf project was to restore the turf and soil systems on the National Mall between 3rd and 14th street. The project included the installation of new underground cisterns to collect water runoff, and rain, and stormwater. We installed new irrigation systems, we installed new drainage systems, new soils, and new turf, as well as installed a granite curb edge around the turf panels that prevented the migration of the existing gravel walkways (the gravel itself) from migrating into the turf.

Paul: What is the time frame for this project, and where are you in the implementation process?

Sean: Well the project is actually three phases: we just completed the first of the three phases which was the section of green space between 3rd and 7th street and included three large center panels of the Mall. The second phase includes the center panels between 7th and 10th street, and then the last phase is the area between 10th street and 14th street.

Paul: Is the work being implemented by the NPS or outside contractors?

Sean: The work is being awarded by the National Park Service and we are hiring contractors, private contractors, to perform the work.

Paul: Can you go into more detail about the enhanced soil you’re using to alleviate the compaction on the Mall?

Sean: The soil that we’re using out there is an engineered soil that has a very high sand content to allow for drainage of the water very quickly so that we don’t have standing water out there. Then we can actually get the water back into our cistern systems a little more quickly. It also has a higher organic compound rate where we have a good mix of the sand and organics into our soil mixture.

Paul: What kind of grass are you using?

Sean: We’re using a turf type tall fescue with a blend of bluegrass.

Paul: How did you chose that particular [grass]?

Sean: Well what we did was we researched a lot with regard to other types of turf fields, particularly fields that received a lot of high use and high impact. We looked at baseball stadiums, football stadiums, and other types of venues that have a real high use and high impact events on them. We decided that the turf type tall fescue with a 10% bluegrass blend was the best mixture for the amount of use that the Mall gets.

Paul: How does the irrigation set up? Where’s the water coming from?

Sean: So the irrigation is a very robust underground irrigation system, it’s not your conventional (or residential) pop up head type system. We had a system like that previously that was just compromised too much with tent stakes and other types of high impact events on the Mall. What we did was we installed a very robust irrigation system it still, it does, have pop up heads but they are few and far between. They shoot the water out at very high rates, or flows, and pressures so that we can cover the center panels with the minimal amount of heads. We also installed the irrigation lines 4 feet deep, because one of the things that was changed in our permanent process is that no one can run a stake larger, or drive a stake larger, than 36 inches into the ground. We’ve lowered all the piping to 4ft; we’ve put all the heads on the exterior, or the perimeter, of the panel so that we have clearly identified ‘no stake areas’ on the National Mall.

Paul: How does the irrigation connect to the cistern system?

Sean: So what happens is, we have a number of drains around the perimeter of the center panels of the National Mall. The drains are collected through a series of piping, the piping then dumps the rainwater into our cisterns. When we are completed with the project, the total amount of storm water capacity will be 1,000,000 gallons. So we have four 250,000 gallon underground cisterns that will collect all the rainwater from the runoff from the center panels of the Mall. Through piping into these 250,000 gallon cisterns, from there we have various pumps that will transfer that water to our irrigation pump. When the water gets to that point the water will be filtered through a ultraviolet light filter system and then it will be pumped out into the irrigation system where eventually it will go to the heads and be sprinkled on the ground.

Paul: Has the paving system been looked at on the Mall?

Sean: We’ve looked at the paving system, we’ve looked at it very extensively. We continue to look at that. We do have some significant issues with the gravel walkways, however it’s something that we’re going to continue to work with the commissions (or review commissions or review boards) to look at what the best, or most appropriate, paving material is on the National Mall.

Paul: Were aspects of the project excluded that you would have liked to have seen included?

Sean: No, the first phase included a lot of the infrastructure that was necessary for the new soil and turf systems to thrive. We actually installed a lot of infrastructure to accommodate phases 2 and 3 in the first phase so phase 1 was a success. We are just getting ready for phase 2 and phase 3 as funding becomes available.

Paul: Do have any suggestions for institutions looking to do a similar kind of project?

Sean: Sure, I think that you really need to take a take a look at your soil mix and see what type of soils and turf is most appropriate for the application. I think that by doing a lot of research upfront, depending on how your areas are used, you can really drive what types of turf (turf systems) you use, as well as your soils.

Paul: Is there anything additional you’d like to add about the implementation of this project?

Sean: I think that it’s been a great project for the United States. I know our visitors have really enjoyed coming out to the Mall and seeing the true difference between what an investment we made is, compared to what we’ve been doing in the past. When you look at the newly renovated center panels it’s a big difference between what our investment has gotten us, compared to where we were years ago on the other areas, so it’s making a huge difference.

Paul: Is this going to be a model for future projects the National Park Service is going to be doing?

Sean: We hope so, we hope so. I think what we’ve learned from this, in terms of how to collect water, and to recycle water, how to design, install robust irrigation systems, and how to manage our turf is something we’re going to use as a model throughout the park. Another thing that we learned is that hiring appropriate staff is really key to the success of a turf system. The National Park Service hired the first ever turf manager in the Park Service, and certainly here on the National Mall it was something that we’d been looking into. We went ahead and made the investment in a high caliper type of a person, with a turf management degree, who was well versed in turf management and soil science. It was a great investment that we made in our hiring to actually hire a turf manager.

Paul: Alright, well thanks very much Sean for talking to me today, I really appreciate [it].

Sean: Hey, no problem Paul. I hope this helps, and good luck in all your future endeavors.

Paul: Thank you very much.

Kevin: That was Paul Cady’s conversation with Sean Kennealy. You can find the transcript of this interview on our website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time…

National Mall Plan Project Part 3 (Podcast Episode 54) Today we join NCPTT's Paul Cady as he speaks with Michael Stachowicz about the National Mall Plan Project. This is the last of a three part series about the design of the National Mall turf renovation project.

53. National Mall Plan Project Part 2 (Episode 53)

Transcript

Kevin: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Paul Cady as he speaks with Sean Kennealy, the Chief of Division of Professional Services and currently Chief of Facility Management for the National Mall. In the second of this three part series, they’ll talk about the installation of the National Mall turf renovation project.

Paul: Ok Sean, can you describe the Mall turf project as it has been implemented?

Sean: Well, the Mall turf project was to restore the turf and soil systems on the National Mall between 3rd and 14th street. The project included the installation of new underground cisterns to collect water runoff, and rain, and stormwater. We installed new irrigation systems, we installed new drainage systems, new soils, and new turf, as well as installed a granite curb edge around the turf panels that prevented the migration of the existing gravel walkways (the gravel itself) from migrating into the turf.

Paul: What is the time frame for this project, and where are you in the implementation process?

Sean: Well the project is actually three phases: we just completed the first of the three phases which was the section of green space between 3rd and 7th street and included three large center panels of the Mall. The second phase includes the center panels between 7th and 10th street, and then the last phase is the area between 10th street and 14th street.

Paul: Is the work being implemented by the NPS or outside contractors?

Sean: The work is being awarded by the National Park Service and we are hiring contractors, private contractors, to perform the work.

Paul: Can you go into more detail about the enhanced soil you’re using to alleviate the compaction on the Mall?

Sean: The soil that we’re using out there is an engineered soil that has a very high sand content to allow for drainage of the water very quickly so that we don’t have standing water out there. Then we can actually get the water back into our cistern systems a little more quickly. It also has a higher organic compound rate where we have a good mix of the sand and organics into our soil mixture.

Paul: What kind of grass are you using?

Sean: We’re using a turf type tall fescue with a blend of bluegrass.

Paul: How did you chose that particular [grass]?

Sean: Well what we did was we researched a lot with regard to other types of turf fields, particularly fields that received a lot of high use and high impact. We looked at baseball stadiums, football stadiums, and other types of venues that have a real high use and high impact events on them. We decided that the turf type tall fescue with a 10% bluegrass blend was the best mixture for the amount of use that the Mall gets.

Paul: How does the irrigation set up? Where’s the water coming from?

Sean: So the irrigation is a very robust underground irrigation system, it’s not your conventional (or residential) pop up head type system. We had a system like that previously that was just compromised too much with tent stakes and other types of high impact events on the Mall. What we did was we installed a very robust irrigation system it still, it does, have pop up heads but they are few and far between. They shoot the water out at very high rates, or flows, and pressures so that we can cover the center panels with the minimal amount of heads. We also installed the irrigation lines 4 feet deep, because one of the things that was changed in our permanent process is that no one can run a stake larger, or drive a stake larger, than 36 inches into the ground. We’ve lowered all the piping to 4ft; we’ve put all the heads on the exterior, or the perimeter, of the panel so that we have clearly identified ‘no stake areas’ on the National Mall.

Paul: How does the irrigation connect to the cistern system?

Sean: So what happens is, we have a number of drains around the perimeter of the center panels of the National Mall. The drains are collected through a series of piping, the piping then dumps the rainwater into our cisterns. When we are completed with the project, the total amount of storm water capacity will be 1,000,000 gallons. So we have four 250,000 gallon underground cisterns that will collect all the rainwater from the runoff from the center panels of the Mall. Through piping into these 250,000 gallon cisterns, from there we have various pumps that will transfer that water to our irrigation pump. When the water gets to that point the water will be filtered through a ultraviolet light filter system and then it will be pumped out into the irrigation system where eventually it will go to the heads and be sprinkled on the ground.

Paul: Has the paving system been looked at on the Mall?

Sean: We’ve looked at the paving system, we’ve looked at it very extensively. We continue to look at that. We do have some significant issues with the gravel walkways, however it’s something that we’re going to continue to work with the commissions (or review commissions or review boards) to look at what the best, or most appropriate, paving material is on the National Mall.

Paul: Were aspects of the project excluded that you would have liked to have seen included?

Sean: No, the first phase included a lot of the infrastructure that was necessary for the new soil and turf systems to thrive. We actually installed a lot of infrastructure to accommodate phases 2 and 3 in the first phase so phase 1 was a success. We are just getting ready for phase 2 and phase 3 as funding becomes available.

Paul: Do have any suggestions for institutions looking to do a similar kind of project?

Sean: Sure, I think that you really need to take a take a look at your soil mix and see what type of soils and turf is most appropriate for the application. I think that by doing a lot of research upfront, depending on how your areas are used, you can really drive what types of turf (turf systems) you use, as well as your soils.

Paul: Is there anything additional you’d like to add about the implementation of this project?

Sean: I think that it’s been a great project for the United States. I know our visitors have really enjoyed coming out to the Mall and seeing the true difference between what an investment we made is, compared to what we’ve been doing in the past. When you look at the newly renovated center panels it’s a big difference between what our investment has gotten us, compared to where we were years ago on the other areas, so it’s making a huge difference.

Paul: Is this going to be a model for future projects the National Park Service is going to be doing?

Sean: We hope so, we hope so. I think what we’ve learned from this, in terms of how to collect water, and to recycle water, how to design, install robust irrigation systems, and how to manage our turf is something we’re going to use as a model throughout the park. Another thing that we learned is that hiring appropriate staff is really key to the success of a turf system. The National Park Service hired the first ever turf manager in the Park Service, and certainly here on the National Mall it was something that we’d been looking into. We went ahead and made the investment in a high caliper type of a person, with a turf management degree, who was well versed in turf management and soil science. It was a great investment that we made in our hiring to actually hire a turf manager.

Paul: Alright, well thanks very much Sean for talking to me today, I really appreciate [it].

Sean: Hey, no problem Paul. I hope this helps, and good luck in all your future endeavors.

Paul: Thank you very much.

Kevin: That was Paul Cady’s conversation with Sean Kennealy. You can find the transcript of this interview on our website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time…

Today we join NCPTT's Paul Cady as he speaks with Sean Kennealy about the National Mall Plan Project. In the second of this three part series about the design of the National Mall turf renovation project.

52. National Mall Plan Project Part 1 (Episode 52)

Transcript

Susan Spain, NPS landscape architect and Project Executive for the National Mall Plan. Susan Spain, NPS landscape architect and Project Executive for the National Mall Plan.Photo Credit: http://www.olmsted.org/events/frederick-law-olmsted-jr-symposia/background-information

Kevin: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Paul Cady as he speaks with Susan Spain, the National Mall Plan Project Executive and a landscape architect with the National Park Service for more than twenty-four years. In the first of this three part series, they’ll talk about the design of the National Mall turf renovation project.

Paul: Susan, could you describe your role in the design of the project and give a brief history of how it came about?

Susan: My role was to be the lead planner for the National Mall plan. This is an award winning, 800 page EIS [Environmental Impact Statement], that talked about how we’re going to manage the National Mall in the future. The Mall is the component part of the National Mall which contains also the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and so on. It’s about 750 acres overall. The Mall is a portion of that area and it’s the area directly west of the capitol and it’s surrounded on both the north and the south sides by the museums of the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution as well as the headquarters for the USDA [United States Department of Agriculture].

Paul: What were the design goals the project?

Proposed plan for the National Mall, from the National Mall Plan: Summary, Fall 2010. Proposed plan for the National Mall, from the National Mall Plan: Summary, Fall 2010.

Susan: Well clearly sustainability. We wanted to make sure that we could have a sustainable space. The Mall, and the National Mall, were never designed for the types and levels of use that they receive. For example, the Mall area between the museums held about 800 days of special events annually. It was never designed for that type of use, it was never designed for the level of use, and when we started planning, at this point in time, we had conditions that were unacceptable to virtually everyone. The soil was incredibly compacted (a soil scientist from Penn State University broke his probe the first time he tried to stick it in the ground), our soil conditions were like a concrete block and we didn’t have anything that was sustainable. Our irrigation system was broken; basically we looked pretty bedraggled.

Paul: Since it is such a visible project, with all the museums and other things around, how much input did the public have in the design process?

Susan: We had about 30,000 public comments during the National Mall plan time. The most common comment in our first round of public comments was ‘this doesn’t look good enough for what it means to our nation.’ People would tell us this was our nation’s front yard, or our nation’s stage, and they wanted to be proud of the way it looked and they didn’t feel like they could be.

Paul: What was the process for receiving input from the public?

Susan: We had a dedicated website and we were using the Park Service’s link, cross link to the Park Service’s PEPC [Planning Environment and Public Comment] site which is a internet way to submit comments. We also had a number of public meetings and we had fax comments, we had email comments, that came in to us. But you know, our process was a four year process to complete planning.

Paul: Do you use other examples of historic landscapes to help you with the design process?

Susan: Before we even started planning we undertook two Best Practices Studies. One of the Best Practices Studies was about local historic designed landscapes in the Washington DC area (PDF, 4.3MB). We had identified 7 historic landscapes and how they were managed to maintain high levels of high quality conditions. These could be things like American University, Georgetown University, [The Washington] National Cathedral, Architect of the Capitol grounds, the capitol grounds, so to speak, the National Gallery of Art and so on. We were looking at what techniques could they use to make sure that their landscapes were in good condition. We learned a great deal from that; it’s always desirable, for example, if you can close off an area (that’s not an option for us on the National Mall) or if you can restrict the types of use (which is also not an option for us). The second Best Practices Study we did was looking at heavily used urban parks around the nation, and around the world (PDF, 3.7MB). We looked at four urban parks in the United States: Central Park, Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Golden Gate Park and Millennium Park in Chicago, Golden Gate Park was in San Francisco. And then we looked at international landscapes in London, in Canada, and in Canberra, Australia. We looked at the national capitol because we were looking at places that had the right to protest, and what were things that they did in order to maintain their landscapes. It was very clear, probably early on, that no one had the level/demand that we did on the National Mall and in most cases, when you have gathering space for your nation, they are on hard surface spaces. It certainly rammed forth the challenge we faced in planning a sustainable future for designed historic landscapes within the National Mall.

Paul: How does the turf project fit into the greater Mall design project?

Susan: We had identified, right off the bat that this was probably one of the most degraded historic landscapes that we had. We had identified that we needed to restore the soils. We wanted to meet the sustainable SITES initiative. We needed to reduce the amount of potable water that we were putting on any place, because if we would have had an irrigation system that worked we would have been using potable water on that irrigation system. We had mostly gooseweed out there (as opposed to a healthy turf) and so we had the goals of really restoring our health of the turf, and the trees, and being able to still manage high levels of use in the area. That’s putting incredible demands on a turf situation.

Paul: How did you balance designing for the public while also the maintenance needs of the NPS?

Susan: We had identified, right off the bat, that to be sustainable it had to be maintainable. We knew that we needed to then make changes in the way that we managed events in the area. Basically we’re telling our events planners that they have to do things differently: they have to be in different areas, they cannot be on the turf as long as they were on the turf before, they may be required to use turf covers. We would like to disperse our events throughout the year and reduce the impact on the turf area.

Paul: So with these new restrictions in place has there been any positive or negative response?

Susan: There has been a huge positive response. For example, the first event we had after we finished phase one of the turf project was the last presidential inaugural activities. We had just finished the turf project in early January and this is taking place just two weeks later. Using turf covers, and having limitations on the amount of time the turf covers could be down, we came up with a situation where we took the turf covers off and everything, while there were a few dents for awhile, the turf looked fabulous. At this point in time, midsummer, it still looks very healthy and good.

Paul: So what other kinds of sustainable features were you designing into the fabric of the Mall to make it more sustainable?

Susan: We wanted to make sure that we would have a soil system that would be resilient; we did not have soils that were resilient. One of the things that were a result of that was that you would have increased runoff and storm water generation that could lead to some localized flooding. We wanted to be able to have soils that water could penetrate, as opposed to runoff from. We wanted to have turf that was as durable as possible, a mix of turf that would be as durable as possible, and we wanted to make sure that our irrigation system was placed deep enough so that tent stakes didn’t penetrate. That was one of the problems we had had in the irrigation system, but it was starting to look like, it had been punctured so many times that it couldn’t be used.

Paul: So how far along is the project?

Susan: We have completed phase 1 of the project. There’s phase 2 and phase 3 coming, and then adjacent to that will be replacement of gravel walks with another kind of paving. We’ve yet to determine exactly what that paving will be, but we wanted to make sure that we were putting infrastructure in the paving that would encourage people to be using larger paved areas for placement of tents and stages and things like that that have been typically placed on the grass at this point in time. It’s been interesting to see that the people were happy to utilize walkways to put the stages or tents on. We saw that in the new area last week, during the 4th of July, there were first amendment demonstrations up on the area between 3rd and 7th, very successfully using the paved areas.

Paul: What is phase 1?

Susan: Phase 1 was three panels of grass, and they were center panels on the National Mall. The National Mall, just as a reminder, is an area that has five panels that are filled with American elm trees and they are on a grid system (I think about 50ft on center) so it is a lawn framed by panels with elm trees. And it is probably the most historically recognizable landscape in our nation because at one end of the Mall is the Washington Monument at the other end of the Mall is the United States Capitol Building. It has these iconic symbols of our nation that are highly visible, which is what makes it so desirable for first amendment demonstrations and for a variety of activities: they want to be placed between the symbols of our nation.

Paul: When will phase 2 and phase 3 be implemented?

Susan: Phase 2 and phase 3 are under design at this point in time. I think we expect them to be under construction in 2015.

Paul: Ok, well thank you very much. Is there anything else you’d like to add about the design of this project?

Susan: I think that it looks so simple that people don’t realize that it’s a fairly complex system. We had taken a group of people from the Architect of the Capitol’s office up there last week and they were just astounded. While something looks simple, and they had helped us by taking photos during the construction period, they were impressed with the state of the art facilities that come from this project. We really planned on, and wanted to capture and reuse, rainwater; the rainwater was going to be reused to irrigate the turf. The system to do this is what impressed the staff from the Architect of the Capitol’s office, the sense of a real state of the art system that was doing cutting edge work in terms of reuse of water and reduction and the use of potable water.

Paul: Alright, well thank you very much for talking to me Susan, I really appreciate it.

Susan: No problem, thank you.

Kevin: That was Paul Cady’s conversation with Susan Spain. You can find the transcript of this interview on our website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time…

Today we join NCPTT's Paul Cady as he speaks with Susan Spain, the National Mall Plan Project Executive and a landscape architect with the National Park Service for more than twenty-four years. In the first of this three part series, they'll talk about the design of the National Mall turf renovation project.

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