Upcoming Programs

In 1903, the Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts, were hired by the City of Portland to create a plan for a vast network of city parks and landscaped boulevards. The Olmsteds were well known and revered for their citywide planning and landscape designs. Their plan for Portland included many places we know today, such as Terwilliger Boulevard and Mt. Tabor Park, but some parts of the plan were never implemented; other parks that existed in 1903—perhaps most notably Hawthorne Park—have since been lost.

From the early 1900s until the Second World War, so-called “mail order” houses played an integral role in the U.S. real estate market. The ability to mass produce and ship entire home kits epitomized post industrial revolution manufacturing and marketing. Join us as historian and AHC Education Manager Val Ballestrem takes a fresh look at the mail order house phenomenon and its impact on Portland.

What could be more fitting for our very last formal “Partners in the Field” National-Trust-supported preservation advocacy program than the subject we started our initiative with—the Portland Plan? As all of the related planning work has proceeded, we’ve participated every step of the way—and we find that there is lots of public confusion out there. Of course, we want to dispel that and we have just the right program to do it!