Don't worry and don't be put off by the title - let me preface this post by saying that given everything I have learned and seen in preservation, no matter how old, historic, glamorous, well built or beloved a building is, nothing will save it if you don't have the $$. Too bad right? Life isn't fair, but let's face it money talks and I want learn how to make it talk about saving my buildings. After a lot of soul searching and flat out denial about going back to school, that's exactly where I am headed.
Naively, I thought that once I'd completed my doctorate the world would be my oyster - at least that's what I thought. I didn't know what I was going to do or who I was going to do it for, I just knew that I had the answers. I'd written the first doctoral thesis connecting historic preservation and the global environmental predicament. The topic was hot, or so I was told when I presented my thoughts and research to a number of my peers internationally.
Call it what you will - the folly of youth and yes maybe arrogance. The reality was that I didn't have prospective employers lining up at my door to offer me a job. At first it wasn't too alarming, during college I did anything during summer breaks to make a buck: waitress, security guard, housekeeper, house-sitter - you name it as long as it was legal, I wouldn't say no. So that resourcefulness served me well when I first moved to DC. I temped - I signed on with a great agency that placed me with a law firm and then with the Brookings Institution, which then hired me after a couple of months. So finally I'd landed my first real job post-graduate school. I had benefits and paid vacation, what more could a girl want, right?! Well, I was working but not in my field of choice and I'd studied all of this "stuff" but no one but me could see the value. I just knew that I was destined to save the world from itself - saving old buildings the rest of the world paid no mind to - they were walking or driving past the gems oblivious to their past glory. I saw their potential and value, but have come to learn that I was missing something. (Check out this cool shot of the inside of Michigan Central Station)
When I was in graduate school I would drag my friend Hsu-jen along with me to see the grand dames in the city center of Glasgow - well actually we probably went out for Peking Duck and he indulged my fantasies about the glorious sandstones. When I returned to the US it was the same thing in every city I visited and lived in - in New Yorkit was a convent in the Upper Westside; Cincinnati, a plethora of school buildings, one in particular in the hospital district that has since been torn down for parking and if you can believe it or not my best friend's home - torn down by the neighboring private school (Summit Country Day tears down Piatt-Grandin house) for - you guessed it - a parking lot and driveway! So now I am living in Arlington, Virginia and work in Dupont Circle in Washington DC. Unfortunately there isn't much left in Arlington. Don't get me wrong it is very convenient to get to work from here, but other than that it seems to have lost its soul. Dupont Circle on the other hand is glorious and as you can imagine comes with a glorious price tag.
So after suffering heart-break, yes I am heartbroken every time I learn of a loss, I have decided that there is something I can do about this - I need to learn the language of the developers, and economic development officers, in other words I need to be versed in the money. After some soul searching and yes, denial, I will be enrolling in the Masters in Professional Studies Real Estate program in Georgetown in the fall. Classes like Real Estate Accounting, Real Estate Financing, Bankruptcy, and Community Economic Development make my head start to hurt, but I am ready, ready to learn the language that will help me save my beloved buildings.
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