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August 1, 2024
5:30 pm
7:30 pm
Relax by the water after a day of pre-conference events or travel at West Palm Beach’s Lake Pavilion. Located at the end of the historic commercial corridor, Clematis Street, attendees will enjoy breathtaking views of the Intracoastal Waterway and network with conference-goers while enjoying light refreshments. Conveniently located to popular local restaurants, the Lake Pavilion is a great starting point for your evening in West Palm Beach. Attendees are also welcome to stroll down the Waterfront Promenade area and take in the music of Clematis by Night, an award-winning weekly concert series that happens every Thursday evening from 6-9 pm adjacent to the Lake Pavilion. Chill out South Florida style at this community event that has been attracting locals and visitors alike for nearly three decades.
Tickets for The Lake Pavilion Event are $30.
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August 2, 2024
8:30 am
10:00 am
We will kick off FORUM 2024: Preservation Under the Palms with a light breakfast and program featuring Erica Avrami, PhD.
How we manage, adapt, and retrofit the built environment is shifting in response to climate and social justice concerns. New knowledge and emerging legislation regarding energy, carbon emissions, adaptation, land use, and equity challenges the preservation enterprise to reflect on its intentions, processes, and outcomes, and to anticipate challenges and opportunities for policy reform. This talk will explore this new policy horizon and examine ways in which preservation action can contribute to more just and resilient futures.
Dr. Avrami’s research and teaching extend the heritage enterprise beyond a practice focused on sites and buildings, exploring preservation as a form of public policy that functions across geographic scales and diverse demographics. She interrogates the intentions, processes, and outcomes of historic preservation in relation to social justice and the climate crisis, and seeks to transition heritage tools and policies toward equity, resilience, and decarbonization.
Erica Avrami is the James Marston Fitch Associate Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, an affiliate with the Columbia Climate School’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development, and co-director of the Adapting the Existing Built Environment Earth Network. She also serves as the co-chair of the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation’s Experts Advisory Committee.
This event is included with full registration.
August 2, 2024
6:00 pm
9:00 pm
Friday evening’s event will immerse conference attendees in Palm Beach history and culture during a program and on-site reception at the Flagler Museum. When it was completed in 1902, the New York Herald proclaimed that Whitehall, Henry Flagler's Gilded Age estate in Palm Beach, was "more wonderful than any palace in Europe, grander and more magnificent than any other private dwelling in the world." During the last 122 years, Whitehall has been many things: a private home, a private club, a grand hotel - and for the last 65 years, a museum and National Historic Landmark. Stripped of nearly all its contents a hundred years ago, today Whitehall’s appearance is nearly indistinguishable from when it was completed in 1902. The story of the restoration of Whitehall and the recovery of its contents over the last 25 years is one of incredibly good luck, two dozen capital projects, and a lot of very hard work by a team led by the Museum’s Executive Director, John Blades. Hear directly from Mr. Blades about this work during his lecture titled “From an Abandoned Hotel to a Nationally Recognized Museum and National Historic Landmark.”
Tickets for the "Night at the Flagler" event are $45.
August 3, 2024
11:45 am
1:00 pm
In this presentation, author and art conservator Rosa Lowinger will discuss the ways in which materials conservation and the preservation of historic buildings provides a framework for understanding personal and societal damage and how this can lead to repair on a broader scale. Lowinger's interests have been developed over decades in her award-winning bicoastal conservation practice RLA Conservation, LLC and have included hands on work with extraordinary modern buildings and works in crisis in areas of disasters and political calamity. The presentation will be a literary delve into notions of repair, and how the telling of compelling narratives is a tool that can be used to help buildings survive. Lowinger will discusses the links between historic preservation and healing of intergenerational trauma using examples from her family’s story of double exile from Eastern Europe to Cuba and then the United States. Based on her 2023 memoir Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair, this presentation highlights the specific challenges of conserving twentieth-century materials in tropical and marine climates and the metaphors for and dealing with coastal conservation in the period of climate change. Purchase your copy of Dwell Time through the conference registration website.
Tickets to the Saturday Luncheon are $35.
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August 3, 2024
5:15 pm
8:00 pm
Join friends and new acquaintances at the conference hotel on Saturday evening to celebrate NAPC’s Commission Excellence Award recipients and FORUM Scholars. Short videos highlighting the good work of commissions around the country will inspire you to take lessons learned at FORUM and apply them in your own community. Stay until the end to find out which city will host FORUM in 2026! A light reception will follow the program.
This event is included with full registration.
Welcome to the City of Lakes
Minneapolis is located on Dakota homeland. Its name derives from the Dakota word mni, which means water, and the Greek word polis, which means city. The Ojibwe and several other tribes have ties to the area. The Mississippi River, known as Haha Wakpa to the Dakota and Misi Ziibi to the Ojibwe, runs through the heart of the city. At the center is Owámniyomni, or St. Anthony Falls. The river holds an important place in our history. To the many communities who have lived here, it is a source of life, a transportation route, and also a boundary.
In the 1660s, French fur traders arrived and came into contact with Indigenous people. Other European explorers soon followed, building trading posts along the rivers. A series of treaties in the first half of the 1800s resulted in the forcible removal of Dakota people from what would become Minneapolis. In the 1820s, Fort Snelling was built at Bdote, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, which is just south of the city. Although slavery was illegal here, military officers brought enslaved laborers to Fort Snelling. Other people of African descent came to Minnesota freely or to escape slavery in the South.
Development began on the east side of the river in 1848, through the platting of St. Anthony. The west side was platted six years later. Minneapolis was incorporated as a city in 1867 and merged with St. Anthony in 1872. The power of the waterfalls led to an explosion of milling industries along the river, including both flour and lumber. Minneapolis earned a new nickname: the Mill City. The city expanded rapidly until the 1920s. European immigrants and settlers from elsewhere in U.S. made new homes here.
Wealthy white families grew to great prominence and built stately homes. Initially, they lived close to their businesses. Over time, and through the expansion of the streetcar network and other thoroughfares, they moved farther away from the city center. Multi-family housing emerged to meet the growing housing needs of laborers and middle-income households. Neighborhood commercial centers formed around streetcar nodes.
The Black population grew considerably in the mid-1900s, during the Great Migration. However, discriminatory practices like redlining and racial covenants limited where Black people could live and work. At the same time, tight-knit communities formed and nurtured youth to become trailblazers in various industries.
Urban renewal efforts in the 1950s and 1960s led to the construction of interstates through predominantly Black neighborhoods and the destruction of downtown architectural gems, like the Metropolitan Building. Since its establishment in 1972, the Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission has worked to recognize our city’s built heritage through the designation of over 200 landmarks and historic districts. Recent initiatives are telling a fuller story of the people and places that make Minneapolis a beloved place to call home.
The city’s natural environment is as important as its buildings and structures. The western half of the city is situated around the Chain of Lakes. Our renowned park system was established in 1883, following the vision of noted landscape architect, Horace W.S. Cleveland. Today, it includes 180 parks, 55 miles of biking and walking paths, 22 lakes, 12 gardens, and seven golf courses.
Minneapolis prides itself in being a welcoming city that embraces the diversity of its residents. Honoring our history is essential to understanding our present and shaping a better future.
