Historic Future

Once known as the unassuming steward of 38 historic house museums and 2,300 acres of land, Historic New England has been thinking a little bigger these days. “We’re the largest independent, comprehensive historic preservation organization in the country, and it’s really incumbent upon us to be a convener and bring everyone together,” says Vin Cipolla, Historic New England’s president and CEO.

New approaches and hidden stories have contributed to a surge in visitation—nearly 170,000 at last count—and the annual Historic New England Summit has rapidly become a lynchpin of the preservation world. And about 35 miles north of Boston in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the organization has embarked on an ambitious adaptive reuse project, transforming a bygone manufacturing space in two massive buildings on Essex Street into a new headquarters as well as a publicly accessible showcase for its 125,000-piece collection of artifacts, a project aimed at reviving and sustaining the gateway city’s cultural spirit. Here, Cipolla talks with Traditional Building about Historic New England today, from the Haverhill Center for Preservation and Collections to the value in unearthing marginalized narratives. (Interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

You joined Historic New England in 2020, but among other roles, you held a leadership position at the National Trust for Historic Preservation three decades ago. How has your understanding of historic preservation deepened or shifted over time?

Vin Cipolla: I’ve been a lifelong advocate across a number of different preservation causes, and if we’re not in touch with our history and what has made our communities develop and grow—if we don’t seek to really understand and appreciate it—we’re losing an awful lot. Having worked on a national level as well as on a big-city level through my work with The Municipal Art Society in New York City, I’ve been thinking about how the conversations have changed and widened. As preservationists, we were the original sustainability and resilience people: we were into adaptive reuse, controlling waste streams, using preservation as a revitalization tool—we wanted to save what was there. In some ways I think preservation has been slow arriving to a party it was throwing, but it’s also created discussion about our environment. It’s been gratifying to see leading voices of different disciplines join together to talk about building better solutions.

Lately, Historic New England has emphasized excavating and centering previously ignored stories. Which stories have had the greatest resonance?

Bringing forward the stories of enslaved people at our museum sites—giving a name to these individuals, seeking objects within our collections and beyond that illuminate the time that these individuals and their families spent there—is an absolute priority for us, and we’ve been doing great work led by a cohort of scholars that we’ve brought in for these discoveries. Also, for the first time, we have two indigenous history scholars, and they are looking at the nations we are a part of, how those communities continue to be with us today, and how we can better connect with and amplify the history of those peoples and places. I’m extremely proud of how fast-forward we’ve been in the last three years. We don’t wait for some huge epiphany: As we’re finding the information, we are introducing it into our visitor experience. Our visitors are increasingly younger and more diverse—we had close to 200 public programs throughout summer 2023, bringing in thousands of people, many of them new visitors drawn to this information we’re now providing.

The annual Historic New England Summit has become key to the organization’s work. What does bringing together this cross-disciplinary perspective add to the region’s preservation community?

It’s just so powerful. Whether we’re talking about preservation thinking and ethics and techniques, or what keeps the community sustainable, the almost endless stream of interactions that occur when there’s diversity of use, how many communities have lost their walkability because of urban sprawl and how there’s still an opportunity in many places to reverse those trends—all of these things are discussed and discovered at the summit. Zoning is the elephant in the room; exposing zoning codes that exist in countless places that are actually bad for communities is just one of the tough, complex topics that we take on.

Haverhill was a powerhouse in textile manufacturing—something like half of all the shoes sold in North America were made in Haverhill—and it’s a proxy for so many other industrial river towns throughout the Northeast. When manufacturing started to become more globalized, this wonderful, architecturally rich fabric of downtown Haverhill was not valued to the extent it should have been during the period of urban renewal, but the City of Haverhill managed to save 51 historic buildings within its historic downtown. We own the Lang Building and Burgess Building, which comprise 150,000 square feet of early concrete industrial buildings with a cobblestone drive between them built as a shoe manufacturing center with all kinds of companies taking space—in its heyday, it was kind of the WeWork of shoe manufacturing.

Obviously, the environment looks different today, so we’ve assembled a whole series of vacant lots contiguous to this campus that provide a fantastic cultural mixed-use development opportunity, all sitting at the doorstep of Amtrak and the commuter rail. We’ve taken steps to build a temporary visitor center on the first floor of the Burgess Building so we can have outreach, education, and exhibits, and slowly strengthen the dialogue about preservation, New England history, and the work we’re seeking to do in downtown Haverhill. Historic New England already houses the world’s largest collection of New England artifacts in one place in this location: before it was just a quiet, off-the-radar collections facility, and now we are increasingly opening it to the public. Our plan is to really partner with the city and the broader community and create kind of the centerpiece campus for Historic New England in the region.

It’s a culture-as-catalyst project: to celebrate urban preservation, to celebrate culture, to work collaboratively with other nonprofits, the city, the state, and beyond, and to help bring green space and contribute to the vibrancy of downtown Haverhill. The amount of density that can be taken onto this site is quite considerable, and appropriate density—instead of the lonely, vacant land that interrupts walkability and neighborhood energy—is good for downtowns. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to close the gap. TB