Every spring, Historic Preservation Planning (HPP) students and alumni sponsor a Work Weekend, taking steps to save existing historic properties. Work Weekend is a mutually beneficial opportunity for students, who gain hands-on experience into how their classwork translates into the real world, and historic properties and their caretakers, who receive much-appreciated help.
This year, 25 HPP and Master of Regional Planning (MRP) students traveled to Lynnewood Hall located in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania – about 10 miles north of Philadelphia – for the four-day Work Weekend with HPP Professor Michael Tomlan, HPP faculty member Nathaniel Guest (HPP ’12), and Professor Suzanna Barucco of Thomas Jefferson University (HPP ’88). Lynnewood Hall, a Neoclassical Revival mansion, is one of the last surviving private mansions of the Gilded Age in the greater Philadelphia area. The T-shaped behemoth of a building, which has been called “the last of the American Versailles,” has 110 impressive rooms and sits on a large densely forested lot.
Lynnewood Hall is now vacant and in a state of disrepair, however, is amid a massive adaptive reuse plan that explores its potential to accommodate education, recreation, and other possible uses. The local host, Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation, had recently entered into a purchase agreement to take over and restore the property which had been held by the First Korean Church of New York since the 1990s. One of the best opportunities of the trip for first year HPP student, Brytton Burnside, was “learning firsthand how [historic preservation] foundations go through the process of acquiring a historic property and then restoring it.”
Students participated in landscape restoration work, recovered historic architectural details (e.g., balusters, trim, door hardware) from thickets and rubble, and cleaned and organized rooms within the residence. Over the weekend, students worked diligently to remove mounds of overgrowth and considerable remnants of a sophisticated landscape, with terraces, railings, statuary, and fountains were revealed. All this hard work was done under the watchful eyes of Perry, a Canada Goose who was dutifully protecting his nest in a fountain on the property.
For second year MRP student, Laurel Margerum, the trip was an unbelievable experience to explore a house of this grandeur in its unrestored state. She was gracious to the local hosts Angie, Bill, and Tyler who allowed students the rare opportunity to explore almost every inch of the mansion. “It was rewarding to be involved in a small part of [Lynnewood Hall’s] transformation.”
On the way back to Cornell, students were treated with a visit to Colebrookdale Railroad, a Civil-war era rail line that had fallen into disrepair. Professor Guest led a restoration effort that not only restored the train and its tracks into a functioning state, but also served as an engine of community and economic development for the area.