2025 Old Building Forum
Annual Meeting, Gehring House Rehabilitation & Civic Halls Filmstrip Our next forum will start with our Annual Meeting, followed by a presentation about the rehabilitation of the Gehring House in Bethel from Maura Adams, Director of Community Investment, at the Northern Forest Center. We will also premier a filmstrip from multi-media artist Brian Dewan about Maine's Civic Halls.
Thursday, May 29, at 5:30pm via Zoom
The Northern Forest Center has transformed the Gehring House from a grand but long-neglected mansion into nine middle-market apartments for year-round Bethel residents. Maura Adams, Director of Community Investment at the Northern Forest Center will highlight the renovation and share the strategies used to make this exceptional project a success: impact investments, historic tax credits, an exemplary design and construction team, community support, and others.
Brian Dewan's series of I Can See filmstrips use the technology of the educational filmstrips from the mid-twentieth century as a point of departure for imaginative personal invention. Each panel features one of Dewan's fanciful drawings, usually skillfully rendered in magic marker or watercolor. The images are accompanied by elaborate soundtracks in which Dewan is heard, adopting a deadpan narrator's voice, and playing various musical instruments to create a different miniature soundtrack for each panel of the filmstrip. The themes of the strips often seem as though they could have been taken from actual educational strips, including his work for the Maine Civic Halls Initiative, a shared project of Greenhorns, Friends of Liberty Hall, and Maine Preservation. The strips tend to take many free-associative liberties and are by turns satirical and surreal, often whimsical and sometimes touching on serious themes.
No Place to Hide: Lighthouses on the Front Lines of Climate Change
Bob Trapani, Jr. and Ford Reiche February 12, 2025
Photo by Dominic Trapani
Bob Trapani, Jr., of the American Lighthouse Foundation, and Ford Reiche, of The Presumpscot Foundation, with whom Maine Preservation partnered on the successful nomination of Maine's historic light stations to the 2025 World Monuments Watch will recount the damage from last year's January storms, explain the practical impacts of climate change, and preview plans for developing more resilient lighthouses.
Bob Trapani, Jr. has served 28 years in a leadership position within the field of lighthouse preservation – spending the last 20 years serving as the Executive Director for the nonprofit American Lighthouse Foundation, which is headquartered at Owls Head Light in Maine. Bob also serves as the President for the West Quoddy Head Light Keeper’s Association in Lubec, Maine. In addition, Bob is the author of seven lighthouse/lifesaving books. He experiences lighthouses from a variety of perspectives, including as a lighthouse technician for the U.S. Coast Guard as an Auxiliarist. Bob has worked with the Coast Guard for 25 years.
Ford Reiche has board experience with a number historic preservation organizations, and has owned and completely restored five buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. He is the recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Service Award of the National Maritime Historical Society and Maine Historical Society's 2024 Neal W. Allen Award for outstanding contributions to the field of Maine history. The Presumpscot Foundation, of which Reiche is founder/president, works with American lighthouses to support preservation and mitigation of the threats of climate change.
