10
Wesleyan Chapel Reimagined
In the Capitol of our nation there is a sculpture that seemed to be a bathtub filled with women: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, three women known in the fight for women’s rights. To some, the three women appeared to be sitting inside the sculpted marble basin. It was 1987, and the tub was sitting in the Crypt of the Capitol building, underneath the first-floor Rotunda and under the famous Capitol dome. Way underneath, in the basement. The Capitol Rotunda is the center, and link, between the chambers of the US Senate and the US House of Representatives. Back in 1987 the stunningly beautiful round room was ringed with statues of only men. Below, in the basement, or Crypt, were more statues, including the only statue of women. The “bathtub sculpture” had become notorious when a group of women organized by the National Women’s History Museum waged a campaign to raise it from the basement up to the much-visited Rotunda. Congress finally enacted legislation to authorize its relocation upstairs to the Rotunda but provided no funding. Finally, the $75,000 moving cost was raised, and the statue was moved upstairs on May 14, 1997.
I chose this statue in Washington, DC, as the site for the announcement of the design competition. Reporters are always on hand in the Capitol, and I wanted maximum coverage in the press so that individuals all over the country might be aware of the opportunity of the competition. I also wanted the presence of our two heroes in Congress, Senator Moynihan and Congressman Horton. Their presence was more assured when they only had to walk from their offices over to the Capitol building, or better, take the members’ subway to the Capitol. And I hoped that congressional appropriations would fund the winning design and so intended to build some early enthusiasm for the project.
The announcement for the design competition was staged on March 31, 1987. Senator Moynihan, Representative Horton, NEA design director Adele Chatfield-Taylor, National Park Service director William Penn Mott Jr., and I took our places in front of the “bathtub” sculpture, which was still in the Crypt. Director Mott was a descendent of Lucretia Mott, the notable Quaker woman who worked for women’s rights and attended the tea party as well as the 1848 convention. When Director Mott stood in front of the statue of his foremother it was clear that he shared the family profile. Tourists were milling about and talking, and the polished stone floors amplified every sound. Senator Moynihan bellowed his enthusiasm for the project over the noise, and the others spoke briefly.
Reporters attended from the New York Times, USA Today, and the wire services of UPI and AP. The New York Times the next day carried twelve inches of copy, and USA Today featured the announcement on the front page of its Life section. The Los Angeles Times carried six inches, and the Wichita-Eagle Beacon posted a six-by-six-inch feature. That national press coverage spurred 905 inquiries on the competition. The competition posters were printed and mailed without delay to the 905 inquirers, as well as to another eight thousand organizations and individuals, from a list compiled by the public affairs officer Kathy Christie at the NEA.
I was criticized in Seneca Falls for holding the announcement in Washington. Partly to quiet the critics, a ceremony officially opening registration for the competition was held in Seneca Falls three weeks later. Rhoda Jenkins, an architect and the great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was on hand from Greenwich, Connecticut, to be the first to register for the competition with her check for forty-five dollars. The park mailed an additional four hundred press releases that day.
We were pressed by a looming deadline to create the program of instructions to be sent to everyone who registered. While the competition program was being written, the Park Service was still intensely researching the chapel to determine what historic material remained and needed to be preserved as part of any design. Blaine Cliver and Barbara Yocum were again the detectives looking for scraps of wallpaper, paint, nail holes, or other evidence that could be scrutinized and dated to figure out what remained of the chapel that had housed the convention in 1848. The chapel was our second puzzle, after the Stanton house, with painstaking comparisons of layers of evidence that could offer clues to what was missing and what remained from the period around 1848. An archaeological dig within the footprint of the building documented the foundation. It was a major sightseeing event for the community and visitors, as part of the dig was immediately behind the floor-to-ceiling windows of the laundromat and easily observed from the Fall Street sidewalk. Many days I received word in my office that “Blaine and Barbara found something,” and I would run over to check out the discovery so I could relay the news to the planning team.
It took a team to complete the research on the Wesleyan Chapel: Sandra Weber wrote the initial Special History Study for the park; Dana Linck of the National Park Service and Paula A. Zitzler of the American University carried out the archaeological dig of the foundation; Sharon Brown produced the Historic Structure Report: Historical Data Section; structural engineer Terry L. Wong and architect Elayne Anderson of the Denver Service Center analyzed the structure; Blaine Cliver and Barbara Yocum teased out the historic physical remains for clues hidden away in crannies untouched by subsequent alterations. All was summarized and later published in a final Historic Structure Report.1
Competition manager Peter Smith, a preservation specialist and design competition specialist with the NEA, was hired by the Park Service for the duration of the competition. Peter accepted the challenge of writing the program guidelines and determining what additional information would be sent to all who registered. The number one priority was honoring and preserving the remaining historic fabric of the chapel. Peter was both a big thinker and thorough with every detail. As a child he had suffered a severe cut to his right wrist, which had healed in a way that made it challenging for him to write. He wrote slowly and carefully, which it seemed to me was reflected in the way he thought and spoke and worked. His experience, expertise, and strategic thinking were critical to our success. He had advised hundreds of grant writers and reviewed hundreds of competition grant applications from all around the country. One day, close to a deadline for NEA grant submissions, he returned to his office from lunch to find 112 telephone message pink slips. Callers from all over the country wanted his advice on strengthening their application for an NEA grant. In those days the NEA was granting funds for design competitions around the country. But NEA had not sponsored a competition on its own until the Park Service brought it the Wesleyan Chapel project. The Park Service was fortunate to have such an experienced manager working on our design competition.
We traveled to Washington almost weekly to meet with Peter Smith and wrangle through various decisions. One of our trips included a lively evening meeting around the fireplace in the cozy lobby of my favorite hotel, the Tabard Inn. A surprise blizzard had just paralyzed Washington, and we were lucky to get rooms for the night. Snow seemed to make cabs in the city disappear, so we had to walk to the inn. Peter pulled his tennis shoes out from his gym bag and lent them to me for the walk. I slipped and slid on the mush turned ice in his several-sizes-too-big shoes, but at least I salvaged my favorite red leather heels.
Many policy issues arose between the Park Service and the NEA in the course of the competition. The major bone of contention was the Park Service’s many unbendable strictures for preserving the historic remains of the chapel. The NEA repeatedly questioned whether there was enough freedom of design choice to actually hold a design competition that would attract creativity. A battle formed concerning the long stretch of brick wall of the former Village Hall that faced the Wesleyan Chapel across the green space. It set the western boundary of the future grassy park between Village Hall and the chapel. Blaine Cliver and others in the Boston Park Service office insisted that what some viewed as a massive opportunity had to be treated as a preservation project, not a wall available to designers to express their creativity. The wall was interesting only in its long stretch of uneven mortar between bricks that had been hidden by the historic movie theater next door. However, when the theater building suffered a major fire and was demolished in April 1972, the uneven mortar of the Village Hall, which had never been intended to be seen, was exposed.
In preparation for the final meeting on the subject, I took twenty photographs of the wall with my camera, numbered them, and took them to Boston. I lined the photographs side by side the length of the conference table in the Park Service regional office. The tableau was just brick and sloppy mortar and more brick and sloppy mortar, all looking the same but for my numbering system. Peter Smith flew to Boston to attend the meeting so that he could support including the wall in the design competition. The regional staff, however, insisted that the wall’s appearance be preserved. Adele Chatfield-Taylor commented that the National Park Service has a “reputation for fighting by standing their ground and refusing to compromise.” The agency “can stall, the agency can outlast you.” In the pressure of time to complete the planning for the competition, the NEA conceded the issue, and the wall was removed from the possibilities that design competition entrants could address. The wall was set aside for preservation.
After losing the wall debate, the NEA demanded freedom for the designers even more strenuously. The focus moved over to the chapel itself and evolved to a question of whether the design submissions would be required to have the Wesleyan Chapel enclosed, for the practical reasons of protection from street noise and weather. The historic remains of the chapel included only side walls and some roof structure. The front and rear facades were missing. The NEA insisted there must be freedom on this point, and eventually the Park Service agreed that design entries proposing the chapel remain open would be acceptable.
The NEA raised a third issue, which seemed insurmountable. It felt strongly that there had to be a commitment to build the winning design; however, the federal government was limited by a law that required funds be available before any commitments could be made to build anything. Our funds were not available then and would not be available for two more years, at best. I traveled to a round of personal meetings to inform every major player in the Park Service and obtain their personal verbal agreement to build the winning design. Agreements were secured from our regional director Herb Cables, the Denver Service Center manager Gerry Patten, deputy director Denis Galvin in Washington, and Park Service director Mott. The NEA accepted this heartfelt personal commitment so that the competition could proceed. While I worked on the verbal agreements and commitments, the Boston office worked through the requirements of the procedures of the preservation law, and the review and approval by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
Many, including Park Service director Mott, offered that only women should be eligible to enter. I countered that we did not need more discrimination in this park, but less. After much discussion the National Park Service and the NEA agreed that anyone who paid the forty-five-dollar registration fee could enter the competition. Entrants would have about three months to create their “design board,” required to be on foam core board two feet by three feet. A jury would come together and over a few days winnow the field down to a single winning design. The jury would also choose the number-two board, and ten honorable mentions. The prize for the winner was $15,000.
Registration closed July 20, 1987. A total of 751 individuals and organizations representing forty-eight states had paid forty-five dollars each to register. The directions to the entrants were finally finished and had to be assembled for shipping out. The final program packet included a bound twenty-four-page description of objectives and a ninety-six-page appendix with excerpts from the Park Service research documents. Also included were eighteen full-page photographs, six sheets of architectural drawings, and seven slides of the remains of the historic chapel. The park brochure and park walking tour, and reprints of the historic report on the 1848 convention, were also included.2
Twelve students from Cornell were hired for a day to assemble the packets. A workshop was set up on the first floor of the vacant Village Hall. The students stacked the components in piles and then walked around the table picking up and adding every piece to a large gray envelope. Other students were runners, restocking the piles on the walk-around table. There was another station for gluing on the mailing labels, and another for gluing the packets shut. The students loaded the packets into the open back of the park truck, and Peter Smith had to make three separate trips to the post office with the 751 packets.
Heavy pressure was then on me to find a suitable very large room for displaying the entries for the jury to examine. Each design, mounted on foam core board, would be propped up on a table. One option was using the third floor of the empty Village Hall, which had never been divided into rooms and so met the requirements of open, and large. It was also quite grand, with huge windows overlooking the main street, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Park across the street, the historic Cayuga–Seneca Canal, and the historic stone Seneca Knitting Mill. However, the third floor had never been used by the village, and pigeons had usurped it; the floor was covered with several inches of pigeon poop. But the New York State department charged with such health hazards said it would be no problem, as long as certified specialists cleaned it. A firm was contracted to clean the floor. There would later be a few groans when the required chairs, tables, and boards had to be hauled up the long flights of stairs to the third floor. But the room otherwise worked perfectly.
Contestants were required to submit their board, wrapped in brown paper, by the deadline day for competition entries, October 14, 1987. The post office delivered 211 wrapped boards to the room in the former Village Hall that had been the packing station. Submissions had arrived from forty-one states. The very last board arrived on deadline day to the screech of tires, and Bert and Phil burst into the office with their wrapped board at 4:59.
As each one arrived the wrapping was carefully removed by Peter Smith, and a number was written on the back of the board; a separate document paired the number with the name of the designer. These steps allowed the competition to be completely anonymous. The professional adviser, Theodore Liebman, FAIA, of the Liebman Melting Partnership, had arrived from his New York office to oversee every aspect of the competition. He had a long and distinguished history advising on design competitions. Part of his job was to assure that the boards were anonymous and all the proceedings were scrupulously fair. Had there been any last-minute glitches, he would have been referee and judge.
At five o’clock on the day before the jury would arrive, Peter Smith and Mary Kelly Black were organizing materials in our office. I cautioned them to hurry, as I had hired a firm to clean the carpeting on the entire second floor of the visitor center where we were working. Peter Smith lost his temper—not usual for him—and shouted at me, “Can’t you ever do one thing at a time?” I said of course not, you can’t get anything done that way.
The NEA and Ted Liebman had proposed the members of the jury, focusing on individuals prominent in their fields and known to work well in potentially tense discussions. The jury members were also chosen for their sensitivity to the issues of women’s rights. I had insisted that a historian must be on the jury, but the NEA demurred, countering that only architects and designers experienced with design juries would be capable of judging such a complex project. Eventually the NEA agreed to include Joan Hoff-Wilson, the executive director of the Organization of American Historians. The other jurors were Reese Fayde, president of Real Estate Enterprises, who served as jury chair; Cheryl Barton of EDAW Inc. and the president-elect of the American Society of Landscape Architects; John Belle, FAIA, Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners; Grover Mouton III, professor of art and architecture at Tulane University; Adele Santos, chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania; and Thomas Vonier, principal of Thomas Vonier Architectural Associates.
The jurors traveled from all over the country to Seneca Falls and assembled for a dinner in the restored historic Hotel Gould on October 18, 1987. Community leaders spoke movingly and eloquently about their hopes and dreams for the future chapel. They included Seneca Falls mayor Robert G. Freeland; the park’s advisory commission chair, Charlotte Conable; advisory commission member Marilyn Bero; Stanton Foundation president Suzanne Cusick; the Urban Cultural Park director August Sinicropi; and historian and author Judy Wellman. Augie especially moved me as he spoke of his dreams of equality for his daughter. The NEA design director Adele Chatfield-Taylor also spoke, as did the Park Service’s regional director, Herb Cables.
For the one and only time in my life, I had written out my thoughts and intended to read them. I was used to speaking from my heart, with a brief outline, if anything, and not reading, and I felt my comments were a disaster, made worse by my tears in a couple of places. There was so much at stake with the competition, and I had no control over the outcome for the centerpiece of the park. My tears revealed my overwrought emotional state at that point. By then I had already reviewed the boards on display for the jury. Some enchanted me, some concerned me, and some I did not understand; the range was overwhelming. I wondered how the jury could possibly make a thoughtful decision. I was used to the Park Service traditions and policies of years of research and written documents and endless meetings before deciding on action. I had just met the jurors that day and was most impressed with both their character and their professionalism. But I had no clue what they would select.
The next day the jurors toured the park sites. Then, for three days, they studied the 212 boards, walking around them, chatting with each other occasionally, sometimes standing in front of a board for a length of time. I had required that the jury proceedings be open to the public, which was unusual for competitions. It added to the pressure, but Ted Liebman said it also made the three days more interesting. The night before the announcement of the winning design, the jury met in private to thrash out their differences. Juror Grover Mouton from Tulane confided that “a challenge to the jury was the chapel itself. Did the chapel, as a religious symbol, affect the 1848 convention, and should it affect the new design? Did the particular denomination and its beliefs signify importance in 1848, and should that affect the design? Following that, if the chapel had religious relevance, should the structure somehow be reconstructed or evoke its original design?” The design program was silent on these questions. Finally, the required twelve finalists were chosen on that last night, and the winning board was selected from among them.
Mouton said he instantly picked the eventual winning submission as his choice. He saw a “work of art, beautiful, elegant, and spiritual,” which “evoked the story of 1848 and beyond, and before.” He found it “full of life and evoking value and significance,” that it “made him wonder” and “want to enter into the sacred space of the chapel.” To him the design “had honor, and presence that perfectly honored its soul.” He described it as “lyrical.”
Ray Kinoshita and Ann Marshall had created the winning design. They both were just graduating from the Harvard School of Design and had been best friends throughout their time in Cambridge. They were so excited by the competition that they had already planned to come to Seneca Falls for the announcement. Peter Smith had telephoned them the night before to say their entry board had been selected and that they would be announced as the winners the next day. They were ecstatic. They arrived in town the morning of the announcement ceremony and were first seen walking down the sidewalk in front of the huge windows of the Hotel Gould, where several Park Service and NEA folks and jurors were eating breakfast. Adele Chatfield-Taylor remarked they were “right out of central casting.” They both had the look of very intense and serious young women artists. They were also perhaps a bit peaked from the rigors of just having finished their time at Harvard and probably getting very little sleep the night before an early morning six-hour drive from Cambridge to Seneca Falls. Breakfast with them was delightful as we began to get to know these two bright lights of sensitivity, creativity, and artistry.
We walked together over to the Village Hall and climbed the stairs to the third floor. We were greeted by a standing-room-only crowd jammed into the front of the third floor for the final ceremony and press conference.
The proceedings of the announcement were recorded, and I personally transcribed all of the remarks. Excerpts are included in my book on the design competition, A Vision Realized: Women’s Rights National Historical Park Design Competition, produced with design competition funding. The following quotes are included in the book:
Juror Adele Santos of the University of Pennsylvania presented the winning design: “The chapel itself is left as a ruin, exposed and accessible. So we really see what remains of that period in history.”
Adele Chatfield-Taylor accepted the recommendation with the following:
“And this effort is reflected in the result which is a design that is many things; it is completely attuned to the events, it is resonant with the significance, it is a brilliant neighbor in urban design terms with that which it joins here on the street—and it is extremely beautiful…. [It] is provocative, is meant to illicit a ‘what is that about’ question by everyone visiting it, or even just passing by.”
The Director of the Park Service, William Penn Mott, accepted the winning design selection and commented: “I feel sure that all of you here in this room sense the excitement, the thrill, the opportunities that we have here today to create in Seneca Falls an outstanding example of what can be done when everybody works together to accomplish an objective. People care what happens here. What once was neglected is now cause for concern and great interest. There is discrimination, and it must be eliminated, so that mankind throughout the world will enjoy equal privileges irrespective of sex, color, or national origin.”
Kinoshita and Marshall’s winning design was haunting and challenging and even shocking, intended to create an emotional reaction as well as an intellectual understanding. The winners hoped it would become the inspiration for pilgrimages to the sacred space. The design proclaimed that this most important structure had not been preserved and maintained, just as women’s history was not preserved. The design created a monument to the story of what happened in 1848, and also to the neglect of the chapel following the 1848 event. It was also a statement on the restrictions on women. Only on two days a year, during Convention Days, would it be possible to walk in the front door. On all other days the visitor would have to walk around the new front wall and enter the chapel from the side.
A new exterior perimeter wall would stabilize the remaining ruins and establish a boundary around the historic remains. The new roof covering tied the historic walls to the substantial new stone wall running on the east and south sides around the remains of the chapel. Metal cladding would be added to the brick walls to protect the precious remains. The chapel was emphasized by creating a grassy slope from the western side wall down to a “water wall,” a bluestone wall the length of the Village Hall (soon to be the new visitor center). The words of the Declaration of Sentiments would be carved into the 140-foot-long wall, with shiny stainless-steel letters imbedded in the bluestone. Water would pour over the reflective steel letters, symbolizing that their meaning was alive and ever-changing and also reflecting the historic falls in Seneca Falls. Standing down by the water wall and looking back up at the enormous chapel would create an intensified sense of the change in American society since the 1848 convention.
An amphitheater was created behind the open rear of the chapel structure: simple concrete rows of seating faced “Declaration Park” and the water wall at its base. Behind the top of the water wall a walkway from Fall Street to the rear of the new visitor center created an imposing stage for events in Declaration Park. The paving along the back of Declaration Park and a new line of trees both expanded the sense of the design and created a sense of enclosure by providing a backdrop. Tucked into a corner in front of the new walk and trees was a spot for reflection and rest. The sidewalk on Fall Street overlooked both the park and the chapel and created a viewing station for everyone walking by.
The additional winners were also announced:
- Second prize: Diana Balmori, Cesar Pelli & Associates, New Haven, Connecticut
- Honorable mentions:
- Ted George and Jeff Stein, Somerville, Massachusetts
- Elizabeth M. Slotnick and Barry A. Richards, Basking Ridge, New Jersey
- Paul Manno and Jeffery J. Burris, Environmental Impact, Dallas
- Edgar J. Gonzalez and Rosendo E. Marcet Jr., Miami Beach
- Jeanne Schlesinger, Cassandra Wilday, and Gwen McMillan, Schlesinger Associates, Princeton, New Jersey
- Stephen Luoni, New Haven, Connecticut
- Bobbie B. Crump Jr., Michael Versen, and Martin Flanagan, Crump Associates, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
- Michael James Plautz and Anne Marchand, Ritter Suppes Plautz Architects, Minneapolis
- Liz Nemura and Julieanna Preston, Peter Forbes & Associates, Boston
- Hubert White and Karen Gans-Piazza, Urbana, Illinois
The next day I scurried around the village to pick up the newspapers. Then I sat at my conference table with Peter Smith surrounded by piles of USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, to name a few. Reading all the newspaper coverage was a satisfying wind-down from such an intense time. On December 4, 1987, a special thank-you ceremony was held in the regional office in Boston honoring the winners and competition manager Peter Smith. All those from the regional office who had worked on all phases of the competition, including especially Blaine Cliver and Barbara Yocum, were honored. Herb Cables awarded Kinoshita and Marshall the first-prize check of $15,000; a second-prize check of $10,000 went to Diana Balmori. The ten selected as finalists were each awarded $1,000. Happily, the income from the registrations covered the prizes awarded. Herb Cables presented a much-used but still coveted official ranger flat hat to Peter Smith. Not that he could ever wear it, but it still was precious.
Ann Marshall and Ray Kinoshita were contracted to construct a large three-dimensional display model of the design. On March 23, 1988, the model was unveiled at a congressional reception in the House Interior Committee’s Longworth Hearing Room, sponsored and attended by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Representative Frank Horton, Park Service director William Penn Mott Jr., and Adele Chatfield-Taylor of the NEA. I had requested permission to hold the ceremony there and was delighted that the park would be so honored. All twelve boards of the winners were on display. Ann and Ray had the opportunity to personally describe their design to Senator Moynihan, Congressman Horton, Director Mott, and the NEA’s Chatfield-Taylor. Senator Moynihan was effusive in his comments: “This is a very special place in Seneca Falls. Three hundred people gathered 140 years ago and began a movement which is still profoundly affecting all of our lives. When the bold and beautiful design is built, the Wesleyan Chapel will become a place all Americans must come and visit.”
My mission at the unveiling of the model in Washington was to promote the winning design, and its impressive and engaging creators, to the members of Congress who I hoped would later be voting to approve the many millions of dollars required to build it. Again I received complaints in Seneca Falls for staging the unveiling in Washington, as I had for first announcing the competition there. But when the personal attendance by senators, representatives, or other dignitaries is very important, it is far better that they walk or ride a few minutes to an event rather than schedule a plane trip to Syracuse, rent a car, and drive an hour to Seneca Falls.
Washington, however, was not all that convenient for those who didn’t live there. Ann and Ray drove their design model down from New York City and managed with their husbands to move the heavy model up to the Longworth Building hearing room. All twelve of the finalist boards came from Seneca Falls to the Longworth Building in my car. Peter Smith and Mary Kelly Black and I managed to transport them up into the building and into the hearing room. Capitol Hill staff were most helpful after the event as the large and heavy model was transferred into my car for the drive back to Seneca Falls, along with all the boards. The building staff had kindly supplied all the easels and as well the wine and cheese served at the reception. Dale Crane, the chief of staff to Representative Phil Burton, made sure we were well taken care of.
The park was fortunate to have this support. I had the idea of using the Longworth Hearing Room for the event, as most Park Service hearings were held there. On a previous trip to Washington I had simply walked into the hearing room while a hearing was under way and stood in the back until I caught the eye of the chief of staff to the subcommittee chair. Dale Crane looked at me and mouthed the words, “Now what do you want?” But he smiled and walked out of the room, and we met in the hall. I put in my request for use of the room, at which he smiled again and said of course, he would arrange it.
The drive back to Seneca Falls with Mary Kelly Black, the twelve boards, and the precious new model was long and memorable. The fog was so thick I could only drive about ten miles per hour, and for what seemed like hours I was saying out loud, “Go away fog, just go away fog.” Fortunately we were driving on back roads with little traffic in the middle of the night. We did finally make it back safely. A May 3 unveiling ceremony in the park visitor center introduced the model to Seneca Falls, where it remained on display.
The Park Service had made a commitment to the NEA, and to the competition contestants, that it would build the winning design. But there was no guarantee that the winners would be hired to complete the architectural and engineering plans or be involved in the construction. The winners were offered their choice of either being hired sole source, without competition, as advisers to the park on the chapel development, or they could assemble their own team of consultants and compete for the architectural and engineering contract. The winners decided to form a team and compete for the contract. Their team included the Stein Partnership (architects), Robert Silman Associates (preservation structural engineers), Howard Brandston Associates (lighting designer), Chermayeff and Geismar (interpretive exhibit and graphic designer), and A. E. Bye (landscape architect). A team of Park Service professionals was assembled from the Denver Service Center and traveled around to interview candidates. The Park Service interviewers selected the partnership gathered by Ann and Ray as the best team to complete the design and working drawings for the chapel. Their selection was announced October 18, 1988.
Years later Ann and Ray and I had an hours-long reunion at Ray’s dining room table in Amherst, Massachusetts. They said they had immediately decided to enter the competition because they resonated with the meaning of the project, and what it would mean to women who could see the transformed chapel. They had not even considered skipping the competition. It gave Ann goosebumps to think their design might make the world a different place. Ann also said, “I think in a way to not do this competition would have said more than the fact that we did it. I would have been ashamed of myself, I think, to look back and know that we had an opportunity to do a project like this and chose not to.” They were drawn to the project in part because neither of them, in their years at Harvard or in earlier schooling, had learned the story of the 1848 convention and the work of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Ray Kinoshita had grown up in Ithaca, forty miles south of Seneca Falls, and had heard of Seneca Falls but never visited. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a BA in visual and environmental studies. She had wanted to be an architect since the age of ten, when she met a woman architect from Japan, a friend of her mother’s. Ray did not want to follow the family footsteps in physics. Ann had aspired to be an interior designer. She finished her degree in interior design but decided it was too limiting and returned to school to become an architect. The two of them became friends the day they met during their first year at the Harvard School of Design and stayed best friends through it all.
Before beginning their design, they traveled out to Seneca Falls from Cambridge. They were moved to tears when they first saw the damaged and deteriorated laundromat that had been the Wesleyan Chapel. Ann’s thought was “So this is the way it ends up. Of course, yes, that’s the way it has always been.” The core of their design was peeling away the layers and layers of changes to the chapel and revealing the essence that remained. It was a bitter story. They compared the fragmented Wesleyan Chapel to the parallel fragmented history of women’s rights.
Ann and Ray inspired me. They began their work on the design with a passion to help tell the old story of the diminishment of women’s roles, work, and achievements. And they created a design that boldly proclaimed that women’s stories had not been marked and told and preserved in history, and the building that held the crucial 1848 convention had not been marked and preserved and so it could no longer tell its story.
Ann and Ray maintained their passion and creativity through troubled times. Once they were selected to complete the architectural drawings, a struggle began with the subsequent superintendent and the Denver Service Center of the Park Service. Yet they retained their vision and protected their design intent. Also a complaint regarding the design was filed and resulted in a hearing held in Seneca Falls with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. The Advisory Council found that every procedural requirement had been fulfilled and the Council dismissed the complaint. Blaine Cliver had made sure that his Preservation Center staff had meticulously met the requirements of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act.
In perpetuity. I heard these words over and over once I began working for the National Park Service. Perpetuity means forever, and the intent of national parks is to be forever. Congress has to pass legislation to authorize a national park, and only Congress can deauthorize a national park. Congress has by definition declared the Women’s Rights National Historical Park a sacred place that is nationally significant to our history and important to be shared with the public. That cannot be changed by shifting political winds around the park.
This national park designates a place and structures to celebrate the American journey toward a more perfect union. The position of women in law and society has not been unchanging over the course of American history. This is the place where the National Park Service can tell that story. History and its changes have seeped into the walls of park structures. Visitors coming to the park enhance the experience of the site and carry on the story. Perhaps most important, and beyond the official interpretive offerings, the park is a gathering place where women can speak their own story with their own voice, share it with others, and hear the personal histories of other women.
The historic structures including the Wesleyan Chapel, the house of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the M’Clintock house have been restored by the Park Service. The historic structures are the foundation for the Women’s Rights Park. Interpretation will vary, controversies will come and go, but the historic structures will always be there as the focal points for the park. The Women’s Rights National Historical Park has made visible what once was invisible and unknown to many. The park as a place for education and discourse will be there forever. In perpetuity.
And yet, forty years later, there are only twelve National Park sites focused on women’s history and only eight sites created after the Women’s Rights Park:
- Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, Washington, DC
- First Ladies National Historic Site, Canton, Ohio
- Harriet Tubman National Historical Park, Auburn, New York
- Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, Dorchester County, Maryland
- Kate Mullany National Historic Site, Troy, NY (affiliated area)
- Lowell National Historical Park, Lowell, Massachusetts
- Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site, Washington, DC
- Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park, Richmond, California
The following were created before 1982:
- Clara Barton National Historic Site, Glen Echo, Maryland
- Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, Hyde Park, New York
- Maggie L. Walker National Historic Site, Richmond, Virginia
- Women’s Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, New York
One great function of national parks is that they exist for everyone—old and young, rich and poor, women and men, all races and creeds, Republicans, Democrats, independents, and all others. In an age of alarming division, national parks are common ground and one of the enduring sources of hope, understanding, and inspiration.
In 2023, as I finish this book, we are engulfed again in arguments on rights. Who gets to vote? Who decides who gets to vote? Who controls a woman’s body? Who gets to decide who is in control? In the midst of these questions roiling again, the park is a message of hope: the federal government has set aside a place to recognize and maintain where these issues can be shared and discussed. Even when a visit to Seneca Falls is not possible, there are programs on the internet. And the park is a beacon for women in other countries who are often astonished to learn that our government has created such a national park. It inspires many. Controversy over what story to tell in the park is good because more people are made aware of the existence of the park. And there is no limit to the history that can be shared there.
It seems appropriate to recognize a much earlier attempt at bringing women’s rights to the forefront. Abigail Adams admonished her husband, John Adams, as he worked on the Declaration of Independence for our country. She wrote in a letter to him dated March 31, 1776, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”3
We can wonder how different this story might be and how different our lives might be if Abigail Adams had in fact fomented a rebellion in 1776.