This Old House

How did the Historic House Trust come to be, and what’s in the portfolio of houses you manage?

In 1989, the Parks Department owned 15 historic house museums and realized that they needed very sensitive and specialized care. The Historic House Trust was founded to serve as the arm of the Parks Department that had the preservation expertise to take care of these houses. Since then, we’ve grown to 23.

We are the liaison between the Parks Department and the nonprofits that run the historic houses as museums. With old houses, there are many projects in the works. We oversee and manage the capital projects at the historic sites. All of the houses are in different stages of growth as their own nonprofits. Some might ask us to help write a grant with them. Some might ask us to connect them with the right people in Parks to help them.

We serve many roles. We’re in all five boroughs, so for us, it really boils down to a lot of relationship-making and -keeping — making sure that we have relationships within the Parks Department, the nonprofits, and anywhere else that we can to make sure that we are really serving the historic houses in a way that is meaningful so that they can, in turn, serve their communities.

How do you think about the value of these homes for their communities today? What does a historic house offer contemporary New Yorkers? Today, it’s almost too easy to point to how we’ve generally preserved the homes of the wealthy and the privileged, who had the prerogative of preserving their own history and culture. And then we all get stuck footing the bill, as it were. How do you rethink and articulate the value they offer in our contemporary urban society?

Preservation is often seen as very elitist and very Caucasian. Historically, in some instances, it has been. For us, as an organization, and in our thinking about preservation, of course, these are important structures that have interesting histories and have been standing for several hundred years, which most kids visiting a house are just blown away by. But more than that, I think they share really valuable, tangible pieces of history. They serve as community centers, hubs of culture, and resources.

Everyone knows that The Met and all of those really large institutions exist. These smaller institutions can sometimes be overlooked. They’re doing equally good work within their communities.

Many of them are in underserved communities. When I was at Dyckman, we were really thinking about: How do you take a historic site and the several hundred years of history and tell the stories in a way that is relevant to your community? We were collaborating with the library and making sure that all our programs were bilingual and promoted bilingually. Because if nobody comes, who cares?

That’s what many of the houses are really honing in on: What is their story? I think that changes in the lifespan of an organization. Smaller museums are really starting to think about the larger, broader story. Not just telling the story of the wealthy, European landowner. We’ve heard that story many a time. But why are we not talking about the Lenape?

There’s a huge lifespan of these sites. The work that I led at Dyckman was about starting to think about: “We talk about the Dyckmans, and we know that they came here in the 1600s, and we know that they built this house and had this huge farm. We know that they enslaved people. So why are we only talking about the Dyckmans?”

What I found interesting was how we could talk about the multiple different stories and histories in what we now call Upper Manhattan, and how to align that with the story of this neighborhood in general. There have been many different waves of immigration. That’s a throughline that we can not only talk about from the 1600s but also now. Thinking about how we connect the past with the present is what makes these places so interesting and special.

In contrast to a large institution like the Met, these houses also operate on a more intimate, domestic, accessible scale. How do you leverage their “housiness,” to invent a term, to break down some of the barriers between museum and audience?

One of the challenges at Dyckman is that the house is up on this giant embankment. Upper Manhattan is very hilly and rocky, so it was hard to get a road to be level. When they put in what we now call Broadway, they dredged down about 15 feet. That was a big barrier for us, not just in terms of physical accessibility but in people’s minds, thinking: “Is this a place for me to go? It’s up on this hill. I don’t know what it is. Am I welcome?”

It’s important for historic house museums to get people to understand that we want you here, that this is a place for you. Community engagement is at the heart of getting people in the door. Once you get people in the door, then you are engaging with the “housiness” of these places: this is where people entertained, this is where people ate, this is where enslaved people lived, this is the fireplace that they fed all night long. It’s a way for people to engage in a hands-on setting in history. We would have school children, like five years old, say when we went into the kitchen, “These kitchen implements look like my grandmother’s, right now, in the Dominican Republic.”

The history of people who were enslaved at this property over three centuries was at the heart of your DyckmanDISCOVERED initiative. What did it take to unearth those histories? It feels like there’s a tremendous desire and need for that work, but also great difficulty in accomplishing that.

For a long time, a lot of organizations have used that excuse not to do that work: “We don’t have any of that information.” The Dyckmans, for example, weren’t saving documentation about people that they enslaved — the people that they did not treat as human beings. Saying, “Well, we don’t have any information about that,” is a bit of a cop-out. I’ve gone through the process myself at Dyckman, and we were able to do it on an extremely small budget. What it really takes is a strong organizational desire to move a project like that forward.

We started to just talk about what information we did have, which was very little. We started working with local artists to exhibit site-specific work throughout the museum that spoke to the enslaved history of Upper Manhattan. That started to create an interesting dialogue with visitors. People who lived in apartment buildings across the street were saying, “Wow, I wish this organization had been doing this for 30 years.”

Eventually, we were able to hire a research assistant to see what we could find. There was really not much information at all in our files. It took a lot of digging deep. We ultimately ended up finding five names of people that were enslaved on the Dyckman property. We already had a runaway slave ad. There were other things that we could piece together to think about: What would enslavement have looked like in Upper Manhattan, in an area that was, at the time, very rural and had very few inhabitants? It was the Dyckman family and the Nagel family. They had an enslaved burial ground together where they buried people that they treated as property.

Once we had some of that information, we really infused it into all of our public programs, all of our artists collaborations, and that’s the point where we could say, “We want to rework our interpretation.” Then, it was really getting buy-in from our community partners and from everyday people, to say, “There are so many themes that we could cover in this museum: trade, waterways, immigration, the role of women in preservation. What are your thoughts, and how best might that information be represented in the museum?” We worked with museum professionals to distill that down to a plan.  But it was really great to get feedback from everyone.

What did you hear from folks?

We had different focus groups with community partners, members of the Parks Department, members of the community, and elected officials. We did feedback sessions in English and Spanish. The takeaway that I received from all of those sessions was that people were passionate about this place and what the outcome would be. People were happy to be included in the conversation.

Part of the work that’s being done around accessibility is not only social and cultural, but also physical. Is there more to say about physical barriers in some of these spaces around engaging with them?

Accessibility is a real challenge. Historic houses predate all code. They don’t necessarily have big, wide door openings or ramps and the door thresholds have large saddles. Wherever we can, we are trying to improve physical accessibility through capital projects. We have two that are coming up soon at the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum and the Morris-Jumel Mansion — both in upper Manhattan. Depending on the site, it can be challenging. We can’t just say, “Okay, we’re putting a ramp right here.” It has to be approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The Dyckman Farmhouse hasn’t had any capital restoration work in probably my lifetime. There will be a ramp that goes from the street level to the park level and another that goes from the park level onto the first floor of the museum. Historically, there was an addition on the north end of what’s now the museum. It was torn down, and an addition is going to be built there. Not the exact same as the original but in the same spirit, and that will house ADA-compliant restrooms and administrative functions. Also, the house is getting a much-needed new roof and gutter system. It’s going to be looking pretty spiffy.

We are also thinking about programmatic accessibility. The nonprofits that run them as museums steer that process. We had a large-scale programmatic accessibility project in which we worked with several of the houses to think about: “What could you use here to tell a broader story or tell a story to a different audience?” Some of those projects included tactile maps or virtual tours. At the Alice Austen House, for example, we worked on taking some of Alice Austen’s photographs and making them very tactile.

I’m sure you love all your babies equally, but is there a project that’s underway now that you’re particularly excited about or find exemplary?

I can’t find anybody that’s not fond of the Morris-Jumel site. We’re really excited about that restoration, which again, hasn’t had a restoration in a very long time. We’ve got some smaller projects on the horizon. The Conference House at the southern tip of Staten Island is going to be getting a new roof, which it desperately needs.

There’s been some interesting work going on at the Lefferts House in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. They just had a physical restoration of the building, but they’re also in the midst of a program they’re calling “Reimagine Lefferts.” It’s been a traditional-ish historic site in the past, and I really think they’re trying to turn it on its head and think about: What are the stories that we should be telling here, and how do we engage the community in that?

I think what’s interesting about all of our sites is just that they’re so different. They’re in different communities. They’re serving different audiences. They’re geographically disparate. Every organization — and their needs — is different.

One of the challenges that we’ve experienced is being as proactive as possible about restoration. It can sort of sneak up on you. All of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, this whole thing is rotted, and this needs to be replaced.” As we go through and carry out these capital projects, we’re trying to be mindful of preventative maintenance and things that we can do in collaboration with the Parks Department and our nonprofit partners to extend the life expectancy of any component of the house that we’re working on. A capital project is not an overnight thing. In that time that you’re waiting to get to the project, a lot can happen at an old house. We’re trying to keep these things in good condition as we go and not get into a situation where we need a lot of help in any given spot.

What does climate change mean for your capital responsibilities?

We’ve had houses that were damaged in hurricanes. We’ve had houses that had their basements flooded. Some of the sites were built in areas that were swampy. Some of these things are being addressed through capital projects. It’s definitely a constant conversation for us, really thinking about what is going on, how is our climate evolving, and how is it impacting these old structures. And what can we do to mitigate that. It’s a very complicated puzzle.

We had a site visit with some of our conservation committee, discussing that, “Well, this window construction was so smart at the time, but they didn’t have the pounding rain and winds for days like we have now.” The way that the historic house protects itself from the elements doesn’t necessarily stand up to today’s elements, but they did to the elements from a couple of hundred years ago.

You are teaching a class this spring on “Historic House Museums for the 21st Century.” How do you imagine the historic house museum of the future?

I can’t put a blanket statement on all historic house museums, but I think in some instances, they have traditionally been what you would expect: “Look at how these wealthy people lived, look at the possessions that they owned and how fancy they were, and isn’t that exciting?” I think that is not one that people want to come back again and again and see. You saw it in fourth grade, and you never need to do it again because they’re not doing anything different. You saw the chair. You saw the soup tureen. You’re over it.

What I find exciting is seeing these organizations and these museums evolve and roll with the times. Instead of focusing on material culture — the things and the stuff — actually focusing on people. Thinking about not just the people who were influential in building and saving this property, but also the people who live today across the street. I think that focus is what will bring in new audiences and keep existing audiences coming back.