Welcome everyone, welcome everyone to Greater Portland Landmarks Lecture Series this season. My name is Hillary Bassett, I'm Executive Director of Landmarks and I'm very happy to welcome all of you this evening. Thanks for coming out in the dead of winter for some great opportunity to hear from three people who are veteran historic preservationists. You can share their insights with you. Before we start, I just wanted to remind you of Greater Portland Landmarks. Our mission, which is to preserve and revitalize the architectural fabric, history, and character of Greater Portland, renewing our neighborhoods, spurring economic development, and keeping Portland one of the most livable cities in America. I want to thank you for joining us and I also like to, before we begin, do a good promotion for membership. If you aren't already a member of Landmarks, most of you are, but we'd like to invite those of you who are not to join us and you can get information at the table where you checked in. Also, we have some fabulous 50th anniversary note cards which are available. These are six scenes of Portland done by an artist who many of you know, Peter Rolf, who's a great artist who's done many scenes of the Oldport Custom House, Downtown Portland, and some of the great houses in the city. I'd also like to encourage you to come back and take a look at the exhibition, Images of Change, Portland, Images of Portland since 1960. It's a really wonderful exhibition, Bruce Brown, one of the jurors is here this evening. I think they've done a great job selecting photographs that show how Portland really has evolved from that toppling of Union Station in 1961, the evolution of the waterfront, the East End, Downtown Portland. There's many images that really are evocative of Portland's development. I also want to thank the Quimby Family Foundation and Main Arts Commission for making that exhibition possible, as well as the Portland Public Library. Then this lecture tonight is also made possible by the library and Ocean Gate Realty, which is our sponsor for the lecture series, and then part of our 50th anniversary, which is a great series of programs, the exhibition, the lecture series, this summer we'll be having some special tours. There's a lecture by Morrison Heckscher from the Metropolitan Museum of Art coming up in April. The whole series is sponsored by the Dead River Company who's our lead sponsor, and also J.B. Brown and Sons, and the Danforth Group of Wells Fargo Advisors and an anonymous donor. So thanks to all of them, we're able to present a series of special programs this year for you. I'd also like to mention a publication. For those of you who are very long-term landmarks people, you remember the advisory service has been doing on-site visits at homes and properties throughout the greater Portland area for almost the entire existence of our 50 years. They got a new book out called Living with Newer Old Houses, and we have a few copies available also for you to look at and buy if you'd like out of the desk. Now, the last thing I want to mention before we start is that we have another lecture in this series, and the speaker of that lecture is here tonight, Deb Andrews, just walked in, and that is going to be on February 25th on the Portland Historic Preservation Program and its impact on Portland's historic neighborhoods, February 25th here at the Rhines Auditorium. Now, I'm going to introduce our speakers, and as I was saying earlier, you couldn't have three better people to talk about the preservation movement in Portland. All coming from different angles, all with lots of experience to share with us, and they all live in, well, almost all of them. One works in Portland most of the time, and the others live in Portland, so we're lucky to have such experts here in our midst. First, I'm going to introduce Lee Urban. Lee was born in Portland, and he's considered the city's home all his life. He's raised four children here, several cats, two dogs, and lived in the same historic house since 1976 in the West End. He's had many careers, and I have to say, Lee is, I totally admire someone who's able to do so many different things. He's been a real estate lawyer, non-profit consultant, executive director of an AIDS lodging house, corporate officer, mediator. He was director of the Planning and Development Department for the city of Portland, and now is an elementary school teacher, so Lee is taking on challenges anywhere they come from. And he served on a lot of community boards, including Greater Portland Landmarks and the First District Preservation Board in Portland, and he says, and I love this, if you consider Landmarks Board one of the most interesting and exciting boards you've ever been on, so that's wonderful. Chris Kloss is sitting next to Lee, joined Landmarks and Main Preservation in July 2009 as our field services representative, serving all the communities of Maine, including the Greater Portland Region with advice on historic preservation. He has over 30 years of experience as a consultant in planning, preservation, and community development to municipalities, government agencies, private and institutional clients. His expertise integrates historic preservation and community planning, including adaptive use of historic commercial and industrial structures and innovative approaches to downtown revitalization. Chris is a graduate of the University of Vermont master's program in historic preservation, formerly served on the northeast regional office of the National Trust, and founded his own company based in New Hampshire, and actually Chris lives in New Hampshire, but commutes to Portland every week, so we're lucky to have him here. He started his own business in 1979. And then finally Pam Hawks. Pam is a principal with Scattergood Design, a new firm here in Portland, Maine. She has a particular interest in new interpretations of historic sites for contemporary lives. She previously served as principal at Ann Beha and associates architects in Boston for 26 years, and she directed award-winning projects, including the Courier Art Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire, transforming the Charles Street Jail into Boston's Liberty Hotel, and renovation of the Cambridge Public Library. She's also done projects in Maine, including the McClellan House and Sweat Galleries of the Portland Museum of Art, and also the Adaptive Reuse of the Warehouse in Bangor as the University of Maine Museum of Art. Pam is a graduate of Williams College and has an architecture degree from, a degree in historic preservation from Columbia University and an architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and she's got an incredible list of awards and board memberships, but I'll mention just two. She was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is currently on the board of the James Marston Fitch Foundation in New York and on the U.S. General Services Administration's National Register of Professional Peers. So this is our panel for this evening, so I'm really looking forward to your remarks this evening, and we'll start, I think, with Lee, so welcome. Nice to see so many people here and a lot of, I won't say old faces, long time faces. So much has happened in preservation since the 70s that I couldn't really describe all of it, and that's assuming I could even remember all of it, but what I'm going to do to limit my presentation is to, it's called Observations on the Evolution of Historic Preservation Practice. I'm going to just tell you what I literally observed, what I saw with my own eyes, not what I heard about or anything like that, and I was very fortunate to be involved at a time when preservation had a lot of, still does, but a lot of exciting issues. As Hillary said, I was born and raised in Portland, grew up here, joined the Navy literally, saw the world literally, came back in 1976, and with a much greater appreciation of the impact of place on people, on me, on people, and that seemed to mean something to me, but talking about Union Station, 1961, I did observe that in the newspaper. I was a sophomore in high school, I had some real important things on my mind, like studies, girls, tennis, things like that. Union Station didn't mean much to me, except I remembered waiting in the waiting room for my grandfather to come on the train, so I missed it, I missed it, sort of like that, Joni Mitchell song, you don't know what you've got till it's gone, oh, I think that was something important, and that contributed. So after that demolition and coming back, I realized that buildings do have an impact on place and after working as a real estate lawyer for a couple years and starting a family, I signed up with Landmarks, got on the board and Portland then and still is a great place where, if you express an interest, and that's sort of what they did to me, so I got in the pipeline and I joined up when Landmarks had just moved to State Street, couple of doors out from St. Luke's and it was a small place, crowded, jammed, filled with excitement, filled with great people, wonderful people who were working hard, they were, someone who were pretty new to preservation like me, some were the grand ladies like Franny Peabody, so you were rubbing shoulders with all kinds of people but no one can do anything in preservation except as part of a team and so that early Landmarks board was a, I felt was a great team. I was very fortunate, again I say fortunate because all you have to do is say I'll do it and you get grabbed so I started as chair of the Public Issues Committee, I think it was called Public Fairs and then chair of the Revolving Fund Committee and then ended up as a president of Landmarks. The Revolving Fund, it's still around, according to Chris, was trying to be very active. It was originally funded with some proceeds of a historic building, the whole Howe House and then some federal grants, $40,000 I think and the plan for Revolving Fund is you have a pile of money and you go out and you buy a building that no one else wants to buy because it's in pretty sad shape. You fix it up, you find a buyer, usually you try to find a buyer before you bought the building and you attach covenants and restrictions that helped to, I keep whacking that, helped to get Landmarks to have their foot in the door on maintenance and repair. That worked for a while except that building started going up in prices so we started just loaning the money and we would loan the money to people who were doing rehabs when either the bank wasn't giving enough money or the interest rate was too high, we'd go in. We'd like to say we'd go in when no one else would appear to tread. We also felt that even if we ran out of money, that was good because we were going where no one else would go and at least we got buildings that were fixed up. Talk about fixing up a building with the Revolving Fund and a lot of other money. Landmarks got involved with the HHA building and we all know about that in 1978. It was no one wanted to buy it. It was an absolute wreck. The owner threatened to open a Burger King franchise on the first floor. Fort Museum of Art was making some rumblings about moving maybe to the Libby building but we didn't really know for sure and the Libby building was right across from the HHA building. So a bunch of us at Landmarks said that this is an obvious Revolving Fund money at that time, not project. At that time, Joel Russ was the executive director and he had an incredible knack of getting money from the feds, getting money from the state and doing matches that matched this and therefore that would leverage this and leverage that. We used some Revolving Fund money and we went out to try to see what we could do but before we could do that we had to negotiate. I ended up being a negotiator with the buyer but much to our surprise I was a negotiator negotiating with the board of Landmarks. So this was not an easy project for the board. This was a big project. We've never done anything like this. It was a very important project to the square, Congress square and it was a very public project. This wasn't one of these things that was just down the alley. This was a centerpiece project. So there was a lot of debate on the board as to whether we should really do this. Was it really too risky? Ultimately, after many months, a vote was taken and we moved forward. At the time we were also working with Doug Carden, who's here in the office and his partner Joe Volas and they stepped up and this was despite, I'm not sure if Doug knew this, despite we having a real estate appraisal that said, even if Landmarks did the exterior renovation, the appraisal said the value of that property is still minus $60,000. So it was a big step up. Did you know that, Doug? I'm sorry. It worked out, it worked out. So now Landmarks is involved in more than just the small time historic privatization. We were really putting our money, we were walking the walk, talking the talk, doing things and I think we gained a lot of respect and I think as a result of that, we started working with the city of Portland and I helped with the team negotiate the lease for the Portland Observatory where Landmarks took over the maintenance and repair and I think that was the first time that now Landmarks had a very formal, mutually respectful relationship with the city of Portland. In 1978, many in the legal community and I was a lawyer at that point were aware of something coming down the pipeline called the Penn Central case. Not sure how many of you have heard it and I won't bore you to tears with all of the details but it formed the legal underpinnings for the historic preservation ordinance and for historic preservation really throughout the United States. Basically it was the Penn Central Transportation Company owned Grand Central Terminal and wanted to build a 55 story building above it to get more value out of the property. The New York Landmarks Commission said, no, that's not gonna work. They had declared it a landmark already. Penn Central appealed here and there. Ultimately it went to the New York Supreme Court which held in their favor and said that because Landmark Commission had named it a landmark and it said no, it had decreased the value of private property. In other words, it had taken private property without just compensation and that's not allowed in the U.S. Constitution and that's the way it should be. After that case, we in the preservation community, the legal community were saying, I'm not sure how this is gonna work. Went to the U.S. Supreme Court, 1978 William Brennan, Justice William Brennan in a six to three decision, basically held, yep, the city can do that. The city can designate something as a landmark and have restrictions. He wrote the following just so you wanna stand exactly what the question was. The question presented is whether a city may as part of a comprehensive program to preserve historic landmarks and historic districts, think historic preservation ordinance, place restrictions on the development of individual landmarks in addition to those imposed by zoning without affecting a taking without taking property. Can you have something that says no, you can't do that to your private property. Is that a taking? Court said not necessarily. What the community has to do has to make real sure that that building or that area or that district has a public benefit. And it also really has to safeguard the rights of private property. So it's a balancing, it's a balancing. Yes, you can if you do this. To say the preservation community was elated would be an understatement because we now had the tool. Justice Brennan had said historic preservation contributes to quality of life he said it enhances the quality of life for all. So figured we're not home free but now's the time for the historic preservation ordinance. Two months later, the then city council said no and voted it down. We had to try again because we had to have an ordinance because without standards in the zoning ordinance which really weren't speaking then specifically to historic properties or to building committees, building codes which have always been woefully behind work on historic properties. Without those standards, landmarks and other preservationists couldn't really have any say, any standing, any right to stand in front of planning boards and say I don't think that's a good idea. But historic preservation ordinance did come and it came long after. There's much debate, much controversy, countless drafts. I happen to think that as a result of landmarks with their work of the HHA building with the Portman Observatory that landmarks we had some credibility that we knew a bit about private property because we had gotten involved with Doug and Joe Bowis on a massive bit of private property and it all worked out. We were definitely at the table negotiating over and over and we had people, we had Deb here were providing information. We had National Trust were providing information from other localities throughout the country and then in 1990 it passed. It passed with a lot of compromises. Some of them are being made up for now but a lot of compromises to get the historic preservation ordinance. One which is hardly a compromise but we were the historic preservation committee. We were not the preservation board. And we haven't forbid, we couldn't think of ourselves as a planning board or the historic preservation board and certainly not a commission when in fact nationally most of them were called preservation commission. Whoop, we said that's fine, I get too excited. That's fine, we said we can live with that. I was fortunate enough to be the chair of the first historic preservation committee and I think we denied only one application in the two years that I was chair. People were wondering what would be fair, what would be strict, how consistent would we be? And I always felt that we were laying the keel for the rest of the practice of preservation on the committee now board I'm pleased to say. We had a committee made up of people who really did listen, who really responded appropriately. There was a lot of back and forth give and take and I think although we never said it, it was and you hear this phrase more and more that we didn't let perfect become the enemy of good but we knew that good was good. Good was not just good enough so there was a lot of back and forth and the one that we did deny just didn't want any back and forth so that's how that worked. I think we, that may remember how many but we had a lot of applications and I still drive around and they still work. Then came the Merrill Auditorium. That was a project that was completed in 1993. I was involved in something called CARES, C-A-R-E-E-S which was standing for Citizens for the Auditorium Restoration and it was filled with people. I was a Johnny come lately. Again, I was one of these things who said, two minutes who said I'd like to help out and so I ended up helping out and we raised the enthusiasm in the community that led to the city council voting for a bond that was critical necessary to continue funding. I was also in the building committee which came up with a world-class acquisition and a local architect who came up with a plan because the idea was to make the hall acoustically almost perfect for the organ, for the symphony, for people coming. So we had a world-class acquisition. Great plan, but great plan acoustically but design-wide, but no, that's the only plan. That's it, that's all you can have. If you wanna have acoustics, it's got a m-m-m which involved taking out balconies and doing a lot of other things. So I remember standing in what was then the first balcony of the Merrill showing it to the preservation community, seven or eight people and they didn't have glazed eyes and the jars didn't drop but they might as well have and they left and they came back months later with something called the second opinion committee. They found a world-class acquisition and a local architect and that's what you see. That's what you see now. I have a painting of what it would have been but I was sort of too embarrassed to bring that one. What you see is what you get. I think every one of us who still walks in as I do in my chore does drop out of joy. We have the second opinion committee to thank for that. 1999, with the approval of the city manager and the city council, I became economic development director and then we combined two departments and I became the planning and development director. The first department was the economic development department and the other one was then called the planning and urban development department. Urban wasn't gonna work except for my mother and I became the planning and development department. The idea was to promote communication and not confrontation instead of having economic development bumping into the planners and all of that. It was to sit down and I think it worked. I think we got some things done. I thought we got a lot of stuff done. We'll see how that turns out. Another totally different observation. I'm wrapping up. Talk about the hay building. What? What? What? Talk about the hay building. What? There are a lot of forward models, fascinating models. You know, from another point, it doesn't need to be a big project. Sorry, okay. It doesn't need to be a big project. I think one of the secret sleeper projects in Portland is the Boothby Square Fountain. I don't think many people know it was here for years. It disappeared. I'm skipping over a lot of facts and it reappeared. And it's a perfect example of the collaboration between public and private. Things happened. I kept notes, it's about this thick, of what it was involved to get that Boothby Square. Not by me, by all of us working on it. So it doesn't have to be a major project. If you don't notice it, that's good. It's because it's just part of the landscape. Well, it wasn't for many years. Miss Portman Diner, my favorite place. Miss Portman Diner. A diner, got moved, public-private, community. How many meetings do I see down in a booth at the Miss Portman Diner? So that works. So, where are we now? I'm gonna defer to Pam who's gonna try to wrap everything up but I would say two things. I think the concept of historic preservation has expanded far beyond historic and far beyond preservation. Far beyond that, we do much more than that. And secondly, I think that's good. I think that's very good. I think it's good for everyone here, including myself who live, play and work in Ivory City. Thank you. Thanks, Lee. You did it. We said we'd have fun and so you've let us off on the right foot. Good evening, everyone. In preparing for this, I felt a little bit like I was attending an appearance on This Was Your Life. I've been in this field a long time and to concentrate on a presentation like this, and to look back 40 years and to consult various manuscripts, documents, the internet, photographs, some of myself was a bit alarming but at the same time, that reminds me of a couple of things that need to be said tonight. And one is that we're now looking at what had been a movement, at least in the early days. I'm saying the early days because I got into the field in the early 70s. What was a movement is now a profession and a professional discipline. I think it's actually arrived at that point so that we can safely say that. I want to first lead off, I'm actually breaking stride here and I'm gonna try to pick up the pace as I move along. But I wanna pay a tribute to women. As I went through the background and looked at not only the last 40 years, but all the way back to Anne Pamela Cunningham in the mid-19th century, it can't be said often enough that the influence of women in this field has been both significant and dramatic at times. And it continues. And I wish I had statistics tonight to be able to tell you what the preponderance of women is in our field today. I have a feeling it's at the break-even point with the men that have been in the field, but I think you are actually growing in numbers. And I think that's been a powerful force for us over time for lots of reasons. A couple of other things I wanted to say before I get into the body of this. Preservation's agenda is now a part of everyone else's agenda or if not everyone else, the people that we were aiming at certainly beginning in the 60s and 70s. That's an advancement, that's success. I hear that in meetings that I go to at the planning department, at the economic development department, at Merida, at the library, lots of places. I want to reinforce something that Lee said in a little different way. In the early days, preservationists had to be rather aggressive sorts and be willing to to get out there in front of often heavy machinery. But I think looking back, we can say now that the difference between having to be right and simply being accurate and correct is a subtle one. But one we might think about as we negotiate our way forward and draw victories where once they were thought to be difficult to attain. And finally, this is the anecdotal section, the people in preservation. Think about it. Haven't some of the greatest characters you've met been preservationists? All right, I'm going to get into the serious part of this that sounds like an ancient history professor. Before I do that, one last thought. One of the things I wanted to be able to do in summarizing my piece of this today was to be able to say to you, this is the vanguard now. This is the spear point of our activity, of our thrust into social affairs, into architecture, into planning, engineering. I was not able to do that. There are too many. But I will say, and that's because preservation has become increasingly diversified and Pam's going to talk about that in her remarks so I won't seal her thunder. But I'm going to come close by saying that the leading edge today is probably in real estate activity, things like revolving funds which are used extensively by nonprofits and to a lesser degree, but as importantly, particularly in places where you're unable to create a historic district for political reasons, is the instrument of the preservation easement. That is a one-on-one negotiation with an owner which can sometimes say the building even if the district fails to be designated. Okay, now let me jump into this. This was intended, the title of our presentation tonight was intended to pick up where Greg Paxton and Jack Baum had left off last fall. And both Greg and Jack ended up in the late 60s and there's going to be a little bit of overlap here in my slides, but that's what we're going to try to do. Do a little bit of taking account of where we've been, something of a measured critique of what was tried and perhaps didn't succeed too well and then some of the things that we would acknowledge as tentative victories which are yet to be concluded. So I recall in 1976, first being presented with a definition for the then emerging field discipline of historic preservation. Chester Leaves, who was a Columbia graduate and ended up being the founding director of the University of Vermont program in which I was enrolled at the time, said, and I'm paraphrasing here to keep it short, historic preservation is a planning tool for managing change. And that stuck with me for the better part of the last 35 years. And there's much in that that is unsaid but embodied in that simple statement, portions of which I hope to examine this evening. Over time my views have broadened as I've labored in the fields of both community planning and preservation. In preparing for this evening it occurred to me that historic preservation, one might argue, to use an aviation metaphor of all things has been the necessary trailing edge of America's manifest destiny. It's the instrument which records and preserves the story in the physical realm of the turbulence and backwash of the tectonic cultural shift of westward expansion that we recognize today as our national experience, the one that was preceded by the colonial experience. It is also the planning instrument which we used presently to protect, maintain, interpret, and reutilize the physical artifacts of our built environment which interprets the settlement of an entire continent and marks the country's advancement and growth at the local, state, and national levels. Manifest Destiny was a bold new world experiment which gained momentum following the close of the American Revolution and extended to 1890 when the US government declared that the Western frontier was now closed. Now the frontier of space confronts us. From Lewis and Clark's expedition of 1803 to the Gold Rush in 1849 and all of the other land rushes which followed, the great en masse migration, many of them immigrants, was predicated upon the notion of unlimited land, water, energy, minerals, timber, and human labor combined with the growing technology and capital associated with rapid industrialization. And yes, the displacement and extinguishment of the Native American culture and its way of life. Now with hindsight just over a century later in light of rising environmental costs that we find we are incurring, is the growing realization that Manifest Destiny while arguably inevitable at that time was likely founded absent a plan for careful stewardship upon the false premise of endless bounty. Our still developing comprehension and the cost of this continental phenomenon continues to manifest itself today only more locally in the contemporary land use pattern we have dubbed suburbanization or less affectionately sprawl. And it's close associate within the more urban social context, gentrification. One of the most important observations about preservation that I wish to convey this evening regarding the period of focus 1970 to the present is the notion of convergence. And in particular the convergence of the relatively recent sustainability movement with the principles, values and practices of preservation. Increasingly our public secondary educational institutions have de-emphasized and sidetracked the disciplines of history and art further into a subordinated zone of popular irreverence in favor of promoting understandably on a technical level STEM oriented study tracks, science, technology, engineering, mathematics. But we need both. The folly of this policy has shortchanged in my opinion much of the collective national memory for at least a generation, if not more. Collective memory and informed citizenry is a critical shared intellectual resource, one essential to the maintenance of our democratic form of government. The very essence of our jurisprudence depends upon the social memory as does averting descent into social chaos. My second point, and admonition really, and made more poignant by the observance of the 50th anniversary of the formation of greater Portland landmarks this year, is that those of us in the fields of preservation, planning and architecture, to name just a few, as well as our community leaders, have a solemn duty and an added responsibility in our respected professions. This responsibility extends beyond administration of our codes, our zoning ordinances, our building conservation standards, and reaches across into community attitudes and resource use policy making. We call this leadership. We must assure our children, our neighbors, our fellow citizens, our visitors, even the world community, through both education and exemplary decision making, that our contemporary and future practices in the planning and management of our built environment, those resources recognized and recalled in our historic downtowns, districts, neighborhoods, sites, structures, buildings, landscapes, objects, and monuments, are seen not only as enlightened but inclusive, as well as innovative, and perhaps most importantly, sustainable by future generations. If we will not help lead, then who will? In the time I have remaining, I'd like to examine some of the setting factors which I think characterize the rapid growth of this field after 1970, a field that we have begun to rename now as simply preservation, rather than historic preservation. Catch me, eh? So, let me see if I can screen in front of me. So, I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this part, the overlap period that I'm calling it. From 1949 to about 1970, let's look at a couple of the things that happened. The National Trust for Historic Preservation was chartered by the Congress as the only, and the still only, sole private sector preservation organization at the national level. Two minutes, thank you. Some other things happened. In 1949, the American Housing Act was passed. That created urban renewal, which had a more than lengthy life that many were happy to see expire in 1986. You can look at some of the numbers and the magnitude of that program and some of the damage that it was considered to have brought. That being said, it was certainly founded with good intentions. Here's an example. This was probably the pinnacle of urban renewal thinking in 1952, the construction of the 33 buildings complex of the Pruitt-Igo Towers in St. Louis. Designed by a modernist architect, Menorio Yamasaki, said to say that he and his firm were also the architects of the World Trade Center. The advancements in the period of 1964-70 were also significant. We saw the publication of the book with Heritage So Rich by the National Chamber of Commerce. This had a direct bearing on the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act, probably the single most important piece of legislation affecting our field in 1966. It created the National Register of Historic Places. It created Section 106 Review. It set up the structure for the state and local partnership that we have today, which is still the test of time. We also saw the passage of the National Transportation Act in the same year, and without going into any detail on that, I'll just say that Section 4F, the parallel piece of segment of legislation in that act was included in that passage of that statute. And then finally, the capstone of many of our experiences of going through Earth Day, the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, which for the first time included at a national level the requirement that one must take account in projects that require an environmental impact statement, one must take account of historical resources. Post 1970 events, this was a very prolific period between 1972 and 1986. In fact, I will say to you that my talk tonight is weighted toward that end of the spectrum rather than the 90s and into the end of this century. Among those was Nixon signing the first of the executive orders that brought the other federal agencies into line following their reluctance to observe the specifications of the Act of 1966. Executive Order 1153 was later along with other executive orders folded into the Code of Federal Regulations that we have today that regulate the practice of preservation at the federal level. Excuse me. National Trust for Historic Preservation established its system of regional offices throughout the country in 1974, which later grew to six offices nationwide. On the economic front, we saw the tax reform of 1976 enacted for the first time this level of the playing field between rehabilitation and new construction. It eliminated deductions for demolition and it put in place accelerated depreciation for rehabilitation of properties that were listed in the National Register of Historic Places. That's probably one of the most single revolutionary events that we have in the last four years. Lee has mentioned the Penn Central case, all I will say in addition to that is is that it's been challenged numerous times but it stood the test of time. In 1977, the National Trust published this poster partly in reaction to the 1973-74 oil crisis which we suffered and many of us remember. It's a very poignant look at what buildings do. Am I out of time? Okay. How will I do this? Okay. So we'll show you the Pruitt-Igoe Towers, I'll give you a minute, Hillary, I'll wrap it up. Now this is what became of that complex. It didn't survive about 20 years before they took down all 33 buildings because of the flawed social engineering and to some degree the architecture that went into the construction of the complex. In 1980, Main Street was launched. You'll have to read some of these things so I can speed right along. You can see the growth of that program. This is one of the things that I wanna point out that inspired the concept of what I will call incrementalism, taking things one step at a time in small bites and that's how successes were built. The period of the 80s was a boom period following the close of the recession of 81 which was rather short. We saw that the federal tax law was changed again this time to create a 25% tax credit. I just want you to look at some of those numbers, the order of magnitude from 1976 to now, the billions that have been spent on 38,000 historic properties that have been rehabilitated. I don't have time to talk about the charitable deduction for preservation easements but that's been important as well. It all slowed down in 86 just before that recession. I'm old enough now where I can actually start to look at my life in terms of the recessions. Somebody said once, you haven't really lived yet until you've been through a full economic cycle. Well, I think I qualify now. So after 86, the tax credit program survived but it slowed down because it eliminated a class of investors that had fueled the program for the first seven or eight years. Pleased to say that I was a participant in one of the first tax credit programs in the nation, the rehabilitation of the Bangor House in this state in 1979. Okay, I'm gonna let you read that. Trent, this is my last slide, Hillary. Here's where I think we've been. This is the shift that's occurred. We've gone from individual sites to thinking now more globally in terms of districts. Who knows where we go from here? Maybe we'll start thinking more about whole regional landscapes. Decentralization and regionalism, that's been key at both the national park service level and with the national trust. It's created and spurred the growth of state and local historic preservation entities, great important landmarks being one of them. Women in preservation, I can't say enough about that. Incrementalism I've mentioned. This is an odd drag on the entire field. Full funding for the National Historic Preservation Act which was mandated to use offshore gas and oil leases on the east coast to fuel the program has been an elusive pursuit. It's never been fully funded in all the years that we've had the funding for it. And finally, education and jobs, both growing in the field. Thank you very much. Thanks, Chris. It's such a pleasure to be here. I grew up in Cape Elizabeth and I can remember walking down Congress Street as a teenager with the locally owned fine clothing stores like Porches and Benoites and WT Grants and three movie theaters. Of course, I also know that dining out consisted of steak, lobster and spaghetti. I came back to Portland after graduating from college in 1976 trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and volunteered for landmarks, laying out their newsletter and designing some of their brochures. And then I left for 40 years. Going to graduate school, working around the country. And so it's been really a lot of fun and then came back here as a permanent resident just two years ago and started a new firm. So this panel has really been a nice chance to think about how Portland has changed since I left and also how preservation has changed since I entered the field. And a lot of fun to hear the perspectives that both Lee and Chris have shared as well. They've set such a nice background that I thought what I might do is to really dwell more on the philosophical, think a little bit about what we're preserving and why we're doing it. Since the rescue of Mount Burrin in the 1850s, the first 100 years of preservation were really focused on saving single family houses and the solution was to make them museums. It's easy to see why Margaret Musse sweat, one of those women in preservation, donated the McClellan mansion to the Portland Society of Art in 1912. It stands on a prominent corner. It was associated with important people. I would add typically wealthy, Anglo-Saxon and male. And it's an outstanding example of federal period architecture. It was the best. Union Station was a wake-up call that everyday buildings are significant. And the renovation of the HHA building and the Thomas block demonstrated that they could be commercially viable too. Now, as Chris has mentioned, we've expanded our focus to boats and bridges, neighborhoods and cultural landscapes and have recognized those by listing on the National Register. But it's important as the kinds of buildings that we're saving are the people that they represent. Over the past four decades, we've discovered places that were Native Americans and African Americans, Irish and Italians, factory workers and jazz singers lived, worked and worshiped. The Abyssinian Meeting House on Manjoy Hill is really a wonderful example of this. It's a real contrast to the McClellan Mansion. I think it was built to be low-key and kind of under the radar. It's a vernacular building that's been much altered and well and hard used. A generation ago, it might have slipped away and taken away the remarkable stories of generations of Portland's African American citizens. Portland in 2014 is much more diverse than it was 50 years ago in terms of race, religion and language. How can Portland's heritage empower recent immigrants from Cambodia and Vietnam, Somalia and the Soviet Union? And how will their contributions be marked in the years to come? Digital technology is making everyone's histories more accessible and more engaging. We've come a long way since the days when I used rubber cement to paste up typewritten copy and my own pen and ink drawings to create every month's landmarks observer. History isn't confined to books. Via the web, people are gaining access to historical and technical data that was once reserved for the experts. And they're creating their own stories in the process. In this interactive age, standing behind a velvet rope and listening to a docents tour has become much less satisfying. So has schlepping guidebooks around. Imagine standing on a street corner and pulling out your phone and discovering the history of nearby landmarks with historic photographs, with alternate viewpoints, maybe music of the period or even the voices of the owners themselves. It's already happening. The Portland Public Art Committee has created a wonderful new website and there will be QR codes on the sculptures that you can hold your phone up to to learn more about the sculptures and the history of their design. New Orleans has an app for the architectural history which you can download for $299. And what's out there is another app from the Cultural Landscape Foundation that allows access to a growing database of information about cultural landscapes all around the country. Chris told me that he's using Google Earth to do preliminary architectural surveys of historic districts, what we used to call windshield surveys when we did them in automobiles. And it's only a matter of time before sites like GreatBuildings.com will enable you to walk through the Paris Assent Chappelle without leaving the comfort of your Portland living room although I would add that the opportunities for fine dining afterwards may, well, I should say they may even be as good as Paris. It may become another way of preserving historic sites and maybe allowing us to experience them after they've been demolished. New media can build support for preservation. How might they influence what and how we preserve? Art can also shine a light on the past. Artists have been important players in Portland's preservation. First, by making the old port fashionable, then by keeping Congressry going in the 1980s and 90s. It's a phenomenon that's not unique to Portland. In 1968, just a few years after our starting point here, Donald Judd purchased 101 Spring Street in New York, a 19th century cast-iron loft building. It was the start of a phenomenon that's made loft synonymous with contemporary art and then with hip retail restaurants and boutique hotels. Today, it's the only intact single-use cast-iron building remaining in Soho. It's the headquarters of Judd's private foundation and also one of the founding sites in the National Trust's program called Historic Artists' Homes and Studios, a nationwide consortium that also includes the Winslow Homer Studio here in Maine. Equally important, artists can offer unique and powerful insights into historic sites. The Eastern State Penitentiary, a national historic landmark, was constructed in 1828 but abandoned in the 1970s. It's been open to the public since the 1990s and preserved largely as a ruin. The nonprofit that operates it has used art installations as a way to explore the site's history, making connections with today's criminal justice system and humanizing the very challenging subjects of punishment and incarceration. I was really so excited to see up the Biennale at the Portland Museum last fall where the rooms of the McClellan House, Margaret Mussie's drawing room, was used for art installations. How exciting might it be to have artists create temporary installations that would focus attention on the buildings and sites that are included in landmark's most endangered list every year? Portland's become more creative in the 21st century. Chefs and sculptors, clothing and web designers are all helping fuel our economy. Artists have been preservationists and preservation has become more inclusive but preservation activities often threaten artists, immigrants and other low income residents. In Portland, like so many other cities, artists and immigrants tended to settle in the least desirable and least expensive areas. Typically, those were the areas that had the oldest and the most poorly maintained buildings. They also were typically the first targets of urban renewal, like the Franklin Arterial. The industry areas still shows traces of the Italian and Jewish immigrants that were displaced in the 1960s. What will happen to the residents of the East End, Bayside and other neighborhoods when the middle class moves in must preservation always equal gentrification. Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas demonstrates that you can support preservation, artists and low income residents too. This included 22 shotgun houses built in the 1930s as tenant shacks. They were derelict by the 1990s when they were bought by artist Rick Rowe and a coalition of others with seed money from the National Endowment for the Arts and Private Foundations. Corporations and volunteers added their labor and it's become a public art project that integrates artists and the families that have lived there for a hundred years. It offers eight houses for visiting artists as well as a home for single mothers who are trying to finish their education and new housing designed by architecture students from Rice University nearby. The formula has been such a success that it's expanding far beyond its five blocks to other parts of the city too. In Portland, projects like the North School, St. Dominic's and many others have shown that with preservation and housing tax credits and other programs, rehabilitation can preserve neighborhoods and the low income families that live there. Like Portland, preservation is more creative than it was 50 years ago. The options are not just restoration and preservation but adaptive reuse and much freer transformations of the historic fabric, something that Europe has been doing for not just decades but centuries. Schwartz-Silver's addition and renovation to the main historical society a few years ago is a great example of distinctive contemporary design as a companion to a landmark. So is Scott Simon's transformation of this building which is not a historic building but certainly stands as a landmark. In the Mercado, Santa Catarina and Barcelona is a very exuberant example of this. Architects Enrique Merales and Benedetta Talebue transformed an mid-19th century market building in the middle of one of Barcelona's worst slums. They retained the masonry walls and some of the roof trusses but not all of it. Inside there are about 60 market stalls intermixed with cafes, restaurants and community services bringing new life to the whole area. This large, the entire complex is covered with this wonderful undulating metal tile roof. It's clearly contemporary but it's also contextual. The red, yellow and green hexagons echo the colorful vegetable displays within and the robust structural system. For me you really recalls the wonderful and expressive vaulting of Antonin Gaudí's Sacrata Familia which is such a landmark in Barcelona. It's been embraced by the local community and even become a local icon reproduced on travel posters and buses. Landmarks are becoming more youthful while at the same time we're challenging. As this month's preservation magazine reminds us, modernism is one of the next frontiers. Organizations like Docomomo have called attention to the modernist resources and masterpieces in our own backyard. In my case, I'm Marcel Breuerhaus, just a few doors down from the Colonial Revival House that I grew up in in Cape Elizabeth. Haystack is a modernist icon that I think we all admire and it's no surprise that was placed on the national register in 2005 when even before it became 50 years old. But not everyone loves modernism. It's hard for me to believe that something built in my lifetime can actually be historic. Buildings from the 1950s and 60s are also post-technical challenges. They're often built of materials that haven't stood the test of time and their envelopes and mechanical systems are far from sustainable. The Houston Bakery, which we see in the foreground of this view from the 1960s, was designed by a nationally prominent industrial designer, Albert Kahn. I made a great deal of controversy. It became the USM Library in 1991. The structure was preserved, but its appearance was dramatically altered. With enhanced appreciation and technical knowledge, would we have done the same thing today? And I have to think about what might be the fate of this car dealership. Now the U-Haul headquarters built in 1963 when cars were really the expression of the American dream and marginal way was pretty hot. I think I end with a question because I think landmarks need to make room for the future. Our preservation needs to make room for the landmarks of the future. Lee talked about the loss of the Libby building and its replacement with the Portland Museum of Art, which I think we all agree was a good equation. If Portland's to be a vibrant, evolving city, preservationists have to recognize, promote and support great contemporary design. And contemporary designers need to learn from preservation and history, which is not something that happens very often in design schools. Landmarks 50th anniversary photo exhibit is entitled Images of Change. And it's a reminder that preservation can't stop change nor should it be, nor should it if it wants to be remain relevant. But I think it can help ensure that our city has the best possible future, one that's sustainable, equitable, inspiring and meaningful for everyone. So we have a few minutes for questions with our great pals. Anybody would like to throw out something for discussion? Do I see anybody? I had sort of a question, maybe, which would might be a summation thing, which would be what do you think the biggest challenge for preservation is in greater Portland and then sort of put that into a broader context international or nationally? Is it something, you raise a lot of good points, Pam, but in the greater Portland area, what do you think is the biggest challenge for this field?  I think preservation has been so much something that's focused on a really small segment of our population. And I think that Portland is really changing. I think that's the most exciting thing. And I think preservation really needs to begin to think about how it is relevant to a much wider group of people. I take a slightly different view and say that challenge of energy going forward is starting to be and will continue to be a very large challenge, particularly for older and spacious buildings. This is not just about saving oil or keeping warm. We're now beginning to see a spread in the real estate market between buildings that are highly energy efficient and the values, the fair market values of those properties compared to other comparable buildings which have not received energy efficiency improvements. If that spreads to the neighborhoods, talking about commercial buildings now, if that spreads to the neighborhoods, we're all in trouble. So one of the suggestions that I would have would be that the National Park Service and those who safeguard our ordinances at the state and local level, building codes as well as historic district ordinances need to take a fresh and serious look about how we're gonna confront the challenge of addressing rising energy costs. One of the things that will come up will be how do we incorporate alternative energy equipment on historic buildings that are protected under current ordinances by virtue of their exterior architectural appearance and detail? Back in the day, when in Portland you could buy a building in the old port for $4,500, you could put a lot of sweat equity into a building and rehabilitate it. Where are the opportunities for young people or grassroots activism and preservation today? It's different. What are the opportunities for young people to get involved in the old days? You'd find a wreck of a building come up with $2,500 and go at it. But what do you do today when you can't? There's a lot that's been taken already. By my experience, again, it's a personal experience, I have four kids, four adult children, and they all wanna come back to Portland and they really can't. I won't name the town that my daughter said, but she said, Dad, do I have to live in and think of something about 40 miles away from Portland? And I think there are enough far better real estate people than me in this room, but the pricing, what we've found, I've found, I live in some neighbors here in historic houses, and even if they are the handyman special we used to call them, the price reflects all I know what you're going to do and I know you're gonna be able to turn this into something, really increase the value, so I wanna get a piece of that value now, so I think it's very difficult to find those handyman specials now. I would just opine as a footnote to that that I think we're going to see more of the phenomenon known as co-housing or community housing, particularly for the elderly, but I would guess that the younger folks will respond to that concept equally as well. There's no other way to finance it. You need more partners on the prices of this sign. Thank you Pam, I think that's a great place to go to our final thing this evening. We have a very special discovery that Lee Urban and is going to, and Doug Cardetti is going to share with us. This has to do with the hay building and that bold move that Lee and the board decided to take at great risk and we all have those moments on boards trying to figure out that right move. Are we going to risk and what are we gonna do and is it going to turn out to be a good outcome or not and certainly the hay building has been a great outcome and so I'm gonna invite Lee and Doug to step forward with this interesting and special thing they discovered to share with you. I'm gonna let Doug introduce himself but when you go into an old building let's face it the fun part is to walk through the basement before the renovation begins and see what you can find there and I didn't get down to the basement as fast as Doug did and so he did the renovations and so Doug would it, why don't you introduce yourself? Well I'm Doug Cardetti and I was one of the unfortunate people that got involved in the hay building. It was $60,000 less? Less, yes, you made up for it. Well I can remember when Lee approached Joe and myself with the idea of doing a hay building it's hard to think back that nobody was interested.  And like Lee had said, the museum wasn't really there yet and the building had broken windows and all of the nice architecture had been weathered and that particular building is so narrow like a flat iron as there were three staircases in it to begin with. We had it out of four because of exits, no elevators. It was a neat building but it was basically functionally obsolete. But in any event we said, well when Lee started crying that kind of got us, we took pity on him and we really didn't know what we were doing but we did it and it worked out well. But in the process, the first thing we needed to do was to clean it out to see what the heck we had and so you climbed up these very narrow staircases and years ago that's where all their accounting department and marketing department, the HHA organization had more than just that building. There was one in the south end, there's one on the east end and I think some others. And over time it had dwindled down to being just the corner drugstore on the bottom floor selling mostly cigarettes and gum I think and what upstairs was just a collection of anything that they didn't need anymore. They threw it upstairs and sadly to say they were just piles of all those cardboard cutouts of the alpha cells avoid and what I mean just so many if there was one you would say to really keep them but there were friends of them and so we just had the guys pick it up and throw it out the window sadly to say and on the floor up there was this and so I picked it up and I'm looking at it and it's Edward Hayes, a licensed to be a pharmacist which was granted to him in February 1888 and so I said, well, I guess I'll keep this and because there's only one of them and so I don't think there's any more around and so we saved it and I'd like to present it to Lamox and as you can tell if it wasn't for Lee the hay building would have been going really Lee Urban saved that building and he deserves a lot of credit for it, that's the truth. Thank you very much for coming this evening if you'd like to take a look at the certificate we'll have it be up here on the stage we appreciate your attendance tonight and look forward to seeing you for Deb Andrews talk on February 25th right here at six o'clock, thanks again.


tastes a little bit like a contagious monkey oh that's a hot mug guys hey guys this is my review for 12 monkeys this is one of the films suggested to me to review during this whole covid thing i'll be straight up honest i don't like this movie as much as other people do it's not because the film isn't well made it's got a absolutely ridiculously dedicated set deck team the production design in this film is phenomenal and on a level of insanity and that's something that terry gilliam is known for for being a perfectionist that's also why i don't like it i don't like terry gilliam movies i understand what the appeal is i understand why people like this guy he is a very unorthodox british film director he's the reason why montipython was the way it was montipython is weird humor but it's great weird humor and i just feel that his odd and unorthodox sort of filming techniques just didn't translate well over into this film even though it's actually a pretty well put together time travel movie the film star is bruce willis as he sent back in time to try and figure out what happened what caused this virus to destroy over 90 of the world's population everyone lives on the ground now animals rule the earth first time he lands back in time he actually goes to a psych ward and we meet brad pit who is this cuckoo bananas character and actually a very well done performance by brad pit one of the best performances he's ever done in my opinion it does help that he has that fake eye that's droopy all the time he is a different character from anything he's ever played before it's one of the best performances he's ever done same with bruce willis too bruce willis is just kind of looks like he's drugged out of his mind about the whole movie and technically he is there was actually a list that terry gilliam gave him of bruce willis movie tropes when they were filming this film and he says you can't do any of these you see a much different character from bruce willis and this is a time when bruce was actually really still cared about being a decent actor and a lot of the actors actually took a pay cut to help this movie be made because they wanted to work with terry you can see that because the production design the set design getting freaking elephants to come through philadelphia if that's exactly what actually happened that wasn't an incredibly costly shot it's kind of surprising that this movie was made by universal was produced by them and the fact that the movie came out at all in a western audience is still very peculiar to me because while the time travel aspects are pretty good the kind of mystery the multi-layered time travel discovery aspects of the film story are very well done i can't stand how this movie shot everything is a god damn dutch angle it's like watching battlefield earth admittedly there's a lot more work put into this it's not on the same level of literally hey tilt the camera this way tilt the camera this way it is really helping put you into a sense of paranoia putting into a world of distrust and disillusion which is pretty much bruce willis is going through his character a little bit of a spoiler does go back and forth in time a couple of times he's kind of forgetting which is reality he doesn't know where is where and when is when and he's going all over the place there are some times where he actually pops into different parts of time which was pretty crazy but the film's idea is that humanity really shouldn't rule the earth the humanity should suffer this that it's an unstoppable event that it can't be stopped whereas bruce eventually just wants to go back to a time where things were better where he could breathe a fresh air other things that bother me are just the wackiness of this movie again i'm not a fan of terry goham's weirdness i understand why people are it's just not my thing it works for some elements of the film but there's other parts where it just is comical like when they go into this abandoned theater house and there's this fight scene and it's just the worst ad are just some terrible terrible sound which by the way that's something else throughout the film there's a lot of very odd audio it sounds like a lot of audio was recorded elsewhere was recorded via adr because so much of it seems off with people's voice movements it's just odd it's just a really disjointed feeling of through the film and then the final nail in the coffin for me about this is that they play the same fucking song over and over and over and over i got so sick of you gotta have something else what did you pay the composer literally for one song and that was it but on the whole i do appreciate 12 monkeys for what it is i appreciate how well made of a film it is i appreciate its aspects and i actually i'm pretty impressed with the performances given by most of the cast in this film it's just not my kind of movie it never has been i watched this movie a long time ago and i was bored watching it and i watched it again i fell asleep watching it several times this time in the end i'm gonna give 12 monkeys a four out of seven again this is more so my personal opinion i know some people really enjoy this movie i can understand where you're coming from and you're free to have that opinion this is just mine i just just don't like this movie anyways guys that's all for me i hope you enjoyed this review if you did leave a like and if you're interested in more subscribe otherwise see you guys next time thanks for watching the video my name is nits and you might remember me from the animated cult classic tv show undergrads it's been a while but i'm happy to say the click is finally getting back together in an all-new movie thanks to a successful kickstarter campaign but we are still asking for your support to see any and all updates about the upcoming undergrads movie be sure to check out and like the bring back undergrads facebook page and with any luck we'll see you guys soon


The study found that the tensile, three-point bending and morphological properties of flax-epixibio-composite fibres with different fiber ratios were characterized, and the interfacial binding of fractured composite samples was examined by scanning electron microscopy. The results showed that biosodium carbonate treatment enhanced the mechanical and morphological properties of the biocomposites. A one-way and over-using Minitab software was performed on the experimental results. This article was offered by Salah Amroun, Ahmed Bailodi, Ramazan Dalmiss, and others.


Welcome folks, we have the Dow industry is trading down 540, you get the Nasdaq off 234, S&Ps are down 80, that being said folks, check it out man. So we had the E-minis do a 1-2 ABC structure on the way down, bottom line a 1-1.68, anything over is an immediate change of trend, we'll see how this shakes out, but the bottom line if we get off the 4212, right now you're 100 points higher inside the S&P, you're still down 75. What was happening here, which is pretty wild, is that the S&P was waiting for the NQs. So the NQs, when the S&P actually was at a 1-2 ABC structure down, the NQs folks hadn't made the 1-1.618, the number on the 1-1.618 on the way down, inside the NQs was 13,753, when we made it to 706 and took off like a rocket ship. Bottom line, you're going to get a bounce going, it's going to be a big bounce. This is only the first leg folks in a market that wants lower price, but what I do expect we're going to see out of here is you're going to see a dynamite bounce, you know, you talk about the Fed, you really think the Fed is going to be hawkish when this comes down to January, that's the biggest down January on record, not going to happen folks. Bottom line is that, yeah, they're going to raise rates on a slow basis, yes they are, that's what this comes down to. Gold, gold contract out here, we take a look at the gold contract, we have gold that rejected 1829, you're at 1839, bottom line, it has the volume, it's going to need more price. And if we go to the King dollar, you're going to see King dollar basically is going after its highs once again, we got to 96127, the high up there was 96462, now it's giving it up, so you know, we'll see if the dollar can close at 95861, which it's over that area now, then it's saying okay, you can go back downtown. Bottom line folks, whether you look at the NVX, whether you look at the SPI, no matter what you're looking at, you can expect it will chop into the close, but I expect that the close that more than likely you might be lucky to have the S&Ps down 25, they might be flat. Stay right there folks, come right back.


So so Winston cover my introduction So so I'll jump into Oh it's not sure Command Command Command F1 Ah okay Ya so basically I'm trying to start this segment where I just create open source issues that I see mainly on rails and some other places then I will share them during Ruby Meetup so maybe people can work on them So my main driving force is actually rails has a lot of issues but there's not enough people working on them so what part of my motivation is I'm trying to inspire more people to work on them Ya so recently on rails so now rails is on developing for rails 5 your action controller parameters is not a hash within different access anymore they change it to something I can't remember what but basically so this is an open issue if you do a comparison between the parameters and the hash it doesn't work so I think it's pretty simple you can just good for beginners basically implementing a method and just writing a test for it so I'll post these slides up later so you can get the link to the issue Ah ya okay so this if you use current page and if your URL has a trailing slash on it your current page will actually not match will actually return false so the method is broken I actually submitted a PR but then there are some issues with how to test it so if anyone wants to take a step at it feel free to do so I basically ran out of ideas so basically someone in your middleware is actually removing the trailing slash from your URL so I have no idea how to test that but I can fix the thing but I don't know how to test it something like that ya so DHH2 has a list on the issues page so there's a ton of them and I think you should look at them if you want to get in touch with DHH you get a talk to him over on GitHub then make sure you're happy so this part is sort of like a self plug for me elections are coming so please raise your hand so basically ya I've been working on Rubybench for quite a while and I really don't have time to work on some issues that I really want to work on so to inspire more people to work on Rubybench so basically in Rails 4.2 actually in 4.1 onwards your scope is actually 3 times slower 3 times slower in 4.2 about 1.5 times slower in 4.1 so yes it's slow so in order to identify I was able to identify these regressions because Rubybench helped me to do so so I'm trying to inspire more people to help me with Rubybench then so we reported this and then one of the core team members in Rails worked on it and then your scopes are 15% faster but they are still somewhat a lot slower than what it was in 4.0 ya so just more inspirational pictures there was a regression with some query that you do you can see the dip and then there was an increase so when I saw the dip I went to look at the commit that caused the dip end up it was my own commit and then I had to revert my own commit so basically I caused the regression and then I fixed the regression ya so this was the thing I was talking about your scope across the Rails version from 4.0 to 4.1 in Rails 3.0 something is actually a lot faster as well ya so that's the end of my presentation pretty short so let me know if this useful like if you guys would like to know some open source issues that someone can curate for you and interesting thing is that if you go to the Rails issues right now I would say about 90% are all active record based so if you'd like to dive into active record just go into the issues page about 90% so that would be interesting ya so that's all for my presentation oh if you'd like to work on Rubybench or find out ways you can help just feel free to reach out to me on Twitter I'll be more than happy to get more get more help with it okay ya that's all Any questions for Oben Sasa? ah ya yes we have a legacy Rails application that we are running on the more Ruby cluster till day 20 so then it's like Rails 2? ya what is it? wow not that Ruby but Ruby 1.7 right now Ruby 1.7 2.7 okay not that Ruby okay so do you recommend to keep Ruby itself or do you recommend JNB? I have no idea because what do you recommend? aha JNB and Ruby Legacy I wouldn't know is it a business decision? ya I think the question is they have a legacy app that's running on Ruby 1.8.7 with Rails 1.9 something so is it better to stay on Ruby or JNB I think we have to look at the application in context and sort of you know I can quickly answer that firstly you have to you have to see wether you have your current JNB what the dependency are because like I have a product with development of series the dependency was on communication with flags and we had the same I had the same problem of whether to go up from go up a version or not and it's now at stay at 1.9 I couldn't go up to 2.0 because it doesn't work it doesn't work it doesn't work so the way to go is to is to go I would say forget about the rule that's my thing test each of the version of the JNB app along the way it is very effective let me add another point that you write to as government tax yeah but that one is date it's not offered anymore but I think the fact that your app is independent in that stage it's difficult to upgrade especially if you don't have a test because our model license so we use needle jam to pass us needle jam which consumes the model so there is a middle way so migration is not that easy just as it died so you write no usually people don't know the power but 30 is the one and one of approximately 1.5 billion emplosif as well and that implementation is the problem okay so the thing is because in terms of Ruby 1.8.7 is not supported some of these versions are not supported already so the fact that I still want it is dangerous even for Rails 1.9.7 is not recommended so in order to move away from all these you probably do a lot of rewrite internally to make sure that you stop using some of the old legacy way of using active record or Rails or whatever so to give some context even GitHub they were started on Rails 2.0 they cannot move to trade even Rails 3.0 even though they are like a company so big but they cannot move to Rails 3.0 Rails 2.0 before they slowly do the upgrade etc so it's going to be a can't move can't move okay what do you think shall I choose? I don't think that's even a question yeah it's not about that I don't think it will help you just maintain it maintain it so GitHub is very gigantic by the way 10 years ago that's been growing until now if it's still money okay so maybe i should compare but actually it's the keep the fall everything else right? yeah okay maybe actually i think it's audience amount okay sorry