Thursday, April 26, 2012

2 East Village 'historic places' selected for Partners in Preservation program

[EVG file photo]

Today, officials from American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced 40 NYC finalists for their Partners in Preservation program, which provides preservation grants for local historic places. Per the news release: "The program will infuse $3 million in grants to preserve the city’s historic buildings, icons and landmarks."

Here's more from the Partners in Preservation website:

From April 26 through May 21, 2012, local residents and people across the country are encouraged to vote for their favorite of 40 historic places throughout the five boroughs of New York City to receive preservation funding.

Voters are allotted one vote per day ... The four projects that receive the most public votes will have their grant requests fully funded, and the remainder of the $3 million in grants will be given to a number of the other sites after review by American Express, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and an advisory committee composed of civic and preservation leaders from New York.

Through this partnership, American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation seek to increase the public’s awareness of the importance of historic preservation in the United States and to preserve America’s historic and cultural places. The program also hopes to inspire long-term support from local citizens for the historic sites at the heart of their communities.

Anyway, of the 40 places that they selected, two are in the East Village...

• St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
Project: Restoration of the portico

• DMAC - Duo Multicultural Arts Center on East Fourth Street
Project: Restoration of 6 murals, decorative tin ceiling

[A Duo before and after via the Duo website]

You can learn more about the program ... as well as vote right here.

Disclosure:
Organizers asked EV Grieve to be part of their Partners in Preservation Blogger Ambassador Program. We'd just need to visit 3-5 sites and attend a couple of the events they had planned. Then we'd write about them, noting that the posts are "sponsored." For this, we'd receive a $2,000 stipend. We declined. Actually, we never responded to the three emails about it. Regardless, we still wanted to mention that this is happening.

4 comments:

marjorie said...

Grieve, you are an unbuyable full-disclosure-oriented mensch.

Both these buildings are gorgeous (and the restoration of the DMAC building so far has been wonderful) and both are vote-worthy.

Anonymous said...

You could have instead hired a local writer to write the pieces and still taken part of the $2,000 for yourself. It's very hard for writers like myself who are local EVers to make the rent and I for one would have appreciated the opportunity to make some money. It would have helped provide jobs for people like me.

DrBOP said...

"It's hard to be a Saint in the city....."

And I have to say, Saint Grieve's Cathedral has a very nice ring to it. I do wonder what religion it would follow?

chris flash said...

You mean to say that EVG can't be bought? What's this country coming to????