Practical Preservation Podcast featuring John Goodenberger and Lucien Swerdloff from the Clatsop Community College’s Historic Preservation and Restoration Program

John Goodenberger and Lucien Swerdloff from the Clatsop Community College’s Historic Preservation and Restoration program joined the Practical Preservation Podcast to discuss:

  • The collaborative approach their program uses to deal with the contractor storage
  • Sustainable building (viewing historic buildings as resources to be preserved)
  • Their combination of teaching both theory and hands-on preservation (very practical)

Contact info and Bios:

Clatsop College

1651 Lexington Ave

Astoria, OR 97103

The Clastop Community College Historic Preservation Program, in Astoria, Oregon at the mouth of the Columbia River, prepares students for work in the building trades with an emphasis on the preservation and restoration of historic and vintage residential and commerical buildings. Students gain the knowledge and skills to plan and restore structures in historically accurate ways utilizing both traditional and modern materials and methods. The program offers classes in historic preservation theory and workshops in practical hands-on skills.

John Goodenberger is a preservationist and instructor in the Historic Preservation program. Educated in architecture at University of Oregon, John has guided the restoration of commercial and residential buildings in Astoria. Working as the City’s historic building consultant, he has analyzed the integrity and historic significance of more than 1,000 properties. John was the chair of the State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation and is currently a regional representative for Restore Oregon, and is on the board of Columbia Pacific Preservation, a collaborative group promoting education and economic development through historic preservation.

Lucien Swerdloff is the program coordinator and instructor in the Historic Preservation and the Computer Aided Design programs at Clatsop Community College. He earned Master of Architecture and Master of Science degrees from the State University of New York in Buffalo. He has organized numerous preservation workshops throughout Oregon and Washington and worked on the restoration of many historic structures. Lucien is on the boards of Columbia Pacific Preservation, the Lower Columbia Preservation Society, and the Astoria Ferry Group, working to preserve, protect, and operate the historic Tourist No. 2 ferry.

Resources Discussed:

National Council for Preservation Education

Historic Preservation and Energy Efficiency Guide – Pacific Power

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Practical Preservation Podcast, hosted by Danielle and Jonathan Keperling. Keperling Preservation services is a family-owned business based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, dedicated to the preservation of our built architectural history for today’s use as well as future generations. Our weekly podcast provides you with expert advice specific to the unique needs of renovating a historic home, educating, by sharing our from-the-trenches preservation knowledge, and our guest’s expertise, balancing modern needs while maintaining the historical significance, character, and beauty of your period home.

Danielle Keperling:

Thank you for joining us for the Practical Preservation Podcast. Today, we have two representatives of the Clatsop Community College Historic Preservation Program in Astoria, Oregon at the mouth of the Columbia River. The program prepares students for work in the building trades with an emphasis on the preservation and restoration of historic and vintage residential and commercial buildings. Students gain the knowledge and skills to plan and restore structures in historically accurate ways, utilizing both traditional and modern materials and methods. The program offers classes in historic preservation theory and workshops in practical hands-on skills.

Danielle Keperling:

John Goodenberger is a preservationist and instructor in the Historic Preservation Program. Educated in architecture at the University of Oregon, John has guided the restoration of commercial and residential buildings in Astoria. Working also as the city’s historic building consultant, he has analyzed the integrity and historic significance of more than a thousand properties. John was the chair of the state advisory committee on historic preservation and is currently a regional representative for Restore Oregon. And is on the board of Columbia Pacific Preservation, a collaborative group promoting education and economic development through historic preservation.

Danielle Keperling:

Lucien Swerdloff is the program coordinator and instructor of the Historic Preservation and the Computer-Aided Design Programs at Clatsop Community College. He earned a Master of Architecture and a Master of Science degrees from the State University of New York in Buffalo. He has organized numerous preservation workshops throughout Oregon and Washington and worked on the restoration of many historic structures. Lucien is on the boards of Columbia Pacific Preservation, the Lower Columbia Preservation Society, and the Astoria Ferry Group, working to preserve, protect, and operate the historic tourist number two ferry. So thank you for joining us. I’m sorry if I mispronounced your names, you can fix it.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Well, thanks for having us. Lucien Swerdloff, you did okay though.

Danielle Keperling:

Very good. Thank you. So tell me about your program. The courses, the workshops. Are your students traditional or non-traditional college students?

Lucien Swerdloff:

So the program is fairly unique. It’s one of the only ones on the West Coast and certainly in the Northwest. It’s a two-year program and we have a large hands-on component. So the idea of the program is to train students in traditional building trades so they can go out and work on historic buildings. The program has three basic types of courses. All students, like in any college program, have to take general education requirements. So, they have to do their math and their writing courses, which they usually complain about. But we tell them that they need to take those.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Then we have a series of more traditional classroom classes where students learn history and theory of preservation. So, historic preservation theory, architects in history, green building materials and methods, project management, and a variety of courses like that. But the unique part of the program is the hands-on workshops. So we have a whole series of hands-on workshops where students learn traditional building materials and trades and different kinds of skills. Some of those we do in the shop, but we try as much as possible to go out in the field and actually work on real buildings. So we’re out in the community locally, regionally in Oregon and Washington working on different projects on buildings. That’s kind of a brief overview of the program.

Danielle Keperling:

Do you find that your students are coming to you looking for second careers? O are they coming to you right out of high school or is it a mixture since it’s a community college?

Lucien Swerdloff:

It really changes. A few years ago, most of our students were 30 something year old females that were looking for different change in career. Currently, we’re getting a lot of 18 year old high school boys. Again, which you would think would be kind of the more traditional group that would go into the building trades. So being a community college, we really get a large variety of students at any age ranging from 18 ,we’ve had students into their sixties and even seventies.

Danielle Keperling:

I went to a community college right out of high school. And taking those extra classes does help. Because then when I went on to go to school further, those credits transferred. But I did notice a wide range of experience and ages. That was one of my favorite learning experiences. It was not just everybody was an academic who had no experience. They’d just been at school for all of their lives.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah. And they come from a variety of different backgrounds. Some of them already have Bachelor’s degrees. Some have Master’s degrees. Some have been working in the building trades. Some have been working in banking, or insurance, or doing a variety of different things and they’re just looking to kind of improve their skills. If they’re contractors, maybe they’re just working on modern buildings and they want to really focus on historic projects. And some of them just don’t have any experience in the building trades, but they just decided this is what they want to do to work in the building trades.

Speaker 3:

When we started this, it was with the idea of essentially building a group of contractors in the area who could do restoration. So as a way to take local contractors, bring them into the schools, have them teach the skills, and develop a group of students that would go out and either become contractors on their own or join forces with the existing contractors.

Speaker 3:

And that was the original intent, but of course life happens and you get a variety of different types of students involved with the courses.

Lucien Swerdloff:

And it keeps it interesting because from year to year, we never know what, what the students are going to be, [crosstalk 00:07:39] where do they come from? Yeah. And we do have a mix of full-time students and part-time students. So we have a fair amount of students that are going, they’re working, they have families, so they’re going part-time. And then we also have students that are just interested in a particular thing. So they’ll just come and take a class in plaster restoration or something, and then they’re not full-time students. And they’ll just come back periodically and take classes.

Danielle Keperling:

[crosstalk 00:08:06] I know you said that it’s one of the only ones in the Pacific Northwest, but it’s interesting to me that, and it shouldn’t be, but that you had that need. Because what we consider old on the East Coast is much different than what’s old on the West Coast. But you still have the Pre-World War II buildings before building change that need to be restored.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah, yeah. But that’s a good point because it is. I’m originally from the East Coast and out here if a building is 150 years old, that’s pretty old. And on the East coast you have buildings that are 400 years old.

Danielle Keperling:

But they’re babies compared to the buildings in Europe or Asia. So, okay. Well, I was looking at [crosstalk 00:08:53]

Lucien Swerdloff:

The University of Oregon does have a historic preservation program.

Danielle Keperling:

Has been for 20 years, and then he retired last year. And now my husband is really starting to think about, can he find somebody to pass these skills on to. Because it needs to be shared.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah. And actually, we see it happening a little bit on a different scales. Several of our students who have graduated have gone out and started their own businesses, are now out there working. And now they’re using our students as interns and then hiring them to work with them. So it’s kind of the next generation is taking over that role of the crafts people.

Danielle Keperling:

Do you have internships, then in your program or is it mostly just through the hands-on coursework?

Lucien Swerdloff:

It’s mostly the hands-on coursework. We do have a small internship component in the program. So, students have to take one internship. We call it a work experience and it’s 66 hours and they go out in the field and they work with somebody, with either an organization or a contractor. So just so they experience something that’s out of the classroom setting. So they’re really out in the workspace dealing with contractors that are working. So it’s a fairly small component, but I think because we have so much of the hands-on workshops, they really got a feel for that real world job experience there.

Danielle Keperling:

Yes. Yes. So green building and preservation, at least in my mind, are tied together. And, we always say the greenest building is one that’s already built. How do you integrate the new building techniques in with the traditional building?

Lucien Swerdloff:

Well, we incorporate a lot of green building concepts in classes. So we have a green building class. And the instructor for that is an architect who specializes in sustainable building. So, in that class, students learn about solar, passive solar, energy efficiency, insulation, new materials and products, and all of that stuff. Our focus is not so much as a program on those kinds of technologies. But I think the way we incorporate the ideas of green building is to try to restore those functions of historic buildings that make them green and that naturally made them green. So for example, opening up transom windows and letting natural light in. Making sure windows are operable so that we’ve got ventilation.

Danielle Keperling:

I always remind people that they were built before we had air conditioning. So the way that house worked was the way that you could stay cool. So, it’s making the building work the way it was intended to.

Speaker 3:

And also speaking about these older buildings with green technology and all, that’s really a way that we get folks interested. It’s one thing to talk about the age of a building and compare West Coast to East Coast to Europe and all, that’s one aspect. But when we start talking about the historic buildings as being resources, and that we can’t build our way out, and that we need to figure out how to work with our existing structures, and that our existing structures do actually operate in a green manner, that captures their imaginations. And that does something that even the history, which is my love, but even the history doesn’t. Because then they see themselves as kind of moving forward in a way and becoming a part of something that way.

Danielle Keperling:

Yes, I can see that. And also that the idea, and it’s a concept, but that embodied energy. The energy that’s already there, that’s a very green concept that I probably had worked full time in preservation for seven years before I had been introduced to it. So, it is a…

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah. And we tried to recycle materials as much as possible.For example, we were just working on a project of an old building. We needed to rebuild a window sill. And it’s a small town here, so there’s lots of connections. So a friend of mine had a big piece of wood in his basement that he recycled from another building and he gave it to us and we cut that up and made a new window sill out of it. So we have wood from the same period that’s going into that building.

Danielle Keperling:

Do you have architectural salvage dealers in the Northwest?

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah, there’s a few here in town. There’s many in Portland. We’re about two hours from Portland. So, Portland has a lot of salvage, but being that it’s a small town here, we have a lot of connections. So we know when buildings are coming down, we know the people and they usually contact us and say, “Do you want this?” And we have more old windows than we know what to do it. I have to keep it. Because we don’t have a place to store them anymore.

Danielle Keperling:

Yeah. I am one of those people that as I see windows on the side of the road, we have to stop and grab them.

Lucien Swerdloff:

I was going to go… A few years ago, we got a grant from the local gas company to write a book on historic preservation and energy efficiency. And so, John traveled around the state and interviewed people that were restoring buildings and looking at energy efficiency. And then we did a tour of the state to present that to different communities. And it was…

Danielle Keperling:

Oh, very good. What is the name of the book?

Speaker 3:

It’s not very lyrical, it’s Historic Preservation and Energy Efficiency: A Guide for Historic Commercial Buildings. It’s put out by Pacific Power.

Lucien Swerdloff:

It is available as a PDF. I’ll send you the link to that.

Danielle Keperling:

Oh, very good. I’ll put it on the website. I was going to also say, I think sometimes the concept that historic buildings are not energy efficient was really promoted by the people who are selling replacement windows and those things rather than what the facts of energy efficiency in historic buildings are.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah. It’s real. Another big factor is the region that you’re in. Because our region here is, we’re fairly temperate here. So we don’t have really big swings like you do in Pennsylvania, hot and cold there. So it’s a very different kind of conception of energy efficiency in buildings. And in a way, it’s easier.

Danielle Keperling:

Right, because you don’t have to make it cooler and then make it hot.

Lucien Swerdloff:

We never cool around here.

Danielle Keperling:

So, I was looking at your Facebook project page and it seems like you tackle a wide range of projects. Do you do that over multiple semesters? And how do you choose them and what areas do you work in?

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah. Getting projects is no problem. We have more projects than we can possibly ever handle. We have people contacting us all the time for projects. So we do have a few program partners that we work with a lot, like the park’s department over here at Knappton Cove quarantine station. It’s a heritage center across the river. The Clatsop County Historical Societies. So, there’s several organizations that we have partnerships with and they have historic properties and we work with them over and over again. So we might be working on a project for several years. Because our primary function is a training facility. So, it’s always go out and finish a project. It’s too big of a project. And most of these organizations are non-profit and they’re not necessarily in a rush, so we can kind of go out and work with them and kind of do several workshops that maybe span several years to work on a project. We’re dealing mostly with nonprofits, government agencies, churches, things like that. And we…

Danielle Keperling:

Definitely filling a need.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah, yeah. Because it’s projects, for the most part it’s projects that would not get done otherwise. They just don’t have the funding to do that. And so we can provide a good learning experience for our students. And we could also work on real projects. Most of the projects we do are local within our region and we’re right on the Columbia River. So our region includes across the river in Washington. Some of the projects we worked on there is the North Head Lighthouse, which is an historic lighthouse on the Pacific Ocean that was built in 1898. And the Columbia River… What is it?

Speaker 3:

The Cape Disappointment officer house.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah the officer houses at Cape Disappointment. And Fort Columbia, which is one of the historic forts on the Columbia River that was built between 1896 and 1903, which is a standard kind of military fort design that you see all over Cape officers’ quarters, and housing and batteries. And we’ve done several workshops there.

Lucien Swerdloff:

We’ve done workshops way out in Northeastern Oregon, which is about seven or eight hours away from here. But that’s about our limit. It’s travel. Usually if we’re doing those kinds of workshops, we’ll go out for three or four days and just stay there and do an intensive on that kind of a workshop. And most of our workshops are hands-on, actually working, but we do a fair amount of documentation, also. So sometimes we combine those because maybe we’ll go to a site, do some documentation, do measurements, make drawings of a building, do an assessment, and then we’ll come back, we’ll put together a preservation plan, and then we’ll go back later and do the actual work on the building.

Danielle Keperling:

That’s all part of the process. So that makes sense that you would want to incorporate all of that and teach all that into the process. Because it’s not just the documentation, it’s not just the hands-on. So it’s kind of to be able to see everything. That’s really a good exposure.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah. And we really stress that kind of sketching and drawing to the students. And we do a hand drawing class where we go out and actually make hand drawings of the building.

Speaker 3:

Kind of paps harrow.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah, paps harrow style drawings. And we do CAD stuff. So we kind of try to combine both of those different aspects, the old fashioned hand drafting and computerated design drawing.

Danielle Keperling:

I think both are beneficial because you can sometimes… The AutoCAD can be fast. But sometimes if you just need to do a quick sketch, that could be faster also.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Yeah. Yeah.

Danielle Keperling:

So, is there a reason that you chose preservation for teaching? Was there a why?

Speaker 3:

Well, this started in 2009 and I know , for me personally, I just lost my job in the architecture firm because the economy collapsed. So there were a number of us that came together and said, “Well, as long as nothing’s going on in the economy, let’s start a program so that when we get out, there’ll be jobs. So let’s start training people.” And Astoria has more historic structures per capita than any other town in Oregon.

Danielle Keperling:

That’s pretty amazing to me.

Speaker 3:

And so this was the place. And we were able to approach the college. The college was in the middle of rehabilitating their buildings. We just said, “Let’s kind of walk this talk, rehabilitate the building, start a program, get new craftspeople out, and save this area.” Because we’ve been working on Astoria and the restoration, and now it’s kind of the place to come and visit on the coast.

Speaker 3:

But we were working for many, many years on that. And one of the things that we have lacked is large squads of contractors. And so the idea was let’s start training them.

Lucien Swerdloff:

And there really is, in the general community, there really is an understanding of the benefits of preservation. It’s not a town where people want to just knock buildings down. They see these historic buildings and they see them as part of the character of the city and they want to try to preserve them. So, we do have a lot of community support, also.

Danielle Keperling:

That really helps. Having the community support and having the buy-in from the people. So what do you see as the biggest challenge in preservation or in your program? You can answer that however you want.

Lucien Swerdloff:

Well, specifically for us, attracting new students, especially from out of the area, is something that has always been a challenge. The demographics of this area is changing. The population is getting older, so there’s less college aged students, less school-aged students. So we need to, in order to keep our student numbers where they need to be, we need to start attracting students from out of the area. And so that’s something that we’re kind of working on a little bit to do that. And, of course funding is always a challenge in education, just having adequate funding to support the program. And again, with that, we’ve been lucky that we’ve had a lot of partners. The State Historic Preservation Office has given us numerous grants, Restore Oregon, the Lower Columbia Preservation Society has given us significant grants to support our program. And then we do have a special scholarship fund just for the preservation students that’s supported by community members. So again, it’s that kind of a community support that’s really helping us

Danielle Keperling:

Well, and you’re doing a service for the entire preservation community. So yeah. So do you see any trends in preservation?

Lucien Swerdloff:

I mean, in terms of effecting our program, new technologies for documentation are definitely kind of one direction that the field is going. And we do a fair amount of documentation, as I mentioned, most of it is fairly low tech. We use digital cameras, we do hand measurements and sketches. We do come back and do CAD. We do 3D models. We have been experimenting with some new technologies. So we’ve done some photogrammetry to do 3D models. We’ve actually worked for a while documenting historic Columbia River gillnet boats, which was kind of a fun project working with the Hare Ameritime program. And for that we’ll use total stations to collect three-dimensional data. And we even tried doing some LIDAR stuff. There’s all those kinds of high collecting data. But I think for most of the projects that we’re working on, which are small scale local kinds of projects, a lot of that is a little bit of overkill.

Danielle Keperling:

Right, yeah. I agree. So well, thank you so much for joining me today. How can people find you? How can people get in touch with you or learn more about the program?

Lucien Swerdloff:

You can go to the college website, which is clatsopcc.edu, C-L-A-T-S-O-P-C-C.edu. We also have a Facebook page where we post images of a lot of the projects that we work on. And you can just search for Clatsop Community College Historic Preservation on Facebook, or it’s actually it’s facebook.com/clatsoppreservation all one word. We’re also a member of the National Council of Preservation Education, which is the national organization of preservation schools. And so we’re listed on their website, which is ncpe.us.

Danielle Keperling:

Okay. Very good. Thank you. I will make sure that all of your contact information and the link to your book is on the website too, for everybody that’s listening. Okay. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Practical Preservation Podcast. The resources discussed during this episode are on our website at practicalpreservationservices.com/podcast. If you received value from this episode and know someone else that will get value from it as well, please share it with them. Join us next week for another episode of the Practical Preservation Podcast. For more information on restoring your historic home visit practicalpreservationservices.com.

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